The New York Times Could Always Just Start a LiveJournalThe ‘Times’ today had three stories about the media’s epic struggle to stay afloat. Way to be self-referential, ‘Times’! And they say newspapers are having trouble adjusting to the Internet.
Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Apple? Chicago Is!Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune included an opinion piece that, even though we’re a day late on it, we just can’t let slip by. In it, writer Dennis Byrne rails against the fact that both party’s presidential front-runners are New York politicians (and Bloomberg, our mayor, might join them in the race). He claims it’s bad for America that the leading candidates are from somewhere so “provincial.”
I find it curious that American voters may have to choose between two New Yorkers and it has received little, if no attention, from the coastal media. Maybe they think the rest of us won’t notice. Maybe they don’t care whether the rest of us notice. After all, New York is the Center of Everything (followed at a respectful distance by the District of Columbia and a great distance by everyone else), so the rest of us should be glad that someone from New York would be sitting in the Oval Office.
Okay, first of all, stop projecting. And second of all, fuck you.
company town
Investment Banks Mull New Trading FloorsFINANCE
• JP Morgan, Lehman, and Merrill are in talks with developers to build new trading floors in Manhattan. [Bloomberg]
• Donald Trump set a new low last night, defeating WWF owner Vince McMahon in a “Battle of the Billionaires.” [AP via Yahoo]
• The SEC celebrates April Fools’ Day with a prank press release about new disclosure rules. [Financial Times via MSNBC]
it just happened
Tribune Co. Goes to Sam Zell (for Now)
The big idea lately in newspapering — poor, beleaguered newspapering — has been the proposition that newspapers of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the people might just be the best kind of newspapers. (One well-known billionaire, goes the logic, is better than anonymous private-equity firms or, worse, Hassan Elmasry.) The proposition hasn’t worked out quite as believers hoped in Philadelphia, and in Boston Jack Welch hasn’t even been allowed to try. But this morning Chicago’s Tribune Company — owner of the eponymous paper, plus the insurrectionary Los Angeles Times, Long Island’s Newsday, and other newspapers, TV stations, and a baseball team — announced that it has accepted an offer from local billionaire Sam Zell.
