More People Watching Network News, Which Is Weird
In your woebegone Wednesday media column: network news is on the ups, The Source magazine remembered, Harper's Bazaar cuts back, the trickle away from The Daily continues, and ad revenue at the NYT is bad (again, still).
- For the first time in almost a decade, all three evening network newscasts saw their viewership rise over the past season. Even CBS! Quick, name a network news anchor other than Brian Williams. No one in America can! So why is this? Widespread internet outages? No, just more people checkin' out the news! It's just dumb old population growth. Congrats to all!
- Former Source magazine writer Thomas Golianopoulos writes a pretty damn great NYO story today on the rise, fall, and partial rise again of The Source's founders, who are now running crappy hip hop/ celeb rag Hip Hop Weekly. Stories about The Source magazine are always great! What a fucked up place! Five mics of lunacy!
- Harper's Bazaar is cutting back to 10 issues per year, after cutting back to 11 issues earlier this year. But the magazine is getting physically larger, also! It's a push.
- News Corp's future-of-journalism iPad newspaper The Daily is becoming less attractive by the week to its star writers, just as predicted. The latest: Sasha Frere-Jones, fancy NYer music critic whose hiring was considered a coup, has "relinquished his full-time editing duties at the iPad tabloid" to become an editor at large, according to the NYO. That means he wasn't so hot about working there any more. He won't be the last.
- New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson told a financial industry conference today that "third quarter advertising revenue would drop by a larger-than-expected 8 percent." Larger than who expected? So what else is new? Newspaper ad revenue down? What next, bananas growing on trees?
[Photo: AP]