Pitt’s friend Frank Pollaro is quoted in the new issue of Esquire Magazine as saying, “Once I walked in and Angie was standing there and [Brange's eight-year-old daughter] Zahara walked up and said, ‘Daddy, you’re not going to start making out with Mommy again, are you?’ And it’s like that. This is a guy who has tried not to do any sexy scenes with other women since he’s met Angelina. He’s crazy about her, and she’s the same way about him.”

Indeed, Pitt talked about his family life and says he’s happiest when he’s home, surrounded by the sounds of his children and the loving arms of his lady.

“I have very few friends. I have a handful of close friends and I have my family and I haven’t known life to be any happier,” he said. “I’m making things. I just haven’t known life to be any happier…I always thought that if I wanted to do a family, I wanted to do it big. I wanted there to be chaos in the house… there’s constant chatter in our house, whether it’s giggling or screaming or crying or banging. I love it. I love it. I love it. I hate it when they’re gone. I hate it. Maybe it’s nice to be in a hotel room for a day – ‘Oh, nice, I can finally read a paper.’ But then, by the next day, I miss that cacophony, all that life.”

Pitt made headlines this week after the issue came out and speculation began about a quote from the interview, in which he talked about his past…ten years ago. When he just happened to be with ex Jennifer Aniston.

“I’d get so far and then want to do something else. I mean, I’m two credits short of graduating college. Two credits. All I had to do was write a paper. What kind of guy is that? That guy scares me – the guy who always leaves a little on his plate. For a long time I thought I did too much damage – drug damage. I was a bit of a drifter. A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired. I followed that other thing. I spent years f–king off. But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity. It was a conscious change. This was about a decade ago. It was an epiphany – a decision not to squander my opportunities. It was a feeling of get up. Because otherwise, what’s the point?”

The line reads, “Zoe Saldana: 115 Pounds Of Grit And Heartache”, and many are upset that the magazine would choose to publish an actress’s weight where anyone can see it. Maureen O’Connor of The Cut says that presenting that number as a healthy weight to young women isn’t a good idea, and reinforces an unhealthy celebrity image.

“Since numerical representations of weight rarely grace the covers of women’s magazines, we conclude that this number must be special,” she wrote. “Since 115 isn’t a large enough number to suggest defiance, we conclude that 115 is a number meant to represent an attractively tiny weight. Delicate and tiny, making her “grit” all the more charming. Just a tiny little pretty thing, but boy, little missy packs a punch! A rare catch, that 115-pounder, same size as the prize tuna fish.”

Many celebrities have spoken out against the way the media treats women in Hollywood; Ashley Judd wrote a strong article last year after photos of her looking “puffy” surfaced online and she was blasted for either having plastic surgery or for gaining weight, both of which were untrue according to her.

Allure has had no comment on the headline, nor has Saldana. The article discusses the actress’s sexuality, however, and includes a photo of her posing in the nude.

Saldana is appearing this month on the cover of both InStyle Hair and Latina magazine. The actress spoke with Latina about her recent career, and stated that she “was afraid” to take the Star Trek role and felt “overwhelmed.” From the interview:

“…I thought: ‘Maybe I should just take some time off and focus and just rest?’ But my mom is a Trekkie, and my team was like, ‘Zoe, are you stupid? Don’t let fear immobilize you. This is an amazing opportunity to step into the shoes of an iconic character in an iconic series and it’s in space and you’re a sci-fi buff.’ And I was like, ‘oh my God, who am I kidding? Absolutely. I’ll totally do it.’”

The star also spoke about the rumors of her “meltdown” after Avatar (she called them “completely blown out of proportion”) and the backlash she endured after being cast in the role of singer Nina Simone in a new biopic.

“Having been involved with both magazines throughout the last five years, it would be fair to say that X360 and 360 Magazine have always occupied their own individual niche; there have always been elements each has realised with greater effectiveness than the other,” said Howdle. “The new X360 combines the power of these unique strengths into one highly desirable whole. I could not be more thrilled at being a part of the team that’s going to make X360’s future a reality.”

The first issue of X360 to be authored by the combined staff is issue 87. That issue, which will hit stores on July 11, will feature in-depth E3 coverage and an enhanced DVD.

“By merging these two magazines, we have a chance to better focus ourselves on creating exactly what is needed is push the X360 brand forward,” said Rick Porter, editor In chief at Imagine Publishing. “Ultimately, we’re now in a position to create the best possible package for the Xbox 360 gamer, and ensure the X360 brand goes from strength to strength in the challenging single-format magazine market.”

Other nominees for the magazine of the year award were Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, and Popular Mechanics.

O, The Oprah Magazine, for general excellence among women’s magazines, Inc., for active- and special-interest magazines, House Beautiful, for lifestyle magazines, and IEEE Spectrum, for thought-leader magazines were all first time winners of the General Excellence awards which were the best awards before the all encompassing Magazine Awards was created.

New York magazine took home the most awards with 4, including a Single topic award for a piece called “The Encyclopedia of 9/11.” The piece is one of the more extensive pieces I’ve ever read and deserves all the praise it can get.

Here is the full list of this years winners and finalists:

MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

Winner: TIME
Finalists: Esquire; New York; The New Yorker; Popular Mechanics

GENERAL EXCELLENCE, PRINT

General-Interest Magazines

Honors large-circulation weeklies, biweeklies and general-interest monthlies

Winner: Bloomberg Businessweek
Finalists: GQ; New York; The New Yorker; Vice

Women’s Magazines

Honors women’s magazines, including health and fitness magazines and family-centric publications

Winner: O, The Oprah Magazine
Finalists: Glamour; More; Real Simple; W

Lifestyle Magazines

Honors food, travel and shelter magazines as well as city and regional publications

Winner: House Beautiful
Finalists: Bon Appetit; Country Living; Garden & Gun; Texas Monthly

Active- and Special-Interest Magazines

Honors magazines serving targeted audiences, including enthusiast titles
Winner: Inc.
Finalists: The Fader; Field & Stream; Men’s Health; Popular Mechanics

Thought-Leader Magazines

Honors literary, scholarly and professional publications as well as small-circulation general-interest magazines

Winner: IEEE Spectrum
Finalists: The American Scholar; Aperture; The New Republic; Virginia Quarterly Review

DESIGN

Winner: GQ
Finalists: Bloomberg Businessweek; Interview; New York; Wired

PHOTOGRAPHY

Winner: Vogue
Finalists: GQ; Interview; National Geographic; Virginia Quarterly Review

NEWS AND DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

Winner: Harper’s Magazine for “Juvenile Injustice,” October
Finalists:
Harper’s Magazine for “Uncertain Exodus,” July
National Geographic for “Too Young to Wed,” June
The New York Times Magazine for “From Zero to 104,” September 4
TIME for “Birds of Hope,” January 17

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

Winner: The New York Times Magazine for “Touch of Evil,” December 11
Finalists:
National Geographic for “Taming the Wild,” March
TIME for “Portraits of Resilience,” September 19
Vogue for “Lady Be Good,” March
W for “Planet Tilda,” August

SINGLE-TOPIC ISSUE

Winner: New York for “The Encyclopedia of 9/11,” September 5-12
Finalists:
Bloomberg Businessweek for “Steve Jobs,” October 10-16
ESPN The Magazine for “NFL Preview: The Vick Issue,” September 5
Garden & Gun for “Southern Food,” October/November
Wired for “Underworld,” February

MAGAZINE SECTION

Winner: New York for “Strategist”
Finalists:
Bicycling for “Know/How”
Esquire for “Man at His Best”
Real Simple for “Food”
Wired for “Start”

PERSONAL SERVICE

Winner: Glamour for “The Secret That Kills Four Women a Day,” June
Finalists:
Good Housekeeping for “Fractured,” July
Real Simple for “Your Holiday-Spending Survival Guide,” November
Redbook for “Would You Get a ‘Mommy Tuck’?” April
San Francisco for “The New School of Fish,” February

LEISURE INTERESTS

Winner: Saveur for “Italian American,” December
Finalists:
New York for “The Urbanist’s Guide To . . . ,” April 25
Outdoor Life for “Sniper School,” March
Texas Monthly for “Home Plates,” April
Wired for “The Wired Travel Optimizer,” October

PUBLIC INTEREST

Winner: The New Yorker for “The Invisible Army,” June 6
Finalists:
5280 Magazine for “Direct Fail,” December
Harper’s Magazine for “Tiny Little Laws,” February
Marie Claire for “The Big Business of Breast Cancer,” October
Men’s Health for “The Signature Wound,” November

REPORTING

Winner: The New Yorker for “The Apostate,” February 14 & 21
Finalists:
The Atlantic for “Our Man in Kandahar,” November
Los Angeles for “What Happened to Mitrice Richardson?” September
The New Yorker for “Getting bin Laden,” August 8
Vanity Fair for “Echoes From a Distant Battlefield,” December

FEATURE WRITING

Winner: Esquire for “Heavenly Father!” October
Finalists:
GQ for “The Man Who Sailed His House,” October
The New York Times Magazine for “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” June 12
The New Yorker for “A Murder Foretold,” April 4
Rolling Stone for “Arms and the Dudes,” March 31

PROFILE WRITING

Winner: D Magazine for “He Is Anonymous,” April
Finalists:
ESPN The Magazine for “Game of Her Life,” January 10
Men’s Journal for “The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See,” March
Rolling Stone for “Santiago’s Brain,” December 8
Sports Illustrated for “Dewayne Dedmon’s Leap of Faith,” November 14

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Winner: New York for “Paper Tigers,” May 16
Finalists:
Esquire for “The Loading Dock Manifesto,” May
GQ for “Too Much Information,” May iPad Edition
The New Yorker for “The Aquarium,” June 13 & 20
Slate for “The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard,” February 22

COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY

Winner: Vanity Fair for columns by Christopher Hitchens
Finalists:
The Atlantic for columns by James Parker
Field & Stream for columns by Bill Heavey
Los Angeles for reviews by Steve Erickson
TIME for columns by Joel Stein

FICTION

Winner: Zoetrope: All-Story for “The Hox River Window,” Fall
Finalists:
The Atlantic for “Scars,” Summer 2011
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “Ambition,” April
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “The Northeast Kingdom,” August
Virginia Quarterly Review for “La Moretta,” Fall

Time Red X Covers are courtesy of time.com

The magazine app (appazine? no? ok…) is a collaborative effort of Christian Ugbode, Lerone D. Wilson, and Robert Pinderhuze, who had a comedy podcast before releasing their magazine. The same satirical and dry humor of the podcast works just as well in magazine form, and it also has a certain flair to it missing from other publications of the type.

Upon loading up Blackline, you’re met with an editor’s note which sets the tone of the magazine really well, stating, “You don’t want to wake up in the morning and read the news at a computer and then read us making fun of it. You want us to be at your fingertips when you need us, whether you’re on the couch, on a bus, or at the airport. You paid for an iPad, and we consider it our personal duty to make sure you never wish you had gotten a Kindle Fire instead and saved a few dollars (Apologies to Kindle Fire users. It’s a good enough device but face it: you’re cheap)”

Once you get into the meat of the content, you’ll be met with a wide variety of topics. Everything from Facebook, Netflix, Al Sharpton, Maya Angelou, and even Tetris. Nothing is too sacred in Blackline. My favorite article was about Bo Obama, the “first dog” at the White House. Which you can have a quick preview below, to get a feel for their article layout. It also features one of their many “faux ads” taking jabs at the political campaign season.

The most impressive use of HTML5 is within the ‘Maya Angelou’s Ice-Box’ feature, which was highlighted by Mashable. It allows users to move around various words on an ice-box; creating your own custom-made Angelou verse(s). Again, something to do while you’re on the toilet.

Along with the interactiveness of their HTML5 feature, the magazine has many embedded YouTube videos you can watch. One of which is an original Blackline exclusive which you can watch below.

Instead of having traditional ads like you’d see in a magazine of this type, they want you to follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Which is evident by one of their calls to action, telling users to ‘pound it’. Good stuff.

Along with HTML5, Blackline is utilizing the new iPad 3 retina display, as all of the articles and features you’ll see are stunning in quality and pushing all of the pixels to their fullest.

If you’d like to follow Blackline, you can find them on Twitter and on Facebook. Seriously, pound it.

Magazines as a whole are facing increasing competition from their online foes which are eating into advertising revenue. Coupled with a general economic malaise that is getting a tighter grip on the world economy and the increase in the raw material costs to print a magazine it was a bit of a no-brainer to shut down the print version. Right now the online version of the magazine generates 70% of the revenue and 80% of the profit of PC Mag.

This is a natural progression as the online edition of the publication was the first stop for news anyway. It’s kind of hard to be on top of the breaking news in any industry when you only go to print once a month. That’s so 80’s!

The magazine’s circulation is ½ of what it was in the late 1990’s. The magazine industry as a whole is suffering a 17% decrease in ad pages for December of 2008 when compared to December of 2007 according to the Media Industry Newsletter. This is the latest magazine to say goodbye to its print edition and my suspicion is that many will follow suit in the very near future.

What are some titles that you think will be online only in the next year or so? Are there any magazines that you would rather have in a print edition v. an online one? What place will magazines play in the future of media and marketing? Looking forward to some Pilgrim input for this one.

Comments

The technology was developed for renowned fashion designer Nanette Lepore and was tested at Bloomingdale’s early this year. Aimed at young women, they can get other’s opinions on what clothes look good and what their peers are buying. They can also text message, IM and email each other about their shopping choices. Live video feeds show what they try on, send a video of an outfit, and get friends feedback. They can also try on outfits virtually. Retailers get something out of the experience too – real time feedback on inventory, buying habits, and preferences for a pretty fickle group of shoppers.

So I guess this means never shopping alone. Or viewing a sports event or anything. We can interact all the time! I find it fascinating how at the same time these technologies bring us together they decrease face time. Everyone is a text message away so why should you actually need to see one another.

Both on and offline socializing and forming communities around music, shopping, and other activities is hot. I found some data from SellPoint through a study conducted by Coremetrics that talked about how online conversions are affected by audio/video tours of products (and I think that’s what stores need – tours of products and outfit suggestions from designers – for all ages).

My friends at HookSell are doing audio tours of more complicated products and seeing a big impact on conversion rates. Even the homemade version that Dan at DVO does have increased sales on his kitchen gear. The study showed a 35% increase in sales when a video/audio tour is viewed – plus it kept shoppers online longer. Not long ago social media was seen as interesting or fun, but it can also drive business.

When you see Time Magazine recognizing a social media tactic meant to drive sales to stores, you know it’s hit the mainstream.

Comments

Now if you have no intention of doing anything unethical, you might believe that you don’t need to understand search spam.

After all, if you don’t want to rob a house, you don’t need to know how to pick a lock, right? Well, what you don’t know most certainly can hurt you when it comes to search spam. Read on for my three-part series in Revenue Magazine for the unsavory tactics that everyone needs to know about.

Legitimate search marketers must have at least a passing familiarity with spam techniques in order to avoid them. Many companies have been tripped up because their employees unwittingly employed spam techniques, or because they unwittingly hired search marketing consultants who do. You’ll want to know enough to protect yourself, but also you’ll want to identify competitors gaining unfair advantages so you can turn them in to the search engines.

You can bone up on what you need to know (no one ever seems to "bone down") by reading my three-part series of columns in Revenue Magazine—now they are posted publicly online:

• Spiders Don’t Eat Spam. Find out what spam search tactics are, what "cloaking" is, and how to spot a spammer masquerading as a legitimate search marketing consultant.
• The Ingredients That Go Into Spam. Get the list of spam techniques that manipulate the content on your Web pages to try to mislead the search engines.
• The Tangled Web of Link Spam. One of the most popular methods of spamming the search engines involves setting up bogus pages and even entire faked sites created just to send inbound links to a site the spammer wants to promote. Learn what you need to know to identify this technique.

The stakes are high. Companies that engage in spam tactics risk having their Web sites "banned" by the search engines, which is geek-speak for having all of their pages removed from the search indexes—it’s like the phone company suddenly giving you an unlisted number. Banned sites are never found for searches, and you probably were hoping to do better than that.

Some people make a living fooling Google, but it’s probably not going to be you. Unless you are clever enough to stay ahead of the spam police, you are better off sticking to the rules and making sure your employees and your search consultants do so as well.

You can check out the full list of "The Searchers" columns for Revenue Magazine that I write. They are posted publicly a few months after they are available to subscribers, so if you want to get them faster, you’ll need to subscribe to Revenue Magazine in printed form or online. Some of you might even qualify for a free subscription, so check it out.

Comments

And so far, only readers of Gizmodo and Engadget are treated to a correction.

Every publication, no matter how careful, makes mistakes. It’s part of the business. Traditionally, newspapers like to bury them a few pages in, placing corrections in a bottom corner somewhere.

But at least they’re there. This incident, though, is more of a case of piggybacking gone awry. Not that piggybacking isn’t standard fare in the news industry. It is, and it happens with the best of publications. Compare these two articles, for instance.

See, happens all the time.

Credit for unraveling the Nissan paint mystery goes to Darius at YoungGoGetter.com, who painstakingly traced the "news" back to its origin after receiving comment from Nissan that they’d only heard of the new technology.

Sure enough, it was one misinterpreted and slightly altered sentence at NextEnergyNews that started it all:

This revolutionary new paramagnetic paint is a technical wonder and is viewed by Nissan and other auto companies as an amazing innovation that would draw huge traffic to dealerships and will make it easier for consumers to get the exact option level they want on a car without the sacrifice of their favorite color.

Which, by the time it reached Wired, became:

Nissan Developing Color-Changing Auto Paint

With similar so-far uncorrected variations at Daily Tech and MobileMag.com.

But what’s most humorous about Darius’s investigative blogging is the publications’ use of the same image of a Nissan car with only the colors altered. Your choice: black, white and red; black and red; silver and black; or green and black.

More time was spent fiddling with the image than actually researching the blog posts, it appears.

So what’s the moral to this humorous tale? Darius nails it:

Bloggers and readers should do more to research the facts and original sources before jumping to the publish button. How else will we establish blogging as a credible, journalistic endeavor?

Yes, indeed. The salty, veteran journalists out there are laughing their butts off.