That’s good for Sony, the people who paid the bill for “Dragon Tattoo,” right? Nope. Terrible, says Sony.

The studio is livid that the New Yorker is running Denby’s review today, more than a week ahead of a Dec. 13 embargo. Why does the studio care? If you want a good explanation of modern-day movie marketing and the push-pull between filmmakers and film reviewers, check out this lucid explainer from NPR’s Linda Holmes.

But for everyone else, this won’t matter at all. New Yorker readers (and now, drive-by visitors as well, since the review has been placed in front of  the magazine’s online paywall) will see the review, and a larger group of people will have a vague idea that the New Yorker likes it. That’s about it.

And that’s the moral for folks like myself in the technology-news-industrial complex, who spend way too much time thinking about, fighting with and cursing embargoes. This stuff can matter a lot (sometimes) to us, but that’s really only because we decide to agree that it matters. Readers don’t care at all.

I’d spend more time explaining this, except that if you care about this at all, you’ve already read many boring essays about it — perhaps even today! And I can’t tell you that I’m swearing off embargoes, because I can’t — I worked with three of them last week, have probably at least one more embargoed story coming this week and, I’m sure, many more down the road.

But this is a nice reminder that every time I do deal with one of these, it almost always means I’m not spending time on something geniunely interesting. Like news no one else is writing about, or a fresh take on something everyone else has already written about. Or even seeing a good movie.

Disney CEO Bob Iger tapped Skipper to take over his company’s most important asset just a week ago. But Skipper, who had been ESPN’s content boss, has been a rising star there for years, hopping from print (!) to the Web to TV programming. We’ll have his first onstage interview in his new role.

At a time when the value of Big Media’s content is in flux, ESPN’s lock on sports — DVR-proof, pirate-resistant programming that draws mass eyeballs in a niche age — is more valuable than ever. Can Skipper keep it that way?

We’ll ask him in January, as he joins a lineup that includes: YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull and Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff.

All Things Digital’s first-ever media conference runs Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. See you there.

There is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.

Facebook investor and futurist Peter Thiel, profiled in the New Yorker (article only available online to subscribers)

Hollywood and Google have been circling each other for years, as each side tries to figure out what to make of the other. Now they’re finally starting to link up in a serious way, via YouTube’s new “channels” strategy.

Which means it’s a perfect time to hear from YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar. And if you’re at D: Dive into Media in January, that’s what you’ll be able to do, as one of the world’s most important Googlers joins us onstage.

Getting Kamangar out of Mountain View and into the public eye would be a big deal under any circumstances, because — while he keeps a very low profile — he has enormous clout: He’s one of Larry Page’s most trusted lieutenants, a position he has earned by joining the company as hire No. 9 in 1999, then helping to build the AdWords product that has generated a vast majority of Google’s revenue.

Kamangar has been formally running YouTube for the past year, but in reality he had been overseeing the world’s largest video site for some time. Kamangar is also in charge of Google’s broader video plans, including Google TV, which is now making a second stab at inserting itself into the world’s living rooms.

So there’s going to be plenty to talk about when Kamangar joins a lineup of media heavyweights Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. Previously announced speakers include Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull, and VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff.

We’ll announce more in the weeks to come. If you want to make sure you get a seat, you should sign up now.

So is this a good time to be in media? Or a terrifying one? Both? Yes!

AllThingsD covers the media business and the way it responds to technology, every day. But in January we’re going to go really deep into this stuff, at our first D: Dive Into Media event, where we’ll focus on the people who create, finance and distribute what we listen to, read and watch. (Facebook is on to something!)

We’ll gather the most powerful, interesting and innovative leaders from a wide range of media and entertainment companies, and sit down with them for one-on-one interviews.

And just like our flagship D: All Things Digital event, we’ll also be able to give you peeks at the future, by focusing on new voices and new technology you’ll be hearing from in the months and years to come. You won’t see panel discussions with middling players here: Just deep, smart talks with the people who matter.

We’ll be announcing our speakers throughout the fall, but here’s a starter list to give you a sense of what we’ve got planned:

Philippe Dauman is CEO of Viacom, which runs one of the world’s dominant cable networks. We’ll talk to him about what that means in a universe where cord-cutting could become a reality — if it’s not already. We’ll also pick his brain about the future of his Paramount studio, and Hollywood in general.

New Yorker editor David Remnick runs one of the world’s best, most storied magazines. Coincidentally or not, it also happens to be a rarity in the iPad world — a successful magazine app. We’ll talk to the Pulitzer Prize winner about the challenge of making long, immersive content in a fast-twitch world.

Edgar Bronfman Jr. ran Warner Music Group from 2004 until earlier this summer; he’s now the company’s chairman at a pivotal time in its history. Since his resume also includes a stint running what’s now called NBCUniversal, he’ll also be able to give us an interesting perspective on the evolution of the TV and movie business.

News Corp. COO Chase Carey can talk to us about his company’s take on the movie business, the TV business, the cable business, the newspaper business and the Internet. News Corp. also owns this Web site, but that won’t prevent us from having a frank discussion about the company’s challenges and opportunities.

D: Dive Into Media will be held at the stunning Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, a little more than an hour south of Los Angeles. On behalf of Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and the rest of the AllThingsD staff, I’d like to invite you to join us Jan. 30 and 31.

It’s not the New Yorker, but it’s built using the magazine’s intellectual DNA. And instead of the $60 a year the magazine charges for its primary app, this one is 100 percent free.

The “Goings On” app, which will work on both iPhone and Android handsets, is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: The magazine’s weekly listings of New York art exhibits, concerts, etc., tethered to an interactive map.

There are a few extra goodies, too, like audio recordings from New Yorker authors that will work as walking tours: Food writer Calvin Trillin will lead listeners through his favorite eateries and stores, and architecture critic Paul Goldberger navigates the city’s amazing elevated High Line park.

All of which sounds cool, if not groundbreaking. I got a very brief demo last week, but have no idea how it will work in the real world.

It’s worth noting that this is another example of a magazine publisher experimenting with an app that isn’t a straightforward replica of one of its titles. Instead, the app leverages the New Yorker’s brand and its intellectual property to create a new standalone product.

In this case, the magazine is turning that into revenue via an ad deal — MasterCard will be the app’s sole sponsor, via a package deal that also gets the brand into the print magazine — but Conde and other publishers have tried charging customers for standalones, too.

Very good bet that we’ll see more of these from Conde and its competitors, and that they’ll continue to play around with price points. Encouraging experiments.

Well-known New Yorker writer Ken Auletta has taken on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the magazine, with a largely glowing profile provocatively titled: “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?”

My short answer is: No, she can’t. But Auletta does yeoman’s work explaining the irksome issue by using Sandberg as his metaphor.

Sandberg has been very vocal about the issue of women in the workplace over the last year, in a series of speeches she has made.

But, actually, the Auletta piece is mostly a full-on Sandberg profile, hitting all the obvious stops in her life and in that of Google — her previous employer — and Facebook, her current one. Also, of course, we can’t leave out the fight between those two tech behemoths.

No news is committed, but it is a very good read (and the second big piece — the other was the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek — Sandberg has been the subject of of late.)

I was also interviewed for the piece, which started out as a larger one on women in Silicon Valley. No surprise, it quickly became largely about one of its most interesting ones.

Oddly, in a section about women in tech, I am quoted saying that I scare men. To be fair: I am an equal opportunity terrifier.

Sandberg, who comes off as quite a deft smoothie (which she is) in the New Yorker piece, is clearly not a terrifier and it seems to be working out well for her so far.

Starting Wednesday, some Samsung Galaxy tablet users will be able to buy app versions of seven magazines, as single copies or monthly subscriptions. The deal comes via Next Issue Media, the “Hulu for Magazines” consortium five big publishers put together to build their own digital newsstand.

This is a cautious first step, with lots of caveats, and Next Issue is taking pains to play down expectations, calling it an “early preview.”

And by my calendar, it’s a bit behind Next Issue’s previously announced plans to have something in the market early this year.

But it’s still something. And you could argue that while the digital magazine market formally kicked off last year when Apple introduced the iPad, it’s been moving pretty slowly since then. So Next Issue really hasn’t missed that much.

Details:

• Four of the consortium’s partners are selling titles: Esquire and Popular Mechanics from Hearst; Fitness and Parents from Meredith; the New Yorker from Conde Nast; and Fortune and Time from Time Warner’s Time Inc. News Corp., the other partner, doesn’t publish any print magazines (they do own this Web site, though).
• Prices are set by publishers, who will be able to offer existing print subscribers free digital editions. For now, though, they can’t offer new subscribers print + digital bundles like the ones that Conde Nast has started selling via iTunes. Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther says that’s coming, along with the possibility of more interesting offers, like Netflix-style subscriptions that let customers swap titles in and out.
• The titles are only available to Galaxy owners who have bought a model with wireless service from Verizon, which sells the titles through a single app available in its Vcast app store.
• Next Issue plans to offer more magazines, on more devices, in the fall. CEO Morgan Guenther says that by the end of the year the consortium will be selling at least 40 titles, and should also have a version of its app available for HP’s WebOS.
• Apple gives publishers 70 percent of each transaction, and Guenther says magazine publishers will get “at least” that much; device-makers or carriers will split the rest with the consortium.
• Crucially, the publishers will get full access to all subscriber information, including credit card numbers. Apple won’t do that.

Again, these magazines will only be available to a subset of a subset of Android tablet owners, which isn’t that big a market to begin with, for now.

But it is a working demonstration of the concept the consortium promised way back in 2009: A single place to get magazines from multiple publishers, controlled by the publishers themselves.

And theoretically, selling magazines on the terms they want on Android will give the publishers more leverage to get what they want from Apple. But they’re a long way from getting Steve Jobs to back down from his terms–let’s see how sales play out on the two different platforms first.

The poem is behind a paywall, so we’ll just give you the closing couplet, but it’s been screenshotted elsewhere.

Let’s sign up, sign in and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.

Alexie is best known for his short story collection “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and the movie based on one of the stories, “Smoke Signals.”

For another less classy–but amusingly so–sendup of Facebook’s awkwardness, see the Australian comedy group Hungry Beast’s recent video, “The Offline Social Network.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Or, if you prefer, you can think of them as very long magazine articles. Here’s the company’s description of the new program:

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today’s announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

Amazon being Amazon (AMZN), there’s nothing else of substance in its press release, but I have asked the company to answer some basic questions. From my email to Amazon PR:

1) Please provide an anticipated pricing range
2) Please explain how wholesale pricing will work
3) Is this program directed at conventional publishers, or does Amazon anticipate that most of the Singles will be self-published by the authors themselves?

UPDATE: Here’s Amazon’s response. Apologies for not getting these up sooner: Amazon sent them along shortly after I posted my story Tuesday morning, but somehow they were swallowed up in an email vortex–some sort of recurring problem I have with Apple Mail client and Google App email.

Anyway:

1) Prices will be less than a typical book.

2) With any particular publisher, pricing and terms will be consistent with our general terms with that publisher.

3) We expect to work directly with publishers and also for writers themselves to publish Kindle Singles.

If you’re in a hurry, though, you can get a good sense of Denton, at least in present tense, via this clip. It’s an abridged version of my onstage chat with the Gawker Media founder at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event last month, and the editors have done a nice job of distilling it down to seven minutes. Bonus for you guys: This thing is so well-edited that I don’t appear in a single frame.

And if you’re in a real hurry, here’s the money quote, which I extracted from Denton by asking him if he thinks what Gawker does is “journalism”:

In the U.S., traditional media has killed itself. And it’s provided a great opportunity for organizations like us, because they have cared too much about the journalism, about the Pulitzers, about the respect of their peers–and too little about the entertainment of their readers.”

If you’re looking for more detail from our talk, which included Denton lavishing praise on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs but refusing to shed any light on the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 case, check out David Kaplan’s summary at PaidContent.

Malcolm Gladwell pees in the social media punch bowl today, with an essay designed to humiliate and/or enrage anyone who thinks that Twitter, Facebook et al can be used to do really significant things.

It’s a bit of a hammer to a fly, really. Because everyone knows, intuitively, that Twitter can’t overthrow governments and that Facebook can’t stop genocide.

But Gladwell spells it out for us, anyway:

The evangelists of social media…seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960…In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Gladwell doesn’t argue with the idea that Facebook and Twitter are good communication platforms, mind you. But he argues that communication alone doesn’t do anything–getting stuff done takes hard work, structure and person-to-person contact. And in the case of really big things, like the civil rights movement, it takes personal risk.

And social networks can make all of that stuff harder to achieve, he says:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Gladwell–or someone using his name and image–does have a Twitter account, by the way. He joined in December 2008, and now has 60,661 followers. He has used the service to send out a grand total of 22 messages. (He does have an interesting blog, although he hasn’t done much with it lately…)

Also: The New Yorker is now available as an iPad app–publisher Condé Nast used the Wired/Adobe (ADBE) template for this one. So, if you feel like shelling out $4.99 for an issue, head to the Apple (AAPL) iTunes store.

The New Yorker finally came out with its profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, titled “The Face of Facebook.”

And while the magazine piece by Jose Antonio Vargas reads well, there is not much new in it for those who have followed the career of the innovative young wunderkind of social networking.

Exeter computer prodigy, Harvard computer prodigy, Silicon Valley computer prodigy. Throw in the Winklevii’s ceaseless quest to say they could have been somebody (they couldn’t have been), mix in Sean Parker and set to bake to billions.

Vargas did score a few interviews with Zuckerberg, including a visit to his current home and a short glimpse of him interacting with his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

But, like Zuckerberg himself, it’s kind of all gray T-shirt and hoodie and working at Facebook.

The best part is Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin, who penned the upcoming Zuckerberg-slasher, “The Social Network,” finding out his subject loves his television classic “The West Wing.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he responded to Vargas.

Oh, suck it up, Aaron, as Mark surely will have to when the movie comes out October 1.

Until then and as usual: Gray T-shirt, hood and, of course, Facebook.

Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff writer Ken Auletta and a profile of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Huffington Post senior contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas.

For the Zuckerberg piece, Vargas was given a lot of access by the Silicon Valley social networking kingpin, including rare interviews with Zuckerberg’s inner circle and also longtime girlfriend and full-time med student Priscilla Chan.

And Auletta–whose big New Yorker takeout on Google (GOOG) turned into a book that is now being turned into a movie–will be assessing the turnaround efforts at AOL (AOL), which is now being led by former Google exec Tim Armstrong.

The Internet icon has seen troubled times in recent years, including a spinoff from Time Warner (TWX), which should make for interesting fodder for Auletta.

Also in the tech-topic kitty at the New Yorker, sources said: A profile of troublemaking Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton by Ben McGrath, which I am hoping will include his terrific tour of Chinese markets near where he lives in Manhattan’s SoHo.

The piece seems to have been primarily reported this winter, just as Chatroulette was becoming a phenomenon and shortly before Ternovsky lit out for the United States. If you’re interested in digital media investing, there are a few tasty tidbits, like Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson’s assistance in arranging a visa for Ternovskiy, and the programmer’s disdain for Digital Sky Technologies’ Yuri Milner.

And there’s a tiny bit about Chatroulette’s finances, at least as of a couple months ago: Since Google (GOOG) wouldn’t get cut him an AdWords check, Ternovsky’s sole source of revenue was Mamba, a Russian dating service. But that was enough: He was generating $1,500 in advertising a day, which he said covered his costs. Still, there’s not much in the way of “news” here.

But make a point of reading Julia Ioffe’s story, which paints a compelling portrait of Ternovsky’s Moscow childhood. It’s going to seem both familiar and alien to a lot of you.

He was born on April 22, 1992, less than four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and grew up in a tidy apartment in a typically dingy Moscow high-rise. His mother, Elena, is a talented mathematician who works on differential equations at the élite Moscow State University. His father, Vladimir, is an associate professor of mathematics at the same university, and dabbles in cybernetics. Their household was loving but turbulent. The couple fought and frequently separated, and Vladimir started a parallel family, an issue that was never openly discussed. (“It’s a little game we play,” Elena said of the arrangement.) Andrey retreated to his room, where, thanks to Vladimir’s belief that “the future would have something to do with computers,” there was always a machine, as up to date as the family could afford. Vladimir invested great effort in Andrey’s upbringing, engaging a Chinese tutor, a weight-lifting coach, and a chess teacher. But most of Andrey’s learning occurred alone, with his computer. He started with games, usually of the reality-simulating variety. By fourth grade, he was writing code.

Like many young Russians with programming skills, Ternovskiy turned to hacking. When he was eleven, he came upon zloy.org (which translates as angry.org), a hacker forum led by a young man named Sergey (a.k.a. Terminator), who trained his followers in cyber warfare. Using the handle Flashboy, Ternovskiy soon mastered the art of the denial-of-service attack, wherein a target system is paralyzed by a mass of incoming communication requests. Next came Web-site and e-mail hacking, a service he gladly performed for girls who asked nicely. By 2007, at the age of fifteen, Ternovskiy had learned about what hackers call “social engineering”–getting what one wants through deceit or manipulation. Posing as a teacher, Ternovskiy got access to some practice tests before they were delivered to his school.

You can, and should, read the rest here.