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Gawker: Media

Gawker posts tagged 'Media'

Rumor: Slate Spinoff For Guys?Yesterday

[Update: We heard from Slate and they say there's no dude site in the works, though Slude is still an awesome name.] From a tipster: "Rumor is that Slate is spinning of another site, this one a counterpart to [new female-oriented spinoff] Double X, but for dudes. It is so far unnamed, but its codename around the office is Slude, and apparently they want Bryan Curtis to come back and run it." Bryan Curtis was always writing for now-dead Play, so he should have time! is now keeping busy as a senior editor for Tina Brown's Daily Beast. Know more? Email us.

Dan Abrams Tries To Explain Away Obvious Conflicts Of Interest. Fails.Yesterday

Former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams seems to have noticed that his plan to start a PR firm made up of actively employed members of the media who will sell their consulting services to corporate clients is causing some uproar among people who believe that it would be a blatant conflict of interest for any journalist to be part of it. Which should include you, and anyone else who doesn't think members of the media should take outside pay for PR work. Abrams and his cohort in the project, former HuffPo media critic Rachel Sklar, offered long defenses of the idea to Daily Intel. Let's do some critical analysis, shall we?

Abrams: "First and foremost there are thousands and thousands of folks in 'media' around the world who are not involved in the news business."

Fair enough. You can hire

Four Ways To Kill A MagazineYesterday

Just because we're in the midst of a Great Magazine Die-Off, you may be under the impression that all magazines die equally. Not true! We Leading magazine scientists have identified four distinct varieties of magazine death. Each has its own special flavor of despair for all those connected with the deceased publication. Here they are, from most common to least:

• Dead dead: Folded. Shuttered. Gone for good. Staff laid off. Throw away the business cards. Shred the back issues. There is nothing more to see here. Notable recent victims: 02138, Play.
• Folded into the mothership: When a publishing company doesn't quite have the hear to say they're folding a magazine for good, they'll say instead that they're "consolidating its content" into some other larger, more stable title. Sometimes this is accurate. Other times, it's just a polite way to leave laid-off staffers with a bit of self-esteem. "At least our magazine survived, in a way!" Notable recent victims:

The Media Has Always Loved Pirates!Yesterday

Pirates are now the most important news in the world! Fox Business News is calling pirates "The New Face of Terrorism." The scary new face! But are they really new? The New York Times has written six dozen stories about Somalian pirates in the past ten years, and they're just picking up steam. We know the Somali pirate crew currently menacing African waters has a good PR man. Maybe he's to thank? We took a look back at a decade of pirate coverage and found that the raggedy scalawags have a long media history:

[A mere sampling of the highlights]:

New York Times:

2/3/99: "Murderous Pirate Attacks Are on the Rise"

9/12/01 (OMINOUS DATE!): "Pirate Militias From Somalia Spill Into the Gulf of Aden"

7/1/05: "Somalia: Pirates Seize Tsunami Aid Ship"

11/6/05: "Pirates Attack Liner Off Coast of Somalia"

12/4/05: "After Attack, Cruise Ships Rethink Security"

7/3/06: "Waters That Prompt Fear From the Toughest of Sailors" (The waters of Somalia, that is)

1/10/08: "Pirate Attacks I

From the Newsroom to the MailroomYesterday

Two longtime reporters at Jersey's Star-Ledger have been reassigned to the mailroom—maybe because they had the audacity not to take a buyout. [Editor & Publisher via Romenesko]