Oh, happy days, we've finally come as nation to a point where we can recognize women as strong, independent political figures, not only in the spectrum of legislation or the presidential race (but whoa, Sarah and Hillary!), but as the heavy-hitting inquirers of those politicians as well.
Just look! Salon named Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, and Campbell Brown as three of the central figures in "The Year of the Woman," as they call it. And that's great news!
Sort of.
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See those maniacs at right? The ones a-hootin' and a-hollerin' about how, if they had their own country, the blacks and gays and A-rabs wouldn't be able to take their women and bars and money, respectively? Ironically, those clowns calling for a Southern nation in America seem to have a lot more in common with the North than they think. The far North, that is. And you know we wouldn't be talking about the crazies in Alaska right now if it had nothing to do with witchy ding-dong Sarah Palin.
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Ready to jump into the Web 2.0 fray, Salon — the left-y web magazine that isn't Slate — today launches Open Salon, a sorta bloggy-news-aggregator-social-networking thing that hopes to bank on the readership's tendency to whine and talk about each other. So far, we don't see any advertising, which makes Open Salon's most ambitious undertaking not its We Are One Web tool set, but how it plans to compensate bloggers content producers.
Because we all know one left-y website with a problem doing it. CONTINUED »
Salon tech writer Farhad Manjoo, who blogged for the web magazine's Machinist, is making a job change … to Slate, where he can feud with Jack Shafer over whether the web will kill the newspaper. [SIA]
In an article about the departure of Martha Stewart Living CEO Susan Lyne, Slate sneaks in a dig at the competition: "[MSL] is a textbook intersection of two media business lessons that should have been learned in the '90s. One is that just because a content company makes a splash online does not mean that it needs to go public. (Departed TheGlobe.com and limping Salon.com are two other examples of content companies that held IPOs.)"
Nevermind that Slate is owned by the publicly traded Washington Post Company, which is a pure content play propped up by the enormously profitable Kaplan education unit.
Cheaters always win. Especially sly ones. Because of this, everyone cheats slyly. The whole world's had about eight years to fully grasp that concept. So, why is Salon making a big stink about how Karl effing Rove and Fox News are bedfellows in an article published today entitled "Karl Rove's sly deal with Fox"?
The "most influential pundit" in America, as Fox likes to trumpet, should have to play by the same rules as other high-profile political analysts. For example, Paul Begala and James Carville are regularly identified as supporters of Hillary Clinton when they appear on CNN. But Rove has been able to act as an independent observer while criticizing Clinton and Barack Obama, McCain's likely general election opponent.
Oh, Fox News is composed of underhanded jackasses who will do just about anything to promote the conservative agenda? Wow, where ever else could we have heard such news? Certainly not all over the goddamn Internet.
Jeeeeeee-zus! Is it any wonder conservatives love to throw out the term "crybaby" when talking about liberals when "progressive" Web sites are literally crying about "playing by the rules"?
At least the piece goes on to acknowledge predictability:
There is nothing shocking about Rove's attacking Democrats, of course. And his operating with a duplicitous air of independence probably isn't going to make or break Fox's claim to "fair and balanced" coverage. But will the greater public catch on?
We've got some info for you, Salon: The "greater public" knows all about Fox News, because they watch it every night.
Educated white woman fight! Watch your loafers.
Today, Salon scribe Megan Hustad's new piece, "You Are Not Your Bookcase," argues that "fave lists" — a person's "Heroes" on MySpace or "Favorite Books" on Facebook, for instance — are silly, juvenile forays into bullshit people need to abandon. To make her point, Hustad calls on the succincter, better Virginia Postrel, who says particular segments of society's eagerness to compartmentalize themselves "has turned us into self-handicapping snobs: Since we've taken so much care to craft our own perfect list, we feel more entitled to shrug off anyone whose list doesn't similarly impress." It's right on, but it's also a slap in the face of a New York Times piece smug masturbators from Brooklyn to Manhattan slavered over a month ago.
Remember Rachel Donadio's "It’s Not You, It’s Your Books"? If no, it was this sad, widely read essay about arrogant jerks who break up with people not because they are stupid, but because their books are, and it encapsulated in less than 5,000 words what's wrong with this city (this industry, this country, our friends, etc). Among others, the article contained this irksome wonder:
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Oh, Salon. The dek head to this story about the gossip industry – "Why the golden age of celebrity gossip is grinding to an end" – proves just how woefully out of touch even web magazines can be.
It is not "grinding to an end." It has ground to an end. Maybe even last year.
"In the past decade, the rag trade had exploded, bringing vaguely shameful joy to millions of transatlantic travelers, subway commuters, grocery store shoppers and those languishing in doctors' offices," writes Rebecca Traister. "But now it seems a confluence of events has changed the manner in which America gobbles its vapid information about celebrities. [...] So what has changed about America's relationship to celebrity gossip? Lots." We would've expected this from Sunday Styles, but not from you.
What else do we learn in this casual stroll through recent gossip history? Celebrity weeklies don't need news, just photos; tabloid journalism used to rely on catching celebs off guard, but now fame whores like Paris and Nicole go the extra mile for the attention; reality stars now count as famous.
But we will give Traister credit where it's due: She didn't say the word "blog" once.
It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which means the online magazines, in addition to everyone else, are in an all-out war to out-black each other. Except here, the result – a healthy discussion about race in America, not a discussion about lynching – might actually be worth your time.
On Slate.com, we've got the first of three excerpts from Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, where Ford "sets the stage with the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, in an effort to determine whether and in which ways his detractors were truly racists."
And over on Salon.com? Wise words from N-Word author Randall Kennedy on … Clarence Thomas.
Stay tuned for February, when Black History Month offers a full 28 days of this.
We're all expecting Amy Winehouse to die. It seems inevitable, given the ferocious soul singer's combination of youth, chutzpah, talent, substance abuse and bad taste in men. The diminutive vocalist has just received six Grammy nominations for her second album, "Back to Black," a set of Motown-influenced ballads of codependency, but her real-life struggles with drug abuse have almost become more newsworthy than her music.
In recent weeks, with the object of her codependency, husband Blake Fielder-Civil, imprisoned on an assault charge, the 24-year-old Winehouse's self-destructive behavior has made her a paparazzo's wet dream.
-James Hannaham writing for Salon on the appeal of Amy Winehouse's offstage antics.
[Photo Credit: WireImage]
Think Jann Wenner's got a bum rep? Think again. This "highlight" (taken from an interview with Norman Pearlstine) reminds us why the narcissistic publishing maven was our favorite Halloween costume of 2007.
Speaking about the pool of young talent: [Wenner] didn't see an "Internet brain drain" because young people apparently face the choice between working for either "Salon or Slate, or for a magazine with a major and meaningful audience."
Either that or they just get pigeonholed into working for Rolling Stone.
According to Salon, "The internet is making us stupid." (Truth be told, it's not actually Salon's theory, it's the premise of Cass Sunstein's new book. Which Salon merely recounts, but fails to dispel). As bloggers, however, whose lives and admittedly meager livelihoods are attached to this whole new media craze, we're inclined to respectfully disagree. And, while we're at it, to vent.
It's not the internet per se that accounts for the supposed decreasing intelligence quotient of the overall population. The world wide web as it's called (by people in our parents' generation) is simply a medium that proves users with instantaneous access to an unprecedented wealth of information.
In Salon’s defense of Katha Pollitt today, there’s a hyperlink to “oral sex.” Naturally curious, we clicked, only to discover Bill Clinton’s new book Giving was Salon’s site pass for the day. Maybe feminism is working. [Salon]
DC may not be a good looking city and journalists can be an ugly lot, but surely Claire Danes in her awkward phase and Jesse Oxfeld look-a-likes are not the best looking writers there. And yet Catherine Andrews, an editor at The Washingtonian online, and Kriston Capps, an arts writer, won this year's FishbowlDC Hottest Media Types, Off Air Division.
But as the sleuths over at Salon uncovered, the whole thing was a fraud. "Friends" of Capps and Andrews created voting bots to rig the election. Which just goes to show, only ugly people care about looking good online.
Good editors work with and not against a writer. They calibrate how aggressively they edit according to how good the writer is, how good the piece is, the type of piece it is, the kind of relationship they have with the writer, how tight the deadline is, and what mood they're in. But an editor's primary responsibility is not to the writer but to the reader. He or she must be ruthlessly dedicated to making the piece stronger. Since this is ultimately a subjective judgment, and quite a tricky one, a good editor needs to be as self-confident as a writer. [...]
In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.
That's how Salon's Gary Kamiya explains the role of an editor. It's also the argument we use as to why we don't have any.
With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker — Richard Armitage of the State Department — but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.
That's from Richard Cohen's WaPo column this morning. The fun begins when Salon's Glenn Greenwald tears it to pieces. CONTINUED »
Wednesday, The Politico published yet another article marveling over over Democratic Presidential contender John Edward's $400 haircut, entitled "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow" by Roger Simon. Yesterday, however, Politico started taking some heat of their own.
And, in the words of a tipster, Salon's Glenn Greenwald really "took them to task," blasting Politico for repeatedly harping on such trivial matters while simultaneously having the audacity to view themselves as a serious news source. According to Greenwald, "this is at least the eighth time that Politico—which gloriously 'broke' the story—has referenced Edwards' haircut."
Ouch.
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• Twelve weeks and counting for Us Weekly EIC Janice Min and boss Jann Wenner to reach a new deal before her contract runs out.
• Bravo buys TelevisionWithoutPity, tries to keep on screwing the freelancers.
• Meanwhile, Bravo's Project Runway re-ups with Tim Gunn as host. Nice negotiating with those rumors of begin too busy, Gunn!"
• That Page Six plugs corporate cousin HarperCollins is news now relegated to a footnote.
• Fox TV and Hearst team up for web videos you won't watch, be able to find.
• Salon gossip aggregator Scott Lamb tires of checking RSS feeds. So does that mean the celebrity category is or isn't saturated?
• Mr. Magazine names Relish the "Launch of the Year." We name Mr. Magazine the "Needs to Give Up That Hack Name" of the decade.
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It's finally happened! Camille Paglia has returned to Salon after six years of writing and promoting that book you didn't read!
And while we enjoyed the entirety of Camille's inaugural Valentine's Day post, our favorite part is where she professes surprise at the vast number of readers who "enthused about"** her Salon columns, and called for her triumphant return:
I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix.
And you know who else is numblingly predictable—at least insofar as her dependable lack of "slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix" prose? Camille Paglia! Just our luck, she also happens to encapsulate the precise balance of humility and pretension that we're looking for in a monthly Salon columnist.
**Her words, not ours
Editorial Director
