Tomorrow magazine, the next Good thing

Six members of the editorial staff of Good magazine were laid off on June 1, including the much-praised editor, Ann Friedman. Two others quit immediately afterward. Good, in some form, will continue without them.

As people leaving an institution often do, they gathered together and had beers. Instead of crying into them, and because they like working together so much, they decided to do one last thing as a group.

That's Tomorrow. It's a single-issue magazine, and will be produced before they scatter to the winds to, they hope, new jobs.

In a Kickstarter campaign launched Monday, they hoped to raise $15,000 -- which they did in less than four hours. On the campaign website, they explain:

For the next month, we will crash on one issue of a magazine. No salaries, no health care, no ergonomic office chairs. No foundation grants, no advisory boards, no independently wealthy vanity investors—for now, at least. That means no filler, no product placement, no luxury gift guides. It means we won’t be afraid to publish things that are complicated or sexy or weird... the kinds of things that might just get you fired. (We’ve been there.) Tomorrow will feature original articles and essays about what’s on the cusp, plus fresh design, illustrations, and photography in a quality print publication.

Although no big $500 donors came in, more than 500 people have donate between $15 and $35. "This is the people’s mag for real," Freidman wrote on the Tomorrow tumblr.

Currently their total is at more than $22,000. "I would rather see everyone paid well on this issue before we go and make a second one," Friedman told New York magazine Tuesday. But if the contributions keep coming in, maybe it won't be single issue after all.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

The New Yorker reboots online books coverage

The New Yorker magazine, which has always provided top-notch literary content and coverage, relaunched its online books offerings Tuesday (or, for those of us who stumbled across the change, Monday night).

It's got a spiffy books landing page, and its active book blog, the Book Bench, has been renamed Page-Turner. The blog has a new pink-and-red logo, of a reader surrounded by books, that appears on its rebranded Twitter feed. Page-Turner editor Sasha Weiss explains what to expect of the blog:

We'll debate about books under-noticed or too much noticed, and celebrate writers we've returned to again and again. We'll look to works in translation and at the politics of literary scenes beyond the English-speaking world. We'll think about technology and the reading life. We'll recommend and we'll theorize. Daily essays will be the blog's mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment.

The blog is staking out its elite territory by bringing some of the magazine's star contributors into the mix. The opening two days' sirocco of literary goodness included Salman Rushdie on censorship, Giles Harvey critiquing "Death of a Salesman," Ryan Bloom's corrective translation of the first sentence of Camus' "The Stranger," Nick Thompson on running, and Mary Norris from the magazine's copy desk on an obsolete medieval alphabetic character.

When the blog launched in 2008 as the Book Bench, it was named for the place where books up for grabs piled up in the magazine's hallway. There was a scrappiness to it, of ideas caught on the fly, and often wrangled by people whose names didn't appear on the contributor page. But the work of co-founder Macy Halford made the blog and Twitter feed essential parts of the ongoing online discussion of books and media. Halford's reach stretches beyond the world of books; she was named one of the New York Observer's 50 media power bachelorettes in 2011.

That's a strong tradition, one that I hope the newly branded blog continues.

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twitter.com/paperhaus

Image: Screenshot of the New Yorker's Page-Turner book blog.

 

Books Editor Jon Thurber announces retirement from Los Angeles Times

After more than four decades at the Los Angeles Times, Jon Thurber has announced he will be leaving the newspaper. Thurber joined The Times in 1971, starting out as a clerk on the foreign desk; since 2010, he has been books editor.

In an email to staff, Times Editor Davan Maharaj and Assistant Managing Editor for Features Alice Short noted Thurber’s guidance in developing special holiday book sections and shaping Sunday books coverage. He is expected to continue in his position until early summer.

Prior to becoming books editor, Thurber was managing editor, print; he worked closely with then-Editor Russ Stanton on a number of newsroom initiatives. He had previously been obituary editor for 11 years.

The official notice to staff is after the jump.

Photo: Jon Thurber. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

'Fox Mole' scores six-figure book deal

Joe Muto, better known as "The Fox Mole," has landed a six-figure book deal. He will publish the memoir, tentatively titled "An Atheist in the Fox Hole," with Dutton.

Muto rose to fame in April when he began blogging anonymously for the website Gawker from inside the Fox newsroom as the "Fox Mole." Less than two days went by before his superiors had figured out that Muto was behind the Mole, and he was shown the door.

His Mole-dom didn't last long.

Muto's tenure at Fox had been much longer -- eight years. He started out as a production assistant and made his way up to an associate producer position on Bill O'Reilly's show.

The Observer, which got a look at the proposal, described what to expect from Muto's book.

Mr. Muto’s book is pitched as a How to Lose Friends and Alienate People-style industry memoir in a Dave Barry/David Sedaris tone. The proposal outlines chapters devoted to the “cheapness and stinginess” of Fox News (“cannot be overstated”), Mr. O’Reilly’s morning ritual (“lots of yelling”) and — “in what’s certain to be the most talked about chapter of the book” — the 2004 sexual harassment suit filed against Mr. O’Reilly.

“I’ll go through the lawsuit line by line, offering my own interpretation and commentary, and will definitively answer the question Did He Do It?,” Mr. Muto wrote.

Things tend to move fast for Muto -- the book deal was announced a day after The Observer posted the story of it being shopped around.

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Image: Screenshot of Gawker.com's Fox Mole

Festival of Books: On the Los Angeles riots, 20 years later

In a lot of ways, Sunday's Festival of Books panel "Los Angeles, 20 Years After the Verdict," was a sequel to Saturday's interview by Patt Morrison with Rodney King, whose beating by L.A. police officers 21 years ago was the first in a series of steps that culminated in the 1992 riots.

And in another sense, the panel was a reunion for some of the players in that tragic moment in Los Angeles history.

Moderator Warren Olney, now a KCRW radio host, was a Los Angeles TV reporter at the time. He was joined by Jim Newton, L.A. Times columnist and editor at large, who was covering the Los Angeles Police Department for the L.A. Times when the riots began. 

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

Connie Rice was a civil rights activist and lawyer, and later a co-founder of The Advancement Project, and the recent author of "Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, From the Kill Zones to the Courts." The fourth panelist was Gil Garcetti, who at the time was mounting a campaign for Los Angeles County district attorney.

Festival of books: Publishing in the digital age

Editors of four of the most interesting and innovative digital publishers sat down with L.A. Times book critic David L. Ulin Saturday to discuss how they do what they do, and why.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

The players, in alphabetical order:

The Atavist. Launched in January 2011, The Atavist was one of the first iPad-native apps to tell robust nonfiction stories that fully exploited the possibilities of the tablet, such as audio, video, an interactive time line and animations. Its editors are careful to pick stories that use multimedia not as add-ons but as storytelling elements -- although the text-only versions of its stories have also been popular.

Byliner. Launched in April 2011, Byliner has two main components: a series of original reports, which are published as ebooks and also as novella-length stories, and a curated database of long-form nonfiction and fiction pieces organized by author. Byliner's first original story, "Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way" by Jon Krakauer, which was published the day after a "60 Minutes" broadcast sharing many of its accusations about the "Three Cups of Tea" author, was a sensation.

Figment. Launched in December 2010, Figment is a collaborative writing and reading site for teen girls that strives to be platform-agnostic -- it functions on the Web, cellphones, tablets, and plays nice with social media tools. It was based on a Japanese phenomenon co-founder Dana Goodyear wrote about in the New Yorker. The site's other co-founder, Jacob Lewis, was on hand to accept the L.A. Times Innovators Award at the book prizes Friday night.

Grantland. Launched in June 2011 by ESPN, Grantland covers sports and culture. Its popular website is dense with daily fresh conent, often long-form stories written with strong voices, and it has launched a print anthology with McSweeney's. Its regular writers include stars like founding editor Bill Simmons and essayist Chuck Klosterman and a host of younger authors who are entirely at home with the conventions and possibilities of social media.

Rodney King and the L.A. riots: When 20 years can seem like yesterday

One aspect of Los Angeles hasn't changed in the 20 years since the 1992 riots: Traffic tie-ups. Rodney King, whose March 1991 beating by L.A. police officers was the first link in the chain of events that culminated in the 1992 riots, was a half-hour late Saturday for his interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison.

So, in a sense, the session ran in reverse. With Morrison, who also anchors a radio show on KPCC, as the moderator, Angelenos spent a half-hour talking about their own experiences during and after the riots as they awaited King's arrival. The general consensus: The LAPD has changed for the better, but the socio-economic conditions that set the stage for the riots have worsened. And the racial divides are still chasms.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

"I'm surprised at how white we are here," said one white woman, looking around at the crowd of more than 500 people in a basement auditorium at USC's Ronald Tutor Campus Center, about four miles north of where the riots began near South Central's Normandie and Florence Avenues. The woman said she lived in South Central, in a neighborhood in which she is the rare white resident. "The riots can certainly start again, until we have socio-economic changes, and in how we view other people."

King, for his part, arrived out of breath, and spoke of forgiveness for the officers involved in his videotaped beating after a high-speed chase. With his history of substance abuse, he said, he has been in need of some forgiveness. "I am a forgiving man," he said. "That's how I was raised, to be in a forgiving state of mind. I have been forgiven many times. I am only human. Who am I not to forgive someone?"

When moon rocks were swag

From July 1969 to September 1972, American astronauts regularly traveled between the Earth and the moon. In those three years, a dozen men were able to climb out of the lunar module and set foot on the moon. And while it was initially astonishing -- humans had never gotten so far into space before -- something about their presence there became expected, routine. The moon wasn't all that exciting, really. The astronauts scooped up rocks and dirt. Some clowned around to fill the television time: Alan Shepard golfed.

By the time those manned moon missions were complete, the astronauts had gathered 842 pounds of lunar samples. Nearly a half-ton of rocks and dirt. Rocks and dirt from our boring old moon.

And one particular piece of rock, after it had given up all the laboratory secrets we'd hoped it might, was broken up and turned into presidential swag. Hey, we had hundreds of pounds of it -- why not give it away?

In 1973, the bits of moon rock were encased in lucite and distributed to every U.S. state and to the heads of state in each of the world's countries. Then President Nixon, who'd left his name on the moon rock gifts, resigned in shame, and that era of the space age receded.

The lucite relics on wooden plaques almost faded into obscurity, removed from leaders' halls, relegated to museum storerooms, and, as the story of one goes, landed on a literal ash heap.

Almost, but not quite. Thank Joseph Gutheinz, NASA investigator, now retired. His obsession, from earliest little tickle to daily duty, is outlined in latest original from The Atavist, "The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks" by Joe Kloc. Gutheinz started out trying to stop con men from claiming to have moon rocks -- he was very successful -- but that led to another quest, the quest for the rocks themselves.

I'm a sucker for a quest story and, apparently, true stories about astronauts and space. Including this one.

Author Jeffrey Zaslow dies in car accident

Journalist and author Jeffrey Zaslow was killed in a car accident Friday morning, Detroit's WJBK-TV has reported. Zaslow's wife, Sherry Margolis, is a newswoman at the station.

Zaslow was the co-author, with Randy Pausch, of the bestselling book "The Last Lecture." Most recently, he collaborated on the book "Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope" with former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mike Kelley.

His most recent book, "The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for our Daughters," about a multigenerational bridal shop, was published just last month.

Zaslow lived in Detroit. He is reported to have been driving under snowy conditions when he lost control of his car, which was struck by another vehicle. Zaslow was a columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

In the lecture above, delivered in Detroit in November, Zaslow talks about reporting about life changes, trying to be honorable, and remembering to say "I love you."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Former Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown donates $30 million

Two years after the death of her husband, David, longtime Cosmopolitan Magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown announced a whopping $30 million donation to fund new media. The funds are being given to both the Columbia Journalism School and the Stanford School of Engineering to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Does 32 years at the helm of a magazine really rake in that kind of money? Could it have been the success of her bestselling how-to book, "Sex and the Single Girl"?

Well, no. David Brown, who attended Stanford and Columbia, was a film producer who had an enormous hit with "Jaws," going on to make "Cocoon," "The Verdict," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Chocolat" and "A Few Good Men."

Commenting on the gift, Helen Gurley Brown said in a statement, "David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge."

The institute will have an East Coast director and a West Coast director, located at Columbia and Stanford, respectively. Each university will receive $12 million to endow the institute, with additional funds going to set up a hi-tech newsroom at Columbia and to provide fellowship grants for new media innovation.

It's interesting that the gift is blurring the line between content and technology, encouraging crossover and collaboration; media have been slower than some other industries to develop the two in tandem.

Helen Gurley Brown, who retired from her editorship at Cosmopolitan in 1997, will celebrate her 90th birthday on Feb. 18.

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Photo: Helen Gurley Brown with husband David Brown in 1979. Credit: Los Angeles Times.