The Media Mob

Can it get any worse for The Los Angeles Times?

In a year when the paper has cut far more editorial staffers than any paper in the country, it appears the're not quite done yet.

Keven Roderick at LA Observed is reporting that more job cuts are on the way, and the number could be as high as 75 editorial positions.

Among those expected to lose their job is Leo Wolinsky, the assocate editor of the paper, according to two souces who spoke to Media Mob.

Sources also told us the job cut rumors have been flying for a few weeks now. One source tells us that the number will be about 50 people let go.  read more »

The Atlantic's PR reps just sent out some PDFs of the magazine's new look, as overseen and conceived by editor James Bennet and Pentagram's Michael Bierut.

In an essay in the November issue of the 151-year-old magazine, Mr. Beirut writes:

I was both honored and daunted to receive the commission to create a new design for The Atlantic. I know the magazine well, having been a faithful reader for the past 20 years, and unlike many designers, I have a sometimes unhelpful suspicion of change. How could we make it new and better without threatening the things that readers like me enjoy so much? It's a hard problem.

One possible solution: Andrew Sullivan. A lot of Andrew Sullivan. Like, full-page spreads of Andrew Sullivan's face, as the above layout shows.

Here's Hearst's latest project: Food Network Magazine.

Now is not the time to launch any magazine, unless of course it's in luxury, or in the other category that's been doing swift business in this ugly year: Food.

Recently, Hearst has struggled with launches. From The New York Post's Keith Kelly:

[Hearst] has shut down Quick & Simple, Weekend and Shop Etc., and a joint venture to do Lifetime magazine in conjunction with the television network also flopped. Now, Hearst President Cathie Black hopes to stop the skid with the latest entry into the food category, which has been sizzling hot despite the industry turmoil.

Maile Carpenter, who was working at Everday with Rachel Ray, is the magazine's editor. The premiere issue, with a picture of a pumpkin pie on the cover, hits newsstands on October 14th and Hearst will roll out six issues next year.

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke has weighed in on Tina Brown and Barry Diller's newly-launched Web site, The Daily Beast.

Ms. Finke's succinct summation of the site calls to mind the scene in This is Spinal Tap in which director Marty DeBergi recites a "merely a two-word review" of the band's album Shark Sandwich.

It should be noted Ms. Finke called The Huffington Post, "the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar."

So, The Daily Beast might have a chance yet.

ABC News announced today that Ian Cameron, formerly a producer for World News with Charles Gibson, will be the new executive producer of This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Mr. Cameron replaces Kathy O'Hearn. In July, ABC announced that Ms. O'Hearn would be leaving the show to become a producer on the network's special events political team.

The move comes at a critical time for This Week. With the future of NBC's Meet the Press, still somewhat up in the air, This Week now has an opportunity to try and recapture its long lost status as the top-rated Sunday morning public affairs show.

More from the release after the jump:  read more »

The Times' B-section is no longer the Metro Section; it's now the Business Section.

And here's Metro's new placement—renamed "New York"—on A21.

Today is the first day that the Metro section merged into the A-section; it comes after Foreign news and National news. Tomorrow, Sports will merge with the Business section.

Read our earlier coverage of the Times' section consolidation.

Former New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman has a post on her WaxWord blog about last week's lay offs at Gawker Media. After worrying a bit about how the company's pay-for-pageview system encourages bloggers to "reach deeper into the gutter" for traffic, Ms. Waxman offers this tantalizing short history of the internet mixed with some Faith Popcorn-esque future forecasting:

The online world is changing and evolving, and quality is the next big thing. When the internet superhighway first debuted, it was pornography that drew all the eyeballs and clicks. The next wave was the independent bloggers—the likes of Wonkette, and Gawker and Defamer. As those got bought up by bigger companies, or grew into bigger companies, we've been flooded with attitude. Aggregation, and attitude. What about some well-reported facts, surrounded by intelligent analysis, in a timely manner? That's what we're hungry for.  read more »

Perhaps the failing economy benefiting someone: Saturday Night Live continued its ratings renaissance over the weekend, a surefire sign that no one is going out and spending money on Saturday nights. Or maybe everyone just loves Tina Fey.

The Anne Hathaway-hosted episode was seen in 7.4 percent of the Nielsen households, up 23 percent from last week and a whopping 42 percent from a year ago. The numbers were only slightly lower than the Saturday Night Live season premiere, making this weekend's one of the highest rated editions in six years.

Of course everyone who tuned in did so to see Ms. Fey's so-good-it's-now-clichéd Sarah Palin impression during an 11-minute opening skit (embedded above) about the Vice Presidential debate.  read more »

Late last month, The Huffington Post announced that media critic James Warren would bring his "On Magazines" column over from The Chicago Tribune.

In a release at the time, Mr. Warren said, "Like a dogged parole officer, the magazines column has trailed me for nearly three decades, no matter my day job. If I had a buck for every one I've written about which is no longer with us, I could fly business class to Beijing."

His first column ran on Sunday. Let's see how he shook things up:

Lucky me! The New Yorker profiles Arianna Huffington ("The Oracle") in its Oct. 13 issue. Lauren Collins crafts a solicitous if not fully satisfying opus on a woman of nerve, energy, eclectic intellect and renowned networking aplomb. If there is a thesis, it surfaces late: 'Huffington's decisions in life, contradictory as many of them have been, seem to have in common the conviction that the worst imaginable fact would be to have people not pay attention to her at all.' But readers don't get much insight into how she's actually pulled off this impressively successful website and gained a distinctly new status amid the bloody competition of the Internet.

Looks like "On Magazines" is gonna do just fine on The Huffington Post.

The New York Times this morning has the second in reporter Motoko Rich's series on the future of reading, focusing this time on video games and whether they are making kids more or less likely to enjoy reading books.

The most interesting part of the piece concerns kids' series like Scholastic's The 39 Clues, Book One: Maze of Bones that come with multimedia tie-ins that are only slightly secondary to the books themselves. While some of these experiments might be no more than marketing gimmicks, Ms. Rich writes, there are those who believe that some of them "may push creative boundaries" and "extend storytelling beyond the traditional covers of a book."

One wonders what Heroes creator Tim Kring and his new friend Dale Peck would say about all this in relation to the project they're working on, an alternate history thriller series distinctly not just for kids that will be accompanied—the way TV shows like Heroes and Lost have been—by an immersive alternate reality game (ARG) that readers can participate in online. Publishers showed enormous interest in Kring and Peck's project when it was pitched to them back in April; Crown, the imprint of Random House that ended up securing the rights, paid $3 million for it.

Another interesting figure who could weigh in on this stuff is former Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe, who retired from traditional publishing earlier this year to pursue a project rumored to involve some fusion of books and video games.