Two years ago the dramatic decline in advertising revenue and the ascent of online media combined to create a financial maelstrom that brought down one regional newspaper after another. Across the board, the situation for newspapers was so dire that the inconceivable began to seem highly plausible: That the New York Times might actually fold. Criticizing the Times establishment is a fun and important American pastime, but with so many other newspapers crumbling, the Times has increasingly become the nation's most robust and important investigative news organization. But in 2009 the Times was acutely imperiled, and filmmaker Andrew Rossi (Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven) just so happened to be inside its costly new offices with the cameras rolling. (Check out the trailer below.) more ›

At 8:30PM (following a half-hour red carpet special), the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony will begin, finally putting an end to the "There Will Be Oscar" or "Oscar Country for Old Men" type headlines. more ›

The Oscars are in town! Well, at least some 8-foot Oscar statues for the official New York Oscar night celebration at the Carlyle hotel, where east coast industry folk will come together Sunday night as the show goes down in Hollywood. more ›

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has secured the votes necessary to purchase Dow Jones & Co., Inc. which includes The Wall Street Journal itself. The win comes after a lengthy proxy battle in which the Bancrofts––the family that has acted as stewards of the company from afar for more than a century––resisted a very generous overture from Murdoch. more ›

The owners of a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Company, Inc. may be considering a move to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. When the news that Rupert Murdoch was interested in acquiring The Wall Street Journal and adding all of Dow Jones to his News Corp. media empire, we wrote about the potential reluctance of the majority owners of the acquisition––the Bancroft family––and their longheld view that family ownership of a newspaper insulated it from profit-related concerns and guaranteed editorial independence. We also noted that $5 billion is a lot of money and the New York Times columnist David Carr predicted that Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers, coupled with the disparate and disinterested ownership, would result in Murdoch's eventual triumph. more ›

Rupert Murdoch did not become a media tycoon by turning tail at the first sign of resistance in his business dealings. New York Times media columnist David Carr examines Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers into folding their companies into the News Corp. family with promises of benign oversight and marginal interference at best, only to run roughshod over the company and imprint it with Murdoch's style before the ink is dry on the corporate bill of sale. more ›

Hours after CBS decided to fire Don Imus yesterday afternoon for his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Imus, joined by his wife, and the basketball team and coach, joined by university officials and others, met at the NJ Governor's mansion . This afternoon, Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer said :

We, the Rutgers University Scarlet Knight basketball team, accept -- accept -- Mr. Imus' apology, and we are in the process of forgiving. We still find his statements to be unacceptable, and this is an experience that we will never forget.

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. Not only are there reports that Bartiromo, a 39 year-old native of Bay Ridge, has trademarked the phrase "Money Honey," but Bartiromo's name has come up in the firing of a Citigroup executive. more ›

If things have seemed quiet at the usual New York haunts of movie folks like Film Forum or Grey Dog Coffee this last week, it's because practically the whole community is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. The annual launching pad of many subsequently huge independent features (see this year's Best Picture Oscar nom and last year's festival break out, ), Sundance is a crazy week. Parties, swag, deal-making and oh yeah, some screenings are jam packed into the proceedings. more ›

At the Sundance Film Festival, the film Waitress will premiere this afternoon. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Last November, Shelly had been waiting to hear whether her film was going to be accepted by the Sundance Film Festival when she was found dead in a the Greenwich Village apartment building she had an office in. Initially, police suspected Shelly killed herself, since her body was found hanging from shower rod, but her family and friends couldn't believe she would commit suicide with so much happening in her life. It turned out she had been killed and her body was staged to look like suicide; the suspect, a construction worker who admitted he got into a fight with Shelly when she complained about the noise he was making. more ›

The non-election-related water cooler question: Did you see Borat? Did you brave crowds of people (mad rush at multiplexes, lines around the block at smaller theaters) to witness a Jewish Englishman portray a hapless Kazakh journalist with a chicken in his suitcase? Did you wonder how the crew was not arrested? Everywhere we went, people were talking about Borat. At the restaurant. At the grocery store. In the subway. All. Talking. About. Borat. Hell, people were buying tickets to Babel and The Departed because they couldn't see Borat. Which proves that if you send your silly, controversial, anti-Semitic mustachioed character on every news outlet possible and you'll get a number one movie. more ›

Tom Coughlin may not want to hear about it, but this is a classic “trap” game. With the big, bad Bears coming to Giants Stadium next Sunday night, all the ingredients are in place for New York to look past this weeks tilt with the 2-5 Texans. Luckily for the Giants, they should be able to do that and get away with it. more ›

). In David Carr's NY Times column, Grove does admit, "New York is not Washington, obviously. There are about 20 different major industries that are headquartered here, and I am still on a New York learning curve." And he says he will be doing something multimedia-ish. Now, we imagine the Daily News will get to really usher in the era of Ben Widdicombe, "New York's hottest young gossip columnist." more ›

- Oh, and Park Slope was shut down for three hours tonight because of a bomb scare. Happy holidays! more ›

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Perhaps you were as surprised as Gothamist when you saw a meteorologist mentioned in the Sunday Styles section of the Sunday Times. In the essay David Carr offers his explanation of how the "changed the world" genre of pop history books that have recently become popular. You know the kind, "How the Irish Saved Civilization"; "Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World"; and "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" to name just a few. Along the way Carr comes to blame MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz for this phenomenon, citing Lorenz's 1963 paper presented to the New York Academy of Sciences. In discussing his research Lorenz quoted a meteorologist as saying "if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever", meaning that small changes in initial conditions can have enormous consequences later on. Lorenz later dropped the seagull in favor of a butterfly, in part because his calculations looked like a butterfly when graphed (you can watch the butterfly, or Lorenz attractor, in action). Carr may not have realized it but Lorenz's insight changed how meteorologists viewed the atmosphere and introduced the world to chaos theory. In his classic, for weather geeks, paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" Lorenz wrote more ›

Something about a Ronnie: Run! Ronnie! Run!, that went straight to video and even Cross and Bob Odenkirk want it dead ("Run, Ronnie, Run Away") but features many Mr. Show character appearances. Gothamist gets our David Cross fix via Arrested Development.
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The Times also has a Julian–Niccolini drawn seating chart for the Four Seasons and while we expected to see Anna Wintour, Harvey Weinstein, and G.Pa(ltrow) on it, we were surprised to see Kerry Kittles, Nets guard. For some reason, basketball players seem more steak–oriented, like at Smith and Wollensky, Sparks, or Michael Jordan's. more ›

Scratchy voiced Alan Light and John Rollins (Gothamist doesn't know anything about Rollins' voice, only Light's because he'dcomment on ANYTHING on VH1) bring a new music magazine offering with Tracks, oriented to more adult readers. The Times' David Carr looks at this venture, which seems to follow the music industry's realization that older consumers will buy, versus download, music, but the older consumers are simply not being spoken to. One doubtful industry expert, wondering if there are adults obsessive enough to shell out some change for a magazine about the music they like, says, "My experience has been that the people who like to listen to Bonnie Raitt and Phil Collins do not have music as a primary interest." Well, duh. If any magazine had a editorial mission to simply cover Phil Collins, it would only be good as a money laundering scheme. But this sounds just like the original business plan for VH1, so expect a couple issues down the road for it to be all about the 80s. Or the Fabulous Life of Sharon Osbourne. more ›

The Post says that New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. denies that his family made him ask Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to resign. He had, famously, right after the Jayson Blair scandal emerged, said that he would not accept Raines' and Boyd's resignations. "Towards the end of last week, and even more towards the beginning of this week, it became clear to them, and in turn to me, that the best thing for this paper would be for them to resign," Sulzberger tells Newsweek. more ›

The Primeda exodus continues with New York magazine publisher Alan Katz going over to Conde Nast to head up the boy version of Lucky. David Carr of the Times writes: more ›