Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it would be cutting 100 newsroom jobs via buyouts and layoffs. When the best paper in the country has to cut jobs, that’s bad, very bad news. Anyone that’s checked out journalismjobs.com lately will tell you that the news industry isn’t clamoring for reporters. But the news provoked a surprisingly sympathetic response from Times readers. Some offered to pay money to read the paper’s online version!

Will you, dear reader, beg to pay us for our online journalism?

*photo courtesy of mediabistro.

Haven’t had enough fun at the expense of Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s “Braveheart” Education Next story? Head over to D.C. Wire, where Bill Turque makes a medieval jab at the profile and its over-the-top lead image:

“The accompanying story by June Kronholz is, as the picture suggests, almost uniformly admiring. Although it doesn’t address what happened to the real Braveheart, Scottish rebel William Wallace, who was hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered in 1305 for rising up against the British crown.”

Read More “Michelle Rhee: Not the Real Braveheart” »

Above is an ad e-mailed out by the Redskins ticket office this week. As you read this, remember, for chuckles, that just a couple months ago Redskins executive Mitch Gershman was claiming in press releases that the team had a waiting list of “over 200,000.”

Sure, the Skins waiting list has long been bogus. But this year it’s also become apparent that the NFL’s blackout rule is enforced as stringently as its steroids policy.

(AFTER THE BREAK: Where’s Chris Cooley in that photo? Clinton Tortoise? Lord Farquaad? Lindsay Czarniak cheers on teams that don’t pay her? Is the NY Times reporter on Dan Snyder’s payroll, too? Another Have-Nots bowl this week?)

Read More “Cheap Seats Daily: Are Snyder’s Redskins Worth Only 17 Cents a Share Now, Too?” »

Author’s note: The Redskins lost. The rest of today’s Cheap Seats Daily will be devoted to what is at once the bizarrest and the most pathetic episode to come out of this sorry season.

Be scared,  people: A fake Hogette is on the loose.

As if things weren’t bad enough in Redskins Land, a dire APB went out to hardcore fans over the weekend: The man calling himself “Stephette Hogette” is not a real Hogette.

Sure, the guy’s rubber snout and his ladies garb, to the untrained eye, make Stephette Hogette look exactly like the authentic Hogettes, who’ve been dressing in drag since 1983 but won’t give up their gimmick all these years after it outlived its cuteness. But don’t be fooled: Not just anybody can align themselves with these douchebags.

(AFTER THE JUMP: The bogus Hogette is “dangerous to women and possibly children”? Cheap Seats Daily tracks down the fugitive Hogette? The fugitive Hogette says “This means war!”? The fugitive Hogette also raps? We need Hogettes, bogus or not, now more than ever?)

Read More “Cheap Seats Daily Exclusive: Bogus Hogette Declares War on Real Hogettes!” »

J.P. Szymkowicz has a prediction for tonight’s U2 concert at FedExField:

“It’s going to be a mess,” he says. “By 6 p.m. they’ll start turning people away from the parking lots. It’s going to be another Radiohead.”

In concert go-er parlance, “another Radiohead” means “way @#$%^&*’d up!” A lack of usable parking spaces for the precious British band’s performance at the Bristow, Va., hellhole caused thousands of ticketholders to miss the entire show.

Szymkowicz personally witnessed that Nissan Pavilion debacle. But that’s not the only reason to have faith in his prediction of another Radiohead tonight. Nobody outside Redskins Park knows more about Dan Snyder’s parking set up than Szymkowicz. He’s the guy who spearheaded the lawsuit against the Redskins for the game-day ban on pedestrian traffic around FedExField.

Because of his litigation, in 2004 the team had to reverse its policy and allow folks who found ways around Snyder’s outrageous parking charges to walk into Skins games.

(AFTER THE JUMP: FedExField has HOW many parking spaces? Capitol Hill interns are going to be to blame for the U2 mess? Some buffoon’s looking for a parking pass to tonight’s show? The New York Times and Dan Snyder are in bed together? Audi is Dan Snyder’s new mattress?)

Read More “Cheap Seats Daily: If You’ve Got U2 Tickets, Don’t Read This! Just Leave Now!” »

Good get by Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp: Pulitzer Prize-winning Middle East correspondent Anthony Shadid is making the familiar jump from the Washington Post to the New York Times, joining Peter Baker, Peter S. Goodman, David Segal, Mark Leibovich, Serge Kovaleski, Michael Powell, Jo Becker, Sharon Waxman, and others who escape me at the moment.

Shadid’s prize-winning work focused on the tumult in Iraq at the time of the March 2003 U.S. invasion and its aftermath. It was amazing stuff, and a great point of pride within the Post.

His official explanation to Strupp, as is usual in such cases, yields absolutely no insight into why he went from one huge sinking ship to another: “It was a difficult decision to move. I still have deep affection and admiration for the Post. My time there represents my favorite years in journalism, and Don Graham remains an inspiration to me. Nada [Shadid's wife] and I just thought it was time to seek new challenges.”

Joel B. Anthony took the words right out of my mouth. Writing on the Washington Post’s Free for All page on Saturday, Mr. Anthony articulated a lingering feel that I’d had about a piece of columnizing by Washington Postie Michael Wilbon.

Read More “Weekend in Review” »

Good morning sweet, sweet, City Desk readers, and welcome to another installment of Freedom Friday! We have a new justice at the Supreme Court of the United States–isn’t that exciting? Dear race-baiting Republicans: Better luck next time (kisses).

In other other interesting news, the New York Times fired its second token conservative yesterday. Ben Stein, of the late John Hughes‘ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was relieved of his financial column for acting as “a commercial spokesman for FreeScore, a financial services company,” according to Felix Salmon. Not too long ago the Times declined to renew William Kristol’s contract because of the error-riddled dreck he scribbled in crayon on ripped paper bags and then forced into the NYT courier’s chubby cheeks for transport. I completely agree with both decisions but find it sickening that the Times can’t seem to part with Maureen Dowd,  a plagiarist, total luddite, and liberal sycophant; or Alessandra Stanley, who writes her column using a quill filled with unhappiness and checks her reporting against the ingredients list on a box of crack-cocaine. Simply put:  The Times needs to hold its writers to a higher standard.

Birthers after the jump.
Read More “Our Morning Roundup: Birthers, Ben Stein, and the Nature of Reality” »

• CP alum John Cloud breaks it to middlebrow America: That snack you’re having after your workout? Kinda canceling out the work you did: “After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in “sports” drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you’re hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it’s easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.”

After the jump: more things that happened yesterday, but with bullet points!

Read More “Morning Roundup: Go Ahead, Have the Doughnut Edition” »

Note that semicolon up there in the title. You see how beautifully I deployed that? I learned punctuation as a copy editor, a job that I took at Spin 14 years ago. There, I first changed like to such as and made bands its rather than theys. I mastered the en dash and the difference between prone and supine.

Prettying up the writing of other journalists, much like answering their phone calls, is a job that isn’t making it through the recession at many publications. Here at City Paper, we used to have a receptionist. We also used to have two copy editors. You will no longer find those job titles on our masthead.
Read More “Disappearing Media Jobs: 1) Copy Editor; 2) Receptionist” »

Now comes good news from the New York Times, which is announcing a second-quarter profit on the back of all kinds of cost savings.

The company issued a thorough breakdown of all its money successes and failures, all of which gets bookended by the following passage, which says it all in this media environment:

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include national and local conditions, as well as competition, that could influence the levels (rate and volume) of retail, national and classified advertising and circulation generated by our various markets and material increases in newsprint prices. They also include other risks detailed from time to time in the Company’s publicly filed documents, including the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 28, 2008. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

More bodies pile up thanks to the scourge that is street racing. This time, the two victims had pulled over to check out a race along I-70 just beyond the Baltimore city line. Last time, eight people were killed in Accokeek.

Read More “Weekend in Review: The Menace of Street Racing” »

Before you do anything, learn all about our hometown fire chief’s outing at the Nats game. He freaked out when he saw there were fireworks going down. More!

Much has been made of the District’s plan to step up enforcement of parking restrictions all around town. The push will affect nightclubbers who try to press their luck in all of those spaces just shy of intersections, not to mention street-sweeping violators: The machines that roar down the alternating sides of certain D.C. streets will be equipped with cameras to nail all scofflaw automobiles in their way.

Read More “Weekend in Review: Parking Tickets!” »

Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to a balmy addition of Freedom Friday. Last week I wrote that police in Mississippi arrested Pete Eyre, Adam Mueller, and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries for filming a traffic stop. Thanks to the support of many liberty-minded folks the country over, the boys received $2,580 in bail donations and spent $1,487. Guess what they’re doing with the rest? Sending it back, via Paypal, to the people who gave it to them. (Take note Timothy Geithner, you theiving sumbitch.)

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a teensy bit more about Maureen Dowd, after the jump.

Read More “Our Morning Roundup: Don’t Ask About Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” »

Around 6:45 p.m. EST, Ryan Zimmerman grounded into a fielders choice in his fifth and final hitless plate appearance in San Francisco. His hitting streak, the best of the few reasons to pay attention to the Nationals this season, was done at 30 games.

A little after 7:30 p.m., a shot from Pittsburgh’s Sergei Gonchar goes off bodies in front of the net and Sidney Crosby pushes the loose puck in. Eight seconds of playing time later, Penguin Craig Adams scores his first career playoff goal. It’s 2-0, but the game, series and season feel over.

In one rotten hour, what had been a fab month in local sports was over.

When’s Redskins camp open?

***

Ted Leonsis always talks about the “10-step plan” that the Caps have been following. He means the rebuilding scheme that got them to verge of a conference final for the first time in 11 years.

But last night, an early victim of his plan came back to bite him.

Read More “Cheap Seats Daily: The End of Days” »