I've long felt that while The New York Times gets all the praise, the Wall Street Journal consistently features the best reporting in the US. That is obscured by the WSJ's near-fascist op-ed pages, but if you want to know what is really going on in the halls of power (which are corporate these days), the WSJ is the paper to read.

Now Rupert Murdoch is about to by it and parent company Dow Jones. No doubt, the corporate hagiography featured on WSJ op-ed pages will start creeping into other sections of the paper as Murdoch does what he did at Fox News: render reporting irrelevant.

Behind the cut, Bill Moyers talks about "the predator of the hour" and why media moguls like Murdoch are this century's version of the robber barons.

The battle for Internet radio as we know it will be won or lost in the next few weeks. As usual, the tired, old behemoths — in this case, the four major recording labels — are out to squash innovators like Seattle's KEXP. Here's the dope.

Tracey Slater's occasional literary salon in Osaka was featured in The Japan Times the other day. Friend and Kuhaku contributor Roland Kelts is pictured as well. Sounds like the kind of forum every city should have.

Here's a little story by a 10-year-old writer in Seattle named Kimi.

Puffle and the Magic Button

Puffle sat contently in his chair, listening to the chattering voices that streamed through the room.
“So, Puffle, have you been out lately?” asked Paul, his business associate. Puffle sighed, leaning against his chair.

“No. I’ve been busy,” Puffle said quietly. Paul frowned, then smiled widely.

“I have been sorting through your paperwork, Puffle,” said Paul, reaching below his chair picking up a document.

Here's an interesting piece from veteran journalist and best-selling author Mark Bowden. He's the first successful print journalist older than me who I can recall embracing the digital shift.

We've often heard canned coffee fans talk about how cool it would be to have those hot-and-cold vending machines here in the States. We've even talked to companies that have tried to import them but found the cost prohibitive. Ryan Meinzer wants to bring together a coalition of canned coffee fans willing to bring a vending machine to the States, so we've turned over our canned coffee bully pulpit to him this week.

We have no idea what Ryan is up to. This could be a benevolent bit of tilting at windmills, or it could be a sly little pyramid scheme that ends with Ryan guffawing into the phone and telling us how much he enjoys bilking grandmas out of their pensions. Perhaps he's thinking of selling time shares in a vending machine (dibs on Thursdays). No matter. He wrote to us, asked to be featured on cannedcoffee.com, and after he politely rebuffed our offer to sell him the whole site for fifty bucks, we agreed to let him talk to our beloved readership. So Ryan, go ahead, make your pitch.

And remember who your friends are when the money starts rolling in.

McSweeney's needs OUR help! From their latest newsletter:

As you may know, it's been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney's included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000 -- actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn't hit right away, but
it's hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there's really no way to absorb a loss that big.

Trust us, this is a big deal. When they say that small publishing is a break-even proposition, it really is.

They're offering some great deals at their store: "For the next week or so, subscriptions are $5 off, new books are 30 percent off, and all backlist is 50 percent off."

I've been on the road for the past week so I haven't had a moment to sit down and pick anything up, but I know I'll be putting in a few orders this weekend. As they say, if you've had your eye on any of their stock, now is certainly the time to pick it up. Vote the American way, with your wallet.

I wanted to share this with you before it gets stale. One of the more interesting items I ran across during Book Expo America in New York at the beginning of the month was not a book, but a movie. Specifically, it was a movie made by Powell's Books of Portland, OR, about Ian McEwan's new novel, On Chesil Beach. I imagine some of you are scratching your head right now and thinking, 'Why is a bookstore making a film about a book?' That's what I was thinking as I dropped round a showing of the film and a brief talk by David Weich of Powell's and Ian McEwan. Weich had me with his opening comments, when he talked about how insular literature has become. "Sometimes it seems that we in the book industry are a bunch of lit majors sitting around talking about what we know really well and intimidating everybody else."

Weich, a Powell's employee, watched how books broke out on the national scene. They did it through appearances on Oprah, through word of mouth. But rarely were those books novels. Novelists could hope to appear on Charlie Rose's show or Fresh Air with Terri Gross, but that was about it. "An author photo on the back of the flap is about as close as most readers get to a writer," Weich said. He wanted to try and make "compelling entertainment that energizes the conversations" about books, and thus he turned to film.

Weich must be a helluva salesman to persuade the owners of Powell's to plunk down the change to make a 28-minute movie (he wouldn't divulge the budget). But what I really like about this development, besides the high quality of the movie (check it out — it's entertaining and even very funny toward the end), is the collective sense Powell's brings to it. The movie is being made available, along with posters and other promotional material, to any bookstore that asks. Thus, if a bookstore in Santa Fe or Ann Arbor wants to screen the movie and promote McEwan's novel, they can. Several bookstore owners in the audience seemed very grateful for this service, since McEwan wasn't planning a book tour.

But will Powell's films kill author readings?

Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas and a contributor to Do You Know, was interviewed this week about life in New Orleans post-Katrina by Critical Mass, a blog from the National Book Critics Circle board of directors.

Part one deals with life after Katrina, and part two focuses on his writing, with insightful cul de sacs into the New Orleans music scene and the environment.

If you've ever wondered how big publishers work, take a look at this snapshot of Random House from New York magazine.

At Chin Music's current rate of one new title a season, on September 1, 2038, we will have produced as many books as Random House pushes out in a week.

We're on a roll this week. The National Cathloc Reporter is running an excellent review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in its June 8 edition. Since the online version charges people who don't subscribe to the paper, here's a passage from the review that gives you a sense of the insightful approach of reviewer Tom Roberts:

One of the unintended benefits of Last of the Red Hot Poppas is the deep immersion one gets into pre-Katrina Louisiana, an experience of a kind of “Louisiana whole,” before everything began coming apart.

In a broad sense — more in the manner of art than slapstick — this is a political/religious comedy about a powerful politician and the people around him. In the end everyone, in some way or other, winds up talking to God and wondering why and how they’ve wound up in an ever more complicated cover-up of a murder.

When you don't have the muscle to get your authors on Oprah! and Fresh Air or reviews in the NYT, you can sometimes forget that all your work to get the word out about your books takes time to bubble up. This Sunday we got a little write-up in The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, LA, which reminded me that no matter how many calls you've made about a book and how many galley sets you have sent out, when you are small, you still have the potential to be discovered well after your release.

OK, so the paragraph from Lafayette won't set us over the top, but it does show that our marketing efforts need to focus on the long-run with each book.

And by the way, it takes just one sentence — even a sentence fragment — to make a publisher smile. This is the sentence that made my Sunday:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans ($18.50) is another ingeniously packaged title from Chin Music Press

Nice.