While CNBC is making their cuts despite record highs in ratings, the guys over at Sirius are trying to find a way to spin the fact that they've lost $4.8 billion this year.
Their current take on it? It's all Howard Stern's fault a write-down because of the crappy economy.
CONTINUED »
NPR just drafted two major web gurus, Vivian Schiller from NYT.com and Kinsey Wilson from USAtoday.com to help relaunch the public radio station. Schiller will be acting as the new CEO, and Wilson is head of the digital content of the station. Which obviously makes a huge push towards the idea of a bigger, better NPR website, making sense of the otherwise inexplicable announcement that the radio station that carries All Things Considered was going to start a social networking program on their website. Especially since that announcement happened only a day after New York Times announced the launch one of their Facebook-ripoffs. Guess Schiller isn't the only thing NPR is biting off of the Times.
But is it really necessary for a public radio station, that relies on fundraisers and listener money, to create an elaborate (and expensive!) web presence? Is the middle of the Venn Diagram between people who listen to NPR and people who spend all their time surfing the web really that large?
CONTINUED »
JOSSIP IN-DEPTH — Election Day is almost over! Let's all vote multiple times and then drink a shot for every state that Obama wins, or something.
But on the darkest night before the dawn, what will become of the old media guards come November 5th? More likely than not, there will be a spike in conservative programming and a drop in liberal ones, because people always like to whine against whoever is in charge.
But the problem is not merely a political one: with the print industry dying out like white tigers before we had an endangered species list, and not even blogs safe from eminent demise, there needs to be a radical overhaul in how news can be presented, for the cheap.
So: Not like the question hasn't been asked a trillion times already, but let's take a comprehensive (read: radio!) look again at what tomorrow might bring for your favorite news makers.
CONTINUED »
The year's drawing to a close, which means it's time for gay glossy Out to celebrate 100 homo movers-and-shakers who made 2008 so damn great!
The journos over there are slowly leaking some of their honorees, including Rachel Maddow, who tops the list. And with good reason - Maddow's catapulted to fame as a pundit over at MSNBC, which in turn gave her a prime time slot. Well done, Maddow.
Martin Savidge used to work at NBC as a correspondent, going abroad to cover the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2004. He also won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award during his stint at CNN for his coverage of the Elián González custody battle (oh my god, remember that?). Now Savidge is leaving cable for a more gritty reality — his own world events show on public television. Worldfocus is expected to debut in early October, and will cover international events that might not be getting as much play on other news stations, and will feature Savidge as the anchor, with a slew of revolving correspondents, like Deborah Amos from NPR. Worldfocus's executive producer, Marc Rosenwasser, makes a funny, then, by turning to NPR, ABC, and NBC correspondents to appear on the show, but insists he doesn't want Wordfocus to be produced “by a bunch of New Yorkers figuring out the world from the West Side of Manhattan.”
Alison Stewart's Bryant Park Project, NPR's $2 million-a-year morning show that hoped to draw younger listeners over the air and on the web, has been canceled. And so it remains: NPR is for old people who can't figure out how to change the dial. [NYT]
The ouster of NPR chief Ken Stern shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the radio network, argues Georgetown University ethics prof Jeffrey Dvorkin. "Ken Stern's departure from NPR was caused, I assume, because his vision for NPR and the stations' vision of service to the listeners became increasingly separate. Inevitably, these competing visions were bound to clash. Managers who ignore the reality that at NPR, the customers (the stations) own the company, do so at their peril." [Now The Details, via MB]
NPR CEO Ken Stern resigned today–or wait, was he fired? The NYT, Washington Post, and Associated Press all use diplomatic language, saying the executive is "stepping down," "departing," or simply "out," but NPR's own website says he was "forced out" by their board of directors.
Stern was intent on expanding NPR to flashy, glamorous new media, which made their affiliate stations anxious: Why would viewers donate during pledge drives when they could hear programs online for free?
But it's not just the HTTP://Information_Superhighway that worries these crotchety old affiliates.
Among the diversions "siphoning audiences away from traditional broadcasters" are television, video games, um, books on tape. Those TV screens on JetBlue flights are the next enemy!
NPR's Bryant Park Project host Alison Stewart on her decision to leave MSNBC for the lower-paying radio gig: "I don’t need any more shoes. I have a lot of shoes." [NYO]
NPR Bryant Park Project anchor Alison Stewart met her now-husband Bill Wolff back when she worked as a daytime anchor at MSNBC. Wolff, the former primetime programming VP and current Tucker sidekick, came over after 13 years at ESPN. They began dating, after he got the okay from human resources, and they married in November 2006. According to TV Week, "to listen to them complete each other’s sentences and stories is alternately charming and alarmingly twins-like."
So perhaps it makes sense this twosome merged their personal and professional lives to begin working together, and not just for the same company.
When Stewart, who got her start at MTV News, left MSNBC (and a cozy Weekend Today newsreader gig) last year to do the Bryant Park Project radio show full-time with since-departed co-host Luke Burbank, Wolff followed her — and became the show's sports commentator.
So how to explain the bout of nepotism in her staffing decisions? CONTINUED »
NPR alerted us on to an interview with Icelandic band Sigur Ros, which even they are dubbing "possibly the worst interview in the history of electronic media." Which it damn nearly is … but there's room to debate.
Terry Gross interviewed Philip Roth this week about his new book, Exit Ghost. Roth has said the book is the last to chronicle the adventures of Nathan Zuckerman.
Now, we weren’t Psyche majors in college and we know Roth likes to keep his personal life on the DL, but it seems pretty clear that Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth’s stand in.
So this exchange seemed a bit, well, awkward:
TG: Zuckerman’s strategy to endure is to completely isolate himself … Is that a reasonable strategy, the strategy of complete isolation?
PR: For him.
TG: I kind of feel like it’s hurting him as a writer too, to be that isolated because there’s no new input.PR: We don’t know anything about his writing. Roth hasn’t told us anything about his writing.
It’s just like an NPR host to criticize a Pulitzer Prize winning writer via his fictional alter ego.
When seeking out a journalist to discuss race relations with, who else would Bush want but the guy who listened intently to Bill O’Reilly’s realization that black restaurant patrons were polite?
The White House offered a Bush interview with NPR’s senior correspondent and sometimes Fox News contributor, Juan Williams. NPR wasn’t interested in having Williams do the piece; Bush was only interested in speaking with Williams. So NPR, which never had an exclusive with Bush, let the piece pass.
Bush still got his Williams interview—on Fox news. Along with talking about race, Bush got to opine about the 2008 election and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
While Fox may play softball with the President, they threw a curveball at NPR. A Fox spokeswoman said, "NPR's lack of news judgment is astonishing, and their treatment of a respected journalist like Juan Williams is appalling."
Though to be fair, Fox’s sense of news judgment and idea of who is a respected journalist are insane.
Because our critics will say we only make time for white celebrities and media figures, we launched a black blog to deflect the charges! Which might explain why our "urban" (that's what black-related things are called, right?) sister blog Stereohyped has to pick up some media slack, at least when it comes to black issues. That's why they screamed in our ear about NPR's new radio show Tell Me More, hosted by journalist and former WaPo reporter Michel Martin. (She's black, by the way.)
It's a move to increase the diversity in NPR's programming, NPR’s executive vice president Ken Stern will tell you. After all, once Tavis Smiley split the scene in 2004 after contract negotiations didn't "work out," the public radio network also lost his 30 percent black audience. (The show's replacement, News & Notes with Ed Gordon, didn't do too well.)
So a hearty welcome to Martin. And, more to the point of this item, please book Stereohyped editor Lauren Williams on your show. We hear she has a lot of things to say about black people. And some of them are good! And she's neither loud nor aggressive!
Sure, you may have missed the appropriate date Emily Post would suggest you send your baby shower gift to Katie Holmes by, but that doesn't mean you can't give a special someone a piece of Katie's happy family. Those wise fellas at NPR – and they're all smarter than you, even the PAs – behind such esteemed programming as All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation are taking a moment away from their busy schedules discussing nuclear weapons in Iran and the plausibility of Barack Obama being your next president to put together a holiday gift list of celebrity-inspired shlock.
NPR calls it their First Ever Holiday Craft Contest. But any "contest" that encourages Mel Gibson menorahs and a Baby Suri angel for your Christmas tree (pictured) should really be called the "First Ever Invitation for the Crazies, Scientologists, and Anti-Semitics to Throw Shards of Glass at Robert Siegel."
• There's no prenup to muck things up in the Ryan Phillippe-Reese Witherspoon divorce. Which means Ryan gets 50 percent of Reese's upcoming $29 million pic, while Reese gets one half of Ryan's waning machismo. [TMZ]
• NPR's new obmudsman Bill Marimow insists he's up for the challenge of everyone hating him. [NPR]
• God, Matt Lauer is queer. [BWE]
• New Jersey, Staten Island remain bastion of New York City commuters. Connecticut reigns supreme. [NYO]
• DealBreaker loses bet with itself, forced to endure minutes, perhaps hours, of ridicule. [Gawker]
• Katie Holmes and Brooke Shields aren't just cordial to each other. They're fawning. [People]
What's a little pretending President Bush got assassinated? If Mel Gibson can spin that tale about Jesus, surely British filmmaker Gabriel Range can enjoy the same goodwill in Death of a President. But CNN and NPR, while willing to cover the controversy surrounding the movie (where digital editing tricks are used to depict Bush being shot), are unwavering in their refusal to accept cash to promote the film on-air. CNN says it won't air commercials for the flick because of its "extreme nature." But our favorite excuse came from the soft speakers at NPR:
NPR will not run sponsor announcements to avoid any notion that it was reporting about the movie because it took the sponsorships, an NPR spokeswoman said.
"The movie is fairly likely to generate significant controversy and we'll cover it as a news story," said spokeswoman Andi Sporkin. "To take a sponsorship spot would raise questions and cause confusion" among listeners.
Funny — that's exactly what NPR told us when we tried to purchase a sponsorship after All Things Considered's Robert Siegel phoned us for an interview last month. And the same went for the New York Public Library; NPR didn't want paid plugs that promoted, ahem, reading to confuse listeners when station programmers were booking authors as guests at the same time. And the Metropolitan Opera? A fine cultural institution perfectly in line with NPR's audience, sure, but NPR can't risk even the perception that its countless haute musicians appearing on its airwaves were part of a business arrangement.*
Lying pussies.
* Apparently, we need to mention that none of this is true. NPR, to our knowledge, has never refused sponsorship payments from the NYPL or the Met. As for us? No, silly, we don't have the budget to advertise with NPR.
Get your computer fixed for free and get paid to write an article about it for the New York Times? We can't think of a better way to multi-task. Not to mention multi-earn.
That's what Times columnist David Pogue (also a contributor to CBS News and National Public Radio) was thinking when he was "comped" $2,000 in charges from DriveSavers, a "personal-data-recovery service" for his review for the Times. And CBS. And NPR.
The case of Pogue, and the DriveSavers pieces he did for the New York Times, CBS News, and NPR, seems to suggest that for all the ballyhoo these days about journalistic ethics, standards, and practices, overseers at the zenith of the U.S. news business allowed at least one journalist and his editors to believe those standards don't apply to them.
So, not only is he getting free stuff, but he's selling the same story to competing news outlets? Doesn't this break, like, almost every rule of being a journalist? Pretty shocking.
Even more shocking, however, was the Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty's claim that the paper's restaurant critics "always pay for their meals."
We were under the distinct impression that the Babbo receipts end up in monthly expense reports, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. surely winds up paying for them.
The Free Press [Matt Smith, Los Angeles Weekly]
• Harper's Bazaar loses 1/3 of it's editor in chief staff. [WWD]
• Google, wiretap, Myspace. We're moving to France where privacy is sacred. Right after we get those damn curtains up. [NYP]
• We don't have much, but should such a thing exist, we would like to donate $15 to the Free Jill Carroll fund. [Salon]
• You've got your low-fat milk and chocolate taken care of, but, how does your media diet look? We recommend less Washington Post and more Jossip. [Poynter]
• The mass exodus of old anchors to NPR is affecting … nobody. Newscasters not wanting to cover politics? Hellooo, we have Jon Stewart. [WSJ]
Rejected ads make us feel sexy. Probably a similar feeling that Anna Nicole Smith feels when she folics in front of the camera at a TrimSpa ad shoot. So when we heard about public radio rejecting an ad from the New Israel Fund, we didn't even need a vibrator to have multi-O's.
The New Israel Fund, which raises money to support Judaeo-Christian lovin' (they call it "tolerance"), was shot down by New York and San Francisco NPR affiliates. Of course on NPR, they're not called ads but "underwriting credits," and the stations say this type of advocacy advertising is regularly denied.
Meanwhile, in the type of advocacy we do like seeing, Jessica Cutler's The Washingtonienne encountered a similar fate. It must've been the blowjob insinuation, but publisher Hyperion's ad for Roll Call (the trade pub, which initially solicited the campaign), also got the hand in the face.
Such dejection - and neither had (direct) ties to supporting terrorism.
Editorial Director
