John Koblin

At today's Newhouse panel at the Plaza, moderator Ken Auletta asked all three Condé Nast editors on the dais—Vogue's Anna Wintour, Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter, The New Yorker's David Remnick—how they felt about the future of magazines. Would the crisis that's currently afflicting the newspaper industry take its toll on magazines?

As they've said before, these editors think everything will be just fine!

"I think we’ve been in difficult times before and we’ve come out of them and I’m sure that we will again," said Ms. Wintour.  read more »

Elisabeth Bumiller will join the foreign policy desk and become The New York Times' Pentagon reporter, a source tells us.

Ms. Bumiller had been the paper's White House correspondent since 2001, and covered the election for the last year. She is also the author of Condoleezza Rice: An American Life.

UPDATE: Ms. Bumiller let this cat out of the bag to the Daily Northwestern.

"I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future," said Vogue editor Anna Wintour as she was walking out of the Plaza this morning.

Ms. Wintour was at the Plaza today along with New Yorker editor David Remnick and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to participate in a panel discussion sponsored by the Newhouse School of Communication and The New Yorker.

Rumors have been circulating for weeks that Ms. Wintour was coming close to giving up her editor's chair. Earlier this week, Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse dismissed reports he was meeting in France with French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld about her replacing Ms. Wintour. "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard," he said. Ms. Wintour, when offered the chance to dismiss the rumor on November 21st, only fueled further speculation when she told a reporter to go away.  read more »

Media Mob has learned that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer will write a new column for Slate beginning tomorrow. The column will appear every other week and it'll be about government, regulation and finance.

"He's going to be doing a regular thing," said Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group. "It'll be heavily about the financial crisis and fixing financial markets and the economy generally."

The column will be titled The Best Policy.

Mr. Weisberg said that he was lobbying him to do it for months. Cliff Sloan, the former publisher of Slate, knew Mr. Spitzer back during their Harvard Law days, and Mr.  read more »

On the day the perennially troubled Radar magazine folded, its editor Maer Roshan got an email from an old friend, Tina Brown, with whom he’d worked at her own sunken ship, Talk.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

These days, Ms.  read more »

Over the next week or two, the January issues of monthly magazines will start hitting newsstands—or perhaps “lightly floating onto newstands like little snowflakes” would be a better way of putting it.

“A lot of people are really, really down in the dumps about what January looks like,” said Jay Lauf, the publisher of the recently revamped Atlantic.

Layoffs, hiring freezes and canceled Christmas parties have cast a general chill over the magazine world. But with budget season finally wrapped up, it looked like the industry could finally take a much-needed breather right before the New Year.

Then suddenly more bad news emerged from the business side: bleaker-than-usual ad-page numbers for January.  read more »

"There’s no truth to it," said Si Newhouse in a statement sent through a spokeswoman to wsj.com today, regarding the rumors that Anna Wintour is on the verge of being replaced by Carine Roitfeld as editor of Vogue. "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard."

Gawker wrote in an item earlier today—filed under the header "Rumormonger"—that Mr. Newhouse left for France early to seal a deal with Ms. Roitfeld.

So what does it mean that Mr. Newhouse released this statement? It means it's probably not going to happen all that soon! Mr. Newhouse very rarely delivers statements, even through his spokeswoman Maurie Perl, so the fact that he felt compelled (from Europe!) to take care of this is a rather strong vote of confidence for Ms. Wintour.

At least for the time being.

Sheila McClear, one of Gawker.com's three writers, has been fired.

Ms. McClear told us her layoff was characterized to her as part of a budget cut at the Web site, and was told that her page-views were lacking. She learned the news after she heard rumors that there would be further cuts at the company (19 people were let go back in October, and a few more last month) and asked her bosses directly if she had anything to be concerned about. After that, she was summoned to a conference room and told that she'd be let go starting in January.

She said she was told there would be no more layoffs at the Gawker Web site in this round of cuts.  read more »

Critics are falling all over themselves to laud Gus Van Sant's Milk. Some seem to love one scene in particular:

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

One of the first scenes in 'Milk' is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase 'angel-headed hipster' comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events.

 read more »

If you wanted to wipe out the American media establishment in one blow, you might have targeted the Grand Ballroom on the third floor of the Plaza hotel at around 9 a.m. on Nov. 12.

The Foursquare Conference was organized by media mogul Steve Rattner’s Quadrangle Partners, and had the kind of exclusive list Mr. Rattner is known for. Barry Diller attended the conference, as did Lachlan Murdoch, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Tribune chief Sam Zell.

It was just the place for Jeff Jarvis, the tall 54-year-old professorial-looking guy who was looking intently through unfashionable glasses at the participants of a panel discussion on the state of American media, from his perch up front.  read more »

As has been speculated for about month, The New York Times Company has severly cut its dividend—the pool of money it hands out to its shareholders, including about $25 million to the Sulzberger-Ochs clan—from $.23 -per-share to $.06-per-share. That's about a 75 percent cut for what serves as one of the biggest sources of income for the entire family.

"This was a difficult but necessary decision that will provide us with greater financial flexibility in these uncertain economic times," said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of the company, in a statement.

The trustees of the Ochs-Sulzbergers sent out a statement supporting the decision and said that while it will be "very difficult" for its shareholders, the decision "serves the best interests" of the company.  read more »

"We're having a lot more fun than we did on Liberty Island!" said Tina Brown, the czarina of The Daily Beast, at her Web site's launch party last night in the Meatpacking District.

No, it didn't quite have the extravagance, say, of that 1999 Talk launch party on Liberty Island, where more than 800 movie stars and celebrities—invites went out to everyone from Henry Kissinger to Madonna—mingled and got drunk in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Well, those were different times.

Ms. Brown's launch party last night was at... Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue. Maybe this is the New Media reality.

At this party, Harvey Weinstein didn't make the guest list, but "Fast Eddie" Felsenthal, the executive editor of The Daily Beast, sure did (and that was his nickname at The Wall Street Journal, we're told!). And instead of nearly a thousand arriving by ferry, this one had a few dozen people who had to take the ACE or the L. Everyone went home by a quarter to nine.

There were free sliders.  read more »

Andrea Mitchell started it.

It was she who told viewers of NBC’s The Nightly News With Brian Williams on Thursday, Nov. 13, that Hillary Clinton “is under consideration to be secretary of state.”

Since then, nobody seems to have known what to think. But that hasn’t ground the Madame Secretary boomlet to a halt—on the contrary, it only accelerated it! Over the past few days, we’ve heard: Hillary is under consideration for the job. She’s been offered the job! She hasn’t been offered the job (which was only news because someone else had said she had).

Last night, we read that she had been offered the job, and not only that, she was going to accept it! More recently, it’s been “unclear,” but her husband is being vetted—that’s the news of the day for Nov.  read more »

Play, the Times Magazine’s quarterly sports magazine, folded yesterday because it was losing six-digit sums every year, said its editorial director Gerry Marzorati.

“It was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years and when you’re not going to see that turn around, that’s the problem,” he said.

Mr. Marzorati, the editor of the Times Magazine, oversees all the Times' magazine products. Mark Bryant was the freelance editor who led the day-to-day editorial management of Play.

Mr. Marzorati said the magazine went under because it was the only one of the Times Magazine products—including all the T magazines, Key, et cetera—that was losing money at a time when the masthead and the Times Company needs to cut.  read more »

The New York Times' quarterly sports magazine, Play, has folded, reports Mediabistro.

As late as Octobser 23, Play editor Mark Bryant told the site that Play was doing just fine, and would run for four full issues in 2009.

It's also the first time that the ceaselessly-launched editions of The Times Magazine (all those Ts!) has been tripped up.

We'll give you updates when we get some.

Out magazine threw its annual "Out 100" fete at Gotham Hall in midtown on Friday, Nov. 14, an event that felt more intimate than in previous years: fewer high-wattage luminaries and an altogether understated sensibility.

And, indeed, there was some bad mojo in the air. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that prohibits gay marriage, had passed 10 days earlier. And you couldn't help but feel that Out--which was sold earlier this year for pennies to the owners of the hereTV! network--might be throwing its last big party that every gay boy from Chelsea to Bushwick tries to get on the list for.  read more »

And, again, at one point today, it hit another 52-week low of $7.25.

Its market cap is just a smidgen over a billion dollars, standing at $1.06 billion.

Two months after Lehman Brothers crashed, and one month after its puzzling Dov Charney cover, Portfolio has finally addressed the financial crisis.

Michael Lewis gets the cover story, and, defying the magazine's recent tradition, the lead image isn't a person. Portfolio's cover is an image of Wall Street's Charging Bull statue, flipped sideways lying under a cover line, "After the Fall."

In the time since the magazine's November release, Portfolio has been confronting a crisis of its own. The magazine has all but killed its Web site, it laid off 20 percent of its staff, the majority of its staff writers were laid off (with some getting an option to sign a contract), it was in serious danger of folding and it's publishing schedule has been downsized from 12 times a year to 10 times a year.

And apparently that has taken effect immediately: this month's issue is the publication's December/January issue. And, finally, the author of its cover piece, Mr. Lewis, has handed in his last assignment and now he's headed upstairs at 4 Times Square to Vanity Fair.  read more »

The job cuts at Time Inc. continue: Media Mob has learned that there have been layoffs at Entertainment Weekly.

One staffer who was laid off today told us that there are "across the board" cuts that affect both the magazine and ew.com. Roughly 15 editorial staffers were laid off today, with potentially more coming. So far, no staff meeting has been convened, and staffers are being informed of the bad news on a case-by-case basis.

Unlike other affected magazines at Time Inc., such as People, staffers at EW who are getting the pink slip today are not being given a grace period to raise their hand and voluntarily submit a buyout application.  read more »

As a follow up from yesterday's bad news, Times Company stock hit another 52-week low today, falling to $7.70 today.

That puts the Company's market cap at $1.1 billion. By comparison, last year at this time the Company's market cap was at $2.7 billion. In an even rougher comparison, George Steinbrenner is worth about $1.3 billion.

Nick Denton published a screed today that warned media bosses, small and large, that the worst has yet to come. "From conglomerates to internet ventures, executives should be planning now on a decline of up to 40% in advertising spending during this cycle," he wrote. "Instead they're sleepwalking into economic extinction—even those lean online ventures which were supposed to take up the mantle and preserve New York's position as a media capital."

And Mr. Denton has put his words immediately into action. He's told us that Consumerist, his buyer self-defense blog, is up for sale.

In other news! The Gawker Media managing editor, Noah Robischon, is taking a job as an editor at Fast Company's Web site. Mr. Denton said he won't be replaced. Mr. Robischon's duties, which included budgeting, hirings and firings, design stuff, etc, will now rest in Mr. Denton's hands.

In this week’s giddily Obama-centric edition of The New Yorker—you had the illuminated O in “Yorker”; the “ELECTION SPECIAL” tab on the outside cover flap; and more than 35,000 words inside about the election—the longest story in the magazine was assigned to none other than the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. His 12,000-word opus on race and politics included dispatches from two different trips to Chicago and one to New Orleans.

It was filed in the magazine under: “A Reporter at Large.”

“As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically” said Mr.  read more »

The conventional wisdom is that shelter magazines are recession-proof. When people are getting laid off, they’re spending more time at home—and home might as well look nice!

But there’s something different about this downturn.

“You’ll see further fallout,” said Kate Kelly Smith, the publisher of House Beautiful. “There’s just not enough revenue out there to support all these [shelter] titles. We’ve already seen it, and we’ll continue to see it.”

Ms. Smith saw it firsthand at her parent company, Hearst, which on Friday, Nov. 7, folded O at Home, reassigning its editor, Sarah Gray Miller, to another struggling Hearst shelter title, Country Living.  read more »

One person who won't stick around at portfolio.com is its editor, and ex-New York Post business editor, Dan Colarusso.

"I'm going to be staying through January 31st to help a newly appointed Managing Editor to take over the site," Mr. Colarusso told Media Mob in an interview.

Portfolio.com was recently gutted amid larger cuts at the magazine, and its staff of 45 has been whittled down to only a handful. Remaining players include Market Movers blogger Felix Salmon and Mixed Media blogger Jeff Bercovici.

But Mr. Colarusso, who was offered a job to stay, won't be hanging around the new skeleton site.  read more »

Well, on the day the Times Company's stock took a nosedive and hit its 52-week low, the company's General Manager for the internet, Vivian Schiller, announced she's leaving the paper and heading to NPR.

Ms. Schiller one of the people responsible for making nytimes.com into something of a machine, and she leaves with lots of record breaking weeks in her wake.

She's also the co-author, with Jon Landman, of all those Friday internet emails that we've come to adore, and, in part, responsible for confusing our understanding of what "platform agnostic" actually means.

One of Sam Zell's big theories for newspapers is to get more and more local.

While Newsday was still under Mr. Zell's grasp, he managed to dismantle its national desk, and dispense with nearly every non-Long Island beat.

Even though it's finally out of his control and into the, uh, gentle hands of the Dolans, the new owners have shown no interest is straying from that philosophy. Now we're starting to learn the cost.  read more »

More bad news for Times Company stock: Its stock has hit a new 52-week low today at $8.12, and stands at $8.28 as we write this.

The plunge comes a day after the Times announced that its New England newspapers had declined in value by $166 million, more than the $100 to $150 million that C.E.O. Janet Robinson had projected in a conference call last month.

That also greatly alters its third quarter numbers. The Associated Press' Anick Jesdanun (here via Forbes) reports: "With the new charge and related tax adjustments, the Times had a net loss of $106 million, or 74 cents a share, in the third quarter, compared with a profit of $13.  read more »

Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at the New Yorker whose stable of writers includes the likes of Ryan Lizza, Nick Lemann and the magazine's own editor David Remnick (he edited this week's 12,000 word piece on race and Obama), is leaving the magazine at the end of the year to pursue a book.

"It was agonizing to make a decision like this," he told Media Mob in a phone interview. "I'm writing a non-fiction project and you can’t be a full-time editor and write a book at the same time. I gotta travel, research, and do interviews."

Mr. Frank wouldn't tell us what the project would be, but he said it would involve lots of traveling. Mr. Frank, whose novels include Bad Publicity and The Columnist, has been at the New Yorker for 13 years.

Yes, yes, newspapers are alive and well for the week (they're cool!), but don't think the internet is lagging behind on this one. This was tucked inside Brian Stelter's story on the election's impact on the Web today:

The New York Times’s Web site, nytimes.com, saw a record 61.6 million page views on Wednesday, compared with 55.1 million on Election Day, according to internal data.

That represents another single-day record.

A source tells us that Alissa Rubin has been named the new Baghdad bureau chief of The New York Times.

Ms. Rubin has been with the Times since 2007, and before that worked in Iraq for The Los Angeles Times. In Seth Mnookin's stirring profile of the Baghdad bureau in the December 2008 Vanity Fair, he says that Ms. Rubin has been basically functioning as the bureau chief all year since Jim Glanz has been home after suffering a neck injury (and he has recently been reassigned to the investigations unit).  read more »

The Observer's Leon Neyfakh just called in to tell us that at a newsstand at the corner of 43rd and Lexington that there is still a mob of people buying yesterday's Times.

Right now, about 50 people are queued up to hand over a $1.50 to get a copy of yesterday's post-election OBAMA-bannered edition. When Leon walked by the vendor about an hour ago, he noticed that the there was a big stack of yesterday's edition that was tied up and untouched.

An hour later, word must have gotten out this is the place where you can still find one.

The New York Times has hired internally to replace Dwight Garner at The Book Review after he moved to the daily reviewing beat. The nod goes to Laura Marmor, a deputy editor for the Travel Section. In her new job as Senior Editor, she'll be making a "broad range of review assignments" and help put the section together each week while "collaborating with our editorial team to upgrade our enterprise projects," writes Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in a memo.

In September, The Times replaced reviews editor and Rome-bound Rachel Donadio with a copy editor at the paper, Greg Cowles.

Memo after the jump:  read more »

Last week, Executive Editor Bill Keller told The New York Times newsroom at his bi-annual State of the Newsroom address that the reporting job to cover the Obama White House would be "pretty goddamn amazing." Likewise, Jill Abramson gushed to a crowd of Times readers on Election Night that the Obama administration would change Washington "hugely" and that "the Obamas have a kind of celebrity that remind me a little bit of the Kennedys in 1960."

Okay!

So who are the lucky folks who get to get the most prized job at the paper?

Michael Calderone of Politico is reporting that Obama campaign beat reporter Jeff Zeleny, foreign affairs reporter Helene Cooper, and Times Magazine contributor Peter Baker will all be heading to the White House for the paper. Additionally, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, the current Bush White House reporter (not exactly a prized job) will stay on the beat.

Newspapers dead?

Today's day-after the election issue of The New York Times—the one with the OBAMA banner headline that the paper's masthead decided on after consulting some of its readers—is selling out fast. (Need proof: Check out this photo from Gawker.)

The paper's spokeswman, Catherine Mathis, has told us that the paper is printing an extra 50,000 copies for the afternoon rush at transit-hubs like Grand Central, Penn Station, and Port Authority. It's a veritable P.M. editition of The Times!

"We had increased our print run for single copy sales today by about 35%," she writes. "In 2004 we saw an increase in sales of around 50,000 copies the day after the election and based on what we've seen today, we expect to significantly surpass those sales.  read more »

Who knew ABC's studio was right in Times Square? Well, we did, but we forgot.

Diane Sawyer reminded us when she got up from herperch for the first time in a while--George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson appear to be the only ones to play with that big, big screen--and walked all the way to a corner of their studio and found George Will, Donna Brazille, Matthew Dowd and Cokie Roberts sitting with laptops, a la CNN, with Times Square serving as their backdrop. They even peek into their studio from cameras that are setup across the street!

This keeps us interested during a moment when there's nothing to call.  read more »

Even though Rick Berke said the immediacy of the web compels the Times to compete and call races as quickly as the networks, NBC, CNN and ABC are all over Ohio.

The Times still has Ohio as undecided.

But if you scroll down the page you can find Kit Seeyle's love blog
where she reports that, yes, some networks have called it and she quotes CBS' Bob Schieffer as saying, "I think Barack Obama is going to
be the president of the United States."

Katie Couric: "The cake is baked, in your view?"

Mr. Schieffer: "Yes."

Has the New York Times been fair in this election? That's what Frank Rich asked Andy Rosenthal at a panel discussion going on at the Times Building just now.

"I can't be objective. I've been critical of the times in the past. I think our coverage has been fine. I don't fault the Times, the Washington Post or the Journal," he said. "I think the real problem has been on television, particularly on cable. People have a story line and they're going to stick to it. Palin was a superstar. There was not a negative word about her when she was announced. this is why we fell for mission accomplished."

"I don't think that's been a problem with the high-end print journalism. I'm not saying that because I'm in it, I'm saying it because i really believe it."

Pat Healy, who covered Hillary Clinton throughout the Democratic primary, just told the crowd at the Times building that since June, Hillary has felt warmer toward Barack Obama, that he's grown as a candidate. "Her primary concern is that a Democrat takes the White House. There are no residual bitternesses."

"I'll start right now as if the outcome [the recent count] suggests is the outcome," Adam Nagourney told a crowd that gathered at the Times building. "I'll write other versions too. Four years ago, the legendary Johnny Apple had written an early edition Q-hed analysis on exit polls that turned out to be wrong. And Johnny reacted pretty badly to it. I started writing it, but