Internet porn has devastated old-fashioned smut rags. We now hear a top executive at FriendFinder Networks, the publisher of Penthouse, wants to close the money-losing magazine down. But his boss denies it. Two sources close to FriendFinder says that Anthony Previte, FriendFinder's chief operating o...

The Rocky Mountain News has rolled the presses for the last time. Here's your Media Crack another-one-bites-the-dust edition: Everyone is competing to be more-elegiacal-than-thou in Romenesko-mourning the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver newspaper which, in the end, was only notable for being the loser...

By now, everybody is aware that newspapers are dying a slow death. Last week, the cover of Time Magazine was “How to Save Your Newspaper.” Now, its ironic that a news weekly would be discussing the death of newspapers, since news weeklies are equally if not more obsolete. In the article,...

Is it any surprise that print is dying? Not for newspapers. In fits and starts since the 1970s and 1980s, they (and others) have been looking to go electronic but they screwed it up. Watch! Ceefax, BBC's "teletext" service, got its start in the 1970s. In 1981, KRON, a San Francisco TV station, repor...

The latest cut in the ever-shrinking kingdom of Larry and Sergey: Google Print Ads, a program which brokered ads in newspapers and magazines. So much for the notion of Google saving the printed word. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has previously said he wouldn't help out by buying newspapers or showering t...

Sinking ship Portfolio has one less expensive contract to worry about. Matt Cooper, formerly the D.C. bureau chief of Time, has joined web outfit Talking Points Memo. Cooper writes in his in his welcome post, he says he'll "continue to write for Conde Nast Portfolio, where I'm a contributing editor,...

A new kingpin of gay content has just come out to Wall Street: Here Media, which rules queer pay-TV, film, magazines, books, and websites. But has anyone stopped to ask if we need it? The media itself is gayer than ever: From the pink mafia at the New York Times to the ambisexual likes of Neal Boult...

Did you know that the New York Times has a crew of "digital renegades" who are reinventing journalism through interactive graphics and databases? It's true! Too bad they're not working on fixing the newspaper's business. Aron Pilhofer, Andrew DeVigal, Steve Duenes, Matthew Ericson, and Gabriel Dance...

Succession politics plays out like palace intrigue at the New York Times and questions about how much longer executive editor Bill Keller plans to stay in his job are already stirring. Keller says, "Bullshit." Keller will turn 60 a week from Sunday, well shy of the typical 65 retirement age. But new...

Even as the New Yorker waxes nostalgic on the glory days of the Village Voice, the weekly is severing more of its legacy, including Nat Hentoff, hired in 1958. Hentoff wrote about jazz and then a civil liberties column. Former Voicer Tricia Romano reports he's been laid off along with Lynn Yaeger,a ...