deathwatch
Whenever he's had a glaring problem in his business,
Harvey Weinstein — legendary manipulator of the press — has always been a master at deflecting attention away: No Oscars recently? Just look at how much money the lowbrow genre films his brother Bob have been raking in! No big genre successes? Well, look at our home video business! The home video business is struggling? Well, we've got an Oscar film coming up! The cycle can be repeated over and over, but financial facts always trump spin. And today, the Weinstein Co. laid off 24 of its employees, 11% of its total staff,
according to the New York Post, in what will only provide more chum in the water for those not-so-quietly rooting for the final downfall of the Weinsteins.
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Births, deaths, and marriages
Births, Deaths, and Marriages is a column about what's happening to persons of interest in Gawker society. Send us your tips about breakups, hookups, knock-ups, and everything else that completes the circle of media-life. Today: one oddly-named celeb infant, one knockup, one breakup, and rabid right-wingers in luv:
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kreepie kats
[Jim Behrle's Kartoon Kats have been reading
The Economist lately, and it has made them sad. Luckily: there are pirates!! Everyone loves pirates!! Klick thru for high seas adventure!]
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Media
According to
some reports, the
Huffington Post has raised $15 million in a new round of investment. But nobody really knows for sure whether that's true, yet! Let us say right up front that if it is true—and the
Times UK
says it is—this will be the coup of the media meltdown. Raising cash like that in this economic environment is impressive, and we would have to tip our hats to HuffPo, and acknowledge that we have wildly underestimated them. Here are all of the details from various reports on Arianna's maybe-triumph:
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Hooray
Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary pick made the stocks jump!
We're all saved! Drudge calls New York Fed President
Tim Geithner "The Man Who Can Save Economy?" (Family Love Geithner!) Geithner worked, obviously, at the Treasury Department that helped create this mess, in the Bob Rubin and Larry Summers days. His background is solid "didn't foresee this in retrospect obvious problem" economist, what with his IMF and Group of Thirty stints, just like everyone else considered for the job. Woman-hater Larry Summers will still probably do
something in an Obama administration. Meanwhile comical New Mexico governor Bill Richardson will be our Commerce Secretary, because he's clearly bored in New Mexico. Hillary Clinton is still dithering about her job offer, and Obama will apparently
finally announce that whole thing after Thanksgiving.
The Commies
Every so often one commenter serves the public body in singularly superb fashion. These comrades deserve recognition individually—a chance to come forward and take a bow. Today we honor commenter CodePink, who in her weird, warm, wise, and always funny way makes the days tick by just a little faster. Enjoy five of her best comments this week after the jump. Nobody does it better.
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Artists
Anonymous subway-based ad remix artist and minor
obsession of ours
Poster Boy has been caught on film! All we had before to identify him
was this photo(shop).
Animal NY's vandal-in-chief
Bucky Turco spent a nice evening with PB in a Brooklyn subway station, just cold maxing and relaxing and shooting the breeze while carving up ads with an X-acto knife and attacking trains. We now have a definitive description of
Poster Boy: a male wearing a hat, doing art. If you see anyone matching that description, call police immediately. (Not really, snitches!). Watch the full clip below:
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Recessionomics
When the NYT Company
slashed its dividend and announced ominous October revenues yesterday, we asked you, our kindly readers: Might this company go into bankruptcy? If so, when? And if not, what should they do? Many of you answered! And virtually every viable option for the company was suggested at least once. The Sulzberger family should just read the following list of your responses and pick one, depending on how optimistic they're feeling today:
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fameballs
It's funny and meta to watch
Julia Allison get profiled. Since she's already done all the work for us in real time—chronicling her thoughts and moods and outfits on her blog—a profile seems beside the point and out of date by the time it goes to print—we've already
seen those outfits and photos, and we already
know what events she's been to. Journalists are usually left baffled upon their first introduction to the JA force of nature—when we've been collectively getting her IMs for years! Australia is
just now catching on to this Internet fameball/oversharing thing, putting Allison on the cover of a magazine—and including her close personal friend, and also our former editor,
Emily Gould. (At this point, Em seems like she wants to erase the Internet and spend a month in a sensory-deprivation chamber.) The profile is very similar to Allison's
Wired cover story, except for perhaps the journalist's outright dislike for her subjects.
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Internal memos
High profile press fight!
People magazine editor Larry Hackett just sent out an internal memo blasting the page one
New York Times story today about
People's alleged
shady dealings with Angelina Jolie. Specifically, the
Times cited two anonymous sources "with knowledge of the bidding" for the photos of Jolie and Brad Pitt's most recent newborns—which cost
People $14 million—who said that there was an formal agreement that "obliged" the magazine to offer only positive coverage. Of course, as Hackett acknowledges, their coverage was positive; but he strongly asserts that the magazine would never "purposely slant coverage as condition for acquiring pictures." And indeed, the
Times may have oversold that angle in their story. There's certainly a difference between what Jolie
asks for, and what a magazine would
explicitly "promise" to do. Read his full memo below:
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Cat Fight!
NY mag's fashion blog
The Cut ran into the
Vogue editrix Wintour at the National Book Awards this week. They politely (we assume!) asked her about the
rumors that she might retire. They are (sort of) substantive rumors and it's a question about her
job, not her personal life, so you'd think that she'd respond as courteously as she could. Except, no she didn't. She gave 'em the ol' heave-ho:
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Public relations
General Motors caught a leeetle bit of flack this week for flying its executives to Washington on a private jet in order to beg for a taxpayer bailout. "Hey," said politicians, the media, and the general public, "you have less than zero money. Should you really have spent thousands on a private jet?" We would also add, "Shouldn't you have driven
a car?" Later GM and its fellow broke automakers left Washington with no money, making this one of the colossal PR fuckups of 2008, and possibly of the preceding decade as well. But
everything is different now, because GM is going to have
somewhat fewer private jets. So please give them some multiple of billions of dollars okay?
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Peeling the apple
I know that you will probably stab me in the heart with a wooden stake for doing this, but I'm going to write another post about
Twilight. You there, under the rock?
Twilight is: spectacularly shitty book series by
Stephanie Meyer and now a movie (out today!
it's bad!) about a dimensionless girl named Bella and the suave sex vampire that she loves, named Edward. It's swoony moony goony shit, and, again, is terribly, monstrously, embarrassing-for-the-whole-of-the-craftly bad. So why on earth is it so popular, and what is
Twilight, I mean really what
is it? I will attempt to answer those IMPORTANT questions after the jump. Then you can elucidate (please! please!) in the comments.
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Books
Famously harsh
New York Times book critic
Michiko Kakutani has clearly taken a liking to prolific
New Yorker writer and "Deadline Poet" columnist for
The Nation Calvin Trillin's latest political book: apparently moved to write a poem, she
reviewed it in verse. You know,
in the style of his book, also written in verse! "Trillin recounted this all with verve and élan/Charting the candidates’ every slogan and plan." Check out the excerpt—and then you can turn the table and judge her poetic efforts.
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Newspapers
The financial reports of the New York Times Co. yesterday
were predictably awful. Print ad revenue was cratering even
before the stock market collapsed, so it's hard to see any turnaround in the near future. And as if the economy itself isn't giving the
Times enough problems, they're also dealing with
Rupert Murdoch trying to crush them, advertising-wise, in a pincer grip; the
Wall Street Journal is falling on their head, and the
New York Post is coming right up their ass.
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Magazines
Yesterday
New York magazine
laid off Gael Greene, a food critic there for the past 40 years. Apparently the recession is hurting
New York like everyone else—not as drastically as everyone else, of course, but enough to have to pare down their fat roster of restaurant reviewers. So is this just a longtime employee being pushed out, or a sign of something worse under the surface?
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