The Media Mob

A few months ago, after Times reporter David Chen left the Trenton bureau for New York's City Hall, and The Times decided against sending a replacement, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine decided to meet with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at the paper's skyscraper on Eighth Avenue.

"I wanted to register a sense of serious disappointment that we weren't seeing the kind of coverage that I think would be good for The New York Times' distribution as well as, certainly, the public," said Governor Corzine in a phone interview with Media Mob.

Essentially, Mr. Sulzberger relayed this message back, according to Gov. Corzine.  read more »

Like a parent who threatens to turn around a car full of unruly kids unless they behave this instant, Vice magazine has decided to suspend its letters page until readers can send them something worth printing.

"You know what? No letters page this month," declare the editors of the Brooklyn-based youth culture and integrated marketing magazine. "You know why? Because we aren’t receiving enough real letters. We mainly get emails now, and people don’t think when they write emails."

Lamenting the fact that they used to receive "great letters... in decorated envelopes along with goofy little tokens, tchotchkes, gizmos, and gifts inside," the editors are throwing down the gauntlet:

In protest of this state of affairs, we are suspending the letters page for one month.  read more »

According to the Associated Press, Barry Diller's redundantly-named IAC/InteractiveCorp is splitting into five publicly traded companies. Presumably, there will be 10 names between them.

According to AP:

With the split, home shopping network HSN Inc., time-share business Interval Leisure Group Inc., ticketing service Ticketmaster and lending and real estate business Tree.com Inc. are due to begin regular trading Thursday under their own ticker symbols. The symbols are "HSNI" for HSN, "IILG" for Interval, "TKTM" for Ticketmaster and "TREE" for Tree.com.

The company's remaining Internet properties, including search engine Ask.com, are staying under the IAC name and will trade for the next 20 days as "IACID," due to Nasdaq rules.  read more »

Jim Romenesko has posted a press release from the Chicago Tribune announcing the promotion of Jane Hirt to managing editor. Ms. Hirt had been the editor of RedEye, the Tribune's young, hip [sic] paper, not to be mistaken with Fox News' young, hip [sic] late night show where bloggers are stars. (In fact, the Tribune Company tried to get Fox News to change the show's name in 2007.)

Ms. Hirt was named to Chicago Business' "40 Under 40," in 2006, telling writer Gregory Meyer, "We know our audience is interested in reading a little bit about foreign and national news, but by far, our research and all our readers tell us that local news and pop-culture news is what they want.  read more »

The New York Times has been hard on Anthony Weiner recently, and he thinks that's a reflection of how the paper has changed.

This morning, The Times ran a story about the departure of yet another staff member from the congressman's office, and that was a follow-up to a July 23 front-page story about his high staff turnover.

(Also, last week, one of his likely mayoral rivals, Christine Quinn, got a more favorable profile.)

I saw Weiner this morning near Brooklyn Borough Hall, where he was handing out campaign literature with State Senate candidate Dan Squadron, and asked him about this theme.

The Times is making its "own theme,” Weiner said.  read more »

Lara Logan, the comely war correspondent for CBS News who recently became the network's chief foreign affairs correspondent based in Washington D.C., recently sat down with Men's Vogue for an interview that appears in the magazine's September issue.

According to the style mag, Ms. Logan wore an "unabashedly feminine—and sheer—blouse and a black pencil skirt" to the wide-ranging interview, which took place at Washington's Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. Along the way, Ms. Logan reveals that she's not much of a life planner, believes that Iran's role in the war in Iraq is underreported, and that she'll spend the fifth month of her current pregnancy reporting for CBS from Afghanistan.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Democratic representative of Ohio's 11th district, died yesterday from a ruptured brain aneurysm at age 58. The Associated Press, CNN, CBS, Fox News and The Washington Post jumped the gun, reporting that Congresswoman Tubbs Jones had died several hours before her doctors confirmed the news.

On Nov. 3, 2005, Congresswoman Tubbs Jones appeared on Comedy Central's then-nascent Colbert Report in the third part of his 435-part series, "Better Know a District."

Mr. Colbert's show had only been on a few weeks, so his blustery persona was still developing: In the taped segment, his hair appears cow-licked; his suit not yet sharply tailored.  read more »

The Huffington Post's Media page alerts us to a note from Bob Costas on NBC's 'The Daily Nightly' blog. In it, Mr. Costas apologizes to his colleague Brian Williams and Olympics superstar Michael Phelps for passing along an erroneous report that Bruce Springsteen had dedicated "Born in the U.S.A." to Mr. Phelps:

I had every reason to believe this information was accurate, and its source was reliable. In fact, I had intended to use it in my own interview with Phelps, but when time didn’t allow for it, I passed the story on to Brian, who did use it.

In her New York Post column today, Cindy Adams takes to task Johns Hopkins University assistant professor of psychiatry John D. Gartner for the Bill Clinton bio he's publishing at the end of September through St. Martin's Press. In the book, titled In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography, professor Gartner claims that Clinton's father is not Bill Blythe, as Clinton has always believed, but rather Arkansas doctor George Wright.

Gartner lays out a whole psycho-biography of Clinton (as is his wont—talk about a weird niche!) that explains why he fell in love with Hillary (she looked like his grandma) and why he went for Monica (she reminded him of his mom).  read more »

Manny Farber, the idiosyncratic painter and film critic for The New Republic, The Nation, ArtForum and other publications, has died. He was 91.

According to The Times' William Grimes, Mr. Farber was "a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance, responded to film viscerally. He despised what he called the 'art-infected' films of cinematic greats like Welles and Alfred Hitchcock — 'the water-buffaloes of film art,' he once called them — preferring the work of genre directors like Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman, who transformed pulp material and genre conventions into 'private runways to the truth.'"

The Village Voice's J. Hoberman wrote:  read more »