I have been beefing about the Times media desk a little recently, so it's definitely on me to say that today's story about the pending sale of Philadelphia's newspapers is AMAZING and BRUTAL. The likely buyers—who are being prevented from having any competing bidders in the sale—are former governor Ed Rendell, the owner of the Philly Flyers, a Democrat party bundler and a "parking lot and banking magnate." What could go wrong?

Very excited to be joining @peretti, @scottlamb,@mattstopera & to hire some great reporters to build the first true social news organization READ MORE

Now you can get your Grantland blog posts from August in book form, to be delivered in November, for $19.95, with "a cover that looks and feels like you're holding a football." Only 81 shopping days until Christmas!

Profound congratulations to Slate for finally stabbing to death its creaky, ancient, and very angry CMS. Called "Gutenberg," it was nearly as old as its namesake. The first rule of Media Club is: never build your own CMS. Someone will build it for you. Speaking of! Now someone is going to build me a Chrome extension to do for New Slate what "Ochs" does for the Times' site. READ MORE

First they came for... etc.

In late 2009, the Washington Post closed its last U.S. bureaus outside of the D.C. area, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. (It also closed bureaus in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.) But what of its 11 D.C.-area bureaus? Now there will be two.

About.com, the content farm owned by the Times and one of the worst things on the Internet, looks like it's finally in trouble, due in large part to Google taking action against the Garbagenet. (These outfits depend on search results.) And also: advertisers realizing there are better ways to spend money than advertising against an empty void. In the second quarter of this year, About.com shed staff and now their real operating costs are $13.1 million; their operating profit is down 24% from last year, to $11.6 million. (That's less than $4 million a month.) To be fair, this is still a "real business": The About Group had revenues of $59 million year-to-date, so hey, I'd take it, but the writing is on the wall for this as a visionary business. It's not. It's bad for the Internet and not even that great for your wallet. There's a number of not-so-great numbers at the Times, just released today for the second quarter, but let's look at the interesting numbers: who subscribes online? READ MORE

1. Before we proceed, we might all need to take a moment to acknowledge that we've reached the point in our culture where former editors of the New Yorker are writing fanfiction. Publicly, I mean; who knows what William Shawn scribbled in his most private notebooks, and in some sense who wouldn’t want to know, how many miles to Babylon, etc. But still. Fanfiction, in a “news magazine.” READ MORE

Yesterday Apple introduced a new version of Safari, along with a ton of other stuff, and it has something they call Reader. Some time back, we'd all heard that Apple was getting into the game, with what people were calling "Reading List," which would let you "collect webpages." This language was suspicious and largely wrong. What Reader does is pop up a nice, easy-readin' overlay over the website you're "at," allowing you to read without distraction—and also to print it or to email it to a friend. It deals with pagination really well; it looks great, and it makes sense. READ MORE

"He just rolled up and trolled. He went into a venue where people have elected to be, and told everyone that their presence there makes them stupid. He then laments that he did not receive more positive responses from within that forum itself."
—Well, yes, here you go. As someone said earlier today, if Times mag editor Hugo Lindgren really wanted to be a big man, he could probably kick it up a notch by firing his boss and columnist, Bill Keller.