Yesterday, Conde Nast announced it would shutter four of its "underperforming" magazines--Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. Foodie legend and Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl is out of a job and quite honestly, this should scare the living crap out of traditional journalists. If a woman as well-respected and savvy as Reichl (she interviewed MFK Fisher for christ's sake!) can be laid off, then what hope is there for everyone else? I have this picture in my head of dozens of old-school news and magazine writers gathered around a laptop, weeping softly into their um..pens, or whatever it is they use.
Or maybe instead of the weeping, they host dinner parties in their fancy New York apartments and laugh about the good old days of yore--when the "internet" was something poor people did to entertain themselves because they were too plebeian for the glamor and pageantry of the New York publishing literati, and God help the web-savvy young things with their snark and state college journalism degrees and how very sad it was for the unconnected and let's call them "mis-educated" masses.
Things that are so real, they're fake: Richard Simmons' enthusiasm, Angelina Jolie's lips, The Onion. In fact, The Onion has done such an amazing job of making their news real, sometimes it even accidentally becomes real. Nowhere captures the over-serious, completely unselfconscious vibe of TV news better than the Onion News Network, probably because the employ actual real news anchors. One of them is CNN vet Bobbie Battista, and she's one hell of a girl reporter. Look at her go!
Every morning when I wake up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, preparing to bring my Dolls the latest in girlnews, I have a bad, bad habit of hitting the tabloids first. The tabs are just plain great places to find something to get irate about in t-minus five seconds. Then one remembers that there are actual issues to be discussed, and few places are better for airing those issues than Feministing, where we learn about 26-year-old journalist Amira Hanania.
She's the lead female reporter at Palestine's Ma'an News Agency, the only independent news outfit in the territories. Hanania had her own talk show at age seventeen, and she's featured in the upcoming documentary Live From Bethlehem. Here's the trailer:
The Heartless Dolls are Andrea, Kathleen, Kiala, Merritt, Nicki and a hifalutin array of notable guest contributors from around the web. We dig pop culture and ladythings.
