Cover Story
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Questionable taste
Ricky Gervais describes the pleasures and pitfalls of being interviewed
As his Golden Globes hosting gigs have shown, Ricky Gervais is not afraid to say what he thinks. So who better to consult about the odd tribal rite that is the Hollywood publicity junket? These highly efficient PR marathons, in which dozens of journalists rotate through the same nondescript set for a few precious minutes with the star, are...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
In cold type
When Truman Capote set out to profile Marlon Brando for The New Yorker in 1957, he knew just how to set his traps
One morning in January, 1957, Josh Logan, the veteran Broadway producer and Hollywood director, came down from his room into the lobby of the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, and spied just about the last person in the world he wanted to see. There, at the front desk, perched on his tippy-toes to sign in, was the diminutive writer and...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Rules of the game
The sometimes nauseating, often fun, and always absurd life of a movie publicist
I’ve always regretted that I never thanked Goldie Hawn for launching my career as a publicist. Goldie became my client when I was hired as an account executive at PMK in 1981, a movie PR firm in New York. (It is now called Pmk*Bnc.) I knew I didn’t want this job and had already turned it down when my...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Celeb-O-Matic
Yes, it's your handy map of access to the stars!
Click to enlarge:
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Gross misunderstanding
What journalists miss about the movie business
The vast preponderance of news reporting about Hollywood concerns the weekly box-office race. It is offered free to the media every Sunday afternoon by Nielsen EDI at a low point in its news cycle, packaged with punning headlines and quotes by industry sources, so it can be reported as if it were a high-stakes horse race. In fact, it...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Esprit de corpse
What it's like to be embedded—on a movie set
With an explosion of light, the screaming starts. . . . This place is wrecked—an entire ballroom flopped on its head. In the middle of the floor (which used to be the ceiling), crushed chandeliers slump like twin crystal wedding cakes left in the sun too long. Playing cards, balloons, dishes, and chairs litter the tiered space; broken glass and broken bodies are...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
The red-carpet treatment
Set the Wayback Machine to April 9, 1984. The stars are filing into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles for the 56th Academy Awards . . .
In 1984, gaining access to the Oscars was pretty easy. Calling from Vanity Fair, where new immigrant Tina Brown had just taken over as editor, I was able to secure photo credentials for the red carpet and backstage just a few weeks before the big day. (I used two cameras, one a first-generation point-and-shoot, so the results are a bit,...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Taking the seen-it route
Why toil as an entry-level slave when you can watch a lot of TV, write it up, build a following—and perhaps even get paid?
Since I could talk, I have talked back to the television. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was great—I loved that segment on how orange crayons are made—but really, he could have tried harder to change up the voices he used for those puppets. King Friday is a man; Henrietta Pussycat is a female and also a cat. They shouldn’t sound the...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Avoiding pilot error
By tracking its users' intent to watch fall shows, TVGuide.com handicaps the new TV season
Television viewers are all over the place these days, tuning in via computers, tablets, and phones, at odd times, and in unlikely places, many far from ye olde couch. “Appointment viewing”—watching a show during its regular prime-time broadcast—has dipped from 93 percent to 79 percent of viewing in just the past year, according to TVGuide.com research. At the same time,...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
The fame game
Just in time for Hollywood awards season, CJR shines a Klieg light on entertainment journalism—a sometimes deprecated but highly influential corner of the craft.
In the past half century, as the big movie studios ceded control of the media narrative, celebrities have loomed ever larger on the cultural landscape, both here and abroad, and have come to sustain a vast economy that orbits around them—agents, lawyers, managers, spin artists, makeup artists, masseurs, etc. Advertisers dangle endorsement checks bearing many zeroes; candidates and charities...
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September 5, 2012 12:00 AM
Will the Daily Bugle survive?
How the most endangered journalism species -- the newspaper -- might prevent extinction
Excerpted from Deadlines and Disruption, by Stephen B. Shepard, published by McGraw-Hill, © 2012
With the traditional business model collapsing, several things become urgent if quality journalism is to survive. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus on newspapers because they still do most of the original reporting in America and because they are the most endangered of the journalism...
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September 5, 2012 12:00 AM
Failing geometry
The once-mighty triangle of publisher-audience-advertiser, long the basis for success in the media business, is now shaky. So let's consider transformation ...
In 1830, a publisher named Lynde Walter launched a Boston paper called The Boston Evening Transcript. Transcript’s most important feature wasn’t its content or format, but its business model. A subscription cost only $4 a year, barely more than a penny a day. Walter could sell so cheaply because industrial production and middle-class consumption created a newly robust advertising...
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September 5, 2012 12:00 AM
Long may it wave
The traditional banner ad isn't dead; it just transforms to fit the latest digital fashions -- and the demands (lots of demands) from marketers
Fifteen years ago, when I was an editor at New York magazine, I had a little side project: I got to launch nymag.com as the site’s founding editorial director. The site’s first advertiser was Armani A|X.
Because I had scant dedicated staff at the beginning, it fell to me to solicit the advertising materials—specifically banner ads, which would go into...
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September 5, 2012 12:00 AM
Made for you and me
In Tulsa, This Land Press is defying news-startup orthodoxy and betting that its community will pay for quality journalism -- not eventually, but right now
Across the street from a Fastenal hardware store in the shadow of Tulsa’s aging art-deco skyline, the staff of what is perhaps the best for-profit local journalism startup in the country has yet to reinvent the craft. Eleven full-time editorial employees sit at desks scattered across the rooms of a bright red house with Astroturf carpeting, telling stories about...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
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