Say what you will about his politics or his dubious interpretation of 'objectivity' -- Rupert Murdoch got it right this time around. Back in the spring, when a very few brave souls produced a muffled murmur that resembled "Newspaper Bailout," pundits praised Ol' Rupe for charging readers to browse his Wall Street Journal online -- a tactic eschewed by nearly every other daily in the nation.
Among the papers fearful of instigating a reader revolt, of course, was New York's Paper of Record. The other day, we came upon this sordid scene at a craft fair in McCarren Park:
Our photo work could stand to improve -- standing there, shooting away, we felt like the proverbial foot thwacking the proverbial dead horse -- but the sign reads "50% Off!" The Times didn't even bother to send out a proper sales rep -- the poor sap here appears to be the laid-off mother of one of their delivery boys (they can still afford those, right?). Sad, sad days for the dead tree industry...
A few months ago, somewhere along the daily descent from online work research to tangentially work-related online reading to Youtube animal porn, Emily Gould became a known name to us me (disclaimer: much of DCQ experienced a near-total internet blackout from 2002-2005, which partially overlaps with the time period in which subject Gould rose to infamy). She's a competent and compelling enough writer, but Jimmy Kimmel got drunk and punched his grandma and then disappeared Larry King before verbally eviscerating Gould on national TV over the dire threat her employer's Gawker Stalker app poses to celebrities like him free societies everywhere. Other bloggers ragged on Gould's performance, she meekly defended herself, others came to her aid, still others doubled up on the attack, and the celebrities themselves were able to leave their Cloaks of Invisibility at home that week when they picked up their frappuccinos.
Then, in February, a Cleveland startup that tracks high-end real estate deals and IDs the players involved found itself the target of some strikingly Kimmelesque criticism: Farcically malevolent legal giant Jones Day sued Blockshopper for daring to evoke the firm's name and link to its website in articles describing condo purchases by two Jones Day attorneys. The site's founders chose to settle with Jones Day rather than blow their wad on legal fees fighting an army of 2,000-plus smarmy Ivy League grads.
For the curious, the firm claimed the site's usage of links constituted copyright violation. If that's the case, Jones Day, you've got your work cut out for you. The real motivation for the suit was most assuredly the fact that Chesters One and Two didn't appreciate their addresses being sprayed all over the virtual world of realty. (If you're still struggling with good guy/bad guy, let this guide you: Jones Day is the firm that helped Chevron first defeat a lawsuit by relatives of dirt-poor Nigerians killed while protesting the company's environmental and human rights violations, then turn around and countersue the villagers for $500K in an attempt to discourage other third-world exploitees who might sue in the future--just as the Blockshopper suit was used as a suppression tactic aimed at other would-be freeloading hippieschannelers of free traffic to the firm's site.
From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates' missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of The Rum Diary:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his "exact profit expectations" from the soon-to-be-released Fear and Loathing film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST's estate -- 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
