UPDATE: 2 stars leave Village Voice

UPDATE: NY Times, in Wednesday report on Village Voice changes, has VV editor Tony Ortega blaming the economy for the firing of Wayne Barrett:

“By now I think we expected the economy to be doing a little better. So I’m a little disappointed we haven’t grown. But we’re holding our own.”

• • •

From NY Times: Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, two muckraking fixtures of the New York City press corps, are leaving The Village Voice. Mr. Barrett was let go; Mr. Robbins quit in protest.

In his last VV column, posted today, Barrett says: “I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of the Voice. These will be my last. I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new. If I didn’t see that, others did.”

 

 

So, you want to be a journalist!

By Brooklyn Lee at xtranormal

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Video via Dana Rubinstein. Thanks, Dana.

JFK in Dallas, 1963

On Nov. 22, 1963 — 47 years ago today — I was a carrier boy for the NY World-Telegram & Sun, an afternoon newspaper. We knew that President Kennedy had died, and a pall enveloped the storefront shack where we rolled our papers — no bands, no bags — in preparation of stoop shoots from our bikes (we almost always hit our marks — definitely a lost art).

The Telegram bore the headlined “Kennedy Cheered Through Dallas” and featured a picture of a beaming JFK and Jackie at the Texas airport that morning.

Those upbeat papers are collector’s items today, but my customers would expect later news. So along with scores of others, I waited patiently at one of my neighborhood’s big newsstands for the arrival of the final edition around 5 o’clock — its headline filled the top half of the broadsheet front page:

PRESIDENT

SHOT DEAD

I shelled out cash for a stack of Finals and brought them to my preferred customers. Then I returned to a few prospects. If they’d subscribe that day, I offered, I’d give them a copy of the paper that everyone wanted.

People were desperate not just for the latest news — TV was covering the story ’round-the-clock — but for their newspaper, a friend they could touch, hold, embrace.

Putting iPhones to work on the subway

They made music on a NYC subway — in an entirely new way.

Atomic Tom‘s purportedly “impromptu” performance of “Take Me Out” — in a B Train on the Manhattan Bridge, using only iPhones and captured on an iPhone — quickly went viral, and after just a few days it is approaching 1 million YouTube views. Previously, their YouTube count, for a different tune that was recorded conventionally, topped off at 24,000 over 9 months.

The Atomic boys get credit — but they weren’t the first to generate buzz by their use of iPhones as music instruments rather than music players. Here is the British girl group The Mentalists, performing in February 2009—

Click here for more videos by The Mentalists (now renamed The New Mentalists) making music on their iPhones.

A Mashable post found the Atomic Tom performance “quite heartfelt — we’d even go so far as to say it’s the best iPhone band performance we’ve yet seen.” Mashable lets its followers judge for themselves — the post links to other groups strumming their stuff.

Back to NYC, subway riders love this stuff, by the way — a friend commented on FB: “Working in MSG area means I get constant subway music, some of it truly incredible. It’s one of the great things about living / working in NYC — it’s the best!”

Over the top at AMNewYork [Video Podcast]

Running a front page ad or promotion is one thing (done right, it can be useful to readers and profitable to publishers). But for publishers to deliberately mislead their readers is something else.

Today’s AMNewYork, the free daily published by Newsday, does just that.

Here’s my say: