For folks into media soap operas — and who among us isn’t? — I stumbled across a doozy this morning from an Atlanta weekly.

It’s a devastating portait of the “death spiral” of some sort of publishing company out of the South. An insider at the shop alleges all sorts of greed and mismanagement and all around crappiness from top to bottom.

Things are tough all over in newspapering these days, but — man o mano! — do things sound awful around those offices. This insider says management wasted money on bad financial advice and focused on the “creation of porn Web sites”* while showing a “bewildering disregard” for writers and readers and watching its papers’ “content erode to a state that can only be called pathetic.”

And now the whole operation is ” dying due to the avarice of ‘more, more, more.’”

So, as we celebrate all that we’re thankful for during this holiday season, maybe we should also take a moment or two to pity the folks toiling at the newspapers discussed in this story, some company called “Creative Loafing.”

Hey, wait a minute! That’s us!

Gotta go!

*Porn web sites? Wow!

Good grief.

All my friends keep asking me, “Arthur, why do you say you’ll never eat another chicken sandwich from Subway?”

I frequent all the cheap sandwich shops near my downtown corporate office. Yesterday I wanted an empanada and beans & rice from Julia’s, but they weren’t selling beans that day. So, since lunch was a bust from the start, I decided to cut my losses and go for a cheap $5 footlong sandwich from Subway.

I now question whether this is ever a good choice.
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Last week I got a letter that made my heart sink a little bit.

“Dear Mr. Beaujon,” it read, “On Friday, November 14, 2008 we will partially reduce the stock of the book Body Piercing Saved My Life (ISBN 9780306814570). Please be assured that copies of the book will be in stock and available after this stock reduction.”

I spent most of 2005 researching and writing that book; it came out not long after I started working here. It sold respectably (I think) for a book about Christian rock, something very few people outside evangelical culture care about, and got mostly positive reviews–and also I got to speak at a couple of colleges, one of which I tried growing a beard for in a flailing attempt at performance art–but my last royalty statement was negative, suggesting that at this point many more stores were returning the book than stocking it.

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Just in time for Halloween, the third installment of “Five Minutes You’ll Never Get Back” is live over at The Sexist. Listeners can look forward to Bobby “The Intern” Allyn’s savvy street reporting, Hess’ name-calling, and more un-PC references to the Goddess/Whore archetype than ever before!

Bennigans is back.

The middle-of-the-road food chain declared bankruptcy in July. Last week, a judge approved a deal that would turn control of the outfit over to Atalaya Capital Management.

If I’m reading City Desk right, Atalaya is the same company that is owed most of the $40 million debt declared by City Paper’s current owner, Creative Loafing, when the newspaper chain filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September.

So what does this convergence mean?

Will we at City Paper soon be able to get great deals on Bennigan’s staples like the Kung Pao Chimichangaâ„¢ and Death By Chocolateâ„¢?*

Or will the post-takeover Bennigan’s eliminate those items from the menu, along with anything else customers ever expected from the place, and force its chefs to tell wait staff and patrons that restaurant chains are in a fast-food-or-die environment, so they all better damn well learn to love Happy Mealsâ„¢?

Stay tuned!

*I’m not sure that the Bennigan’s menu ever really included a Kung Pao Chimichangaâ„¢ or Death By Chocolateâ„¢. But for the purposes of this posting, they sound about right.

Ben Westhoff, a New York freelance writer and occasional contributor to City Paper’s arts pages, recently signed on with the Examiner’s new blogger-generated-content model, where writers proclaim themselves experts in some discipline and get paid based on pageviews. It didn’t work out so well for Westhoff, who had a brief stint as a “music examiner,” because, well—he was trying to get pageviews:

In the beginning I took my column pretty seriously, shouting out stories I’d written for other publications, and including some original content. It quickly became a slog. My hits were 200 or 300 a day, not terrible, but translating to pennies (or perhaps quarters) per day. Then, around the time of the Republican convention it occurred to me that the idiots who dial up Examiner don’t want to read about Jamie Lidell or whatever, they want to read about Sarah fucking Palin. And so I began posting about her, every day. My hits went way up, well over 1000 for this Sarah Palin drinking game.

I was immediately told by an editor — a different one — that this was unacceptable, that I had to write about music only. I pushed back, noting my agreement with the first guy. But he couldn’t be swayed, and since I was near a payment threshold I capitulated. I silently vowed to get over the threshold as quickly as possible, and to entertain myself in the process. And so I began to blog about nothing but Lil Wayne and boobs — Katy Perry’s, mostly — in as absurd a manner as possible. Oh, and I still talked about Sarah Palin via ridiculous musical tie-ins. “Katy Perry and Sarah Palin to wrestle in Jello?” one was titled.

My hits stayed high, probably because nearly every post included a picture of Katy Perry with her tits hanging out, which were splashed across the site’s front page next to headlines like “Katy Perry voted biggest boobs in music.” (The first line of that particular post was, “By my friend Darryl”). After about a week of this they cut me off. My page is still up, but as of Saturday I can’t post to it anymore. This annoyed me at first, but this morning I got paid so I’m over it.

Westhoff’s post includes links to his Examiner posts, but they’re all dead now.

Following yesterday’s pathetic loss to the lowly Rams, a poster on Extremeskins.com writes:

A few of my friends and I had bad omens happen to us. I laughed them off at first but there’s no ignoring them after the fact we loss a game we should have won.

First example, My good friend and fellow Skins fan, who lives in Colorado sent a mass email Saturday night saying, a long haired sheep (ram) jumped out in front of his car and almost killed him and we shouldn’t take this game lightly.

He sent the email to the same 20 or so friends as we do every week. We talk about the game pre and post. Most of us laughed it off.
I was glad he was okay. But I told him the ram wanted to be put out of his misery. Jokes on me.

Then, as I do every week, I nerd out and simulate the game on Madden. I always play as the Skins and play next weeks opponent. I got the game around week two and have won against the computer on the first try every time, not against the Rams. I lost 4 in a row. I had to turn down the difficulty but I knew I was cheating myself.

So question is, anybody else have any bad signs?

Normally I don’t get too riled up about CNN errors, but the headline “‘Power Ranger’ faces death penalty in yacht killings” taints the entire series. The subject of the article, Skylar Deon, who is charged with the 2005 murder of Jackie and Tommy Hawks, was not a Power Ranger. He had a non-speaking, non-recurring bit part in one episode of the show (which was never renewed because the poor sap was incapable of memorizing lines).

Why does this clarification warrant a blog post at City Desk? Because the Power Rangers were the only friends I had between 1993 and 1995, and their untarnished legacy of fighting big-ass aliens while succeeding as high school students is the only thing I hold sacred.

In all the news reports I’ve read, the guy who took over City Paper last year and ran to the bankruptcy court has accepted no blame for Monday’s Chapter 11 filing and framed our troubles as inevitable.

I wasn’t buying any of that.

Until now.

DCist reports today that the relatively new and relatively hated why.i.hate.dc blogger has been fired. Did the Loaf purchase the blog? Nope.

It turns out the blogger, who we wrote about here and interviewed here, couldn’t find enough hate to produce enough blog posts. Hate monger Rusty explains:

Hello. Rusty here.

I tried e-mailing Liz to see what was up and I got no response. Which really was no surprise since she obviously gave up on this blog.

Just because I’m in a weird city like Columbus doesn’t mean that I still don’t hate DC. In fact, for some reason, mail being sent to me from the District isn’t getting to my apartment in Columbus. And what kind of mail should I be getting from DC? Why security deposits and paychecks of course! It might not be DC’s fault, but, come on, DC has always been a good scapegoat. Why stop now?

Well, as you probably have noticed, Liz didn’t work out. It was my mistake to select a writer instead of a blogger. Writers are awesome, but don’t necessarily want to write three times a week. We don’t need writers. We need bloggers.

I’m well aware that I’m hitchin’ up the Andy Rooney pants in asking this, but: Is it just me, or has journalism renewed its love affair with the “drop dead” headline? There’s a ton of ‘em at the moment, mainly attached to the ongoing bailout negotiations:

Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead

However, it also encompasses Nobel Prize judges:

Nobel Chief to U.S. Novelists: Drop Dead

The Schwarzenegger administration:

Schwarzenegger to Seniors and Tenants: Drop Dead!

Hipster asshole pissing matches:

Hipsters to Real World Cast: Drop Dead!

And Sarah Palin:

The old girls’ club to Palin: Drop dead

I admit that I’ve been contributing to the problem; our eagle-eyed managing editor, Andrew Beaujon, caught me employing the headline device twice in the past few days. Clearly something is going on with journalists subconsciously. Maybe we miss the good old days of tabloid journalism, when you could put a shocker headline in print and people got excited about it, as the New York Daily News did when it first used the phrase in a headline. Maybe it’s just appropriate; that old headline referenced a bailout story, after all. Or maybe we’re just actively wishing each other ill in tough times.