We couldn't help but notice that yesterday's edition of the UrbanDaddy newsletter (think Daily Candy for cocks) is frighteningly similar to today's edition of the Thrillist newsletter (again, Daily Candy for cocks). Both reviewed the Meatpacking District's latest addition, Pre:Post, which caters to patrons with drinks and meals both before and after their club crawls. A brief comparison of the two reviews' bullet points:
A memo today from Times deputy managing editor Jon Landman, he of the famous "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now" messsage, announces some backed staffing changes at the paper. The guy who's been running the continuous news desk, Bill Brink, is moving over to be managing editor Play, the new sports mag, and also work on "rich web projects" during the lulls in the quarterly production sked. Jim Roberts becomes the new director of continuous news. But he'll be doing more than Brink did in that capacity, because apparently the Times now thinks this whole online-news thing might be worth paying attention to.
Have you guys noticed the relatively new website TMZ? We've linked to it a few times (notably, they had a lot of documents from the Paris Hilton lawsuit); it's a new entertainment news site that, so far as we can tell, features a lot of the typical wire stuff plus a decent handful of original reporting. It's not half bad, if you like watching celebrity lookalikes traipse around Fashion Week and learning that underage stars drink.
Time Inc.'s heralded young-guys web offering, Office Pirates, launched today, and we've been trying to figure out how we feel about it. After all, keeping you from doing any real work while you're at your office is supposed to be our job, and we know we shouldn't be thrilled about these John Hueys-come-lately at the Time & Life building moving onto our turf. But on the other hand, we do hate to see layoffs and cutbacks at our favorite mag companies, so we also find ourselves rooting for successful ventures from places like Time Inc., so the whole operation can keep on keeping on. Also, we do like funny things on the web, and those things have heretofore been hard to find.
Buck up, little camper. It's not that Remnick didn't appreciate that brilliant pitch for your breakthrough piece; we're sure he loved it. He just can't get word to you. Or at least that's what you can keep telling yourself, thanks to a forwarded memo we received from several tipsters within Conde Nast:
You've spent hours on the therapist's couch trying to move on, but you just can't forget that horrible day in second grade. It was lunchtime, and everyone reached into their backpacks to get out their food, and everyone — everyone — somehow knew to have that cute new Corey Haim lunchbox. Except you. You just had a plain brown bag. And you'd never felt so left out in your life.
Another local website falls victim to the corn-car marketing plague. Seriously, GM, listen up: New York City is NOT your demographic. We only care about our taxis. Please, for the love of God, stop the madness. We once endured an entire winter of saffron — haven't we already suffered enough?
• Icahn and Wasserstein unveil plan to break up Time Warner into four separate companies: Cable systems, entertainment products, AOL, and Time Inc. And if Time Inc. is alone again, maybe they'll even bring back the drinks cart. Please? [NYT]
• Brangelina spawn's baby pix likely to go for up to $4 million. Even our own mother doesn't think ours are worth that much. [NYP]
• More Page Six is coming! More Page Six is coming! Also, David Carr is a quasi-TV star. [NYO]
• God bless the web, which is saving the two non-Murdoch news networks. Also, Dick Cavett thinks Brokaw was drunk. [NYO]
• Why is Brian Williams, not the traditional Katie Couric, Bob Costas' sidekick for the Olympics opening parade? Either because Katie is busy with morning work, as NBC says, or maybe because the peacock doesn't want to build up anchor who's about to bolt. [Chicago Tribune]
• Tom Ford looks like Jeremy Piven, according to VF focus groupers. [WWD]
If you can swallow your pride just long enough to peruse the Fashion Spot message boards ("where the fashion industry meets online," of course), you can learn some interesting things. For instance:
Once, long ago, magazines had their own, separate identities. Typically, this included their own, separate editorial and business staffs, and even often their own real estate. When Si Newhouse bought The New Yorker, for example, he promised that he wouldn't integrate the magazine into Conde Nast, today its business operations are unified with the rest of the company, and the its staff toils in 4 Times Square.
Haven't we all had more than our fair share of Donald Trump? When he's not building something, he's firing someone; when he's not firing someone, he's suing somebody. Sure, he's great as an icon of bad hair and abstract wealth — but that can only support our Trump tolerance for so long. There's no need for Trump University, or Trump Cologne, and certainly no one wants a part of his latest venture, online travel search engine GoTrump. Maybe it's just us, but when we're planning our vacation, we'd rather not be anywhere near his creepy mug.
So we're hearing that the Observer's website has been infected with some sort of particularly malignant virus or spyware or somesuch. Apparently simply visiting the site — on a PC; Mac people, as always, are miraculously inoculated — will infect your computer with something we're told is called "Icyfox," which will, we're further told, send data "to Korea." (We presume that's North Korea; this seems the sort of dastardly subversion the Dear Leader would dream up.)
On Fake Writer James Frey's website, an update announces that the BigJimIndustries.com is currently down not because of detractors, but because traffic was affecting access to other sites that share the same network. "We basically forced James to take the site down," it reads.
• James Risen wouldn't show Times editors his spying book until a week before it came out — and even then only after they signed an NDA. We can't imagine Denton even stifling a laugh if we tried the same thing. [NYO]
• MPA chief "regrets" making donation to conservative group Abramoff suggested. Just as we're sure Bob Ney regrets taking all those perks Abramoff offered. And Abramoff, we're equally sure, regrets offering them. [Ad Age]
• It's a dorky thing to be excited about, but, still, we're dorks: The Observer website finally gives each article its own URL, and our long national nightmare is over. [Jossip]
• Now only TimesSelect subscribers can email the paper's op-ed columnists. We hope, for Maureen's sake, that Aaron Sorkin's a TimesSelecter. [E&P]
• Jon Friedman misses Walter Cronkite. [MW]
Memoir poser and Fake Writer James Frey has wisely added password protection to his personal page, Big Jim Industries. Christ, so many people are relapsing this very minute.
• Judge rules that Stallone's Sly magazine won't be confused for a shoe-fetishist rag. Which is kind of too bad. [E! Online]
• Reuters: "Men want facts, women seek relations on Web." Clearly the reporters don't know any gay men, who we're pretty sure seek all sorts of deviant "relations" on the Web. [Reuters via Yahoo]
• Breaking: Reporters like to drink. [NYT]
• Jossip presents his 2005 media awards, though we don't quite understand why "Graydon Carter's Deep Throat discovery" is a nominee for "biggest newsmedia mishap." [Jossip]
• Bossman's stuck in London, and WWD clearly has absolutely no real news to report. [WWD]
It's been far, far too long since this familiar manifestation of naggery has appeared in the lower-right of our screen:
Our early morning surfing:
