The Media Mob

Bob Torricelli, the former senator from New Jersey who didn't seek re-election after his first term because, well, we know why!, has an interesting view of the reason The Record of Bergen County is having trouble, and it's not, he thinks, the troubled newspaper industry in general. News that the newspaper recently had to close its Hackensack office seemed to delight him because, as he wrote in his column on PolitickerNJ, "somewhere the Record stopped becoming a mirror of the happy suburban life and it became mean."

He's no media expert--although he may be an expert on the Record after all the ink the newspaper gave him back in 2002--but he gives the newspaper 10 years to live.  read more »

On Tuesday, The New York Press ran a short item on its web site reporting that had a strike involving Village Voice staffers had been averted. It was a small story, but the Press owned it from start to finish. Today, The New York Times ran a brief in its Arts section.

Here's a quote from Voice-legend Tom Robbins in the brief:

“We got a deal 3 o’clock this morning,” said Tom Robbins, a Voice columnist and shop steward for the United Auto Workers Local 2110. “We won a good victory for unions... We had a celebratory drink of a little Scotch and then went home.  read more »

• 0 comments

The writing has been all the wall for weeks and now the carnage has been unleashed: the L.A. Times is cutting loose 150 newsroom positions, and 250 overall. Pink slips come by Labor Day. This news comes only a few months after the paper let go 36 newsroom jobs through buyouts, and puts the total newsroom number at about 700, down from the 1,200 it had just seven years ago. 

Russ Stanton's sobering memo is here.  

Charlie Rose's website features an interview with Clay Felker from 1995.

"I've often said that editors who are successful have confidence of their own ignorance," Mr. Felker told Mr. Rose. "By that I mean, What is a story? You ask a question what a story is. And then you find someone else to go out and find the answer... You just need to be able to find the questions."

Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.  read more »

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine)

Vanity Fair has added New York contributors Vanessa Grigoriadis and (Observer-alumnus) Joe Hagan as contributing editors to its fantastically sizeable masthead, WWD's Irin Carmon reports this morning.

She also writes that it is expected that they will continue as New York contributing editors as well.

On June 22, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt had a few words for the Times’ Maureen Dowd for several primary-season columns that disparaged Hillary Clinton. "Even [Ms. Dowd], I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season."

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong.  read more »

Culture + Travel, the idiosyncratic young magazine known for its high-minded approach to travel writing, has been hit with substantial budget cuts about three months after trade journalism vet Bruce Morris joined its parent company, Louise Blouin Media (LBM), as chief operating officer.

To C+T readers, the most obvious change involves the magazine’s publication schedule: Starting this November, it will move from a bimonthly schedule to a quarterly one.

Circulation is also apparently going down—according to Mr. Morris, copies of the magazine will be sent to a total of 40,000 subscribers. Last August, that number was at 75,000, according to an interview conducted at the time with C+T’s editor-in-chief, Kate Sekules. Ms. Sekules had been brought over from Food and Wine a few months earlier, about a year after the magazine first launched in the fall of 2007 under the leadership of ex-Condé Nast editorial director James Truman. Mr. Truman, who was the founding C.E.O. at C+T’s parent company, resigned in October of 2006.  read more »

Frighteningly prolific author Joyce Carol Oates talks to Time Magazine's Andrea Sachs about her latest novel, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike.

Since the book is a fictionalized take on the murder of JonBenét Ramsey (12 years later and still unsolved), Ms. Sachs asked the author "What do you think of tabloids?" Here's Ms. Oates' response:

I talk about Tabloid Hell in the novel ... Basically, I read the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker ... One doesn't have an unlimited amount of time for reading everything.

According to Time, My Sister is Ms. Oates' 37th novel so we tend to believe her when she says her time is limited.

Variety's Michael Schneider reports that HBO has optioned Terry Cheney's book, Manic: A Memoir, about a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer struggling with mental illness. According to a video on Ms. Cheney's publisher's Web site, as a lawyer the author represented Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones.

The show will be a one-hour drama, executive produced by Janet Tamaro, a news correspodent-turned-writer (her IMDB bio says she "produced investigative stories for long-form newsmagazine shows and won several journalism awards for her work," but fails to note which shows or awards; her credits page includes shows like Lost, CSI:NY, Bones and others) and Gavin Polone, who executive produces Curb Your Enthusiasm and Tell Me You Love Me for HBO and previously brought the world Gilmore Girls.  read more »