Thursday, March 26, 2009
The Alpha Media Group (AMG) has shuttered music magazine, Blender:
The music magazine followed so many other publications into the ether amidst a restructuring at parent company Alpha Media Group. It will continue to live online. “Blender has provided unmatched music coverage and entertainment news in its unique voice to a profoundly dedicated audience of music enthusiasts since 2001. However, given the reality of the current economic climate, we are unable to continue publication,” AMG CEO Stephen Duggan said in a statement. “We are grateful to the sales team and to the tremendously talented editorial staff for their hard work and commitment to Blender.”
A few stats/facts: Blender has been publishing since 2001 and its demographic is young men. Ad pages fell 31 percent in 2008, to 522 pages, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. 30 people will be leaving the company.
From Media Matters:
Summary: The New York Times Magazine is slated to publish a story on March 29 — promoting the controversial global warming views of physicist Freeman Dyson — that was written, not by a scientist or science writer, but by Nicholas Dawidoff, whose previous work for the Times has focused largely on sports and music.
For an article to be published March 29, The New York Times Magazine sent Nicholas Dawidoff, whom Brad Johnson refers to as a “baseball writer” and who has not previously written about science for the Times, to profile physicist and global warming skeptic Freeman Dyson.
Dawidoff, who has published four books — The Fly Swatter, a biography of his grandfather Alexander Gerschenkron; In the Country of Country, a collection of biographies of country musicians; The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg; and The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball — and began his career covering baseball for Sports Illustrated, allowed Dyson to advance the falsehood that in the 1970s, there was a widespread belief that the earth was cooling that is tantamount to the current global warming consensus. Dawidoff also quoted Dyson accusing Al Gore of being global warming’s “chief propagandist” and “an opportunist” and scientist James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, of “consistently exaggerat[ing] all the dangers” of global warming.
Read the full article Media Matters article here. Read the full article New York Times Magazine article here.
After 149 years and 311 days, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on February 27, 2009.
