Sales of complete albums reached 330.6 million in the United States last year, a 1.3 percent increase from 2010, according to Nielsen SoundScan. As Ben Sisario writes: “Some businesses might call that level of growth flat, but since album sales had fallen every year since 2004, it was a notable improvement.” That boost can be traced by the huge sales for Adele’s “21” (XL/Columbia), which sold 5.82 million copies, the best one-year sales total since 2004.
Rocky relations between Keith Olbermann and Current TV, which hired him last year to be the top star of its upstart liberal news programming, reached a flashpoint on Tuesday, Brian Stelter reports. Mr. Olbermann declined the network’s requests to host special hours of election coverage, apparently out of frustration about technical difficulties that have plagued his 8 p.m. program, “Countdown.” The relationship, which amounts to a big bet by both sides, highlights “how hard it can be to build big media brands around unpredictable personalities,” Mr. Stelter writes.
The Village Voice fired its longtime film critic J. Hoberman, in a move that The Los Angeles Times wrote “sent ripples through the review community.” Mr. Hoberman, the Times post noted, was “one of the last professional film intellectuals, a staff writer who earned a living wage by writing about films because he thought them important and interesting, not because they happened to be opening that week.” Roger Ebert took to Twitter to say “this is not right.”
At 43, Tyler Brûlé has created two culture magazines regarded as bibles among certain design-savvy readers — Wallpaper and Monocle. His hero was the anchor Peter Jennings, and in his early 20s he worked for the BBC and other news organizations. After being wounded in Afghanistan, he re-evaluated, Eric Wilson writes. What he came up with was Wallpaper, and other projects in taste-making:
The common thread behind these disparate ventures is Mr. Brûlé himself, who embodies the border-agnostic sophisticate whom the Monocle brand is built around. His globe-trotting persona (cocktails-with-Danish-diplomats intellectualism, sleeper-seat jaunts to Taipei) has inspired legions of followers, who hang on his oracular pronouncements on what’s next.
If you are wondering, as some surely are, why J.R.R. Tolkien never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a Swedish reporter can now provide some answers. He looked at the deliberations of the Nobel Committee from 1961 (their 50 years of classification now passed) and saw that Mr. Tolkien was indeed nominated by his fellow fantasy writer C.S. Lewis, The Guardian reported. But in the words of one jury member, he “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.” The winner was that year was the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric.
Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.
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