"Recent defections of talent from the New York Times — Nate Silver, David Pogue, Jeff Zeleny, Richard Berke, Brian Stelter, Matt Bai, et al. — have unjelled the media firmament, according to Politico media columnist Dylan Byers. In a piece this week, Byers called the departures 'a brain drain,' 'a sucker punch to staff morale,' and an opportunity for the paper to come 'face to face with a harsh reality' that in the new media age, its star journalists can no longer be satisfied by the '‘aura’ of the newspaper of record.' In the same day’s Huffington Post, Michael Calderone had the paper fretting about its 'retention rate,' adding the names of Don Van Natta Jr., Lisa Tozzi, Judy Battista, Howard Beck, and Eric Wilson to the list of departees. The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple neutered Byers’s observation by noting that if anybody is suffering a brain drain, it’s Politico, shifting the discussion from the-Times-ain’t-the-ultimate-destination-it-once-was of Byers to the more durable assertion by Wemple that retaining-good-people-has-never-been-easy-for-any-outlet-and-it-ain’t-getting-easier. My view comports more closely to Wemple’s, but that doesn’t mean Byers is full of it. The Times departures mean something. But what? The exodus of accomplished Times reporters to television has been going on for so long that the exits of Jeff Zeleny to ABC News earlier this year and Brian Stelter to CNN this week barely deserve our notice. For as long as broadcasters have been flush, they’ve had their pick of New York Times newsroom stars." (Reuters)
"Glamour, while not traditionally a fashion book, has been getting a lot of attention lately as Anna Wintour gives it a look-over in her expanded role as Condé Nast artistic director. Wintour has already replaced editors at Lucky and Condé Nast Traveler. Jillian Davison was hired as Glamour’s fashion director, replacing Anne Christensen who resigned to go freelance, amid speculation that she might have been given a nudge toward the door by Wintour and her art director, Raul Martinez, as they revamped the fashion look. Davison was the creative director of Vogue Australia, and earlier in her career had freelanced at Teen Vogue as well as Harper’s Bazaar in the United States and Australia. '[Glamour Editor-in-Chief] Cindi [Leive] made the announcement, but it sure seems to have the fingerprints of Anna all over it,' said one source." (NYPost)
"Profit or non-profit? Definitely for-profit! First, because the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's track record (see this the New Inquiry article) shows a fierce appetite for profitable ventures. And second, because there no such thing as a free and independent media press without a strong business side: financial vulnerability is journalism's worst enemy, while profit breeds scalability. How to make money, then, with a narrow niche such as investigative journalism? Can Omidyar's venture move beyond the cross-subsidy system that powered legacy media for decades? This weekend, in a FT.com interview, Henry Blodget justified the deluge of eye-grabbing headlines spread over Business Insider by saying 'The dining and motoring sections pay for the Iraq bureau' For this, Omidyar can look at a wide set of choices: he could devise click-driven contents built on the proven high volume/cheap ads equation. Or he could opt for what I'll call the Porsche Model, one in which the most visible activity (in this case sports car manufacturing) brings only a marginal contribution to the P&L when compared to its financial activities: in 2009, Porsche made $1bn (£620m) in profit from car sales and almost $7bn betting on Volkswagen stock. More realistically, an endowment-like model sounds natural for a deep-pocketed investor like Omidyar. Most US universities are doing fine with that model: a large sum of money, the endowment, is invested and produces enough interest to run operations. One sure thing: if he really wants to go against big corporations and finance, to shield it from pressure, Omidyar should keep its business model disconnected from its editorial operation.
Investigative journalism is a field in which the subscription model can work. In France, the website Mediapart offers a credible example." (TheGuardian)
"Monday, November 18, 2013. Rainy, foggy, Sunday in New York with the temperature hovering damply around 50. A good day to stay indoors and read a good book. Or the FT. Which, speaking of, Simon Schama, the historian, wrote a very good piece on the political career of John F. Kennedy who was murdered in Dallas by an assassin, or assassins, fifty years ago this Wednesday.The Assassination was such a trauma for the nation including those close to the slain President that the event has been shrouded in speculation ever since. The suddenness of his departure did the same to his political legacy. Schama tries to put it in some perspective in an effort to address the man himself. All public figures are never what they seem much of the time. Great public exposure through media or public appearances (speechmaking, etc.) lends itself to illusion and even delusion. We believe we know them, or know what they’re like. And what they like. So it was with John F. Kennedy whose image and stature was greatly assisted by the presence of his beautiful young wife Jackie and their two beautiful children. When he came to the office, he had succeeded a very popular and highly admired man, a military hero, a two term President, whose only deterrent was his age (he was 70; JFK was 43)." (NYSocialDiary)
"'There are job functions that wouldn’t apply to most people.' Last month we talked to Amy, a longtime personal assistant who currently works for, among others, a Very Famous Writer. She talked about some of the weird things that come up when you’re handling large sums of other people’s money, what it means to get to 401(k) land, and how making a living as an artist is hard even when you’re on top of the creative heap. Some readers wanted to hear more about the things Amy does on a day-to-day basis, so here’s a closer look at her job. How do you explain what you do? You say the word 'personal assistant' and even to people who do that for a living, that could mean such a range of things. It could be a really lowly sort of coffee-fetcher, run-this-down-to-Kinkos sort of position, or it could be you have the keys to the castle and you are in control of everybody’s move and the whole production of the life of the people that you’re working for. There’s a huge range. So I find that I have to break it down. Whatever my elevator pitch is, it’s like: I work for people with way too much money—I run their lives, I run their work, I manage their house.Most people don’t know why you would need a role filled—why somebody would need someone like me in their life. It’s this life that my clients are living where they have multiple people on staff and they have multiple construction projects or multiple homes or a private plane, or whatever. They’re thinking of buying a yacht!—or maybe they’ll just rent one, and they have to give that task to somebody, to figure out which is better value. There are job functions that wouldn’t apply to most people ..." (TheBillfold)
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