ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH
- 01 | 06 | 09
- 01 | 05 | 09
- 01 | 02 | 09
- 12 | 29 | 08
- 12 | 23 | 08
Slate: How newspapers tried to invent the web. But failed.
Ad Age: ESPN redesigns to be more ad-friendly.
LA Times: Will the current economic crisis lead us to embrace restraint and disdain excess?
NY Times: Google hopes to open a trove of little-seen books + The Times starts selling display ads on the front page.
Portfolio: 2008 "worst year for media deals this century."
Chicago Tribune: sport writer Jay Mariotti joins AOL Sports as national columnist, no longer "scrutinizing the same five teams over and over."
Hollywood Reporter: 2008 was a bad year for media stocks.
NY Post: Larry Flynt, the wheelchair-bound publisher of Hustler magazine, is locked in a bitter legal dispute with nephews Jimmy Flynt II and Dustin Flynt to block them from starting a new adult-entertainment video company that the duo want to call Flynt Media.
Pop & Politics: Village Voice lays off three more regulars, including Nat Hentoff, who had been writing about jazz and civil liberties in 1958.
AP: Chicago's newspapers facing troubled futures.
NY Post: It Could Get Condé Nasty: web, Domino, Details could be "January surprise" victims.
NY Times: False memoir of holocaust is canceled.
LA Times: Is Ben Lyons the most hated film critic in America?
Salon: Read it and weep: The economic news couldn't be worse for the book industry. Now insiders are asking how literature will survive.
AP: Newspapers to sell buildings, but who's buying?
Wall Street Journal: Prophet sharing: The good book is the best seller. The bible, long a commercial hit, gets repackaged for market niches from the homespun to the fashion forward.
COLUMNS
STOP SMILING BLOG
- Who Needs Another Disc?
-
To many of the growing number of people who have discovered $9-a-month streaming Netflix and other similar online cinema services, the prospect of shelling out $200 for a Blu-Ray player seems ridiculous, as the New York Times reports; for those cinephiles who insist on owning a tangible item they can associate with the movies they watch, the Criterion Collection recently released its first line of Blu-Ray selections, which includes The Man Who Fell to Earth -- a masterwork starring David Bowie and directed by Nicolas Roeg, who STOP SMILING interviewed for its Auteur Issue. [Read Post] - Posted: 01 | 05 | 2009 // Posted by: Stop Smiling
// GENERAL
- Belt-Tightening for Showbiz in 2009
-
"This business was never meant to sustain limousines," Amanda Urban, a literary agent, told the New York Times -- and it's an early entry for quote of the year: The Times reports on the "new austerity" in the publishing industry, which, for decades, "promised a romantic life of fancy lunches, sparkling parties, sophisticated banter and trips to spots like the Caribbean to pitch books to sales representatives" -- that "cushy schmooze fest" is over; meanwhile, Hollywood escaped a difficult year with solid 2008 ticket sales (totaling $9.6 billion), which "were largely attributable to superheroes," yet the movie industry must still confront "drooping DVD sales -- where most profits are made -- and a messy, unresolved labor dispute with the powerful Screen Actors Guild"; and it's lights-out for a dozen Broadway plays. [Read Post] - Posted: 01 | 05 | 2009 // Posted by: Stop Smiling
// BOILERPLATE
- December 2008: In Memoriam
-
We were saddened to read about the recent passing of Freddie Hubbard (pictured here), who Down Beat hailed as "arguably the most powerful and prolific trumpeter in jazz," and we concur -- Hubbard's death comes at the close of a month that has claimed an astonishing amount of fascinating figures, among them the former associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat); pinup queen Bettie Page; director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird); singer and civil rights activist Odetta; sculptor Robert Graham; playwright Harold Pinter; the oldest man in the United States George Francis; cult movie actress Ann Savage; and last but not least, Richard Topus, a pigeon trainer in World War II. [Read Post] - Posted: 12 | 30 | 2008 // Posted by: Stop Smiling
// OBIT
- Facing a Season of Bankruptcy
-
What happens when a logjam of logos can't save you? NASCAR is facing such questions as corporations, hit by sticker shock, are beginning to withdraw sponsorships; the National Hockey League Board of Governors met recently to discuss the downturn in the economy, which might lead to a decline in the salary cap; America's Team is falling into a recession of its own; and the Lovable Losers dodged the bankruptcy bullet when the Tribune Company excluded the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field from its petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. [Read Post] - Posted: 12 | 23 | 2008 // Posted by: Stop Smiling
// INBOUNDS
- Melville House Blogs a Book
-
Washington Post reporter Kari Lydersen has eschewed her newspaper journalist role in an imaginative undertaking to tell the story of the workers who occupied Chicago's Republic Windows & Doors factory in a way that befits an age when online reportage is often too light and quick, yet a story cannot sit idle for long before it's forgotten -- Lydersen has partnered with Melville House Publishing to approach the story from two sides: with a book about the worker's actions that will be scrambled into print by early next year, the creation of which readers will be able to witness via a blog on the Melville House website. [Read Post] - Posted: 12 | 17 | 2008 // Posted by: Stop Smiling
// BOILERPLATE, HAPPENINGS