Recently in Journalism Category
Having spent a great deal of last year consulting for Fanista.com. I recently signed up with the Gerson Lehman Group as a consultant on media, technology and content.
As part of the GLG groups, I am asked to comment on certain news stories and trends. Asked to comment on the recent story about the LA Times intention to move to a 50/50 ad to edit ratio, and to comment in general on the cuts at the LA Times occasioned by Sam Zell's acquisition of the paper and the state of the newspaper industry, I offered up the following:
6/19/2008, 2:51 PM | Mr. Tom Teicholz - Producer and Content Consultant | Tom Teicholz Productions
Editorial cost is often the easiest to cut, and the first place new management turns to for cost savings.
However, quality editorial creates value and distinguishes product in the market place.
Publications that pay for top writers and produce a high quality product, such as The Financial Times and The New Yorker are thriving in a marketplace where others are suffering.
A depressed marketplace for content is an opportune time to invest in editorial, and recruit the best writers, reporters, editors to make a better product. Not better meaning hewing to a lofty ideal, but better in terms of reporting, scoops, service writing, and writing that grabs readers, and stories that readers talk about by the water cooler.
Excellence is a unique selling proposition.
Zell would be better advised to invest in editorial.
As part of the GLG groups, I am asked to comment on certain news stories and trends. Asked to comment on the recent story about the LA Times intention to move to a 50/50 ad to edit ratio, and to comment in general on the cuts at the LA Times occasioned by Sam Zell's acquisition of the paper and the state of the newspaper industry, I offered up the following:
The L.A. Times's Human Wrecking Ball
www.washingtonpost.com | (view article) Tech, Media, & Telecom > Media > Print > PublishingWill trimming editorial improve newspapers?
6/19/2008, 2:51 PM | Mr. Tom Teicholz - Producer and Content Consultant | Tom Teicholz Productions
Implications
Editorial cost is often the easiest to cut, and the first place new management turns to for cost savings. However, quality editorial creates value and distinguishes product in the market place. Excellence is a unique selling proposition. Publications that pay for top writers and produce a high quality product, such as The Financial Times and The New Yorker are thriving in a marketplace where others are suffering. Zell would be better advised to invest in editorial.
Analysis
The announcement by Sam Zell and the LA Times that they intend to move to a 50/50 edit to ad page ratio is the latest salvo in any attempt to cure the newspaper's ills. However, cutting editorial may not be, in the long run the best strategy.Editorial cost is often the easiest to cut, and the first place new management turns to for cost savings.
However, quality editorial creates value and distinguishes product in the market place.
Publications that pay for top writers and produce a high quality product, such as The Financial Times and The New Yorker are thriving in a marketplace where others are suffering.
A depressed marketplace for content is an opportune time to invest in editorial, and recruit the best writers, reporters, editors to make a better product. Not better meaning hewing to a lofty ideal, but better in terms of reporting, scoops, service writing, and writing that grabs readers, and stories that readers talk about by the water cooler.
Excellence is a unique selling proposition.
Zell would be better advised to invest in editorial.
This is exactly the question England's Guardian newspaper set out to answer. In today's installment, dance critics, visual art critics, and other arts writers, review horse racing, darts and crickets. Click Here.
Tomorrow the sports writers take on the arts.
Tomorrow the sports writers take on the arts.
Here's the link to "The Pariah Loophole" in today's LA Times in which I discuss how former Nazis remain free here because no country will take them.
Reports appeared today that the LA Times Sunday Magazine is no more (again). Or Rather than the current regime has all been fired and that the magazine has been turned over to the business side who will devise their own version of the magazine, free from the control of the editorial side, and engage writers as they see fit -- Annie Gilbar, who some of you may recall from LA Style days, but who more recently has been hosting a show on the Home Shopping network -- not that there;s anything wrong with that.....
I suppose this is the way of the world as extreme capitalism overtakes every institution and industry. Yes, the bean counters are in control. But is this any different than at the movie studios? Who runs the studios these days? In many cases it si executives who made their bones not in the creative ranks but rising from the marketing department -- Disney's Oren Aviv, Universal's Marc Schmuger come to mind. At Sony, their have both Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, at the studio's helm
There is obvious concern that the editorial product will suffer as a result. It well may -- depeneding on what kind of magazine you are expecting. The Sunday Times may be less, say New York Review Books, and more Angeleno.
But in order not to be tossed out with other advertising supplements the Magazine will still need to have a voice, and there is no better distinguishing factor than excellence. At the end of the day, if you hire good writers, and pay them well, --- I would like to say that will guarantee success but it doesn't (BUT I AM ALWAYS IN FAVOR OF WRITERS BEING WELL PAID).
I suppose this is the way of the world as extreme capitalism overtakes every institution and industry. Yes, the bean counters are in control. But is this any different than at the movie studios? Who runs the studios these days? In many cases it si executives who made their bones not in the creative ranks but rising from the marketing department -- Disney's Oren Aviv, Universal's Marc Schmuger come to mind. At Sony, their have both Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, at the studio's helm
There is obvious concern that the editorial product will suffer as a result. It well may -- depeneding on what kind of magazine you are expecting. The Sunday Times may be less, say New York Review Books, and more Angeleno.
But in order not to be tossed out with other advertising supplements the Magazine will still need to have a voice, and there is no better distinguishing factor than excellence. At the end of the day, if you hire good writers, and pay them well, --- I would like to say that will guarantee success but it doesn't (BUT I AM ALWAYS IN FAVOR OF WRITERS BEING WELL PAID).
Amy Fine Collins, who often writes on fashion, and who administrates the International Best Dressed List, has written an exclusive web piece for VanityFair.com called "Jewish Like Me" about her own feelings and experiences, and coming to terms with her Jewish identity.
Like many journalists, sometimes the best stories you have to tell, are the ones you avoid, that force you to discuss uncomfortable moments in your life and expose others -- going to those places and writing about them sometimes produces great writing, great stories (and in the case of the Judd Apatow gang, great comedies --but that's another story). Here, Collins has written a wonderful piece that deserves to be read far and wide, and she deserves kudos for doing do. Brava! and, more to the point, Mazel Tov!
Like many journalists, sometimes the best stories you have to tell, are the ones you avoid, that force you to discuss uncomfortable moments in your life and expose others -- going to those places and writing about them sometimes produces great writing, great stories (and in the case of the Judd Apatow gang, great comedies --but that's another story). Here, Collins has written a wonderful piece that deserves to be read far and wide, and she deserves kudos for doing do. Brava! and, more to the point, Mazel Tov!
Just got my copy of Deanne Stillman's MUSTANG: The saga of the Wild horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin).
Mustang has received great blurbs from Ian Frazier, Michael Blake (Dances with Wolves), Tony Hillerman, Samantha Dunn, John Fusco and Deena Metzger and that's just on the book jacket.
Stillman is one of the great narrative non-fiction prose stylists --- and with Hunter Thompson gone, that list just got shorter. Thompson, by the way, called Stillman's 29 Palms "a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer." -- and yes, Deanne is an old friend, and yes, I've tried to set up some movies with her -- but mostly we've been supportive of each other in this long haul called a writing career.
If you love horses, if you love great writing, if you care about the American West, you'll love Mustang -- that's my blurb without even reading the book yet.
You could do worse than read Alissa Quart's article " Lost Media, Found Media" in the current Columbia Journalism Review.
She tells it like it is, and how it may be......
She tells it like it is, and how it may be......
Richard Price has sold movie rights to "Lush Life" to Scott Rudin/Miramax. Price will write the screenplay.
Edward Rothstein's essay on public libraries, their past, present, and future, is worth reading and gives one a lot to think about it. Actually I found it quite inspiring. I've been mulling over my feelings about Dutton's bookstore's closing for an imminent column, and Rothstein's essay made me consider the ways in which libraries may or do pick up some of the slack from the closing of independent bookstores.
Also interesting article/interview with V.S. Naipaul in the UK Guardian.
Edward Rothstein's essay on public libraries, their past, present, and future, is worth reading and gives one a lot to think about it. Actually I found it quite inspiring. I've been mulling over my feelings about Dutton's bookstore's closing for an imminent column, and Rothstein's essay made me consider the ways in which libraries may or do pick up some of the slack from the closing of independent bookstores.
Also interesting article/interview with V.S. Naipaul in the UK Guardian.
As I was checking in to the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley with my family this weekend, I saw a familiar face sitting in the lobby -- Michael Pollan, the now well known author of such books as "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
I haven't seen Michael in several years (I still think of him as "Mike Pollan" from high school) -- I had heard from a mutual friend that he was living in Berkeley and teaching at the University there -- and of course, I'd seen the great reviews he had been getting for his new book "In Defense of Food" usually accompanied by a picture -- so I knew what he looked like.
Still, I wasn't sure it was him. So I looked once and looked twice and finally had to walk over -- As I did he had that look that combines two questions: Do I know this person or is this person going to harass me? -- but as soon as I held out my hand and started to say my name -- well, suddenly we were back on familiar footing.
My Hungarican Soul Brother Lawrence Karman ("Doc" to everyone in the film biz; Latzi to me) coined the expression "The Teicholz effect" for his conviction that no matter where I land, I will run into someone I know within two hours of arrival. So having run into Pollan I could rest easy on that front.
Pollan mentioned that he was going to be down in LA this Monday night (tonight) to speak as part of the Aloud series at the LA Public Central Library. We both immediately said nice things about Louise Steinman who runs the program (I profiled Steinman in my column "The Salonistas of LA" -- by the way, the interview I did for ALOUD with Nathan Englander is available on www.LA36.org here).
When I went to the Aloud series website I learned that Pollan was in conversation with Barry Glassner, a good choice, given his own book on food (My column on Glassner can be read here). I also learned that the evening was already practically sold out, with only standby room available.
STOP THE BLOG-- I was about to launch into a whole discussion of the Pollan oeuvre and why he is respected, admired and yes, envied by his fellow writers -- but I am sensing a potential Tommywood column in all this. So I will hold off, and in the event that a column is not forthcoming, I will return to blogging about him later on.....
I haven't seen Michael in several years (I still think of him as "Mike Pollan" from high school) -- I had heard from a mutual friend that he was living in Berkeley and teaching at the University there -- and of course, I'd seen the great reviews he had been getting for his new book "In Defense of Food" usually accompanied by a picture -- so I knew what he looked like.
Still, I wasn't sure it was him. So I looked once and looked twice and finally had to walk over -- As I did he had that look that combines two questions: Do I know this person or is this person going to harass me? -- but as soon as I held out my hand and started to say my name -- well, suddenly we were back on familiar footing.
My Hungarican Soul Brother Lawrence Karman ("Doc" to everyone in the film biz; Latzi to me) coined the expression "The Teicholz effect" for his conviction that no matter where I land, I will run into someone I know within two hours of arrival. So having run into Pollan I could rest easy on that front.
Pollan mentioned that he was going to be down in LA this Monday night (tonight) to speak as part of the Aloud series at the LA Public Central Library. We both immediately said nice things about Louise Steinman who runs the program (I profiled Steinman in my column "The Salonistas of LA" -- by the way, the interview I did for ALOUD with Nathan Englander is available on www.LA36.org here).
When I went to the Aloud series website I learned that Pollan was in conversation with Barry Glassner, a good choice, given his own book on food (My column on Glassner can be read here). I also learned that the evening was already practically sold out, with only standby room available.
STOP THE BLOG-- I was about to launch into a whole discussion of the Pollan oeuvre and why he is respected, admired and yes, envied by his fellow writers -- but I am sensing a potential Tommywood column in all this. So I will hold off, and in the event that a column is not forthcoming, I will return to blogging about him later on.....
Vanity Fair has canceled its Oscar party -- Given that the party had gotten so big and had become such a big production, taking a year off must come as a relief to many, certainly at Vanity Fair.
The stated reason is the writer's strike -- a feeling that regardless of the outcome, even if the strike has ended and the Oscars go on as planned, the strike will color the festive mood. Canceling the party was made to seem to be an act of solidarity with the writers. And I'm sure that's true.
However, given the late date and the fact that Morton's, where the party was traditionally held, is now under renovation to become the LA branch of Soho House -- I'm sure there were all sorts of logistical issues Vanity Fair is happy not to deal with. Also I'm sure people will be relieved not to have to sweat whether they are in or out, invited to dinner or not, invited at 10 or 11 --
At the same time photographers and gossip/ celebrity journalists will be sorry -- The Vanity Fair party was like shooting fish in a barrel. And of course the attendees will miss it too -- there are less social opportunities for so many stars to mix and for others to see them than you might think. And although it has been several years since I attended (and several since I was invited to attend), I will miss it too.
The Vanity Fair party was launched in the Tina Brown era and it was an extension of Brown's concept of the magazine as a great dinner party. mixing the subjects of articles with their Vanity Fair writers, Hollywood stars and executives, and letting power brokers and advertisers bask in the relflected glory of bold face names.
I was invited to the early Vanity Fair parties in great part thanks to the kindness of Jane Sarkin.
Jane and I had worked together at Interview -- a bonding experience if ever there was one. She left Interview for Vanity Fair early in the Tina Brown administration and rose to become supreme talent booker, arranger of photo shoots, keeper of the Vanity Fair Oscar party invite list -- and a thousand other tasks that were, or are, on balance, critical to Vanity Fair's success. So much so that you may notice that the recent cover stories/interviews with Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts were by Jane Sarkin. Not bad for a Jersey girl!
In time the party grew in importance as the event that you had to visit on Oscar night. Like RIck's Cafe, everyone came by at some point. In the years I attended, I saw, as the old the expression goes, more stars than in the heavens at night, You may be surprised to hear this, but Brad Pitt is a good looking guy; Demi Moore looks younger than her actual years; Nicole Kidman is tall, and pretty but seems somewhat cold; Penelope Cruz is not tall, in fact she has a taller and prettier sister, but she is more attractive; Audrey Tatou is tiny. And so goes the night -- matching reality to the pictures in the magazine and on the screen.
For my part, I was happy to hang out with other writers I knew, gossip columnists of all stripes, my other fellow former Interview staffers, cosmetic and advertising execs -- we would commandeer a booth, enjoy the cocktails and sit back and enjoy the show.
Getting to shake the hands of Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder were memorable moments. Hanging out with Dominick Dunne and hearing his stories of Hollywood in the day was great fun.
And yes, I was there the night that Ellen met Anne. Although they had just met, boy, they seemed friendly.
Some years my friends and I would close out the place and then go over to the Miramax after party -
Eventually, and understandably, I dropped off the list.
Which was just as well because I had come to a point, where, as much as I enjoyed being there -- I had lost the belief I once had that attending such evenings was transformative. That way of thinking belongs to a different stage of the game. So I let it go.
I have no idea whether the Vanity Fair party will, in fact, return next year and if it does whether it will still be as much fun. I can't even tell you whether I will wish I was there.
The stated reason is the writer's strike -- a feeling that regardless of the outcome, even if the strike has ended and the Oscars go on as planned, the strike will color the festive mood. Canceling the party was made to seem to be an act of solidarity with the writers. And I'm sure that's true.
However, given the late date and the fact that Morton's, where the party was traditionally held, is now under renovation to become the LA branch of Soho House -- I'm sure there were all sorts of logistical issues Vanity Fair is happy not to deal with. Also I'm sure people will be relieved not to have to sweat whether they are in or out, invited to dinner or not, invited at 10 or 11 --
At the same time photographers and gossip/ celebrity journalists will be sorry -- The Vanity Fair party was like shooting fish in a barrel. And of course the attendees will miss it too -- there are less social opportunities for so many stars to mix and for others to see them than you might think. And although it has been several years since I attended (and several since I was invited to attend), I will miss it too.
The Vanity Fair party was launched in the Tina Brown era and it was an extension of Brown's concept of the magazine as a great dinner party. mixing the subjects of articles with their Vanity Fair writers, Hollywood stars and executives, and letting power brokers and advertisers bask in the relflected glory of bold face names.
I was invited to the early Vanity Fair parties in great part thanks to the kindness of Jane Sarkin.
Jane and I had worked together at Interview -- a bonding experience if ever there was one. She left Interview for Vanity Fair early in the Tina Brown administration and rose to become supreme talent booker, arranger of photo shoots, keeper of the Vanity Fair Oscar party invite list -- and a thousand other tasks that were, or are, on balance, critical to Vanity Fair's success. So much so that you may notice that the recent cover stories/interviews with Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts were by Jane Sarkin. Not bad for a Jersey girl!
In time the party grew in importance as the event that you had to visit on Oscar night. Like RIck's Cafe, everyone came by at some point. In the years I attended, I saw, as the old the expression goes, more stars than in the heavens at night, You may be surprised to hear this, but Brad Pitt is a good looking guy; Demi Moore looks younger than her actual years; Nicole Kidman is tall, and pretty but seems somewhat cold; Penelope Cruz is not tall, in fact she has a taller and prettier sister, but she is more attractive; Audrey Tatou is tiny. And so goes the night -- matching reality to the pictures in the magazine and on the screen.
For my part, I was happy to hang out with other writers I knew, gossip columnists of all stripes, my other fellow former Interview staffers, cosmetic and advertising execs -- we would commandeer a booth, enjoy the cocktails and sit back and enjoy the show.
Getting to shake the hands of Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder were memorable moments. Hanging out with Dominick Dunne and hearing his stories of Hollywood in the day was great fun.
And yes, I was there the night that Ellen met Anne. Although they had just met, boy, they seemed friendly.
Some years my friends and I would close out the place and then go over to the Miramax after party -
Eventually, and understandably, I dropped off the list.
Which was just as well because I had come to a point, where, as much as I enjoyed being there -- I had lost the belief I once had that attending such evenings was transformative. That way of thinking belongs to a different stage of the game. So I let it go.
I have no idea whether the Vanity Fair party will, in fact, return next year and if it does whether it will still be as much fun. I can't even tell you whether I will wish I was there.
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