Features
"Help me Wolf Blitzer... you're my only hope": CNN powers up the hologram
2008 media round-up
BY Kate Carraway December 23, 2008 21:12
You know who had a fucked-up year? Journalists. Writers and editors and T.V. peeps had the unique responsibility of not only documenting and making sense of a sudden and dramatic change in our fates and fortunes, but getting fired or being scared of getting fired, all at the same time. Concurrently, some great and illuminating media moments emerged in 2008, proving that maybe wild uncertainty is a potent motivator for good journalistic work, and that trope about what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Maybe.
FUCKED-UP GOOD
CNN employed crazy, next-level holograms during their US presidential-election coverage, which almost made up for the under-use of Donna Brazile, and made Wolf Blitzer look hilariously Star Trek-ed and surprised all at once. Another highlight of election season was the growth of decent political blogs, with coverage by curious experts like sports wonk Nate Silver.
As for comedic political coverage: Tina Fey, Tina Fey, Tina Feeeeeeeey.
Fox News has a “banner year," which is “good,” or some dark precursor to an Idiocracy-like society. Wait for it.
Men's Vogue closed down, sort of. This is maybe “negative” for fans of a strong and varied print media, but I'm OK with it because gay men should just read Details and straight men need to stop grooming themselves so much.
Sam Zell hubris is terrific.
The excellent Atlantic Monthly got an excellent redesign; Wired is still perfect; Anna Wintour appears to be staying at Vogue, and the stupid, offensive Obama-terrorist New Yorker cover seems to have been a rare one-off.
Rachel Maddow got her own show on MSNBC, enabling casual viewers to project their deep-seated fantasies of rural Vermont-intellectual dyke-style on her and her smarty-pantsuits.
Derek Finkle is on the case for Canadian freelancers. (Who are in some ways way better off than full-time media employees: creating your own destiny, and all of that.)
This Magazine got a new editor and, more conspicuously, so did the The Walrus.
FUCKED-UP BAD
Rogers announces mega layoffs immediately after the death announcement of company founder Ted. Really, immediately, and via electronic phone message. Harsh tokes.
Torontoist is about to shut down . They didn't seem to like me very much but that's still shitty news for everybody (and I'm gracious like that).
Good magazine fired seven people this week, and New York magazine, which has done right with its approach to the web, had to toss a few staffers. American Media, a sort of tabloidy organization, let go of 12 people.
The Paper Cuts blog provides a cool map (requiring Firefox) of the US newspaper layoffs. The old-guard Pulitzer-scoring Rocky Mountain News went up for sale, and the Albuquerque Tribune closed down. Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune group last year (owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune and the veiled star of the final season of The Wire, the Baltimore Sun), dragged it into bankruptcy super quick-like.
The untouchable “Gray Lady,” a.k.a. The New York Times, fired 15 people and leveraged their own NYC headquarters. When the Times falls, we all fall.
The media shitstorm was happening before the economic sinkhole happened, when swaths of the newspaper and magazine industry refused to acknowledge the import of the Internet and their own format's eventual redundancy (and still sucked the bag even when they figured it out). Gawker, a media group founded on trash-talking said industries, has experienced their own trouble, firing a bunch of people and making the remaining writers work weekends.
The systemic failure of the US to sustain its own media is broader, but less spectacularly crushing, than Canada's CTV-Rogers-City-CHUM-Much-Rogers clusterfuck. The country's various media monsters swallowed each other whole, spitting out tough, expensive bits like long-time staffers and MuchMoreMusic. The unsettling corporate reorganization and massive layoffs aside, this move points to the kind of Clear Channel-style hegemony that will suck extra in Canadian broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Sun Media, care of parent company Quebecor Inc., let 600 people go — the sort of calamity that could easily serve as a ready-made fatalist headline for the Toronto Sun.
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