Fineman becomes latest
to flee Newseek
Other shorts: Study: Affluent readers drift from magazines
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Sep 20, 2010
Howard Fineman becomes latest to flee Newsweek
Newsweek is losing another high-profile writer. That's certainly nothing new, considering the flood of talent that has left the magazine since it went on the block earlier this year, eventually being sold to Sidney Harman. What's interesting about this defection is where Howard Fineman, who worked at Newsweek for three decades, is going. He's heading to the Huffington Post, which many are taking as a sign that the 5-year-old web site is ready to invest some major dollars in growing its talent pool, which for years consisted mostly of unpaid bloggers, celebrity and otherwise. Founder Arianna Huffington told the New York Times that the web site has grown so much that investment is possible now because of fewer financial constraints. Fineman, who starts in October, will be the HuffPost's senior politics editor, directing coverage at the Washington bureau. He also will continue to appear as a pundit on MSNBC. He's the latest in a long line of departures from Newsweek, including editor Jon Meacham, columnist Fareed Zakaria and writer Michael Isikoff.
Study: Affluent readers drift away from magazines
Affluent folks are using the internet more and more, apparently at the expense of magazine reading. Ipsos Mendelsohn's most recent affluent survey, which looked at 13,800 heads of households with incomes at $100,000 or more, found the affluent spend an average of 25.3 hours per week online, up 12 percent from last year, while magazine readership among them decreased. The average number of magazines read per year slipped from 7.0 to 5.9, while the number of issues read per year went from 15.8 to 13.3. There is speculation, however, that affluents are shifting to reading magazines on tablet computers such as the iPad or digital e-readers. The survey estimates that 3 million of the 44 million U.S. affluents already own a tablet or e-reader, with another 3 million planning to buy one within the next year. Overall, 20 percent of U.S. homes qualify as affluent in 2010, according to Ipsos Mendelsohn.
WSJ editor: NYT 'not a serious competitor' nationally
It hasn't taken long for the Wall Street Journal to adopt the brash attitude that parent company News Corp. is known for. The latest example came over the weekend, when Journal editor Robert Thomson continued his war of words with the New York Times, with whom he's tussled over the launch of Greater New York, personnel moves, and awards over the past year. Discussing the Journal's newly launched weekend section with the Associated Press, Thomson bristled at the suggestion that it was being introduced to challenge the Times. "Nationally, there's no contest now," he said. "We're more than twice as big as The New York Times. They're not a serious competitor." The Journal's new Saturday offerings include a pull-out book review section in a larger Review section that got a lot of buzz when it was announced earlier this month, due to the fact that so many publications have eliminated their stand-alone book publications. Another section, Off Duty, will include reporting on fashion, home decorating and design, as well as technology.
Limbaugh duped by Wikipedia prank
Note to radio personalities: make sure information found on Wikipedia is verified before mentioning it on the air. That's some advice conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh could have used last Tuesday for a segment during which he spoke about Pensacola Federal District Court judge Roger Vinson, who recently said he'd allow a challenge to the new health care law to advance to a hearing. On his show, Limbaugh reported that Vinson is a hunter and a taxidermist, and that he once killed three bears and mounted them over the door in his courtroom to "instill the fear of God into the accused." Actually he didn't. That info was part of an internet hoax executed by someone called "Pensacolian," who edited Judge Vinson’s Wikipedia with the false information and attributed it to the Pensacola News Journal. A Limbaugh spokesperson told the New York Times that a staff researcher found the data in a story on the News Journal web site, but an editor at the paper said it had never published the article. The first clue for Limbaugh's staff that the entry was fake should have been the date the article was attributed to, June 31, 2003—a date, of course, that doesn't exist.
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