This past summer, longtime alt (to the Village Voice)-weekly The New York Press died, a victim of neglect and mismanagement, fated to disappear into its ill-fitting parent company. Sad! But! Now! Joe Pompeo reports that the Press is being relaunched, online-only, by "Tom Allon, the owner of [parent company] Manhattan Media and a 2013 mayoral candidate." What's the plan, Tom?
In your shattered Thursday media column: The Guardian's circulation drops, the New York Press is dead(ish), media reporter job moves continue, and meta-aggregation is about as great as you'd think.
In your frigid Friday media column: rumored troubles at the NY Press, Jose Antonio Vargas can't drive, a headline legend retires, Demand Media acts just as you'd expect them to, and Conde Nast will brag about its digital sales.
"I have been putting off doing this Rate-A-Date because I genuinely liked Paul Janka. I felt bad for him in a way," writes Kelly Kreth, the ousted New York Press sex columnist, PR bunny, and seeker of any and all forms of attention. Paul Janka, Manhattan's slimiest bachelor and minor internet-celebrity, "seemed lost and confused and completely harmless... He is just a man with a compulsion that needs to be addressed... He graduated from Harvard and is pretty smart and intense, but it would seem that a few years ago he became aimless. He worries, too, that he isn't contributing to society." Not with a tract called How To Get Laid in NYC, he isn't. Her five-hour date with him is full of frankly disturbing scatological descriptions that cross the line into the clinically weird. It also reminds us where all the smart girls are on a Sunday night: not going on dates as a "media joke."
Have you seen those commercials starring real-life Knicks fans going on about how much they love their team? The New York Press called foul on the ads this week, reporting the team had hired actors to play the roles. Not exactly a shocker, how many authentic Knicks fans could there possibly be these days? The New York Post was outraged enough to run a double bylined piece today, albeit without crediting the Press story, which occasionally happens after an item has languished for a couple of days. Though, um, we wondered how the Post came across the item-can you even get the Press in Midtown?
Anal annal-er and New York Press sex columnist Kelly Kreth was fired Friday after just three months by editor David Blum, who hasn't been satisfied by any of the four three sex columnists he's fired in the last year. Neither Rachel Kramer-Bussel nor Kreth's Press-predecessor Stephanie Sellars did it for the ex-Voice editor. The co-authors of his short-lived "Married Not Dead" sex column at the Voice (kicked to the curb a couple of days after Blum was replaced) didn't do it for anyone. "My feeling is, when you hire a columnist, you let them express themselves in their own way," Blum told us. "Ultimately you have to decide whether it works or not." Kreth was fired for "taste," which admittedly, came in short supply in her columns. In large supply? Gems like this: "I write about my tight starfish because I know, even while disgusted, people will be compelled to read. It doesn't matter if it is out of titillation or horror, want or need, we just want their eyes on the page and on us." Kelly, honey, we hate to break it to you, but the Press is no stranger to a tight asshole.
NY Press's Matt Elzweig thinks that subway love dreamfinders Patrick Moberg and Camille Hayton's rise to quasi-fame has something to do with Jakob Lodwick and Julia Allison's 'connections to Gawker.' "There's an implication that because of your ongoing relationship with both Gawker and Patrick Moberg, that you may have had something to do with the 11/5 and 11/6 items on Gawker about Moberg," he wrote to Jakob on 11/26, in a chain of emails that, in the spirit of "Hey, I tried," Matt saw fit to include in today's cover article. "Did that connection (between you and Gawker) have anything to do with its reporting on the Moberg story? Did Gawker learn about the video and/or Moberg's website directly from you? (If not, how do you suppose they did learn about it?)" Huh?
Matt Elzweig, the New York Press reporter who recently took Deborah Solomon to task for unsavory journalistic methods, placed a fake ad on Craigslist in which he posed as a network executive seeking non-WGA humor writers to work on a weekly series during the strike. The Press rationalized the experiment, which received more than 80 responses, by agreeing amongst themselves that the ad "reeked of bogus intent." "We wanted to meet the scabs," Elzweig explains. Ha! That's exactly the same logic vice squad cops use right before their cases are dismissed. "We wanted to meet the scabs!"
Left: Last week's New York Press cover story about how things are sorta sucky for Jerry Seinfeld. Right: this week's New York Observer cover (drawn by Drew Friedman) for a story about how things are sorta really sucky for Governor Elliot Spitzer. Two things: We had no idea that the stereotypical Hispanic immigrant's fashion sense stopped evolving halfway through the 80s. (No wonder the Observer removed that figure from the paper's actual cover!) Also, we wonder how much time the Press art department spent with their rulers, making absolutely sure that, unlike previous covers by the same editor, the nose of a Jewish man is not drawn more than twice as long as it is wide.
Just in time for Halloween, New York Press sex columnist Kelly Krethtells us which writers and "writers" she'd like to bone next, now that already notched loser- director-pervert Eric Schaeffer on her lipstick case. We read this so now you have to, too: "James Frey... I want to curl my tongue around yours like the southern drawl does the tango with yours. I want to be your drug. Snort me, inhale me, shove me up your nose, up your ass, swallow me, digest me; you will not have to drive to Harlem to try to score. I want to search your face for scars and lick them when I find them. I want you to bite me with those altered teeth as hard as you can. I want you to guzzle some of my blood and wear the rest like a coat. Big Jim, will you be my dime bag? I'd go down dirty alleys and go down on you in them." Also: "He's that guy, the one who will lie to get into your pants." Well, yes.
New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's column this weekend took on Times magazine Q&A'er Deborah Solomon in response to a recent New York Press cover story on Solomon's editing antics. (Solomon's penchant for refashioning the responses of her interview subjects for her 700-word weekly column earned her the serious ire of NPR host Ira Glass, columnist Amy Dickinson and the LA Times critic Christopher Knight.) Solomon doesn't make much of an effort to come off clean in Hoyt's column, calling Dickinson "boastful," (mean!) and misplacing the tape of her Ira Glass interview (whoops!). Solomon also told the Times' internal watchdog that she was just joking when she told a Columbia Journalism Review reporter in 2005 to "Feel free to mix the pieces of this interview around, which is what I do. There's no Q. and A. protocol... you can write the manual." Hold your horses, Deb, Hoyt writes. "In fact, there is a protocol, and 'Questions For' isn't living up to it," he says. Oh snap. The take-away point here may be, however, that Christ, the New York Press had a story with legs! One with tormented prose that could easily have been cut in half, but nevertheless! You don't have a story until the New York Times says you do, so by all means, congratulations.
Last week's New York Press cover story about New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon's perhaps less-than-ethical methods reminded some of her other subjects of their own negative experiences with the Q&A queen. Particularly irate was one Christopher Knight, longtime Los Angeles Times art critic and 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
The New York Press is carrying a breathless 3,000-word piece today alleging that Deborah Solomon, the awesomely tactless New York Times Magazine Q&A queen, redistributed and flat-out invented questions she hadn't actually asked in final versions of interviews that she conducted with "This American Life" host Ira Glass and advice columnist Amy Dickinson. The subjects cried foul to Press reporter Matt Elzweig, who was until about a year and a half ago a security guard at the Met. The Times was not particularly responsive to his inquiries. Elzweig's piece reads as though he's just discovered White House plumbers in Times executive editor Bill Keller's basement. Instead, the Press has, for the most part, stumbled upon a fairly common editing practice.
Publicist Kelly Kreth had long fantasized about boning the author of I Can't Believe I'm Still Single, noted emosogynist perv Eric Schaeffer. So it's really no surprise that, when she finally managed to cram herself into his busy dating schedule, she found him charming. Another thing you should know about Kelly is that her idea of third-date banter is "If you gag and vomit I will force you to lick it up."
From the mailbag: "Does anyone care that David Blum is going to be the new (managing?) editor at the New York Press?" Oh I'm sure someone does.
Lost amidst all the hubbub about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones is this little nugget: The little alternative weekly that could, the New York Press, got bought yesterday! Its new owners are "Manhattan Media." You may be familiar with their other publications, New York Family and AVENUE, not to mention a newish outfit called Our Town, Downtown. Doesn't that just sound so quaint! What's even quainter is that the new owners are going to merge Our Town, Downtown with the Press. Just when it seemed like it would be the perfect time for a real competitor to the New Times-ified Voice to emerge, the Press basically gets turned into a community paper. Then there are these reassuring words: "We also anticipate that most current New York Press employees will be joining the Manhattan Media family." (Does that include Martin Basroon, we wonder?) The full memo follows.
The woes of the New York Press are infamous—staff turnover, low morale, little money. (There's a plus side too—a crazy history, stunts sometimes gone right and also hilariously wrong, and always pluck and gritty determination.) While looking around at the men behind the weekly, we realized we knew nothing about New York Press's Chief Financial Officer, Martin Basroon. He's been at his duties since 2005, at the behest of a friend, Press owner David Unger, and he took that job pretty much right after his release from prison.
