Archives: March 2005

New Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch is already shaking things up at the magazine. Deputy Editor Lea Carpenter, who was brought in to oversee the business side of the publication after the death of George Plimpton, is leaving, as is Ben Ryder Howe, who, according to Gourevitch, viewed the transition as “an opportunity to pursue his freelancing.”

Senior editor Oliver Broudy has been promoted to Managing Editor, following the recent departure of Fiona Maazel. And now that intern Ryan Carr has been promoted to editorial assistant, Gourevitch says they’re reviving their dormant internship program. He’s also looking to fill two editorial positions and doesn’t know if they’ll expand the staff under his tenure, but says they’re “certainly not shrinking it.”

Departures in the wake of a new editor invariably raise questions about the possibility of a major housecleaning, but Gourevitch says he has no plans for that and has assured staff members that their jobs are secure. “I was very poorly informed about what went on before I got there,” he says. “Almost everyone had been considering their position as ‘tentative.’ [But] I’m really pleased with the people who are there.”

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The Jets bid $720 million for the Hudson Rail Yards and MTA approved it. The Dolans of Cablevision bid $40 million more, but lost and are reportedly considering suing as a result. So stadium it is, then.
MTA votes unanimously for Jets [Crain's]

NBC just reported that the MTA board voted to accept the Jets’ stadium bid over Cablevision’s, even if the Madison Square Garden owner offered more money.

Scoreboard: Bloomberg 1, waiting for the call from the Olympic Committee. Any day now, Mike.

The New York Post <a href="alleges that the New York Daily News is giving away free papers.

Newsday claims that the New York Daily News alleges that the New York Post is giving away free papers (a story that we broke):

But the shocking news—the truly shocking news—that we’ve just uncovered is that the daily Metro, is giving away free papers on the street. We demand an audit bureau investigation into these free papers immediately!

Reports are also emerging that the Village Voice is also being given away free. The Onion is also very close to, if not in fact, free. And we also suspect that the New York Press may not be worth more than it costs.

[**yes, we're stealing that from Wonkette. Steal, steal, steal!]

James Wolcott takes a club to nearly everyone who’s come across his TV screen in the last 48 hours:

· On Margaret Carlson and Robert Novak: …Carlson (how the hell does she have a career?) had been so effusive in praise of them and so abusive in disparagement of Michael Schiavo that Robert Novak commended her after she paused for breath, which is like being kissed by a vampire who’s removed his fangs. Of course, it’s easy for your heart to go out to people when it’s untethered from your brain, and Carlson’s brain has never been a wonder of science.

· On Nancy Grace and Don Imus: Just this morning the appalling Nancy Grace railed on Imus’s MSNBC show that Terri Schiavo was “turning and twisting in pain” and nobody was doing anything about it. I have no heard a single medical expert or visitor to her room claim that she’s showing any signs of physical anguish. That was something Nancy Grace just pulled out of imaginative ass and Don Imus, who can rampage for days on the finest details of the “vicious hatchetjob” the Wall Street Journal did on him, was too dumbfuck even to call her on it.

But most interestingly, Wolcott details a punch he pulled with regard to Joe Scarborough—one involving a dead woman in Scarborough’s former district office:

And then there’s Joe Scarborough. Because I have a heart, I removed a couple of pages from by book Attack Poodles about the death of Lori Klausitis, a young staffer for then Republican Congressman Scarborough whose body was discovered in his district office. He was in Washington, DC at the time of her death, but there were some iffy aspects about her case and unlike the Gary Condit situation, this mini-mystery got no play in the national media since it didn’t plug into the horny Clinton Democrats-interns meme…I felt I could make my points about him as a TV personality without the passage, so I cut it, and hearing second-hand he was concerned about the book, called him up to tell him so. We had a very pleasant, brief conversation, and that was it.

Or maybe he cut it because if it isn’t true, what he’s implying could result in a Condit-esque lawsuit, like the one his VF colleague Dominick Dunne is fighting (and possibly losing) at the moment. (UPDATE: Settled a couple of weeks ago, we’re told. But still.)

New York Social Diary’s David Patrick Columbia takes the Daily News’s Hudson Morgan to task for turning what Columbia thought were fairly innocuous, if not flattering, comments about Melania (Knauss) Trump into a slightly scandalous gossip item, and explains how the sausage was made, in excruciating detail:

I got a call late Monday afternoon from a man identifying himself as Hud Morgan, assistant to Lloyd Grove who has a column in the Daily News. He wanted to ask me some questions about Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s new bride.

Okay; it’s not unusual for someone in the media to call me about a social personality in New York, and I am always accommodating, if possible.

So Mr. Morgan says to me: “she’s the chairwoman of a benefit for the Martha Graham Dance Company and she’s calling herself ‘Melania Trump.’”

Okay, so?

Mr. Morgan asks something like ‘don’t you think it’s a bit early for her to be calling herself Melania Trump?’

We fully expect Columbia to be disappeared shortly for giving away the keys to the castle. It’s just a shame there were no publicists involved.

Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak has a blog now. [via Asymmetrical Information]

From a recent entry, titled “Slanted Journalism Is Everywhere”:

As long as mainstream journalists share a similar view of the world, that world can never be reported ‘objectively’… When you check out something called ‘The View from the Right’, you know what you’re getting, but when you read The New York Times, you think you’re getting “All the news that’s fit to print“.

Well, we’re not sure people really think that. “Media critic” Christopher Hitchens in this book:

How to ward off atrophy and routine, you ask? Well, I can give you a small and perhaps ridiculous example. Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine that most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse.

You may choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily influsion of annoyance with extending my life span.

Per Tea Leaf Reading 101, Mickey Kaus parses CNN‘s Jim Walton:

When, in an NYT story about CNN president Jonathan Klein’s newest ratings-boosting strategy, his corporate superior says

“What I can assure you is Jon will be successful in this position, and he’ll be in this position for many years to come.”

it means:

1) Klein’s newest strategy will fail.
2) Klein will be gone by August.
3) (1) and (2).

We’re hearing that New Yorker staffers are none too happy about Philip Gourevitch’s departure for the Paris Review. Anyone have more specifics? fishbowlny@mediabistro.com.

Related: The New York Finger [FishbowlNY]

We like to think of the “New on Poynter” sidebar on Romenesko as the “Playboy section,” where no one actually reads the articles. But as professional narcissists, we immediately assumed the one titled “Editing in a Fishbowl” was talking about us. (Fishbowl?** Fishbowl? Did someone say our name?) As it turns out, the piece is about newsroom environments where the editor’s behavior gets excruciatingly overanalyzed and misinterpreted, i.e.,

Your assistant managing editor for visuals sent you an e-mail today saying he really liked your photo on the front page. He asks that you stop in to see him; he wants to talk about why you decided to shoot from that particular angle. This means:

A) He hated your photo.
B) He really hated your photo.
C) He thinks you should go into catering.

We’ve certainly seen this before—silly superstitions like, “if Patrick McCarthy wears the red tie today, someone gets fired by 3 PM and Memo Pad does an item about Steve Florio.” Actually, we just made that one up, though we’re sure that somewhere in the recesses of the Fairchild building someone’s looking mournfully at their computer screen and whispering, “but it’s truuuuue…”

Send us your superstitions: fishbowlNY@mediabistro.com

**We also recently noticed that Fishbowl.com was an advertiser on Gawker, but ultimately decided that it was no stranger or ironic than VanityFair.com advertising on Gawker.