A democracy cannot function without a free press. O.K., we know that, and you probably can’t see another word about it. The point of what follows is practical. We’re in this unbelievable business morass, an indescribable battlefield. How do we get out of it? Contributing to this catastrophe has ...

On July 6th, 2005, The Observer officially launched the Media Mob under editor Tom Scocca with a post that attempted—and failed—to introduce an awkward portmanteau word we thought would capture large media companies' incursions into the then-still novel medium of blogs. We called it (shudder) bl...

In next week's Time magazine, Walter Isaacson turns his attention to the newspaper industry's troubles, asserting that the way publishers currently operate "is not a business model that makes sense." Mr. Isaacson, the CEO of The Aspen Institute and the former top editor at Time, started hi...

Here's one more tribute to John Updike, who died yesterday at the age of 76: "Insane Clown Poppy," The Simpsons episode in which Mr. Updike made a cameo (along with Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, and Amy Tan). In the book Updike in Cincinnati (Ohio University Press, 2007), the author explains ho...

A week after he toasted the inauguration of President Barack Obama at the Heineken- and Hennessey-sponsored Hip Hop Inaugural Ball (see Ta-Nehisi Coates' Green Carpet in this week's New Yorker), hip-hop oligarch Russell Simmons has a new gig: Editor-in-chief of Global Grind, a Web site that touts it...

If your only contact with Joel Lovell is his regular Men + Money column for GQ, you might be forgiven for assuming that he spends all of his time coveting the stuff he doesn’t have and then hating himself for it. In one of his columns, he recounts indulging in a flat-screen TV, and how he fantasiz...

Remember how back in November former Observer 'Edgy Enthusiast' columnist Ron Rosenbaum used his Slate 'Spectator' column to call out Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis as "the Sarah Palin of Gurus"? At the time, Mr. Jarvis—a former magazine editor-turned-digital evangelist—responded by calling...

Former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman's Hollywood news site The Wrap has launched a "Version 1.0." In a welcome message to readers, Ms. Waxman writes: Today we launch with great optimism what I hope will become an exciting new space to cover Hollywood in the digital age. TheWrap see...

The New York Times may have found its possible savior in Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, but the London Evening Standard has found an even stranger hero: KGB agent-turned-banking mega-billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who just became the paper's new owner. Mr. Lebedev, who once spied on ...

What do you do after co-creating a television series so critically praised, Slate's then-editor Jacob Weisberg called it "the best show on television and which prompted The New York Times editorial page's Nicholas Kulish to write, "If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch 'The W...