Stevie Ryan has a tv show premiering March 4 on VH1 at 11pm. It's called Stevie TV, and from the trailer it looks like satire of some pop culture nonsense to the fullest. If you're familiar with Stevie Ryan's youtube phenoma then you know she's a natural performer, but from the looks of the trailer it looks like she's on a whole new level. Ripping on toddler beauty pageants, real housewives of whereever, mtv reality faces, or countless pop stars could be the antidote to all that nonsense. There's even an appearance from Katrina on Maury Povich, a character that has grown to some popularity online. She's as hilarious as she is outrageous. That seems to be the aim of the sketch comedy show, a little bit ruthless, definitely clever. The truth is I know would not watch most of the shows she's satirizing, but I think I will watch Stevie Ryan make fun of what people watch and why they keep going back for more. Out of all the people on the internet and all of their unique contributions, this might be one of the coolest. With over 40 million views on her channel, this could be the beginning of the Stevie Ryan takeover. Either way it is amazing to see someone who is talented work so hard and do well. -@yahohyah youtubetwitterfacebook
TV LAND.
I’m onset with Stevie Ryan in Burbank. This entire building, in fact, is dedicated to the television personality’s VH1 show, “Stevie TV.”
As the crew prepares for the second season, they gather here every day and work on sketch ideas to pitch to the network. Perhaps that’s why they’re called “pitches.”
Matt points out the pitches that have been greenlighted by the VH1 execs, the ones that are in limbo, and the ideas that have crashed and burned:
but they’re all funny to me.
To give you a better idea, here’s the entire first season on the whiteboard, the sketches that were filmed, and the crew who worked on them.
Stevie takes me on a tour of the costume department. The skit comedy show revolves around a parade of parodied characters and celebrity personalities by Stevie, so the wardrobe has to be pretty convincing.
Lunchtime is where the fit hits the shan. The show’s veteran writers bounce pitches off each other for the next few hours, tuning, whittling, and refining raw jokes into elaborate skits, which then devolve into sexually perverse bathroom humor, but then they take it back a few notches from there and end up with comedy gold.
And the entire time, Stevie rules with a plastic fork.
Hey…
Surprise.
Auguste Rodin at work in 1915 (gif by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic via YouTube)
In 1915, with the newly innovated film camera, a young Russian-born, French actor named Sacha Guitry captured some of France’s greatest artists and authors. His footage of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other luminaries in their twilight years appeared in his first cinematic work, a 22-minute silent film called Ceux de Chez Nous (Those of Our Land).
Last week, Open Culture shared the clips of Rodin, Monet, Degas, and Renoir, showing the artists in their studios, homes, and walking out on the Paris streets. Open Culture has posted the footage before inseparatearticles, and the films were originally uploaded by John Hall to YouTube in 2013, but this recent piece groups them together in the same time frame.
Rodin, just two years before his death in 1917, stands on the weedy steps of the Hôtel Biron, now the Musée Rodin. A later scene shows him at work on a sculpture, hammer and chisel in hand, while huge works like “The Thinker” loom in the background. Monet is also at work out in his Giverny garden, painting en plein air while dressed in a white suit, a well-burned cigarette dangling between his lips. Meanwhile, a 74-year-old Renoir, who would die in 1919, sits at home with his arthritic fingers accompanied by his teenage son Claude. Guitry himself makes an appearance, talking to the old artist. And in the most serendipitous, Guitry set up on the sidewalk until Degas, wearing dark sunglasses to protect his nearly blind eyes, strolled by. The vignettes are brief documentary portraits of these influential artists, offering a quick, but personal, insight into the lives and creation behind their now iconic work.
The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead
Penguin Random House last year doubled the size of its distribution center in Crawfordsville, Ind., to speed up book distribution.Credit A J Mast for The New York Times
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Steve Bercu, co-owner of a bookstore in Austin, Tex., where 2015 sales are up 11 percent, and profits are the highest ever.Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.
E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.
The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.
“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.
Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.
“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.
The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.
Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.
Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.
“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.
At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.
“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.
Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.
“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”
The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.
But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.
As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.
On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt and “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.
The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).
It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.
At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.
Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.
“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 12:00PM 
