Today, a few Good men have fallen, and the Times is catching up with technology. One journalist likens the changes to the passing of Pan Am (“America let Pan Am die,” he writes solemnly); another, to a Western. Discussion among the dead after the jump.
• The Times is assembling a team of experts and op-editorialists to give a speedy reaction to the news, called the “Instant Op-Ed,” online. Times editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal says he likes the “back and forth of it, and the instantaneous nature.” That whole … Internet thing. [Mediaweek]
• Good magazine, a two-year-old, bi-monthly, nonprofit title, has laid off seven people. [Mixed Media/Portfolio]
• Folio’s predictions for the next year in media suggest that people will never stop starting journalistic ventures. Even in the rocky waters of 2008, 335 new magazines were founded. (Peaches Geldof, for example, just launched her own magazine!) Well, some predictions were less grim, anyway. Others, like that of a Post columnist, say “bankruptcy becomes the new black.” [Folio]
• A Times op-ed today laments the end of the days when journalists received “dollops of caviar and free-flowing iced vodka aboard Pan Am a mile above the Amazon.” We’re speechless, other than to say this attitude might be part of the problem. [NYT]
• One way the Times could buy itself out of some debt, perhaps returning to the days of caviar-filled first-class flights? Sell the Boston Red Sox. [FishbowlNY/Mediabistro]
• The Detroit News has slashed its home delivery. Wondering why? A columnist at the paper says, “we couldn’t just duck down behind the horse trough like the sidekick always did in those Westerns when the shooting started.” And also to save money. [Detroit News]
• Today’s Times also notes that there aren’t too many newspaper reporters around to cover the nation’s capital anymore. But the McClatchy Co. calls the paper’s bluff, saying it still has its D.C. journos and won’t be anybody’s poster boy for shrinking staffs. [NYT, Romenesko]
• As part of the continuing epidemic of book-publishing layoffs, an unspecified number of staffers have been pink-slipped at Knopf. [NYT]
