Entertainment Weekly lost a quarter of its staff to layoffs last year, but Time Inc. will continue publishing the magazine, even though it maybe considered axing its print edition. Risky.
Sure, the title made $10 million last year, according to Keith Kelly at the Post. And it has new leadership (Kelly reports) in managing editor Jess Cagle, a People and former Time editor who spent 10 years at EW following its launch. (Fortune vet Rick Tetzeli, the former M.E., was kicked upstairs.)
But the magazine's profits are a fifth of the $50 million they recently were. If 2009 plays out as expected, EW could slide into the red on the cost of printing 1.6 million copies each week.
Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is betting an editorial turnaround will prevent that, as will lower costs, thanks to the loss of 30 of 120 editorial staff and plans to share staff with other publications. But Moore should be ready to pull the plug quickly if the magazine starts losing money. EW never quite made its mark, and Time Inc.'s last round of 600-or-so layoffs was actually not that deep given the magazine group's 10,000 employees.
If the company has to fire more people, it should not be to sentimentally extend a failed experiment.
Our tipster said it's more heartwarming than the puppy cam , this, the best headline yet in 2009: "Bush starts packing to leave White House." It's true, he can't wait to leave.
“The president’s style is always to be one that’s a little bit prepared early, and he and Mrs. Bush have been working to box things up,” [Bush press secretary Dana] Perino said. “They didn’t come with a lot of things; they didn’t bring a lot of furniture here. So mostly what they have are books, obviously their clothes, and then some of the things that they’ve picked up along the way on their travels as they’ve traveled.”
Yes, if there's one word Bush conjures to mind, it's "prepared." Prepared in advance.
To stop working at the White House.
The attached ad, ostensibly raising money to help Israelis, aired during MSNBC's Countdown tonight. As a tipster pointed out, one of the explosions looks totally fake.
Check out that early shot of a presumably Hamas-fired rocket from the Gaza strip hitting Israeli homes. The resulting fireball looks almost painted on — very colorful and well-defined against a more blurry background. (The contrast is a bit harder to see in our small video player.)
At the very least, the ad makes cable news even more melodramatic and pointlessly heart-pounding, adding no new information about an admittedly terrible situation in which Hamas is rocketing Israel. Pointless for the viewer at least; the advertiser, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, hopes to further link (as it has) Israelis with MSNBC-watching American Christian evangelical donors, many of whom support the Jewish state because they believe it paves the way for an "apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish," as AP put it.
If you believe the apocalypse is coming, no alarm is likely to sound over the top.
What did the ex-wife of Google executive Omid Kordestani (net worth: $2.2 billion) do after getting dumped for a younger woman? She hooked up with a doctor and hired Julio Iglesias as her wedding singer.
Iglesias — whose private-performance fee is estimated at $1 million — was only the start of the bills for the wedding, held last weekend at the Marquis Cabo San Lucas hotel.
Kordestani's ex, Bita Daryabari, and her groom, varicose-vein specialist Reza Malek (pictured above, at a charity event in San Francisco), stayed in a $4,000/night presidential suite. Colin Cowie, the celebrity wedding planner who's seen Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and others to the altar, organized the nuptials. Some of the guests took chartered planes Daryabari and Malek paid for. A tequila party on the beach ended with fireworks; the last fusillade took the form of a heart. A chef was flown in from New York to cater the affair. Paparazzi, in town to lens Jennifer Aniston, stumbled across the event — which, in a way, only added to its gaudy glamour.
It is hard to imagine a worse time to throw an extravagant wedding. But Daryabari surely had other things on her mind.
What turned Daryabari, a telecom executive turned philanthropist, into a towering Bridezilla? Her husband, Kordestani, was Google's 12th employee and its first salesman. He struck a search-licensing deal with the now-forgotten Netscape, then an Internet powerhouse where he previously worked, that made Google viable. Google's IPO made Kordestani wealthy, and as Google's shares soared, his fortune grew into the billions of dollars.
But then Kordestani fell in love with a coworker, Gisel Hiscock (right, and yes, that's really her name, poor dear). A rumored reconciliation after the revelation of his affair never happened. The couple moved to London last summer. Somewhere along the line, Daryabari and Kordestani finalized their divorce.
Which, naturally, gave her a big chunk of Kordestani's Google fortune. And what better way to rub her ex-husband's face in her happiness than by spending his money, a million dollars at a time, on the most extravagant event imaginable? If it weren't a supremely arrogant Googler, the self-crowned king of the new advertising world, getting his comeuppance, we might say her wedding was in poor taste. But is there a sweeter taste than revenge?
(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)
Two things apparently distract Jeremy Piven, according to CNET TV host & CBS correspondent Natali Del Conte who was on Fox's Red Eye last night: her breasts and Gawker.
She says this was back in the spring. Perhaps in March, when we asked what the hell he was doing at a Microsoft party and noticed him touching himself a lot during photoshoots. But whenever it was, while Del Conte tried to get an interview with him started, he was furiously checking his BlackBerry mumbling that he'd been on Gawker. He then started looking at her tits.
Natali's tale is in clip form above. And to indulge our number one fan, here's a brief roundup of his post-mercury-poisoning antics.
- Before getting fired from/quitting his Broadway show Speed-the-Plow, he spent a night off sending a mass text message to ladies, telling any/all of them to come to his hotel room. Whoever got there first, won him for the evening. That's how he ended up with his current girlfriend, 23-year-old model Ashley Chontos.
- He also, inexplicably, sent a "six paragraph" text to View prattler Sherri Shepherd.
- E! gossipeuse Ted Casablanca says that Piven was actually fired from Speed-the-Plow, rather than quitting.
- And, finally, he went seeking treatment for his suspicious ailment in Thailand, of all places.
Michael Hirschorn writes the single most insightful and plausible essay yet on the probable coming decline, fall, and (perhaps) rebirth of the New York Times. You reading, Pinch? [The Atlantic]
These are shots of Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey enjoying a Hawaiian getaway. While it's awesome to see Jenny in a bikini, why does it look like she's in excruciating pain in every single pic? I understand she leads a stressful life battling autism, but you're on the beach, lady. And you're with Jim Carrey whose tepid brand of humor will make anyone laugh quietly to themselves. So, live, Jenny McCarthy. LIVE, DAMN YOU! Autism isn't going anywhere, and it'll be there when you get back. Always :) I should never work for Hallmark.
Graybearded Santa figure Neale Donald Walsch, a writer on spirituality, copied a tale of Christmas cheer and posted it on BeliefNet.
The tale of a winter pageant where a child displays a letter sign upside-down, turning "Christmas Love" into "Christ Was Love," was written by Candy Chand and published in Clarity in 1999, Motoko Rich reports. Walsch's excuse: Someone sent him Chand's story, unattributed, and he put it in his clippings file. He then retold it so many times he forgot it didn't actually happen.
Ah yes, the clippings-file excuse — a variant of the one historian Doris Kearns Goodwin trotted out to explain away her plagiarism. And the sloppiness excuse — the one Ruth Shalit used. Walsch, in short, isn't original even in his outrageous defenses of obvious plagiarism.
Kanye West is planning a puppet show, but he's been beaten to the punch—drowsy, dancing teenage rapper Soulja Boy has just launched an online cartoon show starring Alfonso Riberio. Hip hop is magic:
If Ice-T doesn't at least make an appearance on South Park this month he totally loses. [SouljaBoyTellem.com] [I don't care what you think of Soulja Boy, this intro song is at least better than the Fresh Prince's.]
Martin Eistenstadt, that fake pundit/McCain adviser who supposedly started the whole "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa's a continent" thing, has gotten a real life book deal.
You'll remember that Eisenstadt is, in fact, a fictitious, satirical figure, a character created by two men (Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish) who did a good job of fooling people for a while with his "The Last Republican" YouTube videos and making an ass of David Shuster. People were always so ready to believe in him! Because the election was already a complete work of sci-fi fantasy.
Ultimately Gorlin and Mirvish were aiming for a television show, but now that the election smoke has cleared to all but a wisp, they've been forced to settle for a measly old book deal. We received the tongue-in-cheek press release today, in which the pair addresses America. In the voice, of course, of Martin Eisenstadt:
I’m delighted to have an opportunity to put to rest the disinformation put out by The New York Times that the Palin/Africa claims are a hoax and that I myself am the creation of two opportunistic filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish,” said Eisenstadt. “Even CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources’ perpetuated this ridiculous canard. The story has been picked up around the world. It’s time to clear my name and set the record straight.
So it's more jokey haha's for everyone, with mock-serious punditry and politicking not seen since last night on The Colbert Report. This is why hoaxes suck these days.
Photo from Eisenstadt's blog
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