After noting the hullabaloo regarding Amazon.com's defiance in continuing to sell cockfighting magazines, we asked for your help in locating even more objectionable periodicals that Amazon enthusiastically pimps for purchase. You responded with gusto, and we present a gallery of favorites after the jump.
As usual, fascist freedom-hating killjoys at the Humane Society are out to ruin everyone's good time by threatening to sue Amazon.com unless the online retailer ceases selling subscriptions to Gamecock and Feathered Warrior magazines. While mailing cockfighting magazines might technically violate the interstate commerce restrictions of the Animal Welfare Act, Amazon is taking a brave stand for free speech and violent poultry by defying the Humane Society and continuing to accept orders for the mags. Both cockfighting titles are also practically historical artifacts — Feathered Warrior's been published since 1903. And Gamecock has enjoyed an explosion in popularity due to the "bad" publicity, climbing to #105 in Amazon's rankings of over 17,000 available titles. Charming as these magazines are, we're willing to bet Amazon stocks other magazines which are even more objectionable. Send in your contenders (with Amazon links) to tips@gawker.com.
Pounding out capsule summaries is a thankless business, and when it comes to the New York Post's "On the Newsstand," who knows if the column's crafted by one person, five people, or ten monkeys. As usual, it's impossible to track the prejudices of the hidden author(s)/monkey(s) in this week's incarnation. Observe certain questionable word usage. Is it sarcasm? Irony? Blithe semantic indifference? You be the judge. Summarizing Seventeen:
The New York Sun, with what's got to be a bit of foreboding given its own tenuous existence, takes a look at Brooklyn, where a number of borough-centric magazines have failed to thrive. Pegging the piece on the closure of The Brooklynite, reporter Leon Nayfakh notes that:
Worried about the decline of the print magazine format? Not so the geniuses behind the W.W.E., who plan to introduce a lifestyle magazine along the lines of Maxim or FHM but with wrestlers (thus building the homoeroticism right in). WWE's unique selling proposition, at least to us, is the regular column
Emily Gordon of EmDashes has roped two anonymous New Yorker staff members into participating in a Q&A with her readers:
Hachette Filipacchi is unveiling the Middle Eastern edition of Elle this Friday, which, barring any last minute editorial fatwas, will appear on newsstands in Lebanon, Jordan, and Morocco. A second, more conservative version of the Lebanese publication will hit Saudi Arabia in October (though the Saudi government will likely black out most of the images anyhow — how Gilles Bensimon shall cry!). None of these editions will feature Hilary Duff on their covers, making them far superior to our own glossy version.
Like watching TV but regret that you can't take the tube into the bathroom with you? Well, thank God for Bauer Publishing; WWD reports that the constantly conceptualizing corporation has plans for "a proposed weekly title that would recap and comment on the week's news in a manner similar to VH1's 'Best Week Ever,'" even having gone so far as to hire a writer from the show. While there's a case to be made that we're not exactly lacking opportunities to read "humorous" comments on the week's news, we think this argument fails to appreciate the majesty of print. When Paul F. Tompkins talks about Kevin Federline's cornrows hilarity naturally ensues, but when Paul F. Tompkins writes about Kevin Federline's cornrows you'd swear that Murray Kempton had risen from the grave and once more taken up his pen. Also, the gap in Paul Scheer's teeth is a lot less scary on glossy paper. We're almost excited about this as we are about Fairchild's forthcoming "Pimp My Ride" mag.
Following WWD's speculative article about the state of her contract (up at the end of the month), rumors festered yesterday evening that AMI editorial director Bonnie Fuller had left the company. AMI CEO David Pecker had called a smoke-filled meeting with the company's brassiest balls, fueling the chatter that the Canadian Fury had left the building, no doubt in an imagined fit of shin-kicking and ceramic-mug throwing. AMI flack Lisa Dallos says, "Nothing could be further from the truth."
If your long-term memory is not yet completely shot, you may recall that in April, during the rosy days of the Payola Six scandal, Zink magazine issued a press release reminding everyone that while alleged extortionist Jared Paul Stern sat on their masthead as a contributing editor, his work at the mag never "entered into the sphere of gossip" and, to their knowledge, he had not committed any major crimes while doing his work for the publication. OK, Zink — thou doth protest too much, but you need the attention so it's OK.
A flustered emailer writes:
It's been nine months since Joanna Lipman left The Wall Street Journal to found that new business-focused magazine for Conde Nast and, according to WWD's Sara James, the damned thing finally has a title. It'll be called Quote. Unless, that is, it's called Portfolio. Or perhaps File, or Currency.
Hachette's Shock magazine hits the newsstands on May 30, but early copies are floating around Mediaville, and a greasy copy has thus arrived at HQ And, dare we say, it's a thing of lowbrow beauty. If the National Enquirer bound and gagged Life and forced it to sift through Rotten.com, it would result in something like this. Cheap ($1.99), low on words (there has to be well under 1000 in the entire issue) and bravely independent of advertising (FishbowlNY dutifully notes a mere 3 ad pages), Shock just might be the perfect publication for happily deranged voyeur within us all.
Another week, another magland up-and-out maybe promotion. Last week it Time M.E. Jim Kelly who was either upped or maybe eased to the brand-new position of company-wide managing editor, where he'll troubleshoot and help recruit but not have direct oversight of any Time Inc. titles. This week it's Good Housekeeping's longtime EIC Ellen Levine, who is being upped or just maybe eased to the brand-new position of Hearst Magazine editorial director, where she'll help develop brand extensions and new titles but not, as we read the memo, have direct oversight of any Hearst titles. While you debate among yourselves whether or not they're promotions, the full Hearst memo — touting, among other things, Levine's "unparalleled record of putting the reader first" — is after the jump.
• Philly guys officially snag KR's Philly papers from McClatchy. [NYT]
• Al Siegel has left the Times Building. [NYO]
• Despite AMI noncompete, Star vet Mark Coleman to become deputy editor at Bauer's Life & Style, setting off various other staff moves too mundane for you to care much about. [NYP]
• Magazines want more readers, who are younger and richer. And some even got what they wanted. [WWD]
Ed2010 is the "group for young editors who are hoping to reach their dream magazine jobs by the year 2010" (with the presupposition that one's dream magazine job must be at a mind-numbing women's book), and things have been getting hot and heavy on its bulletin boards lately. A perhaps unprecedented number of replies have been prompted by a troubled inquiry posted Friday night:
We've never really heard of Circus magazine, and we suspect this entirely our own fault, because we're so inexcusably square. We're told it's a big-deal rock and metal mag, and, like Rolling Stone, it has been around since the late '60s and run by the same guy the whole time. Or, at least, that was the case until yesterday, when freelancers learned it had unceremoniously shut down. In an era when rich Hachette shutters seemingly successful ELLEgirl because projections didn't look good, when rich Mort Zuckerman can't decide whether or not he's actually willing to sink money in Radar, this has got to be the saddest magazine-closure email we've seen:
• Too weak to even walk through a grocery store, Nicole Richie must ride in a shopping cart pushed by assisted living specialist Mischa Barton. [TMZ]
• If youth is wasted on the young, then it's the same with karaoke. In Flushing, however, Grandma can get her groove on. [NYM]
• SpotBit is an electronic archive of several current magazines — all of which you can download for free, in full. We'd encourage you to go and stick it to the man, but this shit likely won't make much of a difference. [via Big and Sharp]
• Axl Rose and Sebastian Bach hit 6's and 8's, party like it's 1984. [Animal]
• In order to tame and defeat Eurotrash, you must first learn to understand the bare-chested breed. [Save Manny]
• It's hard to care about celebrity lookalikes. But it helps if the doppelgangers are making porn. [Fleshbot]
Here it is, folks, the moment everyone — or, at least, Mark Whitaker — has been waiting for: The winner of Gawker's first-ever High-Stakes Ellies Pool, in which the assembled media-pundit masses competed for prizes and praise by picked who'd win each of the 22 National Magazine Awards.
