Put out by one of the few independent publishing companies left in the country, Yankee aims to provide fresh and heartfelt accounts of life in the six New England states.  ”Our mission has always been New England. Is it about place? Is it about people interacting with place? That’s the first thing we ask and it’s the filter for everything — does it say something about New England?” said editor Mel Allen. 

Allen says the bi-monthly publication is more than open to pitches from freelancers. ”There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than finding new writers,” Allen said. “It’s the most fun part of the editor’s job.” He also stressed that his staff appreciates material that strays from the conventional. “Come in with a topic that will surprise us.”

Get all the details and editors’ contact info in How To Pitch: Yankee.

– Nicholas Braun

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

In Mediabistro’s latest So What Do You Do? interview, Star editor-in-chief James Heidenry tackles his newsstand nemeses head-on, calling People and Us Weekly “the mouthpiece of celebrity publicists” – and he didn’t mean that in a positive way.

Some of his other beefs with the mags? They pay celebrities for stories but don’t admit it, and they get most of their biggest “scoops” right from the pages of Star.

“Even Bonnie Fuller, who used to run Star magazine, doesn’t give us credit at HollywoodlLife.com. But Us Weekly, I think, is the biggest culprit of hypocrisy,” Heidenry said. “Us Weekly has Kim [Kardashian] on the cover saying ‘Don’t Call Me Fat,’ and when you open up the issue, it points out our cover and says ‘Look how these tabloids are making fun of her’ when they are doing it on the cover themselves — not making fun of her, but using Kim’s pregnancy to sell magazines and trying to take a holier-than-thou attitude. To me, it was just a lack of respect for their readers.”

For more of Heidenry’s thoughts on the competition plus what he looks for L.A. reporters, read So What Do You Do, James Heidenry, Editor-in-Chief of Star?

Credit: Roxxe Ireland/Marc Bryan-Brown for Newsweek Daily Beast

For the fourth annual Women in the World Summit, Tina Brown and Newsweek Daily Beast gathered remarkable women of all stripes to highlight their sisters around the globe and provide solutions to atrocities like the honor killings in Pakistan and the tens of thousands of rapes in Syria.

In her opening remarks Thursday at Lincoln Center, Brown urged everyone in attendance to take Sheryl Sandberg‘s advice a step further and “lean ON” companies and governments to do a better job at protecting and propelling women forward. Read more

You remember Cat Marnell, right? The xojane.com blogger who famously infused her writing of lipsticks and beauty balms with tales of her own drug use.

Well, Mediabistro caught up with Jane Pratt, founder of xojane and Jane and Sassy before that, to find out if she had any regrets about hiring such a controversial scribe. 

“I was definitely doing everything I could to get her into rehab, which she did do, and encouraging her to get better for herself,” Pratt said in the latest So What Do You Do? interview. ”But I don’t think that her writing about it is what made her do it. I think it’s a lot deeper than that, and writing about it was cathartic for her and helpful to other women who were going through that.” 

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Jane Pratt, Editor-in-Chief of xojane.com?

Sorry, folks. Our fair Diane Clehane is off for the day, but Lunch will be back next week. (Hmm, wonder who got her usual perch at Michael’s?) In the meantime, check out some of her recent celebrity spottings and interviews:

Naomi Campbell and Her Supermodel Castmates Dish About Their New ‘Face’

Shirley MacLaine Stops by a Birthday Party for Liz Smith

Lisa Vanderpump Dishes on Beverly Hills Housewives, Wendy Williams Holds Court

Over 400 members of New York media and bloggerati packed Kiss & Fly in the Meatpacking District Thursday to watch the premiere episode of VH1′s Love & Hip-Hop 3, which airs Monday January 7. For those not in the know, that’s the show that goes inside the lives (more personal than professional, really) of hip-hop stars.

While the show’s first outing focused mainly on rapper Jim Jones and his family and friends, this season has a lot of upstarts whose affiliations with the music world are flimsy at best. I’m still trying to figure out what it means for Rashidah Ali to be a “shoe consultant” to the stars, but, hey, whatever works for you.

Here are more photos from the event, courtesy of photographer Stephen Knight: Read more

In his over 20 years in the fashion business, Elle creative director Joe Zee has worked for such titles as Details and Allure and styled advertising campaigns for companies like Gap and DKNY. And, in our Media Beat interview, the Toronto native and star of Sundance Channel’s All On the Line with Joe Zee was very clear about how he got to the top.

One: he worked for people he could learn from, namely legendary fashion stylist and editor Polly Mellen. (“She taught me what it was like to have a passion for something.”)

And, two, he worked his butt off. “I won’t put stock in people who tell me they wanna work in fashion, because they wanna be glamorous. They wanna be famous. They wanna be well known,” he said. “If you wanna be those things, wrong business.”

Part 1: Elle‘s Joe Zee Puts It All on the Line for Sundance Channel
Part 2: Elle‘s Joe Zee Reveals Exactly What a Magazine Creative Director Does

As creative director for Elle, Joe Zee describes his as an “interesting, sort of nebulous title.”

“I work with all the visuals from cover to cover, so when you read the magazine, whether it’s the model, the celebrity, the styling, the fashion, the photography, all those things come into my play,” Zee explained in our Media Beat interview. “It’s really sort of helping to define a visual signature for the magazine.”

And @mrjoezee gets pummeled with questions daily from women trying to mimic the seemingly effortless style of their favorite celebs. The number one question he gets? No, not that white pants after Labor Day thing — seriously, are we still discussing that?

“I think the biggest question I get all the time is people want my job. How do I do what you do?” said Zee. “I love my job, and it definitely is glamorous after all these years. But there was a lot of years of no glamour to get to that point.”

Part 1: Elle‘s Joe Zee Puts It All on the Line for Sundance Channel
Part 3: How Elle‘s Joe Zee Broke Into Fashion (and How You Can Too)

In All on the Line with Joe Zee, Elle creative director Joe Zee helps struggling fashion designers save their businesses. And, although reality shows come a dime a dozen these days, Zee says the decision to step in front of the camera for Sundance Channel was not taken lightly.

“I loved the idea of being able to do this, but it was important to me that it be authentic. It was important to me that it be original, and that it would be genuine, and that I could actually come in there and help people,” Zee said in our Media Beat interview.

And he says that the many sides of his personality you see in the show are the real deal.

“The reality is we do what we do, because I am authentic in that position. I don’t do it because of the cameras. I don’t do it for any heightened drama. I do it because I really believe in it. If I’m mad at you, I’m really mad at you and, if I’m really excited about you, I’m really excited about you. And those moments exist with or without what’s going on. So, I think my reality TV experience is the fact that I can be myself.”

Part 2: Elle‘s Joe Zee Reveals Exactly What a Magazine Creative Director Does
Part 3: How Elle‘s Joe Zee Broke Into Fashion (and How You Can Too)

Another accomplishment beloved broadcaster Sue Simmons can add to her resume? Being indirectly responsible for getting LeVar Burton his hosting gig at Reading Rainbow. In our latest Media Beat  interview, the actor and founder of RRKidz said that, although he’d already done some public TV hosting in Boston, it wasn’t until he came through New York that his career took off.

“I was on my way to Africa, and [Reading Rainbow producers] saw me on a Live at Five interview with Sue Simmons — you didn’t come to New York without sitting down with Sue Simmons on Live at Five — and they saw me, and they tracked me down before I left town and talked to me about the show. They pitched the idea and I thought, ‘This is a no-brainer.’ A half an hour of television in the summer to get the attention of kids where they are, where they’re hanging out, and bring them back to literature? I’m in.”

Part 2: LeVar Burton: By not focusing on reading, “We’re sacrificing our kids”
Part 3: LeVar Burton on How Science Fiction Influences Technology