Sam Sifton

The Times’ media desk is getting a makeover.

The reporters who cover movies, television, books, newspapers, movies, and all the titans of those industries will be moved out of their second- and fourth-floor offices in the business and culture departments and into a new third-floor space, as a new “mini-department.”

In many ways, it’s a return to the old days.

“In my time here, I think it’s the third time there’s been a separate media pod,” said Bill Carter, the paper’s television reporter since 1989.

There have been all sorts of configurations, which have been constantly updated to adapt to the rapid changes that seem to happen so often in the media world: Sometimes he’s worked for business, other times culture, other times in the little pod.  read more »

There was almost a full-on press melee in Philadelphia this weekend at the Alternative Newsweeklies Convention. According to Gustavo Arellano, The OC Weekly's "Ask a Mexican" columnist, he and Village Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, New York Times culture editor Sam Sifton and Times media critic David Carr were called "nerds" by a "big mook" on their walk back to the Downtown Marriot after an evening of boozing at a local press hangout.

"All of us were in various stages of inebriation (from nothing to Jim Beam-ing), all of us were living life," Mr. Arellano later wrote. "If the guy said it to my face, I'da kick[ed] his ass! ... Carr, Sifton, and Ortega made similar threats. We headed to the Marriot's bar for a nightcapper and laughed with the knowledge our nerdish ways have rewarded us with lives of leisure, while that assaulting asshole could only look forward to trimming his precious goatee."  read more »