The New York Times Co. released a sharply lower third-quarter earnings today, claiming a "challenging" print advertising market — which sent shares slamming down nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading.
Per Reuters: "The publisher of The New York Times newspaper and the Boston Globe forecast earnings of 8 cents to 10 cents per share, compared with 16 cents in the same quarter last year."
Misery, at least, loves company: Dow Jones & Co. also released a lowered third-quarter forecast because of low revenue at the WSJ, and Yahoo has also admitted to lower advertising revenues than expected.
Last week, top brassman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Vice Chairman Michael Golden pledged $2 million of their own stock-based pay for a staff bonus pool in order to boost morale, if not the bottom line. According to Reuters, New York Times shares fell over a dollar, from $22.83 at the close of the NY Stock Exchange to $21.73 in after-hours trading.
Blistering expose of the Washington Times in The Nation today, courtesy of Max Blumenthal. "These are edgy times at the Washington Times," he opens, explaining that not only is their tension in the newsroom because the newsroom is rife with racism, sexism and far-right white-supremacist overtones, but because they're all coming from editor in chief Wes Pruden's handpicked successor, managing editor Fran Coombs — and upstairs boss Preston Moon isn't having any of it. Moon is the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon and, according to Blumenthal's sources, he wants the current regime and its poisonous politics out.
Blumenthal uncovers how the Washington Times functions as "a key part of the radical right's apparatus in the United States." Read all about it here; sounds like a fun and accepting place to work!
from Gawker.com
Congratulations go out to Jossip's spunky and sassy Corynne Steindler, who brings her gift of the zinger to Page Six as the mag's latest hire in a big few months of turnover — and the first high-profile blogger to be plucked for the job since, well, Elizabeth Spiers did some time there a few years back. Backstory: Joining Page Six stalwarts Richard Johnson and Paula Froelich was Bill Hoffmann in June, culled from within the Post ranks, followed in July by Sarah Polonsky, before there was once again a vacancy when long time Sixer Chris Wilson departed for Maxim in August. Now it's September, and, ekeing out a hire in the eleventh-hour of summer, so joins Corynne. ETP feels bound to point out that Page Six is a rarity in NYC media circles: A high-profile operation staffed by 60% women. We know Steindler will live up to the column's reputation for scoopage and sass, and plan to canoodle with as many hot young rising studs as it takes to get into the column. Uh, we mean, good luck, Corynne!
p.s. Jeffrey Epstein, watch your back.
For the third day running, the NYT's Most-Emailed List — what we like to refer to as "MEL" — has been topped by an article on sleeping together, which, unlike another NYT top-ranked article which wondered if people were sleeping together, is about all of the aspects of bed-sharing and how it impacts the lives of said bed-sharers. We could point out that, for the Paper of Record, MEL is inveitably topped by stories of a non-newsy, non-urgent nature (two words: Shamu); we feel qualified to opine on this as we spend our entire day looking at Eat The Press, as you now are, which offers its readers the service of showing the most popular headlines on CNN, HuffPo, MSNBC, NYT, USA Today and Yahoo. Invetably, words like "Ahmadinejad" don't show up under the NYT.
But today, that's not the point; the point, my friends, is verisimilitude. We mentioned it yesterday and it's just as important today. And are hats are off to the New York Times as a result. We have learned, through intrepid reporting,* that the couple in the photo illustrating the piece is, in fact, married and do, in fact, sleep together on a regular basis. Nice tough, NYT. God is in the details!
Here are those details: The people in the photo are the wildly talented Sam Turich and Gab Cody, both very funny actor/comedians (as seen here, for example - plug!) and clearly excellent at feigning sleep. Photographer Rafael Fuchs called on Sam and Gab because he knew that, and also because he knew it wouldn't take much to get Sam to show a little skin to the folks at home.Here is what Sam says about being photographed sharing a bed:
It was one of the more relaxing shoots I've ever done (lying in bed for two hours) and we got to meet our landlord's wife (we shot it in her loft) who just had her third baby in 5 years and was VERY happy to have some adults to talk to.So, maybe not total verisimilitude, but pretty darn close. Said Sam: "That's not our real bed, or our real dog, but those are my pajamas." Oh, NYT, you think of everything.
In other news, there may never be a more opportune time to make a Phish reference.
*Disclosure: ETP's intrepid reporting consisted of being on Sam's email list sending the article around.
from www.smh.com.au
Radar reports, you decide: Apparently Bill O'Reilly's claim that he was on an al Qaeda most-wanted list is in serious dispute. Backstory:
The loofah-loving Fox News host is raising plenty of eyebrows around the office after telling Barbara Walters in an interview with ABC's 20/20 that, "the FBI came in and warned me and a few other people at Fox News that Al Qaeda had us on a death list." O'Reilly describes the experience--as well as other violent threats he says he's received from various "kooks" - as "disconcerting."But the reaction from some of his colleagues sounds more like disbelief. "I've never heard that before," says a correspondent for Fox News, who added that neither he nor anyone he's spoken to at the network has been warned by the FBI.
According a Radar source in federal law enforcement, FBI agents visited Fox's New York offices last month in regard to the kidnapping of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, but they only spoke with management. Said the source: "I'm not aware of any FBI agents warning anyone at Fox News of their presence on any list....For that matter, I'm not aware of any Al Qaeda hit list targeting journalists." Neither CBS nor ABC copped to receiving warnings; Fox declined to comment on the matter since O'Reilly made the statement on another network (yes, those Fox spokespeople don't like to say too much).
Is O'Reilly a target — or does he really just want to be the target of your attention? Perhaps we'll never know. What we do know is this: Dropping my favorite quote from his book — "Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants!" — just never gets old.
from www.variagate.com
In this week's New York Observer Chris Lehmann takes on Frank Rich's new Bush-bashing tome, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold," and he's not a huge fan: While Lehmann appreciate's Rich's efforts to expose the spin-stylings of the Bush message machine, he wishes Rich would have delved a bit deeper into the "hard-core ideological vision" of this administration and the very real consequences of that vision in the real world.
Having not read the book ETP can't comment on the fairness of Lehmann's review; what we can comment on, however, is the fairness of the assumption that a reference to the movie "Chicago" is obscure. Per Lehmann:
And don't get Mr. Rich started on actual commercial and critical successes such as Chicago — which reminds him of the White House press corps' dismal performance at a rare prewar 2002 Bush press conference, the lapdog journalists all singing along in the big production number, "We Both Reached for the Gun." (Don't worry — he lost me, too.)
Unlike millions and millions of people in 2002 thereafter, Lehmann obviously hasn't seen the Oscar-winning movie Chicago because if he had he'd surely remember the showpiece production number, in which smooth-talking lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) is represented as a grand puppeteer, utterly controlling reporters at a press conference as they literally dance as marionettes as he pulls the strings. It was a dazzling number despite the absence of Catherine Zeta-Jones' heaving bosom, and its point was pretty clear. But don't just take our word for it; enjoy it here on YouTube, as some random kid sings along. It's really an apt and particularly illustrative example to apply to the string-pullers of the Bush administration.
Now, we can only pity Lehmann for his lack of exposure to the joys of musical theater (Ana! Take this boy out sometime!) but we can gently chide him for criticizing Rich for being obscure on a point of general pop-culture reference (surely Chicago was more seen, discussed and publicized than a film such as, say, Malibu's Most Wanted...which Lehmann references to support his thesis here) (and I don't know what this proves, but I actually only just got this now as a result).
Lehmann is no stranger to oblique and erudite references himself, so it seems unfair of him to call Rich out for "losing" the reader on a matter in which most other readers would not, in fact, be lost. Since ETP is on the record as being a fan of both showtunes and their presence in Rich's work, by all means don't take it from me. There are other people who get it, including but not limited to the following: The kids at Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey; Germans (well, they call it "We Grepen Het Pistool" but why quibble over details); enjoyers of Naples Dinner Theater; people who line up at TKTS in Times Square; lovers of Pokemon; the good people of San Jose; fans of R&B sensation Usher; this girl who obviously has a lot of time on her hands; Scott McClellan.
Front-page on today's Wall Street Journal: Facebook.com is apparently in serious talks with Yahoo! to be acquired for up to $1 billion. The social-networking site, staple of college kids everywhere, has also spoken with Microsoft and Viacom (though it's a bit out of Viacom's current price range), says the WSJ, which notes that Yahoo! has been feeling the Google pinch in search advertising and in general global hegemony (well, except in Belgium). Yahoo's shares fell 1.5% yesterday in trade on the Nasdaq.
Facebook represents a giant prize in the big online social-networking properties right now, especially after the savvy pickup of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp last year, which apparently bugged Sumner Redstone enough to axe Tom Freston over it. It's also weathered its first massive misstep: Introducing privacy-eschewing "newsfeeds" for its members alerting their networks to changes in online status, which sent Facebook's constituents into a tizzy (the company hastily reversed their position).
UPDATE: The WSJ story has now been put up for free online here. HIlarious excerpt:
During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn't do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company's 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn't be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous... The young entrepreneur says he generally works late -- he recalls eating French fries recently in the parking lot of a local McDonald's restaurant at 3 a.m. -- and doesn't get to work early. "I'm in the office at 10:30 a.m. sometimes," he says.
