Media People

While Lola Ogunnaike has interviewed First  Lady Michelle Obama for BET and been a regular contributor for Today and MSNBC, her first love is writing, with her byline appearing in the pages of Rolling Stone, Vibe, New York, Elle and Glamour.

So what does it take to land those coveted cover stories time and time again? Cultivating strong relationships with editors, she says in mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview.

“One of the key things is to make sure they know who you are. That can be as simple as asking them out for coffee or tea or asking them out to dinner and offering to pay for both of those things, which is very important.”

Don’t think once you’ve got your story in, you’re done. “It’s also just following up with a link to a story that you may have written, something as simple as ‘You may not have gotten the chance to see my New York Times piece in the style section; thought you may be interested in this.’ What I found in my years in the industry is that most people don’t follow up. So, if you actually do, then that puts you head and shoulders above the pack.”

Read the full interview.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

During TBS’ upfronts, the network’s beacon of hope — Conan O’Brien — took a couple shots at media heavyweights Oprah and Rupert Murdoch. The Huffington Post reports that O’Brien went through fake Craigslist ads and as he did, the pictures of the alleged authors flashed on a screen behind him.

When Oprah popped up, O’Brien said, “For sale: Controlling interest in OWN. $10 or best offer.” Not bad! But we liked the Murdoch zinger better.

With a picture of Murdoch up, O’Brien deadpanned, “Missed connection: You: beautiful, checking your voicemail. Me: goblin-like, selling your voicemail.” Nicely done.

Chances are that after you watch this clip of Anna Wintour on “The Colbert Report,” you’ll appreciate the fashion diva more. First, she displays some pretty solid comedic timing when she comments on Stephen Colbert’s outfit. Then she admits that “there were tears in the office of Vogue in support of gay marriage.”

Wintour was referring to President Barack Obama’s backing of gay marriage, and the disclosure — although not exactly surprising — was touching, in that we typically don’t get to experience Vogue’s editor in such a casual way. It’s nice to see, and we’re hoping for more of it.

Rupert Murdoch had some good times on Twitter recently. He tweeted the above on Saturday, which, coming from him, is sort of ironic and hilarious. However, Murdoch easily topped that with his response to someone who pointed out his hypocrisy:

You tell ‘em, Rupert.

With 21 years of experience under his belt, Dan Savage knows sex — sex journalism, that is. In mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do interview, the noted columnist and star of MTV’s Savage U discussed how today’s media coverage on sex and homosexuality has changed since he first launched “Savage Love” in Seattle’s The Stranger in 1991.

“When I started the column, The Village Voice wouldn’t pick it up because it was too dirty for New York, which was saying something,” Savage recalled. “I was writing this column for kinky, rainy Seattle, and the then editor of the Chicago Reader told me that if I wanted to be in the Chicago Reader I had to write less about anal sex. I think that has changed and the Internet helped change it, because suddenly there was this place for sex writing without the gatekeepers and this paranoia that some child somewhere might pick up this newspaper.”

Find out how he finally got his column syndicated in So What Do You Do, Dan Savage?.

 

You didn’t think we’d get out of the Gawker Fox News Mole story without a comment from Roger Ailes, did you? We certainly hope not. While addressing the media during The Hollywood Reporter’s “New York Issue” event, Ailes had a hilarious take on the whole thing:

What is Gawker? Is that that pornographic website? I don’t care if they have a mole beause we aren’t doing anything wrong, so it doesn’t matter… they hate me because I make money and I do it legitimately and they don’t like my politics, and that’s America.

Someone needs to remember to put “They hate me because I make money and I do it legitimately and they don’t like my politics, and that’s America,” on Ailes’ tombstone one day, because that is gold.

It was hard to miss the buzz surrounding the scandalous Gossip Girl when it debuted in 2007, and the books the television series is based on weren’t any tamer.

In mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview, the series’ creator Cecily von Ziegesar explained how she came up with the inspiration for those elite Upper East Side teenagers.

“I always start with something that’s real, an actual occurrence or somebody that I really know. Then, I change it so much that it’s not that anymore. But that’s always a kind of germ of where the person comes from,” she said. “I had a friend who was obsessed with Audrey Hepburn and, so, Blair is obsessed with Audrey Hepburn. But I just borrowed that characteristic from a friend. The rest of Blair’s characteristics have nothing to do with that friend.”

Click here for the full interview.

Attention any New York media person in a relationship: Brian Stelter, media reporter extraordinaire for The New York Times, is setting the bar extremely high. Stelter is currently dating Jamie Shupak, NY1′s traffic reporter and Complex’s dating columnist. In her piece on “skills every guy should possess,” Shupak inadvertently put every media person in a relationship on notice, by revealing that Stelter is basically the best boyfriend ever. “Luckily the guy I’m dating is an all-star at this; he writes me a love letter every single day,” wrote Shupak.

Every single day? That’s insanity, right? Well, being the dedicated journalists that we are, we tweeted to Stelter, asking that he either confirm or deny this outrageous claim. Turns out, it’s true. “Confirm,” wrote Stelter. “If you were dating @JamieShupak, you’d do exactly the same thing.” Shupak then backed him up, explaining, “and FTR: it’s never a ‘hey babe ur hott’ text as one (very amateur) commenter suggested.”

Damn you Stelter. Damn you and your romantic ways. Now everyone has to up their game. Or at least delete that “hi sexxxy, ur eyes are like rainbows made out of puppies” text and come up with something better.

Sorry to start your Friday out like this, but we’ve got to tell you: The rich do, in fact, get richer. Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive who quit with a hilarious New York Times Op-Ed, is getting $1.5 million to write a memoir.

On Wednesday we heard that the deal was going to be about $1 million (which is absurd enough), but The New York Post reports that Hachette Book Group has agreed to pay a $1.5 advance to Smith.

Oh, and get this: that payday is about triple his old annual salary at Goldman Sachs.

USA! USA! USA!

Karl Lagerfeld is attacking Tina Brown again. In February, Lagerfeld reacted to a Newsweek article that depicted him as overrated by criticizing Brown and the magazine, and now WWD is reporting that Lagerfeld hasn’t forgotten about the piece. Lagerfeld told reporters during a press conference that Newsweek “is not doing well at all,” and that Brown “is dying.”

Then Lagerfeld delved deeper. ”I’m sorry for Tina Brown, who was such a success at ‘Vanity Fair,’ to go down with a shitty little paper like this. I’m sorry.”

And we’re all sorry that Lagerfeld is so riled up about this. Perhaps, to paraphrase Shakespeare, Lagerfeld doth protest too much?