• The news everyone is waiting for: the sale of Philadelphia Media Network, which could happen today. Inquirer reporter Paul Nussbaum reported Thursday on an insurance payback deal orchestrated by George Norcross, one of the investors that may buy the company. He told Amy Chozick and David Carr that the possible sale “won’t change the way I do my job.” Well, “it could change my job, I guess. I could end up as greeter at Walmart next week.”
• Dudes in suits discuss media: That happened Thursday, as Ken Auletta, Walter Isaacson and Marcus Brauchli appeared at an Aspen Institute event called The Future of Content 2020. Here’s a video. Part of my job is blogging about the future of content, so I watched only as far as Brauchli talking about the future of a new Washington Post product called Personal Post: “Ideally what we’d like to be able to do is give people who are interested in that, a front page of content that they’re most likely to be interested in based on their past habits or what they’ve told us they’re interested in or, including, what their friends are interested in.” I’m sure some nuggets from this thing will pop out today.
• The New York Police Department’s Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information, accidentally CC’d instead of BCC’d its press list, giving Jake Dobkin a chance to analyze who’s on it: “there were only 3 email addresses for bloggers, internet-only outlets, and similar publications- Gothamist, Patch, and DNAInfo.”
• DC Porcupine scours new Washington Post managing editor John Temple’s blog for instances of him criticizing the paper and finds him taking a swing at media writer Paul Farhi in 2009, saying Farhi “resorts to generalizations about bloggers that wouldn’t make it past any good newspaper editor.”
• Protesters gathered outside the Village Voice’s offices in New York on Thursday to deliver a petition denouncing its Backpage.com, which some have linked to sex trafficking. John Buffalo Mailer, son of Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, spoke at the rally. Village Voice Media is based in Phoenix, but good luck getting this kind of coverage there.
•Writing as Hildy Johnson, Brian Hieggelke columnizes about Backpage and the Village Voice, saying VVM, previously known as New Times, has “applied the cookie-cutter New Times model of an alternative newspaper to the grandaddy of them all.” Worse, Hieggelke notes, on a trip this past fall from New York to Los Angeles, he saw the Voice’s cover story, a Kristen Hinman piece called “Lost Boys” that said “research demolishes the stereotype of the underage sex worker” in the VVM-owned LA Weekly: “the same work of corporate shilling that graced the Voice,” Hieggelke writes. (Googling around, I see it ran in a few VVM papers.)
• In non-VVM alt-weekly news, Lee Gardner is leaving Baltimore City Paper to work for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Rush Limbaugh says his ratings are up.
Correction: This post originally called Paul Nussbaum “Phil” Nussbaum.
