By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 12/18/12 6:32pm

off the record

ice-skating-rockefeller-center

Skating Through Media Winter: A Guide to Who’s Keeping Warm

Winter, which technically doesn’t start until Friday, came early this year—at least for the media industry. As we first noted in October, a 2008-vintage chill has set in at newsrooms across the city, the kind of cold that not even an extra jacket or a warming alcoholic beverage can shake. (Although, as we recently read in the Times, writers don’t drink so much anymore.) Fingers were too numb to type, and (it turns out) you can’t flip the pages of an iPad newspaper with gloves on. Read More

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 12/04/12 7:41pm

off the record

ipad-the-daily-2 (1)

Media Winter Redux: The Daily Dies; Downsizing at The New York Times

It didn’t feel much like winter.

It was balmy: 60 degrees and sunny. The holiday decorations felt out of place in the mild breeze. But the frost was creeping in—media winter (as foreshadowed in October by the fall of Newsweek) was in full swing by 9 a.m. on the first Monday in December.

First came the announcement that The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s foray into iPad journalism, was being shuttered after less than two years and many millions of dollars. The news wasn’t wholly unexpected. A third of the staff had been laid off over the summer, and a sense of doom and gloom had hung over the ninth floor of News Corp. HQ ever since. It was a matter of when, not if, the tablet app would disband. But, as with any death watch, just because it’s expected doesn’t make it any less humbling. Read More