John Koblin

Bob Torricelli, the former senator from New Jersey who didn't seek re-election after his first term because, well, we know why!, has an interesting view of the reason The Record of Bergen County is having trouble, and it's not, he thinks, the troubled newspaper industry in general. News that the newspaper recently had to close its Hackensack office seemed to delight him because, as he wrote in his column on PolitickerNJ, "somewhere the Record stopped becoming a mirror of the happy suburban life and it became mean."

He's no media expert--although he may be an expert on the Record after all the ink the newspaper gave him back in 2002--but he gives the newspaper 10 years to live.  read more »

On Tuesday, The New York Press ran a short item on its web site reporting that had a strike involving Village Voice staffers had been averted. It was a small story, but the Press owned it from start to finish. Today, The New York Times ran a brief in its Arts section.

Here's a quote from Voice-legend Tom Robbins in the brief:

“We got a deal 3 o’clock this morning,” said Tom Robbins, a Voice columnist and shop steward for the United Auto Workers Local 2110. “We won a good victory for unions... We had a celebratory drink of a little Scotch and then went home.  read more »

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The writing has been all the wall for weeks and now the carnage has been unleashed: the L.A. Times is cutting loose 150 newsroom positions, and 250 overall. Pink slips come by Labor Day. This news comes only a few months after the paper let go 36 newsroom jobs through buyouts, and puts the total newsroom number at about 700, down from the 1,200 it had just seven years ago. 

Russ Stanton's sobering memo is here.  

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

Vanity Fair has added New York contributors Vanessa Grigoriadis and (Observer-alumnus) Joe Hagan as contributing editors to its fantastically sizeable masthead, WWD's Irin Carmon reports this morning.

She also writes that it is expected that they will continue as New York contributing editors as well.

On June 22, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt had a few words for the Times’ Maureen Dowd for several primary-season columns that disparaged Hillary Clinton. "Even [Ms. Dowd], I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season."

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong.  read more »

Last week, The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Robert Thomson, announced sweeping masthead changes—new people have been added, some familiar names dumped.

Laurie Hays, former deputy managing editor, is off to Bloomberg; Bill Grueskin, another deputy managing editor, is packing away for Morningside Heights and semi-retirement at the journalism school at Columbia University.

Other people left, too. Earlier this month, The Journal’s formidable Federal Reserve reporter, Gregory Ip, said that he was leaving for The Economist; a special writer from the San Francisco bureau, Rebecca Beckman, said she was leaving for Forbes.  read more »

Understandably, when a newspaper has to make deep cuts in its payroll, columns like this crunch the numbers. How many pink slips, and in what areas?

But that is arguably less important than how the remaining staffers are reorganized to fill the gaps—or not.

The big victim in the last round of cost-cutting at The New York Times: Starting this month, the Metro section’s regional desks are, essentially, dead. Local reporters who have been spared have been redirected and reassigned. Jersey general assignment reporter and poetry writer Tina Kelley will be “spending more and more of her reporting life online, busting rhymes here and there along the way,” wrote Joe Sexton, the editor, in a memo sent last week to staffers.  read more »

Charles Kaiser at Radar is reporting that ex-Journal editor Marcus Brauchli and current WaPo managing editor Phil Bennett are the top two finalists to repace Len Downie as executive editor of the Washington Post. Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek who was on a short-list of candidates, said that he took himself out of the running a few weeks ago. Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor of the Times, apparently is no longer in a field with the top candidates.

After months of speculation, The Washington Post's executive editor Len Downie finally announced to staff today that he's retiring and that his last day will be Sept. 8. The Post's Howie Kurtz is reporting that the Post's publisher Katharine Weymouth will announce a replacement soon. At a meeting this afternoon, Mr. Downie said, "A new younger publisher needs a new younger editor" and that "it is time for me to retire as editor."

Kurtz reports on the top candidates, widely known in media circles for about a week now:

Those considered to be the strongest contenders for the job are Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett; former Wall Street Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli, who was ousted in April after Rupert Murdoch took over the paper; and Jonathan Landman, a New York Times deputy managing editor who has run the paper's Metro staff and Week in Review section.

We all know that ad revenue for newspapers is tanking, but apparently it's even worse than we thought. Richard Pérez-Peña is reporting in The Times this morning that newspapers are on pace for their all-time worst ad revenue year. He reports:

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S.  read more »

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The future of the city's best radio talk sports show ever, Mike and the Mad Dog, is in jeopardy. Newsday's sports media reporter, Neil Best, reported Sunday that the two oddball hosts of the show, Mike Francesa and Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, are on the verge of splitting up and it's unlikely that both will be on WFAN to celebrate the show's 19th anniversary this September. The reasons why aren't entirely clear, but apparently the two are fighting.

For sports fans, life without Mike and the Mad Dog is a little like imagining baseball without the Mets. Since the late 1980s, they've scored the biggest interviews and have had the most influential voices of any sports reporters or broadcasters in the city. For WFAN, the wound could run particularly deep: about year after losing their morning show, Imus in the Morning, they could lose their drive-home show too.

This morning in a classroom at the CUNY School of Journalism, Robert Thomson gave his first public speech as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal at a kick-off event for a conference for South Asian Journalists Association.

In Mr. Thomson’s remarks, and in a question-and-answer session that followed, he said The Journal would most likely move to News Corp.’s headquarters next spring, wsj.com would be redesigned in the fall and that, yes, The Journal is still a business paper.

“Is The Wall Street Journal a business newspaper? Of course it is. The first thing we did was increase the international coverage.  read more »

There's a big shake-up at The Wall Street Journal! There are new masthead additions, and revised roles for others.

Robert Thomson sent out a newsroom-wide memo this afternoon announcing that Mike Miller, currently a deputy managing editor at the paper, will become his No. 2. Thomson writes that he "will be responsible for editing the paper if I am otherwise engaged."

There are three new deputy managing editors. Nik Deogun, currently the Money & Investing editor, will become the international editor, while Matt Murray becomes national editor. Mike Williams, already a Page One editor, will retain his role.

Noticably absent from the memo is John Bussey, Washington bureau chief, who was reportedly a leading candidate to replace Marcus Brauchli.  read more »

So Victor Ganzi quit as CEO of Hearst yesterday, and with some shades of Jane Friedman's departure from HarperCollins, no one really knows why.

In The Times, Richard Pérez-Peña writes that "Mr. Ganzi’s fall after six years came as a surprise to executives at Hearst and some of its major joint venture partners, and to investment bankers who track the company closely." Likewise, Keith Kelly reported that it was a "move that stunned many inside and outside the far-flung media empire." And: "I am stunned. I am honestly shocked," said one executive to Kelly.

It is Hearst, a traditionally non-leaky place, so the fact it's a surprise isn't much of a surprise.  read more »

Michael Calderone at Politico is reporting that Jon Landman is a top candidate for the chief editor job at The Washington Post, which is expected to be vacated sometime next year by Len Downie.

Landman apparently met with Downie last week, though the nature of the visit isn't clear. Landman sent Calderone an e-mail saying, "I won't confirm, deny or discuss."

O.K., but we will! Calderone reports that Landman now joins a short list of candidates that includes Newsweek's Jon Meacham, ex-Journal editor Marcus Brauchli, Post columnist David Ignatius and Post managing editor Philip Bennett.

Campbell Robertson, the dogged Times journalist who has worked his way up from office clerk to gossip reporter to Broadway-beat man, is headed to Iraq.

“We were out last night and he was picking my brain on Iraq,” said Times Baghdad bureau chief Jim Glanz in a telephone interview on June 17. “He said that people have been asking him when he’s going to Iraq. And he said he’ll go once the Tonys are over!”

In some ways, it’s unbelievable that a man who wrote a story for Monday’s Times recapping the Tonys—for instance, he wrote that the awards tried to “goose ratings” by including more numbers from Rent this year—is going to be filing with Basra and Mosul datelines before old story subjects are back from the Hamptons.  read more »

Mary Kaye Schilling’s final days as an entertainment editor at the Los Angeles Times were bleak.

“It was incredibly stressful there,” she said on the phone June 17 from California. “I really believed the L.A. Times could make a comeback, but the situation really became untenable.”

Two months ago, Ms. Schilling parted ways with the West Coast paper of record—she says it was mutual, sources there say otherwise—and in mid-July she’s returning east, where she worked in magazines for many years, to become the culture editor at New York. Women’s Wear Daily reported the news first on June 17.  read more »

The last days of the Willie Randolph era, much like the Mets’ historic end-of-season collapse in 2007, were both tragic and horrible to behold.

On June 15, at the end of a long, seven-hour day at a stadium that will be pulverized and paved into a parking lot later this year, the Mets announced their attendance for a Father’s Day double-header at 55,438. That was laughably deceptive.

Seats were empty all afternoon, and by the time the second game started—the Mets dropped the first half of the double-header to the Texas Rangers—it was quiet enough for the players to be able to hear the yelled suggestions of individual fans: “Carlos! Hit it to third base! They got a shift.  read more »

The New York Press is reporting today that the workforce at the Village Voice is contemplating a strike over "proposed cuts in healthcare coverage."

"We are adamant that there won't be any givebacks here,” said Tom Robbins, Voice legend and de-facto spokesman for the Voice's incredibly strong union, represented by United Auto Workers Local 2110. “We pay through the nose. We pay co-payments that are very expensive for our members with children. They want more co-payments, they want more, more.”

“If we don't get it, all bets are off,” Robbins warned.

So the ProPublica Web site has gone live. And there's a section where you can learn about their contributors!

There are biographies of the site's stars, of course, like Paul Steiger lately of The Wall Street Journal and Stephen Engelberg, formerly of the Oregonian and the Times.  read more »

"I had a big birthday the other day, a birthday with a zero in it," said Jim Muir, the Baghdad bureau chief for the BBC. "Unbeknownst to me they organized a surprise party. They put out an invitation to our street, which we share with the New York Times, and Reuters, and the AP, and various other news outlets. Only two people came."

The life of a foreign correspondent can be an isolating job; but that is nowhere as true as it is for the reporters covering Baghdad.

It’s rare that you ever leave your bureau at all. When you do, you’re taking one giant risk. So is it really worth it to grab your buddies in the bureau, corral security detail and some translators all so you can share a glass of wine with another reporter?

And if you did … where would you go?

"This is the single worst war I’ve ever had to cover in terms of after hours," said Terry McCarthy, bureau chief for ABC. "There are no bars here. We can’t really go out at night. You really only socialize with the people in your own compound. It’s not fun."

"Once you are in Iraq you have to live it 24 hours a day," said Michael Ware of CNN. "It’s not as if you can stroll down to a restaurant. It’s not as if there is anything of an ilk of a great Saigon bar."

"It’s the most confining story I’ve ever covered," said Bob Reid, the AP’s bureau chief, and 31-year veteran of foreign assignments. "I find actually it’s quite limiting. When you talk to other reporters, it’s good to bounce off ideas and some perspective. It helps you round your opinion of what’s going on and that’s very difficult in an environment like this."  read more »

“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.  read more »

Six days ago, L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton did a Q&A with Mediabistro and he was asked if things were finally getting back to normal at the embattled paper.

"I think they're starting to [quiet down] and I think our morale is beginning to come back to where people are focused solely on doing great work and good stories and terrific journalism."

Then this week happened.  read more »

Paul Krugman just put up a post that's a pointed rebuttal to a statement made by Nicholas Kristof in a blog post of his own today.

Kristof argues that one of the reasons the media snoozed on the pre-invasion Iraq story is because Democrats didn't really attack Republicans on it. Without a fight in Congress, it's a tough story for the media to comprehend.  read more »

That's what Richard Perez-Pena asks in this morning's Times, and he hears a mixed response.

A former executive at Gannett, Allen Neuharth, says that Zell is just doing what he has to do. In order to prevent newspapers to go the way of the steel industry in the 1980s, preemptive steps have to be made.  read more »

James Rainey at the L.A. Times—the embattled L.A. Times!—scored the first interview with 61-year-old Mayhill Fowler, that dogged citizen journalist of the Huffington Post.

No, wait! She's not a journalist! And she doesn't want her sources—like Bill Clinton who told her on Monday that Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum was a scumbag—to know that either.  read more »

The Wall Street Journal’s soon-to-be launched glossy magazine, WSJ., has harvested more mediaflesh. Men’s Vogue managing editor Owen Phillips will become Tina Gaudoin’s deputy. Keith Kelly has the story.  read more »

Are the deadlines at The New York Times about to change?

Moments ago, a big-bylined memo from Keller-Abramson-Landman-Geddes went out staff-wide to reporters and editors saying that, essentially, to make it easier on the digital side, copy flow at the paper needs to change.

They compare their current system to “an old-fashioned electrical utility.”

Too much copy is dumped at the same time, and the digital-side people have not a lot of time to deal with it all. No conclusions have been reached, though! So it’s time for the Times to do what they do best: setup a big committee to talk about it.

Susan Edgerley will lead, and deputies will help. Decisions will come in the “months to come.”

Full memo after the jump.  read more »

Los Angeles Times foreign editor Marjorie Miller has quit the paper.

In the second sentence of the memo announcing the news, editor Russ Stanton tries to make clear that it has nothing to do with anything. “She requested such a move a year ago …” it begins.

So don’t worry, there’s no panic here!  read more »

They've got to be quaking in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The Times reported today that Sam Zell said yesterday on a first quarter conference call that they need significantly fewer bodies to make Tribune into a successful company. Tribune business people, led by CEO Randy Michaels, counted column inches produced by each reporter and realized that, hell, they don't need so many people! From the Times report:  read more »

"What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works," said Sam Zell in a memo he just sent out to Tribune staffers.

So everything is getting trashed and reworked! There are going to be redesigned newspapers, redesigned Web sites, redesigned business structures.  read more »

We just got a tip that a man is currently scaling up the north side of the New York Times tower, and he's about half way to the top! 41st Street has completely stopped to a halt, and Times reporters and editors—and construction workers and cops—have spilled onto 8th avenue and 41st Street and are looking up and staring. He has hung up a banner along the building saying something to the effect of: Global Warming Kills.

We'll have updates—and images!—as soon as they come in.

Update, 12:25 PM: City Room has a full account. Apparently the man scaling the building is named Alain Robert, a usual suspect. And C.E.O. Janet Robinson isn't one bit amused! "This is a publicity stunt, it looks like," Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said as she entered the building. "There is definitely going to be an arrest."

Update, 1PM: Our trusty intern Louise McCready made her way to 41st Street and reports back that all is under control again! Mr. Robert made it to the roof where he was apprehended by police. His neon green banner is still waving from the ninth floor. For the most part, people have stopped gawking, and have returned to work.

One businessman, however, named Bawa Jain still couldn’t contain himself. “Incredible. Impossible. My heart was in my throat! I thought he was going to fall!”

The Times has no official anonymous sourcing rules—no "two source rule" or anything like that—but they do often pass around internal documents to serve as guidelines. The paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, recently recruited some Columbia J-school students and had them take some sample papers from 2004—when Al Siegal and Bill Keller last sent out an anonymous source guideline sheet—and compare them to 2007, and they found that anonymous sources had basically dropped by half at the paper.

But reporters shouldn't feel afraid to use them! Mr. Keller sent out a "refresher course" memo last night. There are helpful tips like: "There is, on the face of it, something ludicrous about a government or corporate "spokesman" insisting on not being identified by name; we should push such sources to speak for attribution."  read more »

The Slate family is getting bigger, and consquently, a restructuring is in order! David Plotz, longtime deputy for the thinky, contrarian Web magazine, is becoming the new chief editor of the site. He'll be the third editor of the 12-year-old site, succeeding Jacob Weisberg who succeeded Michael Kinsley. Weisberg will now oversee all the Slate Web sites in a role not dissimilar to Jim Kelly's current role at Time Life.

"I’ll be in charge of what we do: who works for us, who writes for us, how we cover it," said Mr. Plotz to Media Mob today.  read more »

Russ Stanton got his job as chief editor of the L.A. Times because he was the golden child of the internet, a guy who could bring the paper into the future. And with Mediabistro, he talks about that future and how no newspaper will be involved at all!  read more »

Two weeks after Robert Thomson took over as editor of the Wall Street Journal, the first masthead editor is leaving the paper. Bill Grueskin, one of the paper's five deputy managing editors, is leaving the Journal behind for a job working directly under Nicholas Lemann at the Columbia Journalism School.

Sources at the paper said it was Mr. Grueskin who wanted to undergo an investigative piece to report why Marcus Brauchli suddenly resigned from the paper. Just over a month later, Mr. Grueskin is gone too.  read more »

“Three or four people leaving is not a big deal,” insisted Maer Roshan, founder and editor in chief of Radar.

Actually, it’s five: Senior editor Tyler Gray, en route to Blender, just had his last day at the magazine, as did managing editor Leigh Ann Boutwell, who is joining her boyfriend on the West Coast. On the business side, the magazine’s president, Fred Poust, fled Radar’s East 45th Street offices on May 30, along with finance director Dwight Holovach and Web site general manager Michael Small, who came in with great fanfare from Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.  read more »

On the afternoon of June 2, Wolf Blitzer was talking to Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum about his 9,647-word piece about Bill Clinton.

“Some people who work for him now say that he seems to be angry all the time, angry when he gets up in the morning and angry when he goes to bed at night,” Mr. Purdum was saying.  read more »

Speaking of fashion! Now that we know the latest in Marc Jacobs’ love life at the click of his Facebook page, the Transom was wondering: Will other designers follow suit?  read more »

Longtime editor Jim Roberts is being given the title "associate managing editor" and will be added to the Times masthead. He works with Jon Landman on the digital side and his duties remain exactly the same. Here's the memo from Keller and Landman:  read more »

During Bill Clinton's spectacular meltdown yesterday--calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a scumbag, sleazy and slimy--he also decided to drag just about everyone into the melee. He said:

"The editor of Esquire-- he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."  read more »

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This weekend, Paul Goldberger was on with Bob Garfield on NPR talking about a story he wrote in The New Yorker last year on the design of newsrooms. In the article, Goldberger talked about the cold feel to the Times newsroom, but he elaborated on that with Garfield. He said:  read more »

Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast exec who was the inspiration for Sex and the City's Mr. Big, has gotten a bit of press this past week. There's an item in WWD's Memo Pad today in which he surveys the red-carpet crowd at last week's movie Sex and the City premiere.  read more »

Portfolio senior editor Bob Roe was fired this week, and his last day was today, Media Mob has learned. It's the first major firing this year in what has been a relatively quiet year for the magazine.  read more »