Bravo's reality series "Tabloid Wars" featuring the New York Daily News airs next Monday, promising a look into "the manic, hurly-burly world of a New York tabloid" — but it's not the New York tabloid the producers originally had in mind.
Eat the Press has learned that the show's producers initially approached the New York Post about being featured in the series, but Post editor-in-chief Col Allan turned them down. Through Post representative Steven Rubenstein , Allan confirmed that he had declined Bravo's offer, saying "We're all about making great newspapers."
"Tabloid Wars" has been getting lots of press for the Daily News (nicknamed the "Daily Snooze" by Posties) in advance of Monday's debut, giving play to staffers like crime reporter Kerry Burke, married gossip columnists George Rush & Joanna Molloy, former editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, and former gossip reporter Hud Morgan, who seems to have emerged as the breakout star of the series.
All this does not seem to faze Allan, however, who comments tartly in the Los Angeles Times: "If I look at the circulation trajectories of both papers, I would call the Daily News series 'Tabloid Surrender.' "
Harry Shearer
LONDON--Everybody's seen the footage and/or read the transcripts on both sides of the Atlantic by now, and everybody seems to have buried the lede. The third word of the President's sentence that ends with "shit" is "irony".
"See, the irony is..."
He does irony.
Tony Snow's refusal to discuss the profanity--"unless you have a history of never having used the word"--of course is a resort to the "everybody does it" defense that Republicans...
via YouTube
Last night on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart ripped into CNN and other news channels on their coverage of the war between Israel and Lebanon, and their reluctance to identify it as "war." It's a tart and hilarious segement, as usual, and it's available on YouTube here, but in transcript form without the benefit of Stewart's jocular delivery, it is imbued with a bitter and disgusted incredulity that lends it an extra sting. Stewart taps into the theatricality of the coverage and how the cable nets tease out every bit of drama from events, not wanting to call it "war" too early lest they jump the gun and lose viewers who become bored when the "war" drags on into days of endless coverage (because the last thing we want is coverage fatigue). In the meantime, the segment is every bit as interesting to read:
Jon Stewart: Welcome back to the program! Returning to the Middle East because, if we don't, really who will? The crisis began Thursday morning. I learned about it from the TV. As the bombs began to rain on Israel and Lebanon, at 4PM Thursday CNN asked the question, "Brink of war?" Huh? CNN's not sure. Is it war? The brink of war? The brink of brink of war? A precipice leading to a slope ending on a brink with war?They followed the story, CNN followed the story all through Thursday night and into Friday.
CNN tape:
Lou Dobbs: Israeli aircraft and ships today bombarded hundreds of targets...
Wolf Blitzer: ...thousands of Lebanese are pouring across the border...
Lou Dobbs: ...radical Islamist terrorists fired dozens of rockets...
Unidentified male: ...large explosions...
Kyra Phillips: ...a significant airstrike...
Wolf: ...stepping up rocket attacks...
Unidentified male: ...a naval gunship...
Daryn Kagan: and more planes have bombed a military base near the Syrian border.Jon Stewart: Things seem to be getting worse. So 24 hours later, at 4:06 on Friday, CNN was ready to declare...Brink of war? What does it take for you people to lose the question mark? 300 rockets in two days? One side called it an open war. I think the other side said they were gonna turn the clock back 20 years in Lebanon. And still, brink? Finally, at 10 pm Friday night, Anderson Cooper with the call.
CNN tape:
Anderson Cooper: A new day is about to dawn. The Middle East, poised on the brink.
Voiceover: This is Anderson Cooper 360. Middle East on the Brink.
Jon Stewart: There you have it. CNN officially removes the question mark and declares, "We are on the brink." But guess what? It's really just [bleeping] war. And finally, CNN at that point is ready. Finally, Fox was ready to ask the important question.
Fox News tape: In the impact segment tonight, how the violence in the Middle East is affecting us here in the United States.
Jon Stewart: Yes, all this carnage in a region we perhaps helped destabilize. How's it affecting us? Is there a place where we could quantify how we feel about the devastation being wrought? Perhaps in our hearts, or minds? Or...
ABC tape: we're gonna feel this tension in the near term, here at home, at the pump
CNN tape: some say it won't take long for the ripple effects of the mideast conflicts to be felt at gas pumps.
Fox News tape: I think that most Americans are gonna feel that at the pump.
Jon Stewart: Yes, we will feel it, but only at the pump. I mean, when you see it on TV you can't feel it through the TV. The TV is not an appropriate place to feel things. It's the place we watch "America's Got Talent," you can't feel through that. No, it's only the pump. The pump is like the monolith in 2001. Basically if you're driving down the street, as you get near the pump, you really start to feel it, a sense of foreboding. Then when you're within credit card swiping range, it hits you. My god, the humanity! $3.13 a gallon. Those poor, poor people. You know, sometimes, when it's quiet, you can hear the pump screaming. We'll be right back.
Female Newscaster: And with these prices, the pain is now spreading beyond the pump.
— Transcript by Danny Shea
It's New York Times Day at the New York Observer! This week's Off the Record devotes all three sections to the goings-on at West 43rd Street, focusing mainly on the plans to cut both the paper's width and its production staff (as was reported yesterday). Tom Scocca and Gabriel Sherman insinuate that yesterday's NYT article and the NYT executive memo on the cuts were well-spun (in two memos from the brass, no less), and that the justification for the cuts based on rising costs of newsprint is shaky at best. Newsprint costs, they argue, are well below their all-time high, and "trim-size reductions are not a flexible reaction to a sometimes-volatile newsprint market. They're just cuts." Times staffers are mixed on the announcement: "People are depressed," said one, but restaurant critic Frank Bruni remarked, "Do you succeed in reading 95 percent of the paper every day? It suggests to me that we could lose 5 percent and probably live."
In other NYT cost-cutting news, OTR covers the consolidation of the four New York metro regions -- New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester, and Connecticut -- into one combined regional section. "'You have to look where the bread is buttered,' one metro staffer said. 'And for The Times, the bread is buttered in covering Lebanon, Iraq and Washington. The Times is not known for how we cover Maplewood, N.J.'"
Finally, in what will be Gabriel Sherman's final byline for the NYO (aw! We wish you well, Gabe!), we learn that the Times is so unconcerned by the threats of litigation (and tarring and feathering, if not anthrax) resulting from their publication of the bank records story that reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen have yet to retain attorneys, and the Times has yet to call on noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams (whom they retained during the Judith Miller case). Let's hope the lack of concern is not unfounded: A lawsuit would be a good distraction for this administration, and as the above suggests, Times are tough enough.
Also in the NYO: Niall Stanage on the Times' coverage of the trial of South Korea's Tongsun Park.
— Danny Shea
from corporate.disney.go.com
Yesterday saw a major overhaul at Walt Disney Pictures in which 650 employees will be pink-slipped — including studio head Nina Jacobson, who is officially out.
Jacobson, who has been with Disney since 1998, is currently riding high on the success of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, which has raked in over $250 million since its July 7th debut (domestic - when you factor in overseas box office, DVD sales and promotional tie-ins, it's a money-minting juggernaut). Though she had just renegotiated her contract, when she called studio Chairman Dick Cook from the hospital where her partner had given birth to their third child he informed her that she had been replaced with Oren Aviv, the studio's head of marketing.
Eyebrows have obviously been raised by this move. In addition to "Pirates," Jacobson was responsible for "The Chronicles of Narnia," "The Sixth Sense," and "Pearl Harbor" and who just signed Alicia Keys to a deal with Disney in what was regarded as a coup. Jacobson's misses include "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Ladykillers" (hmm, taking a risk on Wes Anderson and Coen Brothers films starring people like Tom Hanks and Bill Murray - shocking!). Jacobson may also be responsible for having saved Disney a whole whack of money: her high-profile rejection of M. Night Shyamalan's "Lady In The Water" ("It's "The Village" meets "Signs" meets that American Express commercial!"), which Shyamalan sniffingly took to Warner Brothers, looks to have been prescient.
For his part, Aviv has exec-produced two movies: 1997's "Rocket Man" and the Da Vinci Code-esque "National Treasure," the concept of which he came up with. Hired for marketing, not production, savvy he apparently "understands the big movie" (Says FishbowlLA: "And Pirates of the Caribbean, at $266,277,457 domestic, is a small movie?")
Nikki Finke points out that the ousting of female bosses is a worrying trend in Hollywood, and the result of a double-standards where women have to be better than men or else. Finke notes that the track records of Jacobson, Sherry Lansing and Stacey Snider (also replaced by a marketing guy), though chequered, were not demonstrably different than those of their male counterparts. Says Finke: "Hollywood, like most industries, sets the bar higher for its woman executives: they can't just be equal to men, they have to be better. So that may be why this woman's world era is coming to an end. There's no doubt the women were good. They just weren't good enough to suit the men still in charge of them."
From newyorkmetro.com
Almost six months ago, New York magazine's Emily Nussbaum declared controversial motherhood writer Ayelet Waldmana "the writer New York moms love to hate." After this week's article on UrbanBaby, Nussbaum might be inheriting that title herself. Her "expose" on the anonymous New York mothers' bitchfest highlights the class conflicts, work-family balance and loneliness issues and general sense of competition that pervades motherhood in Manhattan (and gives us a clue as to what kind of husband-hating, internet-obsessed women might be e-mailing the Shamu article to everyone they know). But for the women who make up the UrbanBaby community — peopled with anonymous writers who, as Nussbaum points out, could be your next-door-neighbor or Britney Spears — the article is a less-than-welcome profile of a secret online world their husbands were never supposed to know about.
In addition to frank revelations from the mothers themselves ( "I never wanted kids and now I am pregnant") ("We have no sex life and we snap at each other") Nussbaum reveals a weird sort of top-down administrative control on Urban Baby, where threads are erased by invisible "deleters" with no explanation and a mother can be banned in a heartbeat ("You will not be able to post for 24,083 seconds"). This has been borne out, meta-style, in real life: Since publication, UrbanBaby administrators have censored posts including the link to Nussbaum's article (we've got that anecdotally, though have since seen the link on the site). What discussion remains ranges from (sic) "I don't want my posts in a magazine. She over did it!" to "feeling kinda dirty after the nussbaum article. not sure why? maybe feeling a touch less anonymous" to "Emily Nussbaum broke the first rule of UB...never talk about UB." Upshot: Nussbaum should probably watch her back; a Bugaboo in the wrong hands is a dangerous thing.
— Danny Shea
Laurie David
For some reason, John Stossel is often referred to as a journalist. In reality, he's a contrarian blow-hard who believes that government is evil and that corporations would be the most ethical, noble institutions in the world if only they were left to their own devices and not hampered by pesky burdens like accountability and oversight. Riiight.
So it comes as little surprise to me that Stossel belittles the serious threat from global warming. Last...
The Wall Street Journal has announced that it will begin running ads on its front page in a move that is bad for journalistic purists but good for the bottom line. The Times speculates that the move could "bring in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue each year" and that the cost of a front-page ad could range from 75,000 to low six figures.
While selling ads on the front page has typically been verboten, the idea has been raised recently as a way to get sure revenue in an ad-challenged environment for newspapers. USA Today does it, and the NYT has said it is considering it. Currently the NYT sells ad space on the front of its Business Day and Metro sections.
