The Obama of the media industry?

We told you a few weeks ago how David Remnick ‘81 (a Press Club alum who has hit the proverbial “big time” as editor-in-chief of the New Yorker) was writing a “pimped out” new biography about President Obama. It hit bookshelves today, and critics are absolutely raving about it. And about Remnick!

Yesterday the Times ran a story on how Remnick makes running the New Yorker “look easy” while the media industry collapses around him. Quoth the Grey Lady:

It’s hard to make running any magazine, even The New Yorker, look easy these days. Last year, the magazine’s ad pages fell 24 percent, a little less than the industry average. But Mr. Remnick managed to eke out a small operating profit (excluding corporate overhead charges) by cutting costs, as he had for years.

Understated compliment maybe, but given the Times‘ financial state, you can bet they’re a little jealous of a publication that’s not disastrously bankrupt.

And it wasn’t just the old fogey media that was praising the Princeton man’s virtues. Even Gawker wrote something nice about somebody, and in this case, it was Remnick:

Remnick is perfect for his time and place in the industry. He’s no-nonsense, budget-conscious, and a wise cultivator of talent; he’s also a Princeton man and a willing cultivator of The New Yorker’s insular traditions. … Remnick is the best that anyone could hope for (which is to say, he’s excellent). We’re even willing to indulge his determination to write another fucking Obama book.

And then the media finally decided to like, read the book, I guess, and hey, looks like they love that too! (To save you the effort of reading the reviews, it was called “brilliantly constructed,” “flawless,” and other doting adjectives.)

Michiko Kakutani in the Times writes:

But if the outlines of the story told in “The Bridge” are highly familiar, Mr. Remnick — the editor of The New Yorker and the author of a thoughtful 2008 article in that magazine, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” from which this book apparently springs — has filled in those broad outlines with insight and nuance. He’s used interviews with many of the formative figures in the president’s life to add details to the narrative of his political and sentimental education — in particular, his relationships with his self-destructive father and his romantic, sometimes naïve mother. Writing with emotional precision and a sure knowledge of politics, Mr. Remnick situates Mr. Obama’s career firmly within a historical context.

Which all adds up to say, “Yeah, we’ve read this Obama story a bunch of times, but shit, Remnick told it the best.”

So there you go. Princeton’s very own David Remnick – tearing up the journalism circuit and repping to the fullest.

(photo via dutchproblogger.com)

Jezebel, a self-proclaimed feminist blog in the Gawker network, has seen their coverage blow up with user feedback, having more than 15,000 views and 713 comments on their story at the time of this posting. Gawker has 296 comments and more than 14,000 views.

Blogs aren’t the only interested parties. Amelia Thomson-Deveaux ‘11, co-editor of the feminist blog EqualWrites.org, tells us that a Fox News reporter sent an email on the subject to the EqualWrites address earlier today. At this point she doesn’t “know what their plan is.”

The Daily Princetonian has not issued a response to the controversy. Mendy Fisch ‘11, executive editor for opinion, declined to comment for this post on Princetonian standards for vetting potentially inflammatory opinion pieces or the process of editing and approving opinion pieces.  He also declined to comment on the Prince’s rationale for running this particular piece by an aspiring regular columnist.

Jack Ackerman ‘11, editor-in-chief of and spokesperson for the Daily Princetonian, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

What’s the hubbub about? At the risk of reducing Neagu’s argument, the gist of the piece is this:

She knew what would happen if she started drinking. We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense.

Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.

The Princetonian’s own website has a current 231 comments at the time of this posting, and the paper printed a response to the opinion from members of SHARE and SpeakOut on Tuesday.

from blog.nielsen.com

Sure, you might read a copy of the Prince while eating your cornflakes, or grab a Nassau Weekly off the table when you head out of the dining hall–but campus media is headed to the Internet.

Princeton’s newest publications–Equal Writes, American Education Review, which launches in December, and this blog–have all been web-only, and will likely stay that way. 127-year-old Tiger Magazine recently relaunched its website, adding consistently updated content, and American Foreign Policy has done the same.

The Prince is also shifting toward a more web-oriented model, says editor-in-chief Matt Westmoreland ‘10.

“Not only is there so much more we can do on our Web site that we can’t do in print, but there will come a time in the future when The Daily Princetonian is an online-only publication,” Westmoreland said. “We need to make sure that we’re making as much progress as we can, so that when that time comes … we’ve built a new media infrastructure that will have the opportunity to grow even more.”

To read more, check out the Princeton Alumni Weekly.