Sex And The City Sequel Threatened [The Cinema]

"'There is enormous interest' by Warner Bros., [said HBO's] Michael Lombardo... 'And I think, in fact, they’re trying, with our help, to put that together now. When that happens, how long between, can’t say.'" [TV Decoder]

New York Magazine Hungry [Magazines]

"Menupages, the New York City based online restaurant menu guides site, is being bought out by New York Magazine, we have learned. This is the first such online buy for NYM..." [Paid Content via Silicon Alley Insider]

Scheme To Blame Intern For PR Fraud Unravels [Public Relations]

It's not entirely surprising that the PR firm that misspelled the online signature of the guy they were trying to impersonate has now been busted for ineptly trying to blame an unidentified "intern" for everything. Bumbling disaster of a publicity shop 5WPR posted, in the name of a rabbi, fake blog comments about a sweatshoppy kosher slaughterhouse. When busted, senior vice president Juda Engelmayer blamed an unpaid 5WPR intern who he refused to name. Now, news service JTA is severely undercutting this explanation by reporting it traced one of the fake comments to Engelmayer's home (in part by matching the internet address of a comment to the internet address of an Engelmayer email). Whoops! Hard to blame interns at the office when the stuff is coming from your own pad. How are you going to explain this one, Juda?

By claiming he had an intern at his Lower East Side apartment at 10 pm on a Tuesday night, apparently. Said JTA:

A person identifying himself as the intern in question called JTA Thursday, but refused to provide a full name. The caller said that he posted the fraudulent comment to the JTA site using a computer at Engelmayer’s apartment during a get-together there Tuesday night, but without Engelmayer’s knowledge.

Now would be a good time to recap the various levels of incompetence in this whole 5WPR scheme:

• After being hired for its internet PR expertise, 5WPR attempts to plant fake comments from both supporters and (most deviously) critics of the kosher slaughterhouse on various websites.
• This scheme unravels because the company doesn't bother to leave its office or mask its IP address when posting.
• This scheme also unravels because the company misspells the name of a rabbi when signing a comment in that rabbi's name.
• CEO Ronn [sic] Torossian claims an "investigation" is under way to find out which of his employees spun a laughably incompetent Web of amoral deception in the service of flackery. This time.
• VP Engelmayer, assigned the slaughterhouse account, blames an unnamed, unpaid "intern" for the fraud. Says this "intern" has been fired.
• This story starts to unravel because, as blog Failed Messiah notes, the first two impersonation posts appeared in February, "well before any summer interns were working at 5W." Ahem.
• The story unravels further when two fraudulent Web comments are traced to Engelmayer's apartment.
• "Intern" calls to say he was hanging with Engelmayer at his apartment Tuesday night and slipped, undetected, onto Engelmayer's computer to do some impromptu character assassination, so don't blame Engelmayer because Engelmayer did not do it.
• Probably next: Caller comes forward as a paid shill. Engelmayer said he hired him on behalf of the intern, who is deathly afraid of the press, because that's the sort of person who takes an unpaid PR internship.

[JTA, Failed Messiah]

Times Fawns Over Own Insider's Book -- Again [Conflicts Of Interest]

Times editors can't stop lavishing praise on books linked to their corporate overlords — and one corporate overlord can't seem to keep her family members from enjoying the fruits of this self-dealing. Times board member Lynn Dolnick yet again has an immediate family member whose book is featured in her newspaper, and yet again there is no disclosure of the connection to the board or to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who is Dolnick's cousin. And this time, the newspaper really went to town. A book by Dolnick's husband Edward about Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren got an early review ("engaging"), an "editor's choice" recommendation, a special plug on page A4, and a friendly write up on the Paper Cuts blog ("delightful book"). And the Times is not likely to be making any apologies for the situation, judging from its handling of Lynn Dolnick's last nepotism controversy.

Last year, you'll recall, it was Lynn Dolnick's son Ben who was the recipient of a helpful Times notice — one he wrote himself, in the form of an op-ed piece. The scandal made Gawker, and was then picked up in Page Six, but the Times shrugged off the incident, setting aside its normally delicate ethical sensitivities.

How could there be a conflict of interest, the Times asked the Post, if "members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have no more or no less opportunity to appear in the pages of the Times" than anyone else? In other words, Times editors are such ethical superheroes that there doesn't need to be so much as a disclosure when they handle a book from a member of the clan that writes their paychecks.

Later, Ben Dolnick's agent was quoted in a friendly Washington Post feature saying that it was not a challenge or big deal to get his op-ed published, as though that wasn't precisely the point.

In either Ben or Edward Dolnick's case, disclosure would at least have let readers discount the paper's praise as they saw fit. Such was the case when Times vice president Alyse Myers received both a glowing review and room for her own magazine essay this past May in connection with the publication of her book about her mean mom — and even with the disclosure, we heard, Times staffers were still in an uproar.

Readers aren't the only ones with reason to feel cheated by the way the Times has handled Ed Dolnick's latest book. A tipster — who from the sounds of things has a dog in this fight — puts forward the name of a competing author as another aggrieved party:

...a serious, competing book [is] coming out in four weeks from
Harcourt. "The Man Who Made Vermeers" by Jonathan Lopez is based on
years of archival research conducted in Dutch and English, as well as
interviews with descendants of Van Meegeren's accomplices. (Dolnick
neither speaks nor reads Dutch.) Parts of "The Man Who Made Vermeers"
have already appeared as major articles in the London-based Apollo
Magazine and as a cover story in De Groene Amsterdammer, the oldest
continuously-published news magazine in the Netherlands. The book has
already been praised as "remarkable" by major museum curators. But
it's absent from the New York Times.

The Times has had advance readers' copies of "The Man Who Made
Vermeers" for months.

...By placing Dolnick's title in so many
outlets – Sunday Book Review, daily paper, blog – it has
effectively blocked the competition from being covered in any of them,
the general topic having been so recently treated.

Unlike his son Ben, Ed Dolnick is an established writer. He is former chief science reporter at the Boston Globe and author of at least three other books. His work on van Meegeren might do just fine without all this notice in the Times, and perhaps he would have recieved some — maybe even all — of it without being part of the extended Times family. Which is precisely why the newspaper should handle his book more transparently. Keeping his extensive connections in the dark makes them look all the more sinister.

"Nuclear" Smear Campaign Against Fashion Blogger [Feuds]

Don't think for a second that Fox News has a monopoly on vicious, personal attacks against its media competitors. Daniel Saynt (pictured, left) of the blog Fashion Indie is in his own, particularly bitchy catfight with Sarah Conley and Julie Frederickson (pictured, right) of Coutorture. The battle started with a racial insult, then progressed to trash talking and now involves unflattering photos. And one gets the feeling that, when all is said and done, it's going to make the despicably nasty Fox-Times brawl look like a tea party. The whole thing started when Saynt wrote the following noxious critique of Vogue's Andre Leon Talley:

You make way too much money to have teeth like that. Seriously dude hire a dentist...

Turbans are for terrorist. Yeah I said it. (Let the hate mail commence.)...

You’re a blimp... Double breasted suits are for thin people, not people with double breasts.

(Emphasis added.)

Conley wrote in the comments, under her own name, that "this is really pushing the limits."

Later, an anonymous commenter asked, "what do you actually do?... does anyone actually give a shit who you are?"

WHAT? DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM???! Or, as Saynt put it,

We are one of the most successful fashion blogs on the planet. More people read us than all the international Vogue’s [sic] combined. Number two, I’ve recently been on the Tyra Banks Show, MTV, and The Travel Chanel bestowing on others my genius. Also, Time Out New York listed us as one of the top blogs of New York City, just under the Satorialist.

...Does anyone give a shit about me? Try over 500,000 readers per month and an industry that has already marked me as one of the top upcoming influencers in fashion... Don’t be jealous, just accept.

Then another anonymous commenter called into question Saynt's traffic claims.

When Saynt went to check the IP addresses on at least one of these anonymous comments, he became convinced he was being heckled by Conley and Frederickson. Further evidence for this came when Conley sent an email dropping Saynt from Coutorture's blog network just a few minutes after he replied to one of the anonymous posts.

Having made bigoted and nasty comments about Talley, and having tussled with critics of these comments, Saynt went on to further establish himself as the Fox News of this confrontation by writing a new post that called Conley fat ("Sarah herself is not a svelte fashionista, so I could see why saying Andre Leon Tally was 'too fat for fashion' might offend someone like herself) and ran pictures of Conley looking "really shitty," like this one:

OK actually, maybe this spat will never outdo the Fox-Times brawl — except by the standards of middle school, which in the world of fashion is pretty much the metric of choice. As style blog the Pipeline noted, "this is as mad a skirmish as we've ever seen... In fashion, this is the equivalent of a nuclear strike."

[via the Pipeline]

(Top photos via Mediabistro and Flickr, lower photo via Flickr)

Fox Flip-Flops On Jackson Slams [Race-baiting]

It's not even been 24 hours since Bill O'Reilly told Fox News viewers the cable channel was not airing footage of Jesse Jackson's "more damaging" comments (beyond wanting to "rip [Barack Obama's] nuts off") "because we didn't feel it had any relevance to the conversation this evening" and also because "we're not out to get Jesse Jackson." Now, with rumors swirling inside Fox News (and on this site) that Jackson used a racial slur, the network may be having a change of heart. Fox News VP Bill Shine told the LA Times for tomorrow's paper that "news executives were in discussions about whether to air more of the tape." Could it air on O'Reilly's show tonight? If it does, lord knows how anyone in the news media will manage to cover Jackson saying the "n-word," given how tongue-tied everyone got about a simple testicle-removal threat. After the jump, a very funny 23/6 compilation of cable news correspondents making like the Times and getting all tongue-tied about the first bad thing Jackson said.

[LA Times, 23/6 via TV Newser]

Maybe We Haven't Explained This Thoroughly [The Internets]

Someone—a Mom?—e-mailed one of our readers questioning what the hell do we mean by "after the jump"? (Remember: there are no stupid questions!) OK: "after the jump" means that you just click the "MORE" button and you get to read the rest of the article—kind of when you flip to the back page of a newspaper to finish a front-page article. See? (Click to see the e-mail, which confuses our "jump" with the poor model who jumped from her balcony last week.)

"Reading: This shit is crazy" [Kate Beaton]

If you haven't read every last one of the weird comics of Kate Beaton, well, I just don't know what to say to you. "Farming: Is it the best? It might be." Uh, she also has a selection of less weird ones. [Kate Beaton]

Work Dreams [Fucking Denton]

They are the worst.

The Best Live Mic Mistakes Ever [Clips]

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