Hans Eisenbeis

We never did get a satisfactory answer as to why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzer prizes, although yesterday we received word on who’d won. Fiction, history, drama, poetry—musical composition, fer chrissake—are all Pulitzer categories, along with fourteen newspaper categories, but no room at the table for the glossies. What’s more, newspapers are actually … Read more

We detect a recurring meme on the subject of product placement as an alternative to advertising. An article last week in the Times made it clear that the cost to place a product in a popular TV show or movie can be roughly the same as buying an equal amount of advertising, and the impact … Read more

Ken Auletta had a nice article in last week’s New Yorker asking the question we’ve been asking around here recently—does advertising work? The short answer, we think, is that advertising is just like any other “content.” If it’s good, it works. If it’s bad, it doesn’t. That doesn’t go very far in describing or explaining … Read more

Our dear old friend Ana Marie Cox , aka Wonkette, has certainly had a hard time staying out of the limelight these past twelve months. As James Woolcott points out today, there are good reasons to worry for the welfare of the funny, smart, cute little pill in D.C.—a town where, we have to admit, … Read more

Last week, a landmark case was settled between freelance writers and some of the nation’s largest publishers. It was a long-running, complex case, but it basically came down to this: Freelance writers believed that electronic archives of their work—from articles on the web, to paid-access databases like Lexis-Nexis—amounted to republishing their work, without any additional … Read more

One of the great myths promoted and promulgated by the me-first neo-con crowd is not only that the mainstream media is lousy with liberals and liberal bias, but that liberals are inherently “elite” or elitist. We’re not sure where this whole idea comes from, given the well-documented connection between labor and liberalism, as well as … Read more

Sometimes editors are assholes. Lots of times. Most of the time. This seems to be a job requirement. But editors should really be assholes for the right reasons, and we certainly try to be an asshole for the right reasons. Still, even if we do it for the right reasons, we’re still being an asshole. … Read more

A couple of interesting meditations on the newspaper industry today. Generally, we just feel like we want to disagree on principal with such grandiose pronouncements as Michael Malone makes today over at ABC news, namely that “newspapers are dead.” All you need to do to refute such a silly claim is to look over the … Read more

We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far … Read more

Here is a true-life fairy tale for all embattled and embittered freelance writers everywhere—and we can say with some satisfaction that we know this fable by heart. But let’s run through the paces anyway, and we may arrive at a new and surprising moral to the story. A solid mid-masthead writer at a New York … Read more