Last week, OTR found ourselves at a “salon” hosted by the pioneering webmag, Salon. The conceit of a “salon” harks back either to French wits gathering to amuse nobility (and one another) or to Viennese coffeehouses where intellectuals would debate philosophy and gossip. In modern-day New York, however, a “salon” is more often a euphemism for “panel discussion.” And Salon’s salon was no exception. Read More
It’s raining me…dia items. Hallelujah. With so much to get through today, rather than act out the pretense that people are ever going to click on media news roundups from a landing page, we’re just going to skip the obligatory formalities of teasing anything out and just get right into them. Starting now.
As such, here are your Wednesday Evening Media Briefs. Read More
Have you ever seen Wonder Boys, the movie based on the book by Michael Chabon? In the first scene, it takes you inside a grad school fiction workshop, where various students undercut each other through passive-aggressive critique. It is utterly painful and also rings true (as far as we’ve heard, having never experienced the masochistic impulse to seek out graduate studies, let alone the studies themselves). Inevitably, one student will be more successful than the others, and the others will no doubt, in most instances, begrudge them that success. Of course, it is uncouth to publicly begrudge one success, so most people will just go about this in the most passive and cowardly way possible.
Until now! Read More
Former Huffington Post technical director Cindy Jeffers has been named CEO an CTO of Salon, the company announced today. Salon founder David Talbot had been serving as interim CEO after digital media entrepreneur Richard Gingras departed in July last year to become head of news products for Google. Read More
QUESTIONS THAT ARE NOT RHETORICAL
Just a few days after Gawker introduced their recent and short-lived foray into corporate espionage-cum-pranksterism in the form of The Fox News Mole, one Joe Muto found himself on CNN, speaking with Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources about the week he’d just had. In that interview, he explained that he was “completely blackballed within the cable news industry after working at FOX News,” which is to say nothing of how his job prospects might be now (“it’s pretty safe to say my career in cable news is over”). Is it, though? Read More
And the circle goes unbroken! Read More
Just before dawn on Oct. 14, Salon reporter Justin Elliott was on Twitter and in Zuccotti Park, awaiting the outcome of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protestors for cleaning.
“On scene at Zuccotti, infusion of new protesters just arrived with signs “NYPD protects and serves the rich” | big cheers #ows,” Mr. Elliott tweeted.
A few days later, Nocturnalist columnist and New York Times staff reporter Sarah Maslin Nir kept followers up to date on the latest from her Zuccotti sleepover.
“Getting cold and tired, but every serious protestor has a tarp to block the wind. And I refuse to huddle for warmth #gonnadie,” Ms. Maslin Nir tweeted just before 1 a.m. on Oct. 17.
With freezing rain forecast for Saturday, staying warm is a major concern for Occupy Wall Street protesters and reporters alike. For many journalists, the movement is noteworthy for regularly drawing them out of the newsroom for long periods of time, demanding an on-the-fly mélange of traditional and social media reporting. Read More
We weren’t three minutes into our pedicure—or two toes—and already The Observer was getting wasted.
The place was Dashing Diva in Greenwich Village, a chain nail salon with 12 locations in the city and two in California. The place’s decor resembles a little like what might happen if Elle Woods met Malibu Barbie. The only part that isn’t either bright pink or white are the racks of multicolored nail polish on the walls. The pedicure station is a banquette of pink pillows, cut off from the rest of the salon by a wall of mini pearly-pink tiles. It’s a nice place to get plastered. Read More
Disclosure: The author of this post was previously employed by Salon.com.
Salon.com — never, ever to be confused with Slate.com — has brought back former editor in chief/founding father David Talbot as CEO of the online magazine. But in case you think the staff was just feeling nostalgic, Mr. Talbot wasted no time in trumpeting his arrival with news of a complete relaunch of the website as a multimedia platform. The redesign even gets a fancy new name: “American Spring.” Let Salon’s new CEO tell you all about it:
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Salon, the Internet’s longstanding roundtable that’s successfully straddled the line between a high-lit sensibility and self-aware celebrity fixation, is searching for another media company to swoop in and relieve it from increased losses, The Wall Street Journal reports. In the past three years the Salon Media Group has incurred losses of $15 Read More
