Everyone loves Blackout!

It seems so long ago that we were handcuffed and thrown into the pitch-dark of Blackout Haunted House, the midtown scare-fest that included a whole section of fun-times waterboarding. Our sinuses have all but cleared up entirely, and we've put the whole experience behind us.

Not so for Hermione Hoby from The Guardian, who posted her review about Manhattan's Halloween torture-reenactment event last week (despite the fact that Blackout closed in early November).

So what was the British take on the potentially traumatizing experience? Did The Guardian have some commentary on Americans being water-boarded for thrills? Not really:

The water-boarding element is terrifying, but so too is crawling through small tunnels with unseen fingers grabbing at your ankles, or waiting alone in the darkness for more rough hands to seize you...

My throat hurts from screaming, my vision's scrambled from all the torch glare, I'm weak and shaking and aching, but I'm ridiculously proud I made it through and coursing with relief and elation to be back in the normal, well-lit, world of mid-town Manhattan.

The next day I experience something even stranger than all the depraved weirdness of those 25 minutes. It's the creeping realisation that I really, really want to go back and do it all over again.

The takeaway: It's not just sensory-deadened Americans who enjoy being molested by strangers while experiencing some of the less savory experiences of Abu Ghraib. It's just as attractive to thrill-seekers across the pond, which we could have deduced from how fast Christopher Hitchens signed up for a similar experience for Vanity Fair three years ago.

The complete list:

Pigeon English, Stephen Kelman
The Emperor of All Maladies
Down The Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos
The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed
The Submission, Amy Waldman

It is all for U.S.

The Guardian has finally launched its anticipated American web site. Curiously, it did not use GuardianAmerica.com, the ill-fated U.R.L. from its previous venture on this side of the Atlantic (type that in and you just get U.S. news.) Nor has it simply done an automatic redirect to the U.S. page from Guardian.co.uk, which, when accessed from here, has indecipherable headlines about A-Levels and "football" players on its homepage.

Instead, those wanting news targeted to Americans must go to GuardianNews.com. Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of Guardian U.S. (it's not Guardian America, everybody) did not immediately respond to a question about the reasoning behind the decision, but she did post an official announcement, where she said "It's just one page today, but we hope that by presenting a targeted homepage, we'll be able to better display the stories that are most relevant to our U.S. readers."

Ms. Gibson also announced that she would be hiring a "new U.S. team of writers, technologists and editors to work with journalists from the U.K.to combine the Guardian's internationalist, digital journalism with American voices and expertise."

[UPDATE] Ms. Gibson has responded to our queries. A geo-tagged automatic redirect from Guardian.co.uk will happen soon, she said, and GuardianNews.com is not a new site -- the Guardian already owned the U.R.L. "It’s a new page and a new front door," she said. As for GuardianAmerica.com, Ms. Gibson emphasized the U.R.L. was inadequate because of the internationalist ambitions of the new U.S.-based project. "We thought that was a bit excluding," she said. "We're not just covering America."

The book will be called Hack Attack (not to be confused with a 1980s-era McDonald's ad campaign, for those who might be feeling the strange onset of a Mac attack.) American rights went to Mr. Davies' compatriot, Mitzi Angel, at Faber & Faber (a division of FSG.) Ms. Angel acquired the book in a pre-empt, according to Publishers Weekly.

What would Alistair Cooke say?

The expansion of The Guardian's international presence online comes with a casualty: the demise of  print editions of The Guardian and its Sunday paper Observer outside the UK.

This affects a whopping total of 40,000 people, whom we picture as a small tribe of eccentric British expatriates in velvet smoking jackets and ascots who probably also have their print editions of The Guardian ironed for them in the morning by manservants. We hope they will be okay.

The distribution of Guardian Weekly, a weekly digest that aggregates material from The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post, will continue, as will The Daily Mail's online coverage of Prince Harry's new girlfriend.

[The Guardian]

Julian Assange's favorite read. Or is it "favourite"?

We reported last week on the American expansion of the bikini-loving online wing of British newspaper The Daily Mail. The Guardian is also expanding its online presence here, but under rather different circumstances – and for the second time. Does anybody remember Guardian America? Yeah, that’s because it didn’t go so well. We wrote about it in its nascent days back in 2007, but the project never quite materialized as promised and officially died in 2009.

As described at its outset, Guardian America was to bring an opinionated left-of-center viewpoint to American issues – a version of the British paper written by Americans who had a Guardian-ish outlook themselves. The project was headed by Michael Tomasky, a Washington-based journalist who staffed it with several local hires in the fall of 2007.

Like The Daily Mail, The Guardian’s initial popularity with American readers was not cultivated but rather was the accidental byproduct of an aggressive online strategy back home. The new site aimed to address those readers directly, but after the initial fanfare of the announcement and the staffing up of Guardian America in Washington, The Guardian never seemed to throw its weight behind the operation. There was never an automatic re-direct to the URL for readers accessing The Guardian from the US and its correspondents quickly became little more than local hires doing spot news and election coverage as correspondents, sometimes for the actual paper in Britain.

"We all worked very hard for The Guardian and had a lot of support from our British colleagues in Washington and from the foreign desk in London,” a former member of the Guardian America staff told The Observer.  “But ultimately it felt like the paper didn't know who the target audience was and what it wanted, nor how to use the Guardian brand. The readers never showed up like they were supposed to and the project didn't make enough money to sustain itself."

There were also some notable misunderstandings between staff members: The Guardian initially showed only a rudimentary understanding of the US health care system, reimbursing its workers for exorbitant individual health plans rather than purchasing group coverage. This later changed, but along with the alteration in benefits came a new holiday package for local hires, one more in keeping with stingier local customs about vacation days. This caused some irritation among American staff working alongside foreign correspondents from Britain, who continued to enjoy their lengthy European holidays.

In November 2009, the foreign editor, Harriet Sherwood, and the digital editor at the time, Emily Bell, gathered the American employees into the company’s fancy podcast recording studio, thanked them for their services, and told them that Guardian America, and their jobs, would be ending. Mr. Tomasky stayed on with the nebulous title of editor-at-large until this spring, when he was picked up as a special correspondent for the new Newsweek.

Even without a dedicated news team here, however, The Guardian’s numbers of American visitors remained high – approximately 10 million visitors a month according to Janine Gibson, who will be heading The Guardian’s operations here when it ramps up American-targeted coverage for a second time in the coming months. These visitors, even now, are still being greeted with a box showing the weather in London and a landing page featuring articles about David Miliband (although the ads, at least, are in local currency), but readers can expect that to change next fall.

“What we have done before is work with American journalists who have a sort of similar stance or vision or approach to The Guardian,” said Ms. Gibson. But it turned out readers did not come to The Guardian for American voices. “It didn’t particularly work for us as a UK brand in the US,” she said.

This time, The Guardian’s American web site will attempt to be, in the spirit of The Economist’s success on this side of the pond, what Ms. Gibson calls “internationalist.” She described the approach as “a distilled version of what we are, but for an American audience.”

The expansion follows an announcement by the paper that in response to major financial losses it will be focusing its future expansion online, as well as making massive cuts in staff. As such, do not expect a major US hiring spree like the one Mail Online is on.

“What happens if you pick up The Guardian view of the world and way of coverage and put it somewhere else?” asked Ms. Gibson. And that’s precisely what will happen: a group of British-based reporters will be picked up and put down in New York City, to write about local happenings. Unlike The Daily Mail, which has thus far brought over a young, flexible staff, The Guardian is bringing over at least two married couples (including Ms. Gibson’s husband Steve Busfield, editor of a difficult part of the newspaper to translate for an American audience: the sports blogs), along with an as-yet undetermined number of reporters. Ms. Gibson said there will probably be some local hires, but what Ms. Gibson called the “core team” will stay British.

An editor who has worked in both markets was somewhat skeptical of whether the paper will successfully appeal to Americans with American coverage: “Their current American reporting is a little naïve about America, and a little late,” he said. “Often you feel that the people are sitting in Washington rewriting what Americans have written.”

“My feeling is that cultural differences are overstated,” said Ms. Gibson. “We know what we all mean by elevator, trunk, sidewalk and bathroom.”

Or, as we might all get into the habit of saying, lift, boot, pavement, and loo.

Meet The Fleet. (Illustration: Joe Wilson.)

To hear Martin Clarke tell it, The Daily Mail accrued its online readership in America nearly by accident. Lining a landing page with paparazzi shots headlined with expressions of awe and outrage, making the bikini a newsworthy event—that was not transatlantic outreach, just British custom. “Originally we focused ruthlessly on our British audience because that was the easiest to monetize,” said the publisher and editor of the paper’s website, MailOnline, “but we found we’d ended up with a big American audience without really trying.”

They came for Demi Moore’s “incredibly toned biceps” and Gisele’s “perfectly toned pins,” but this growing U.S. audience has convinced the paper that an augmented digital presence here will pay off in Internet advertising revenue. “The way the web works,” said Mr. Clarke, “is that it only makes sense to be free if you’re big.” The untapped potential of 300 million Americans who speak roughly the same language and pay attention to mostly the same celebrities proved too much to resist. So The Daily Mail has set up shop in America: may the sun never set on Pippa Middleton’s derriere.

Media types stateside have so far welcomed their new competitor.

Bonnie Fuller, former editor of US Weekly and current president of Mail competitor HollywoodLife.com, professed her love for the publication, but warned, “It’s a mistake to think you can import people and think they can understand this market. Look at what happened to Cheryl Cole on X-Factor!”

Arthur Sulzberger, for his part, has commented that British newspapers fail to speak to the “American experience.”

“All I can do is point to the numbers,” said Mr. Clarke in response. “Clearly we do or we wouldn’t have a bigger audience than most newspapers in America.”

The paper quietly opened a New York office in Soho in February, filling it with six or so young staffers jetted over from England. The New York branch followed the opening of a showbiz office in Los Angeles last fall, and signaled that the web site was expanding its American coverage from the celebrity gossip to hard news as well. The local media were wary: the Mail has a reputation for poaching news without attribution, for one thing. In January, they were caught lifting sections of a New York Times article almost verbatim. And while a Mail executive claimed that was before they had staff in-country, another pattern has emerged: “For Edwards’s Adult Daughter, a Recurring Role: Family Glue,” was the headline on a New York Times article one morning. “Her mother’s girl: How John Edwards’ daughter Cate became the glue holding family together,” was on MailOnline only a few hours later, albeit with a credit to the Times for most of the quotes. And there’s another local custom MailOnline has chosen to ignore.

“They don’t physically link to websites from which they lift material,” wrote Tony Metcalf, the editor-in-chief of NY Metro, in an email to The Observer. “We’ve asked them to do this because we think it’s fair and right and when Metro refers to the work of others, we link as a matter of course.”

“They don’t link to anybody!” echoed Ms. Fuller.

“We link out to people where appropriate,” said the Mail executive.

Then there’s the reputation of Mr. Clarke, who splits his time between London and New York. According to profiles written about him in the U.K., Mr. Clarke is famous for profane rants and reportedly once yelled at an employee with such vigor that he gave himself a nosebleed. “We’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome here,” an employee of his at a previous job told London’s Independent. “He’s so focused, he can force people to do things they don’t want to, the least of them being working a 12-hour day.”

“We’ll hire people who want to work here,” said a MailOnline manager, when asked if Mr. Clarke’s style might not translate to accommodate needier American sensibilities (they are actively recruiting American reporters).

MailOnline has done well so far, with the most recent statistics from comScore placing it fourth in unique page views for news sites, beating out the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Whether that translates to brand recognition is unclear, however. Will headlines like “Jackass star Ryan Dunn dies in horror crash as $100,000 Porsche flies off road and explodes in fireball after night out drinking in bar” foment a loyal readership beyond search-engine hits and random Tweets?

“What they’ve done, which is clever, is to get a lot of traffic without spending very much money,” said an editor in the web business who has worked in both markets. “Whether or not they could become a respected right-wing populist news site is possible, but it’s not easy.”

But it’s not immediately apparent that the MailOnline will maintain its ties with the favorite paper of conservative middle-aged U.K. women. (“My mother-in-law and all the rest of it love The Daily Mail,” said Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor of The Financial Times.)

“It’s really quite different from the print version in the U.K.,” said John Gapper, a British business columnist at The Financial Times. “I don’t think they intend to bring over The Daily Mail, I think they intend to compete with TMZ, Gawker, and Huffington Post and just try to get more and more traffic.”

They will also face a more familiar foe: The Guardian has announced its own American expansion, with a vanguard editorial colony led by Janine Gibson, its most senior digital editor, and several reporters. The two papers might even bring their famous culture war stateside. “They spend a lot of time egging on their own readers to hate the other’s readers,” said Mr. Gapper.

But those worried about a resurgent British hegemony will feel encouraged to know that the Huffington Post—one of our own country’s most catch-all media concerns—is opening an office in London this summer.

ewitt@observer.com

Or something like that. This week, that person is James Franco, the over-booked coffee addict who is currently taking Sundance by storm with his performance art extravaganza based on the super-seventies TV show "Three's Company." So you meticulously constructed the sitcom's living room and then showed up wearing a Suzanne Somers wig? Oh James, you walk that tenuous highbrow-lowbrow line without apology, and we love you all the more for it.

So where does this photo project shared with The Guardian stand? Did you do this in earnest, or is it more of your "performance art?"

The verdict: It's impossible to tell with this guy! Anyway, here are some of the things we managed to glean from these low-quality photos:

• His brother takes care of cats Harry and Arturo at his pad in L.A. The pets are "as large as bobcats." A writer, using the literary device known as the simile.
• He edited a movie about radical poet Hart Crane on a Mac. Of course, Franco is also playing the lead role of Crane.
• He records music with fellow performance artist Kalup Linzy. Also: Franco-referring-to-himself-as-Franco alert! "Kalup and Franco, recording. Kalup and I started recording some demo tracks for our album."
• To ward off the "meanies"at Yale, Franco has a mini toy tiger guarding his laptop during class. And we get a rare look into James' photoshopping skills, as he whites out the faces of his classmates.

Fascinating, Franco! The highlight, though, is the picture of what James calls his "new best friend." The picture is below.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Seems like someone at the Guardian was either off their nut or completing a long simmering vendetta with former Brit Tina Brown. The paper copped to "a series of errors and basic failings of journalistic practice."

Those included: putting the Beast's traffic at 1.656 million unique users, while the Beast provided data that said 2.9 million; ignoring the 66 new ad campaigns the Beast secured in 2010; and overstating Tina Brown's age by a year (zing!)

The Guardian's sense of guilt and the scope of the retractions are rather amazing -- although perhaps not as amazing as the fact that it took Brown and Barry Diller six weeks to extract them. 

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The source told Channel Four (from The Guardian):

"He was very conscientious and he wouldn't let stories pass unless he was sure they were correct ... so, if the evidence that a reporter had was a recorded phone message, that would be what Andy would know about."

"So you'd have to say: 'Yes, there's a recorded message.' You go and either play it to him or show him a transcript of it, in order to satisfy him that you weren't going to get sued, that it wasn't made up."

Mr. Coulson, who is now a communications adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, said that he couldn't remember any instance of phone-hacking during his time at the newspaper during testimony to the House of Commons in 2009. 

Earlier: New York Times Watches as Phone Hacking Story Stirs British Rivals into Action