Take it slow
In her latest media column, titled “The Twitter-fed disaster over Epstein’s death demands a solution: Slow news,” The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan writes that all the conflicting, conspiracy-theory-driven conversation about the death of wealthy financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is...
... an argument for what seems impossible in 2019: slow journalism. That’s not a joke, or an unwitting oxymoron: It’s a real thing, modeled after the 30-year-old “slow food” movement.
“We need to decide for ourselves what so-called news is worth our while, not just allow ourselves to be subjected to an endless barrage of unfiltered media assaults,” wrote Peter Laufer, a University of Oregon professor and author of “Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer.”
Keep reading here.
High-end range
Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit is testing the upper limits of event pricing with its Best Weekend Ever (Oct. 17–20) in New York City, which promises “four days of eating, drinking, cooking and hanging with the Test Kitchen team, Bon Appétit editors and the hottest new restaurants in America.” Though admission to some events (e.g., “Back to Back Chef IRL with Carla”) starts at $100, other events are priced at $199, $200, $299, $300, $400 and $450—or you can go all-in with a $1,500 All-Access Pass.
A good sign for Bon App: Two months in advance, some of the pricier events are already sold out and wait-listed, including the $400 “It’s Alive: Sauerkraut Class with Brad.”
Fire sale
Scott Lucas of BuzzFeed News gently trolls Tumblr with, yes, a BuzzFeed listicle: “7 Condos You Could Buy In New York For The Same Price As Tumblr.” As Lucas writes,
Tumblr—one of the OG blogging sites—just sold. Its owner, Verizon, agreed to let it go to Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, for a price reported to be less than $3 million. That’s way less than the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for Tumblr in 2013. So much less so, in fact, you could buy a pretty nice home near Tumblr’s offices in New York for that same amount.
Cue the real-estate porn.
Briefly:
• “Condé Nast Hits Back Hard at Stefano Tonchi’s W Magazine Lawsuit,” a rather stunning read from WWD’s Kali Hays.
• “Hearst Magazines restructures sales and marketing to simplify media buying,” from John McCarthy at The Drum.
• “Who works best in a revenue development role? Here’s what these local news organizations have found,” per Christine Schmidt of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
• “Patrick McCarthy Art, Belongings to Be Sold Through Sotheby’s” (subhead: “The former editorial leader of WWD and W died in February. His collection of art includes work from Brassaï, Robert Mapplethorpe and Ed Ruscha”), also from WWD’s Kali Hays.
• “Saveur hires Modern Farmer’s Sarah Gray Miller as chief,” the New York Post’s Keith Kelly reports.
• “The Em Dash Divides” (subhead: “Why do people care so much about a piece of—no offense—punctuation?”), from Kate Mooney in The New York Times.
And finally...
Bloomberg Businessweek posted this on Instagram this morning and we ... have ... no ... words:
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