U.S. unemployment might still be hovering near 10%, but don't worry about the supermodels.

The trustees of the City University of New York are reconsidering their decision to block an honorary degree for playwright Tony Kushner.

Here’s a job that’s worth geeking out over. Wired is on the hunt for a new senior editor of entertainment and culture. Who wouldn’t want this gig?

To be considered, you need to be immersed in technology and geek culture. Just because you saw Source Code and have an iPad doesn’t mean you’re a shoo-in. You need to have enviable contacts in the industry, and be passionate about what goes down in the indie and mainstream worlds.

You also need to live in the San Francisco area (or be willing to relocate), as the job is completely hands-on. You should at least five years of related experience, and the ability to create multimedia content — we’re talking print, Web, video, podcasts and more. Interested? Apply here.

For more openings and employment news, follow The Job Post on Twitter @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tyler Shields, a photographer and painter, will debut a new show this weekend at the Poodle Parlor in downtown Los Angeles. Titled “Life Is Not a Fairy Tale,” the exhibit will be open to the public on Sunday after a launch party Saturday night.

The main attraction is a painting he created using blood collected from more than a dozen celebrities. The list of artistic donors includes nightclub promoter Brent Bolthouse, film financier Ryan Kavanaugh, and actress Jenna Ushkowitz.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Wrap‘s media reporter Dylan Stableford is jumping ship and heading to Yahoo! News, where he’ll be the site’s senior media reporter.

Twitter was abuzz with rumors of Stableford’s impending exit earlier today and The Cutline confirmed the hire late this afternoon. Stableford will fill Michael Calderone‘s spot, who left Yahoo! for HuffPo earlier this year. He starts his new gig May 23.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Berkeley County officials say Quad/Graphics Inc.'s plan to invest $15 million in two plants will create 400 jobs.

Dancer will represent a men's scent due out in September. Posted May 6, 2011 The Professional Beauty Association's Salon & Spa Performance Index has hit a record high.

Eddy Hartenstein, publisher of the Los Angeles Times Media Group, has been promoted to head honcho of the Tribune Company. His official title is Company President and Chief Executive Officer.

Oddly enough, Hartenstein will also keep his current job as LA Times publisher. And he’ll continue to live in Los Angeles, even though the Tribune Co. is headquartered in Chicago.

From the LA Times announcement:

“The board feels strongly that it is in Tribune’s best interest to have one person providing strategic vision and day-to-day direction for the company and its employees as we prepare to emerge from the Chapter 11 process,” said Sam Zell, Tribune’s chairman.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After a decade at CNN, Brooke Anderson is now co-anchor of syndicated entertainment news magazine The Insider. Her first assignment for the show was familiar territory–taking part in the recent press junket for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

The biggest difference between Anderson’s new Studio City digs and former Showbiz Tonight perch at Sunset and Vine is arguably the fact that there will now be much less overnight TV ratings pressure. CNN/HLN is constantly competing with the other cable news networks for its share, while The Insider enjoys relative syndication stability alongside Extra, Access Hollywood, and ET.

Anderson, a native of  Savannah, Georgia, turns 33 on May 13th.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The most recent episode of Glee had some fun at the newspaper industry’s expense:

Not a bad business motto for the internet age. But still, ouch.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Work on Purpose by Lara Galinsky: “The book offers thought-provoking questions and a list of more than 175 career resources and programs to help readers put their hopes for a purpose-driven career into action.” (April 2011)

The Brightened Mind: A Simple Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu: ”This simple, short introduction to meditation, particularly well suited to young people, can help anyone rattled with the stresses of living in today’s society rife with financial uncertainty, war, crime, and the psychological assaults of bosses, teachers, and the media.” (May 2011)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Michelle Aielli will now serve as director of publicity at Little, Brown and Company. At the same time, Sabrina Callahan has been promoted to assistant director of publicity for James Patterson.

Here’s more about Aielli’s work with that mega-bestselling author: “she spearheaded all major publicity around Patterson publishing events, including the launch of the Michael Bennett series, his guest appearance on The Simpsons, his Guinness World Records induction, the celebration of his 20th anniversary with Little, Brown and Company, and all major media hits, including the front pages of both USA Today and the New York Times Magazine.”

Callahan joined the Hachette imprint in 2007 as senior publicist, working on a number of campaigns including Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, Robert Wright’s Evolution of God, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu Morning Media Menu (MP3 link) was Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose talking about how the journal rushed a brand new eBook, The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What It Means, and What Comes Next.

The digital collection pulled together timely articles, interviews, and primary documents to help readers understand the historic changes sweeping through the Middle East. Rose talked about the powerful eBook opportunities available to magazines and journalists.

Follow this MP3 link to listen. Here’s an excerpt: “We did an instant book right after 9-11 called How Did This Happen? We managed to basically pull together within a few weeks a full-scale, serious book. We published it with Public Affairs and it sold more than 40,000 copies.  It was a back-breaking effort. It’s something that I’m proud of, but I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to repeating the crazy experience.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this week, Borders CEO Mike Edwards spoke with AnnArbor.com about the current status of the company as well as its plans for the future.

Edwards explained in the article : “All I can tell you is that we are here fighting to the end. We know we have a business plan that works, but it requires a lot of support to get it there, and our publishers are going to make or break our ability to transform this company at the end of the day.”

Edwards emphasized that Borders’ ability to weather the crisis is dependent on the support of publishers. He also spoke about the factors that lead to bankruptcy, the bonuses for executives, and office morale. Do you think Borders will be able to recover before the end of 2011?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Paychex, Crocs, OpenTable, ServiceMaster, R.R. Donnelley & Sons, CAI International, Commercial Metals.

"Something Borrowed" should have changed its name so as not to seal its sorry fate.

Social Media and the Law: Time to Get With the Program Take a look at these recent examples of companies' brushes with social media and the law from the website Virtual World Law Blog: - In March 2011, a California court ruled that Facebook messages sent to friends' walls, news feeds or home pages are "electronic mail messages" under the CAN-SPAM Act. “While the court did not address the underlying merits of the CAN-SPAM claims, companies using social media in marketing should verify that they (and any marketing services they engage) comply with CAN-SPAM's requirements for commercial messages sent via social media platforms.”

Streamline your editorial process with these must-have editorial management tools When you're writing content that you know like the back of your hand, being a daily online editor seems like a piece of cake. However, the truth is that as online editors, we pour our brains out into our blogs day after day. Having written over 150 blog posts already this year, I can look at a blog from four months ago and not even clearly recall writing it. Content, especially when written on a daily basis, is not just a nice spread of words on a "page". They are a combination of thoughts, opinion and research that are somehow organized into a comprehensive, linear story that we tell on our blogs.

Nielsen data shows promising signs for tablets Tablet devices are gaining popularity among owners. Recent data from Nielsen shows that 77% of tablet users are using their tablets to perform actions that they once did on a laptop of desktop computer.

 

We don’t know what to say.

Isn’t the Rapture in a couple of days? This has to be a sign.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The term “exclusive” is constantly misused in the media. For example, here in Hollywood, is it really accurate to deem a brief, canned one-on-one chat with the star of Thor as “exclusive” when it was one of nearly a hundred such conversations granted by Chris Hemsworth from the same hotel suite, on the same day?

Sacramento sportswriter Joe Davidson makes a similar point in reviewing the meadow of local media coverage generated by the possible move to Anaheim of NBA franchise the Sacramento Kings:

TV folks forgot–or simply ignored–what “exclusive” means: to have the only access to an interview subject. Yet the stations touted having “exclusives” with the Maloofs on relocation filing day when the owners talked extensively to everyone–print, radio, TV, Internet, and news services.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You know how when some artists get old they completely lose their edge and become mere shadows of their former selves? Well, not our Mr. Lynch. The acclaimed director is now selling coffee, and it is #&@!% surreal:

David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee from David Lynch on Vimeo.

Hat tip Laughing Squid

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Congrats on the new gig Kathy!

LOS ANGELES TIMES MEDIA GROUP NAMES KATHY THOMSON AS PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

LOS ANGELES, May 6, 2011— The Los Angeles Times Media Group (LATMG) today announced that Kathy Thomson has been appointed as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately. In this newly created position, Thomson will report directly to Tribune Company President and Chief Executive Officer and Times Publisher and CEO Eddy Hartenstein and oversee the company’s growing portfolio of products, including all editorial, advertising sales, business services, marketing and operational functions.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tilda, the HBO series whose title character bears an unmistakable resemblance to Deadline.com‘s Nikke Finke, is never going to get made. It’s done. Over. Finished. Which is too bad, because The Atlantic Wire got a hold of a piece of the pilot script and it’s actually pretty funny. What follows is snippet of a phone interview between Tilda and an LA Times writer named Brian Sheen.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Well isn’t this a pleasant surprise? Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt sent out a tweet this morning asking for experienced feature writers. Demand Media is a notorious content farmer, paying writers according to the amount of hits their stories get around $5 to $20 a post–so at first we didn’t pay it much attention. But then we saw on Romensko that Rosenblatt plans to really pay these writers he’s looking for. Pay them…like…actual money.

From Demand Media‘s job listing:

Demand Media has introduced new payment rates for feature stories. Features writers earn up to $350 for their stories, depending on factors like the experience required to write the story, the complexity of the topic and length of the story. Like all creative professionals who work for Demand Media, feature writers are paid within two business days of their articles being approved by Demand Media’s editorial staff.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In this social media age, many believe the future of advertising lies in heretofore unseen levels of consumer engagement. While John and Jane Doe may fast-forward through pesky DVR commercials, they will – it is assumed – pause and play with something on the iPhone or iPad, if it merits their attention.

That’s the idea behind Being Henry, a super-cool interactive Range Rover film recently shot in LA that allows viewers to click and drag a live-action lead character played by Leo Fitzpatrick (The Wire, pictured) and thus dictate where he goes, and what he does. Per the press release:

“The film is one of the most adventurous projects I have worked on and has been a real learning curve for me on how interactivity online is the future of really engaging with consumers,” says the commercial’s director, Nick Gordon.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The most recent issue of Fast Company has come online, and it includes a big feature list of 51 companies who are doing innovate things in each state, as well as DC. (What about the commonwealth’s Fast Company? What’s happening in Puerto Rico and Guam? American Samoa anyone?)

California’s contribution to the list: San Diego’s non-profit journalism startup Voice of San Diego. Here’s what Fast Company has to say about them:

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tony Award-winning playwright Arthur Laurents died yesterday of complications from a bout of pneumonia. He was 93.

Laurents was perhaps best known for his work on the stage, most famously penning the book for West Side Story. But he had an extensive film and television career as well. He produced and wrote the screenplay for the Robert Redford/Barbra Streisand love story The Way We Were as well as the Shirley MacLaine/Anne Bancroft film Turning Point. Both film were nominated for multiple Oscars, although neither won. Laurents’ other screenwriting credits include Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope, and Anastasia, starring Ingrid Bergman.

RIP.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today's guest post is by NO RULES regular Susan Cushman, director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop.

Last month, I wrote about how to plan the budget, faculty, venue, housing, meals, and social events for a writing workshop—specifically for the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Today’s post is about what comes next: scheduling, marketing and promotion.

SCHEDULE
Setting the schedule is a bit like putting together a puzzle—you have to find just the right shape and space for each piece, and the picture isn’t complete until all the pieces are included.

Deciding how much time is needed for each event—craft talks, manuscript critique sessions, panels, meals—is something you learn from experience. And it’s helpful to always remember that things take longer than you think they will.

But arranging the lunches on site (in a room next to the workshop room) saves valuable minutes, and overlapping where you can (pulling participants out of the workshop for 10-15 minutes each for their pitch session with a literary agent) also gives you the most value for the allotted time.

In the end, our schedule ended up with 10 hours of manuscript critique sessions, 7 hours of craft talks/presentations, 1½ hours of panel discussion, and up to 5 hours of pitch sessions, depending upon how many people sign up for those.

You can see the complete schedule here.


MARKETING & PROMOTION
With a large conference, you can count on some extra money for advertising, but with a small workshop the budget is tight. If you spend more than you take in, you put yourself at personal risk.

After considering the options available for paid advertising, I chose to only place one ad, in an online creative nonfiction newsletter that reaches 9,000 active subscribers each month and has an average click-through rate of  28%. The ad cost $75 and will run in May, four months before the workshop.

The rest of the promotion only cost some time and thoughtful "product placement."

Social Networks. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are great places to promote events. I have a personal blog, and I post monthly here at No Rules and also at the Southern Authors’ blog, A Good Blog is Hard to Find.

You can create an event page on Facebook, and link back and forth between all of these avenues each time you post more information. Keep your readers interested by posting new information at least once a week on the workshop site. This can be in the form of promoting faculty readings at bookstores, linking to interesting posts about various aspects of creative nonfiction (or whatever your workshop’s genre) to start a discussion, and even citing good resources for emerging writers to tap into before the workshop.

And don’t forget the oldest social network—e-mail. If you have access to e-mail lists from neighboring workshops and conferences, send out a group e-mail announcing the workshop to those participants.

Local Media. Press releases are free. So are event listings in community and arts calendars in many city and neighborhood newspapers. Send this information out as many months in advance as the papers will allow, and then follow up with a reminder—just a couple of sentences—a month before the workshop.

How far should you reach? Since this is a small workshop and not a conference, I’m limiting my reach to Memphis, and about 5 surrounding states.

Bookstores and Coffee Shops. Create posters and fliers and take them (or mail them if you can’t get to all of them) to area bookstores and coffee shops, where lots of emerging writers hang out. If you can coordinate your effort with an event—like a book signing by one of your faculty members—all the better.

When I learned that one of our speakers was coming to a bookstore in Memphis in March, I called and asked if I could hand out fliers for the workshop at his signing. Look for ways like this to connect the dots in your marketing and promotional efforts.

A note about libraries: our public library won’t allow notifications to be posted unless the event is free, which is too bad, since I’m not going to make any money off the event. Be sure and check to see if you might be allowed to post information in the libraries near you.

So there you have it. I’m having a great time planning this workshop. If you’d like to organize a writing workshop in your area and have any questions, feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

And, if you have organized a writing workshop and have more tips and suggestions to share, please leave a comment. Check back in September or October to find out how successful the workshop was!


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You can read Susan's blog here, and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

In offices from Manhattan to Mountain View, they’re picking up the scattered pieces of the Google Book Settlement. But like Humpty Dumpty in the old ...

Self-published authors don’t have to sell millions of books to be successful.

By covering topics of local interest and cultivating a readership that’s close to home, they can handle their own marketing and distribution – and maybe even quit their 9-to-5s.

Below, we’ve interviewed two authors in the New York City area who have made it work.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Three major publishers–Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA), and Simon & Schuster–will partner with AOL Huffington Post Media Group to launch a mysterious new website for readers this summer. Bookish will provide readers “with a personalized experience connecting them with their favorite authors and books through original editorial features, unique tools and more.”

AOL and The Huffington Post will help reach readers and AOL plans to provide advertising sales support for the new venture. Arianna Huffington explained that they will “use our multimedia, social, and community engagement tools to help connect our readers with authors and their books. And we’ll highlight this content through our entire network and hyperlocal sites.”

Here’s more from the release: “New media veteran Paulo Lemgruber is leading the effort as Bookish’s CEO. Previously, Lemgruber developed and ran digital businesses for Comcast and Reed Elsevier. Also part of the Bookish team is Charlie Rogers, who will serve as Editor-in-Chief. Prior to becoming part of Bookish, Rogers was Editor-in-Chief, Digital Media at NBC Universal and worked at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and The Paris Review. Technology efforts will be directed by Bookish Chief Technology Officer Andy Parsons, who previously served as CTO for Outside.in and Digital Railroad, Inc., as well as Director of Software Development at Juice Software.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Minnesota House majority leader Matt Dean has issued a halfhearted apology to fantasy author Neil Gaiman for calling him a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”

Earlier this week, Dean criticized Minnesota’s House Legacy Funding Division for paying Gaiman to appear at a speaking engagement.

Dean told Minnesota Public Radio: “[My mom] was very angry this morning and always taught me to not be a name caller. And I shouldn’t have done it, and I apologize.”  Dean still insisted that the author should have “donated his time” to the patrons of the Stillwater Library.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a blog post, Curtis Brown literary agent Sarah LaPolla (pictured, via) recommended five “band-aid editing” tips for fixing a manuscript before sending it to an agent.

LaPolla first advised that authors avoid sentences that begin with a conjunction. Here is an excerpt from the post: “Sometimes standalone sentences that begin with ‘And’ can be used for emphasis. And that’s OK. Other sentences, however, can end up sounding like a mere continuation of the previous sentence, making them sound weaker in comparison.”

LaPolla’s other tips elaborate on how to steer clear of weak sentences, redundant points, and the passive voice. Can you think of other “band-aids” that would be helpful? (via Elizabeth S. Craig)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS), most renowned for its use as a blogging / publishing application. According to usage statistics tracker, BuiltWith (http://builtWith.com), WordPress is considered to be the most popular blogging software on the planet—not bad for something that has only been around officially since 2003. In this article by Brian Bondari and Everett Griffiths, authors of WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials, we will learn about a special type of WordPress plugin: the widget. The architecture of widgets has undergone a radical change starting with the release of WordPress 2.8, so now we must talk about Object Oriented programming. We will learn a bit about its power as we extend the WP_Widget class to create our widget. We will also learn how to create a preference page in the manager so we can store our plugin's configuration details.

Extensive surveillance of Osama bin Laden's hideout from a nearby CIA safe house in Abbottabad led to his killing in a Navy SEALs operation, US officials said, a revelation likely to further embarrass Pakistan's spy agency and strain ties.

Agfa Graphics has announced a silver surcharge on graphic film products in response to the all-time high price of silver. The price of silver has climbed 60% so far in 2011 with no sign of stabilization, following at 80% increase in 2010. The company says the surcharge will fluctuate with the changes in silver prices and will be discontinued when the price of silver returns to January 2011 levels. more

The Managed Print Services Assn. honored the 2011 Leadership Award winners at the Global MPS Conference in Orlando on May 4. Winners were Photozo Group (Independent Professional Services provider), Pharos Systems International and Digital Gateway (tied for the Software Providers award), Qualpath (indiect MPS provider), Ricoh Americas Corp. (direct MPS provider), and Auxilio Inc. (Independent Managed Service Provider). more

vjoon has released a set of K4 Digital Publishing Packages tailored to the requirements of magazine app publishing, providing publishers with a quick start option for cross-platform publishing that includes Adobe InDesign Server. The packages include K4 Overview Advanced to allow production and project managers visibility into the publishing workflow. more

The Institute for Media Convergence has appointed Jesus J. Rodriquez, Ph.D., Chairman of its Education Council and a member of its Advisory Board. Dr. Rodriquez is a distinguished Professor of Technology at Pittsburg State University. He is a professor of Graphics and Imaging Technologies, coordinator of the Master of Science in Technology program, and was chairman of the Department of Graphics and Imaging Technology at the university from 1988 to 2007. more

Xennia Technology will present a program on the latest advances in inkjet technology for garment and technical textiles and cosponsor the Digital Textile Conference and FESPA Fabric 2011, May 24-26. The company will display its advanced inkjet technology solutions including diagonal reciprocating inkjet textile printing systems. more

Madison Advisors has released the fourth installment of its multi-channel market Series, the 2011 Service Provider Multi-Channel Marker Study. The study indicates companies are becoming more interested in customer communications management and multi-channel delivery is a key element. New service providers are entering the market offering a variety of service offerings. more

Managing Editor Inc. is offering a special software package and pricing combining the vjoon K4 Cross-Media Publishing Platform and Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. The package makes it easier to integrate the two for publishing to multiple tablet devices. more

The Japan Times, the oldest English language daily in Japan, began using a 60-seat license of the WoodWing Enterprise cross-media publishing system in mid-April, WoodWing Software has announced. more

Discover an array of future events that help build digital skills The need for new skills has emerged for online editors, marketers and publishers in 2011. Success in the digital future belongs to those individuals who can supply their multiplatform content to eager audiences without hesitation.

Next week, Sherwood Neiss will testify in favor of a small offerings exemption for investments, which could spark a revolution in grassroots entrepreneurship.

To celebrate the recent publication of the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Reporting book, Packt is pleased to announce a series of attractive discounts on our wide range of Dynamics books. For more information click here. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software product that integrates financial, manufacturing, supply chain management, sales and marketing, project management, human resources, and services management information from across your organization, into a centralized database. The installation of Dynamics NAV and related components is a little bit more than the standard Microsoft—next, next, next—process. This article by Sharan Oberoi and Amit Sachdev, authors of Microsoft Dynamics NAV Administration, covers the following: Installing the Dynamics NAV Classic client, also called the Dynamics NAV C/SIDE client Installing the new Dynamics NAV RoleTailored client (RTC), for NAV 2009 and beyond Installing the Dynamics NAV Classic database server also known as the Dynamics NAV C/SIDE database server Connecting Dynamics NAV clients to the database server in the lower versions and also the latest NAV 2009 version

In this article by Philipp Krenn, author of SilverStripe 2.4 Module Extension, Themes, and Widgets: Beginner's Guide, we'll focus on the layout, which is the ideal candidate for starting off with, as it is the most visible part of any project. We will take an in-depth look at SilverStripe's template engine and explore SilverStripe's standard theme BlackCandy. Technically speaking, we'll cover the following goals: Explore what themes are Learn how to use SilverStripe's template engine Discover how to edit the layout of our pages, both on the final page and in the CMS backend Get an overview of available controls and how to use them