Tonight's Grey's Anatomy was about an all-nighter. People drank, people died, and some even had sex. You'd think this would be a recipe for some kind of awesome cut-em-up, save-them-lives-and-have-celebratory-sex episode. You'd be wrong.
We hear that Jo Piazza, late of Bauer's wretched and folded-before-opening Cocktail, is going back to her old home at the New York Daily News. That's crazy! Who goes back to places they quit? Oh right, this stupid industry. She'll be a features princess or something. We also hear she found out about Cocktail's death while on a cigarette break. Heh. Anyway, fellow Cocktail castoff Piper Weiss will also be rolling up to the Daily News. So much for that self-actualizing screenplay or book proposal or whatever she was talking about.
The classy way that Bauer handled the shuttering of Cocktail—hiring four people to start the day it closed, for one thing!—made us wonder just what else goes on in the offices in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. You probably already knew that our German friends who run the home of Life & Style and In Touch are as cheap as anything. But what you might not have known was just how cheap. Let's bring on the disgruntled Bauer staffers!
As the staffers of Bauer's ill-fated launch were picking up the pieces of their short-lived careers in Englewood Cliffs, they received an inadvertent forward from the mag's editor-in-chief, Maria Lissandrello, that was meant for the eyes of one staffer only. Some context: Lissandrello, unlike many of her staff (several of whom had started only on Monday, when the magazine shut down), was quickly installed at Women's World when Cocktail folded; she had been at First for Women before. Yeah, we get them confused too. The correspondence after the jump. (Later today, we'll have more on why you should think twice about accepting a job offer from Bauer. But for now, enjoy!)
Yesterday's announcement that Bauer was shutting down Cocktail before the first issue even launched caught many in the industry off-guard—the poor thing didn't even have a chance! "Nobody saw anything coming," says one former staffer. But another source tells us that signs pointing to the magazine's problems had been evident for the past few months. For one thing, what were they doing naming it Cocktail in the first place?
Poor former Daily News gossip girl Jo Piazza. Bauer Publishing lured her to lady-startup Cocktail mag—and now it's not even going to happen. (Still, thank God. Seeing that name on newsstands would just do us in.) Well, too bad Jane isn't going to hire the glut of ladies now to be dismissed by Bauer! [Radar]
New Cocktail publisher Alexandra Heatly tells Ad Age about the forthcoming Bauer ladymag: "The readership that we're looking at is as low as 18 going up to 34. They want it fast, they want it digestible, they want to get through it and then they want to see it the next week." There you have it: Cocktail, the magazine equivalent of the bad boyfriend you can't seem to get rid of.
Girl reporter Jo Piazza, who earned her gossip Brownie badges as a Rush & Molloy stringer before becoming a full feature-writing girl scout, has taken up her sash and emancipated herself from the New York Daily News. She's headed for the greener pastures of New Jersey, where she'll help to launch the Bauer-owned ladygoss magazine Cocktail—no, not the eponymous magazine for men with small weiners that Balk made up—as an executive editor. Good news for Jo, but a devastating blow for newsroom gender equality: now there is almost literally no one left on the News's writing staff for Joanna Molloy to borrow a tampon from.
