Results tagged “felixsalmon”

After a turbulent couple of months at Gawker, the New York Times Style section is checking the media website’s pulse and wondering, with equal parts hope and desperation, if Gawker has finally jumped the “snark”. The Times’s uptick in Gawker stalking mirrors their aggressive game of catch-up with “teh internets” by increasingly emphasizing blogs on their website, and the article finds the Gray Lady digging a nice, cozy grave for Gawker owner and editor Nick Denton, pictured, to curl up and die down in, thereby releasing his zillions of page views to the cosmic trough.

The assumption that buying is preferable to renting is so ingrained in our national real estate psyche, that to suggest otherwise could result in someone questioning your financial, if not actual, sanity. The New York Times did some serious nationwide number crunching, however, and is concluding that renters fared better than buyers over the last two years. The turnabout is the result of buyers facing higher monthly costs than renters, while losing money on their investments as home prices declined. The paper then goes on to discuss the necessary conditions for perceived order in the universe to return, when buying is again the smart move.

Over the next five years, which is about the average amount of time recent buyers have remained in their homes, prices in the Los Angeles area would have to rise more than 5 percent a year for a typical buyer there to do better than a renter. The same is true in Phoenix, Las Vegas, the New York region, Northern California and South Florida. In the Boston and Washington areas, the break-even point is about 4 percent.

Continue reading "Reversal of Fortune? Rent vs. Buy Revisited"

- And A.M. Rosenthal, NY Times executive editor from 1977 to 1988, died at age 84; the Times calls him "a principal architect of the modern New York Times" and he "expanded the weekday paper from two to four parts, including separate metropolitan and business news sections, and inaugurated new feature sections for weekdays: SportsMonday, Science Times on Tuesdays, the Living section on Wednesdays, the Home section on Thursdays and Weekend on Fridays."

Felix Salmon is our favorite Englishman in New York. Why? Because he's anything but laconic. He can write a thirty paragraph essay regarding just about anything. For instance, over the last two days, he's written more than 3600 words about buses. That's right, buses. The heart of his meditation is a simple question: would buses move faster if drivers were paid per passenger, instead of a fixed wage. The question comes out of a University of Arizona paper that considers the Santiago, Chile bus system, where many drivers are paid per passenger, and do seem to get where they are going a little bit (up to 15%) faster than their fixed-rate colleagues.

Famous British blogger Felix Salmon rented a Zipcar on Thursday and spent seven hours giving people free rides around town. That's so nice! Good work, Felix! A small slice of his adventure:

To start of this coverage of the head-to-head matchup let's look how the two camps treated the New York Times City article that started this whole mess. Gawker alluded to the smackdown piece twice(1 and 2), and linked to it straight in it's Remainders section. Fishbowl never mentioned it. Chickens! Score +3 for Team Gawker.

Continue reading "Snarky Blog Stuff, Day 2"

Be warned, anyone who works in media or anyone who knows anyone who works in media or anyone who knows anyone who consumes media. Apparently, a line in the sand has been drawn between blogs that cover NY media - a line in the sand, people! Or at least that's what an article in the NY Times City section suggests. The facts: In one snarky corner, there's Gawker with snarky publisher Nick Denton and snarky editor Jessica Coen, and in the other corner, there's Mediabistro, with less-snarky founder Laurel Touby and new uber-snarky editor Elizabeth Spiers (formerly of snarkcorp Gawker- still with us?) who is co-authoring the Mediabistro media gossip blog, FishBowlNY - add some quotes about competition, snarketition, rivalries, bitch-smacking, and Tara Reid's boobies (we made two of those up!). It's like Million Dollar Baby, except without the million dollars, and with more snark, and um, what were we talking about?

Toby Leah Bochan, About.com Editor

Felix Salmon was also at the protest and writes about it; he was not arrested. callalillie has great photos (1, 2), as well as ones of the pro-choice rally yesterday.

Eurotrash's slam and later parody of Hesser, Felix Salmon on Hessergate, and Amateur Gourmet's Moderate Defense of Amanda Hesser. Gothamist on Masa's chef, Masa Takayama, and his strict ways. And Gothamist on Amanda Hesser.

The NY Times writes about how lots of people keep blogs even though few read them, and the bloggers become obsessive over posting entries. () It includes the requisite quote from Jeff Jarvis (something about addiction or narcissism or obsession...but not the 12-step program). Luckily, Felix Salmon writes a parody of the article so no one else has to.

Gawker dissects the shell game that would be the business of publishing bloggers. But, getting to brass tacks, what's next, blogger reality tour buses ("That's where Felix Salmon lives!" "That's where Peter Rojas gets tea!") of the Lower East Side, "Blogger Eye for the Unwired Guy?," high concept movies about bloggers ("Imagine Die Hard without Euro terrorists or guns: Just kids with computers whose loss of Wi-Fi and DSL make them go John McClane on ISP providers...so, it'll be like The Net, without Dennis Miller sullying it up, and while it may only do $40 million domestic, ancillary should be good."), blogger tips to journalists on how to be snarky and unsubstaniated?

Gothamist also would like to thank: Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, and Jeff Jarvis for a spirited (though less punchy than wished for, to be honest) discussion about the future of publishing blogs; Anil Dash, Paul Ford, and Meg Hourihan for enlightening us about what goes into designing blog publishing tools (less nerdy than it sounds, for those who missed it); and Felix Salmon, Lockhart Steele, and Choire Sicha ( and Jen) for being good punchlines. Yay!

Various personalities of the blogging world will collide at the NY Bloggers talk at the SoHo Apple Store this Monday, May 3. See Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis moderate/referee a discussion with web publishers Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis. ftrain's Paul Ford chats with Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, and Jason Kottke about technology. And Felix Salmon will find out what kinds of medication Choire Sicha, Lockhart Steele, and Jen Chung must be on during the editors panel. Plus, Jake will be running around as the water boy. We can also promise question-and-answer time as well as some surprises. All in all, a great opportunity to see the bloggers you love (to hate?). Be there to be square.

Disclosure: Gothamist started to read The Effects of Living Backwards (called a "mess - a goodmess, an ambitious mess" by the official Amazon reviewer) last fall but then realized our apartment was a mess so we tried to clean it and found that mix CD we got for our birthday ages ago, so we bopped around to that while we tried to organize our CDs but then This Old House came on, so we just watched that.

Felix Salmon at Memefirst suspects that the "trademarked Eggers High Ironic" he reads in an article about best of lists comes from Ben Greenman. After thinking, "what on earth is the most venerable magazine in the world doing appropriating a prose style which was cool for about ten minutes in 1997," Felix almost goes over the edge when he discovers the author is Louis Menand.

Photolog Revolution
A straight-up South American revolution is taking place on fotolog.net, pitting the sexy camgirls against the artistic photobloggers. Gothamist continues its investigation.