So remember that Rick Warren magazine that was rumored to happen, before the entire publishing industry went the way of the Hale-Bop Comet people? Well, somehow that is still happening, on the dime of Reader's Digest people.
Rick Warren is the pastor who moderated the McCain/Obama debates where the cone of silence fell off of John McCain's head. He is also pretty securely centered in that zone of super-church fundies who make up the majority of Midwest Obama haters.
How this "megapastor" from the right convinced the publishing industry he was worth a shot, after the jump.
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Pastor Rick Warren was the guy who moderated the debates where McCain's cone of silence fell off. Now the popular evangelical with odd taste in facial hair is getting his own magazine with the Reader's Digest people. Maybe!
Everyone is keeping pretty mum about the possible project, which will center around the ideas he promotes in his book, A Purpose Driven Life, which you needn't read or even scan on Amazon to figure out its premise.
But with the magazine industry enjoying a massage from a cheese grater, will religious articles from the guy who thinks churches will solve AIDS be the injection that the flailing biz needs? Actually, yes:
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Rampant drug use. Rape. Negligent homicide. Those are just a few of the lovely job perks that are part of running in a magazine crew, one of those nefarious working environments that operates in the underbelly of the magazine industry. Magazine crews, often made up of troubled youth from broken homes, are the dark secret of publishers, who like to pretend minors and convicted felons aren't going door-to-door, hawking subscriptions based on fictitious stories about raising money to travel abroad or go to band camp, and then retreating to seedy motels to get high and have their wages withheld. This whole scenario works out quite lovely for magazine publishers, who score plausible deniability about how a slice of their paid subscriptions are secured.
If this whole things sounds familiar, it should. Last February, the Times devoted 3,200 words to the matter, exposing a shadowy ring of fly-by-night operations that suck in young people hoping for a cool summer gig, only to have their sanity played with as their managers used mental and physical abuse to keep them meeting their quotas. Now, the Houston Press takes the story one step further, and in its attempt to confront the industry about its sales practice, shows just how blind an eye everyone is turning. CONTINUED »
Would you trust Rachael Ray for recipes? Exactly. So it makes sense you'd trust Jimmy Kimmel for advice on comedians, right? He told Reader's Digest four of his favorites that he would like to see join (replace?) the Dane Cooks of the world as funnyman household names. They are: Chris Elliot, Tracy Morgan, Artie Lange, and Zach Galifianakis.
Many of you, because you see yourselves as cultural experts, already know these names. But perhaps America does not. And it can only be a good omen, then, that Kimmel's got their backs.
After all, Americans didn't know who this Sarah Silverman girl was before Kimmel, either, and now she's recreating Britney Spears' pussy lips on the VMAs.
Tina Fey was likely just kidding around during a Reader's Digest interview when she supposedly slammed Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Whereas she makes people laugh, Stewart makes them uncomfortable. And all that cheering and clapping when he delivers a one-liner about politics? That's "clapter," the Seth Meyers term for queuing up feigned audience excitement.
All that hating, even after Tina kicked Jon's ass in Celebrity Deathmatch.
HOLIDAY BOGUS BONUS Reader's Digest CEO Mary Berner gave her staff of 3,000 each a $5 bill, encouraging them to help others this holiday season. Like their newsstand sales. [KK]
Breaking dental office magazine news: Peggy Northrop will become the new editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest. Northrop is leaving More magazine and replacing Jacqueline Leo. In January the magazine will launch its redesign and reduce its paid circulation to 8 million from 10. Warning to the subscribers who do stay on: the revamped book excerpt is going to blow your mind. [AdAge]
Back when we were about 11 or 12, we made our mother write a cheque for a subscription to Reader's Digest. We quite liked those real-life medical mysteries … or was it the true-life tales of overcoming obstacles? Either way, we kept the subscription active for a couple years, eventually letting it fizzle out for one reason or another, but probably because we realized we weren't the mag's target audience. That is, we weren't a 65-year-old grandmother of 12.
Turns out, we weren't the only ones to let our subscription fizzle out.
• If you subscribe to Reader's Digest, you're probably insane. Also, you have very questionable taste.
• AP photographer Nick Ut is lauded for covering everything from Vietnam to rich, spoiled brats.
• Meanwhile, the NYT praises marketers for coming up with London 2010 "toileting monkey/broken swastika" logo.
• Tina Brown: magazine genius or buzz-created hack? Answer: Who cares, so long as the advance orders for "The Diana Chronicles" keep coming in.
• And, your obligatory Conrad Black update. Turns out that $62,000 party Black threw for his wife was really "a business event masquerading as a social occasion." At least, according to the defense.
After much legal back and forth, suspected anthrax mailer Dr. Steven Hatfill is done dragging Reader's Digest and Vanity Fair through the courts on libel accusations.
Hatfill, as you'll recall, was the center of a 2003 VF article (later picked up by RD) that essentially fingered him as being behind the deadly anthrax envelopes that popped up post 9/11. The magazines issued their requisite half apologies and, with the help of a little pocket padding, it seems that's enough for Hatfill.
Like a certain diner upset at The Waverly Inn's expensive truffles, the threesome have settled the matter.
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• Mary Kate Olsen scores a New York Times byline for her undying devotion to unaffordable purses.
• AsianWeek is assailed for their "Why I Hate Blacks" column. David Duke says he "loved the scope of the piece," but admits he's not exactly wild about Asians, either.
• Vanity Fair, Reader's Digest pay Steven Hatfill an undisclosed settlement to "shut the fuck up "about about that time they wrongfully accused him of trying to kill them.
• Paparazzi, drunk frat guys, feel "threatened" by cell phone photographers.
• NBA highlights to appear on YouTube, possibly Facebook and MySpace. Related: Who cares? The Knicks still suck.
• Wow, a bizarre magazine about finance ministers, Gucci and Japanese naval helicopter pilots…and all for just $10 a pop!
• WSJ readers like planes, not as interested in trains, automobiles.
• Thin is good! Thin is bad! Tabloids are passive-aggressive! Which is good! And bad!
• NFL tries, fails at gouging cable providers.
• Ousted Viacom exec Tom Freston finds a new hobby in Plum TV.
• Sure, Reader's Digest is getting bought for $1.6 billion by Ripplewood, but that pricetag is $150 million shy of what it could've been.
• If you say it fast enough, "B.M.I." sounds like the noise a purger makes while booting.
• Microsoft hands out free computers, bloggers everywhere post items from their new free computers questioning ethics of accepting free computers.
• Arianna Huffington is adding original political reporting to her online outpost. Even better: Staffers will be paid!
• It comes as a shock that it's Reader's Digest who requires you to be hot to lead the company.
• Sundance readies 122 feature films for this year's festival. Attendees will stick to just one digital short and 16 parties.
• CBS let 3 Lbs get all the way to the 3-episode mark before canceling it.
• With Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, and Katie Couric all currently reporting from Jordan, it looks like the news lass is landing the biggest gets.
• Former AIG chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg showed what it takes to move the NYT's stock upward: false rumors of a takeover bid.
• Fox News has at least one staunch defender — who sometimes makes sense.
• It's no guest editing French Vogue, but if you win Stuff's contest to be an editor for a day, promise to email us?
• Google engaged in secret advertising practices? Psshaw!
• God help us if it's Details that's chronicling the new class war.
• Celebrities who blog finally receive well-deserved attention.
• Cute! The WSJ gets to the bottom of those annoying underlined text link ads you've seen (and read about) everywhere.
• Lindsay Lohan throws some kerosene on her Paris Hilton feud, claiming the heiress threw a drink at her.
• Sixth grade math puts the cost of canceling the O.J. Simpson book-interview extravaganza at $10 million.
• NBC and MSNBC begin calling Iraq a "civil war." Tony Snow certain to get angry.
• We love a hefty Ken Auletta media piece in The New Yorker (this week: Lou Dobbs!). We don't love having to choose just one punchline from thousands and thousands of words of copy.
• Publicists: Leave David Carr alone for a while, and he just might talk to you.
• Tom Mazzarelli begins staffing up Fox's morning show, with nary a Today show staffer in sight.
• Simon Dumenco read skimmed Reader's Digest, and lived to tell about it.
• Let Bill O'Reilly know: It's safe to assume any media company with the name "Fox" in it is owned by his boss.
• Christopher McCowen is sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 2002 rape and murder of fashion scribe Christa Worthington.
• Andrew Ross Sorkin labels all these media companies falling into private hands – wait for it, wait for it – a trend!
• At a time when it's hard for NBC to draw any more criticism, it manages to out-do itself.
• In media land, Reader's Digest sale is like the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village deal, time 650 million!!
• Sure, Dreamgirls is going to be an Oscar shoe-in. But we can wait a few weeks for the tickets to drop from $25.
• Revamping the TWA terminal at JFK sounds as plausible as Moynihan Station ever coming to fruition.
• Marc Jacobs follows Karl Lagerfeld's lead and cleans up his act.
• Reader's Digest pricetag of $2.4 billion doesn't even require the large-print edition to be shocked.
• Radar's Tyler Gray continues the Perez Hilton beat with news of three-pronged attack by paparazzi agency Splash.
• Not surprisingly, the family of Ron Goldman find O.J. Simpson's book smarmy and disgusting.
Reader's Digest conducted a little experiment recently to determine how polite the citizens of various cities around the world actually are. And, by some strange fluke, this survey found New York to be the most courteous city on the planet.. Whaa? How was this possibly determined?
Well, RD sent teams of reporters to 35 cities to see if people would do crap for them like open doors, and help them pick up all the headshots they drop when coming out of the city. For New York, the reporters picked Starbucks as their location of observation.
Ninety percent of the New Yorkers held the doors open and 19 of 20 sales clerks got passing grades. The document drop didn't go as well, with only 55 percent bothering to stop and retrieve the piles of "accidentally" fallen papers.
In despite of our lacking desire to bend over, NYC scored a very unscientifically determined 80 , which beat out Zurich and Toronto. (Supposedly, those city's are notorious for having nice people in them.) Let's just say it's a really good thing they didn't conduct that experiment at K-Mart or Element.
APPLE AIMS TO PLEASE [David Seifman, New York Post]
How Polite Are We? [Reader's Digest]
• Despite all those budget cuts at Tribune Co., its Chicago Tribune still has plenty of money to run a column about how blogs waste employee time. [Chicago Tribune]
• Nobody should be surprised that Geraldo Rivera's return to hosting his own show would go on without sound effects and sensationalized stories. [WaPo]
• Charlie Gibson is the man for Peter Jennings' job, at least according to departing Nightline host Ted Koppel. ABC News prez David Westin, meanwhile, has no idea why Ted is running his mouth. [Lowdown]
• Apparently there are just too many -steins, -witzs and -bergs in the media biz to officially declare it a diverse industry. [Harvard Crimson]
• While Jennifer Aniston proves to be Vanity Fair's largest seller, Britney Spears' pre-birth spread on Elle is the Hachette Filipacchi's title's biggest mover in its 21 years (thanks to Preston Sean's birth 15 days after it hit newsstands). [MIN]
• Reader's Digest chief Tom Ryder announced yesterday he'd be leaving the publishing giant after seven years at the end of 2005, where he'll then change his subscription to the Large Print edition. [Folio:]
• Not everybody's welcoming David Lee Roth and Adam Carolla with open arms as Howard Stern's replacements, with some non-Infinity-owned stations opting for different programming. [Page Six]
Editorial Director
