Archinect - News

Blair Kamin: ‘Writer underwriting writer’

2024-10-24T17:59:00-04:00

The [Chicago] Tribune, which had been reducing staff and budgets for years before Alden Global Capital accelerated the process with its May 2021 purchase of Tribune Publishing, did not replace Kamin, just as it did not replace several other culture writers who left the paper. So the retired critic took matters into his own hands.

We covered the debut of the Windy City’s newest critic Edward Keegan back in August along with the restart of work on 400 Lake Shore Drive. His position is being funded by Blair Kamin after Kamin stepped aside in January 2021. He explains the situation to Northwestern's vaunted J-school's Local News Initiative blog.

"I decided that if initially they weren’t going to make a grant, that I would make a grant myself to do this," he tells of his personal philanthropy. "But it’s complicated, because when you have a so-called donor-advised fund, you can’t give money legally to a for-profit enterprise. So you need to find a nonprofit to give the money to, and they, in turn, will give the money to the for-profit. So it took forever going through a variety of possibilities."

The NY Times drops 38 year-old Thursday "Home" section

2015-03-13T12:06:00-04:00

For many longtime readers of The Times, Thursday was tinged with sadness. One of their favorite weekly sections, Home, was no longer in the paper. The section was discontinued after the March 5 edition, almost exactly 38 years after its debut.

Traditional news outlets recruit architecture critics Lamster, Saffron and Sorkin

2013-04-22T16:45:00-04:00

The shrinkage of daily newspapers and news and culture magazines has thinned the already slim ranks of architecture critics. While blogs and social media proliferate debate about architecture and design, many have fretted about the lack of a common dialogue around architecture and urbanism as defined by the work of leading critics. It turns out that architecture criticism is far from dead, however, as three established voices are finding new outlets with newspapers and national magazines.

Mark Lamster has been appointed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Inga Saffron has begun writing a monthly column on urbanism for the website of the newly re-launched New Republic. Michael Sorkin is slated to begin writing for the left-leaning Nation magazine.

Washington Post Co. hires architecture firm Gensler to design new offices

2013-03-22T18:33:00-04:00

The Washington Post Co. has hired the architecture firm Gensler to plan and design the company’s future workplace as it considers selling its downtown headquarters and relocating. Based in San Francisco, Gensler is one of the largest global architecture firms and has done extensive work in Washington for law firms, universities and think tanks. Spokespersons for the Post and Gensler confirmed the partnership.

The NYT paywall is working

2011-07-26T13:49:40-04:00

... several people have confirmed that the goal was to amass 300,000 online subscribers within a year of launch. On Thursday, the company announced that after just four months, 224,000 users were paying for access to the paper’s website. Combined with the 57,000 Kindle and Nook readers who were paying for subscriptions and the roughly 100,000 users whose digital access was sponsored by Ford’s Lincoln division, that meant the paper had monetized close to 400,000 online users

There may be a future for newspapers after all.