Whoops, The Media, it looks like all your jobs have been outsourced to the Internet. While Notre Dame faculty held a conference for aspiring journalists to feed them lies like "If you can write well and gather news, you will always have a job," the current situation in the press rooms speak otherwise. Jobs are being cut (god forbid you are a movie critic these days), whole papers are folding (god forbid you are The Sun these days), and the industry in general is desperately lashing out at whatever available resource they can get their hands on to keep afloat. Unfortunately, that means grabbing up journalism students once they graduate and putting them in unpaid or minimally paid internships that go nowhere.
Unfortunately for the papes, there are some paying jobs for students out there, in the burgeoning and exciting field of blog writing! CONTINUED »
Hey guys, remember the success of Vogue India? The publication that got called out in the NYT for using "local" models, i.e. homeless people living at the poverty level, to promote haute couture for a nation where fifty percent of the population lives off less than two dollars a day? And then the editor for the magazine was all like "Lighten up?"
Yeah, totally not one of the magazine industry's finer moments, but hey, every PR crash-and-burn has a silver lining. In this case it was to alert the public that just because it's cheaper and more lucrative to produce words in India, doesn't mean you should necessarily just move your entire operation over there without taking the local culture into account.
But apparently the lesson that Condé Nast learned from all this was "stop featuring poor people," because the corporation is going ahead with the first issue of GQ India, featuring not legions of nameless poor but Bollywood megastars. CONTINUED »
