"Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck." That was the tweet sent out by the Boston Phoenix the eve the world found out the legendary, nearly half-a-century-old publication would be shutting down. Its loss was mourned acutely and by many, perhaps most eloquently by Phoenix alums Susan Orlean and former Voice staff writer and current Gawker senior editor Camille Dodero. But not all is lost: Earlier this week, former Phoenix staffers announced the launch of a new alt-weekly, one that started taking shape as the paper fell apart.

Welcome "The Media." With a subversive URL, a radically simple ad-free design, and plans to raise funds by donation buttons and lemonade stands, former Phoenix assistant music editor Liz Pelly and production artist Faye Orlove published The Media's first issue on Wednesday. The Voice spoke to The Media's editorial and creative directors over the phone about the publication's journalistic direction, how they plan to keep it going, why they made it their mission to "save the spirit" of the alt-weekly.

Is it alright if I record this for my notes?

Liz Pelly: Yeah, totally. And thanks for being interested in writing about The Media.

Definitely.

LP: I should specify--the name of the publication is actually "The Media." Everyone keeps referring to it as if it were titled, "Fuck the Media," but that's just the URL.

Why make the URL "Fuck the Media"?

LP: Honestly, The Media was taken. We didn't want to take ourselves too seriously and we thought it was a super tongue-in-cheek way to find a home for our newspaper.

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NYCIsNotForSale

A still from the new attack ad on Christine Quinn that Quinn is inadvertently promoting.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is having a rough week so far. For one thing, new Quinnipiac poll shows the mayoral front-runner's numbers hitting a five-month low. She's also facing a new attack ad paid for by a coalition of labor and animal-rights groups.

The ad got some media attention early this week as the first outside ad to run in the mayoral race. But it didn't really grab anyone's attention until Quinn herself Streisand-Effected the thing to the top of the city's political discourse.

Rather than limiting herself to disputing the advertisement's allegations, say, or running an advertisement of its own, the Quinn campaign lashed out, sending a threatening-sounding cease-and-desist letter to NY1, the Time Warner news channel, which is among the stations airing the ad.

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No, it's not Christine Quinn. No, it's not Joe Lhota. No, it's not John Liu. And, no, it's definitely not John Catsimatidis (though wealth-wise that would make the most sense).

Even after saying the other day that the candidates this year are a weak bunch, Hizzoner is keeping his mouth shut on who he thinks should be the next Mayor after he gives up his 12-year throne this November. And he wants reporters to do the same with their questions about it. No, but seriously.

He made that point perfectly clear at a press conference yesterday.

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We have TriBeCa Film Festival. We have the Angelicka. We have countless movie premieres, movies being made here left and right, celebrity spottings and the like. New York City is a place made for the movies; it's basically a film mantra that you're either filming here or in L.A. And Mayor Bloomberg doesn't like any of it.

In an interview with M Magazine, the Hizzoner expressed his discontent with the whole 'going to the movies' thing after going to see 'Les Miserables': "I sat through an hour of trailers, and every one was stupider than the other... And then there were these ads for video games -- for adults! And you want to know why we're dumbing down politics."

No fuss was made over the fact that the movie and television industries rake in $7 billion for New York a year. Or, when he went on to criticize new media, the fact that he runs a multi-million dollar media company. But that doesn't matter.

We've already heard the Mayor hate on bloggers for being bloggers. In the interview, he went a step further: "I don't see any difference between a newspaper on the Internet and a blog. It confuses everything and takes away the difference. People are getting their news from sitcoms and from movies with a political agenda. They're even getting information from games!"

We should stop listening, right?

[jsurico15@gmail.com/@JSuricz]

As the New York Times faces budget cutbacks and new digital media threats, talks of an enormous buyout have risen a good deal in media circles. And rumor has it that the Donald has been recently hosting meetings on ways to become its new owner. It's safe to say that the Sulzberger family would never even imagine giving the reigns over to Trump, especially after he crudely criticized columnist Gail Collins.

So yeah, no.

Cue his advice from The Apprentice for further research.

[jsurico15@gmail.com/@JSuricz]

The FCC may allow the media landscape in top-20 markets to resemble the one in New York City -- where media mogul Rupert Murdoch is permitted to own television stations and newspapers.

The internet has been abuzz for the past month with news that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski circulated a plan to his fellow FCC commissioners to strike down the long-standing regulation preventing media entities from cross-owning newspapers, radio and television stations in the same market.

Genachowski's plan suggests that the commission vote to "streamline and modernize media ownership rules, including eliminating outdated prohibitions on newspaper-radio and TV-radio cross ownership."

Those living in New York City might be under the impression that media conglomerates are already permitted to cross-own. Murdoch's News Corporation owns the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and the local television stations WNYW (channel 5) and the New Jersey-based WWOR (channel 9).

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The New York Times' roughly 1,150-person newsroom is about to get smaller, the paper announced in article published this morning.

In a letter to the staff, Times executive editor Jill Abramson announced she is "seeking 30 managers who are not union members to accept buyout packages."

"There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced," Abramson says in the letter, according to the article published this morning.

The paper cites a "volatile" advertising climate as the reason for the need to trim the newsroom, and notes that the New York Times Company's ad revenue shrank by 10.9 percent, according to the latest earnings report.

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Serious conviction: Most of New York's media folk are stuck indoors, looking for something to write about to fill blogs with content. Guilty as charged myself. However, while social media collapses with updates of Sandy's destruction, there have been flares of America's severe electoral illness. Symptoms include: taking any event and asking "What does this mean for the election?"

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In the Age of Too Much Information, an infinite stream of photos floods the blogs, the news sites, the Facebooks, the meme world, Google Image Search, and whatever other nook of the Interwebs. Sometimes they are credited, and sometimes they are not; the whole mantra "give credit where credit is due" is a nonissue in online communities, where the universality of everything online trumps the degree of transparency. 
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Variety

Allison Gollust will replace Richard Bamberger as Andrew Cuomo's communications director.

New York Governor/undeclared 2016 presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo has appointed a new communications director: former NBC News executive Allison Gollust.

Cuomo's office announced this afternoon that Gollust will replace Richard Bamberger, who has been on Cuomo's staff since 2008, when Cuomo was the state's attorney general.

In addition to her time at NBC -- where she served as a spokesperson for anchors Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, as well as a gig as the senior vice president of NBC News Communications and executive vice president of Corporate Communications for NBC Universal -- Gollust worked as the head of communications for Major League Soccer.

In other words, she's got the national media experience Cuomo would want if he were -- but definitely is -- running for president.

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