Haunted by what he witnessed from the roof of his building near the World Trade Center on 9/11, Russ Smith sold his upstart weekly, New York Press, and moved his family to Baltimore. He has disparaged the city where he once edited Baltimore City Paper as "Tinytown," but old friends say he has a strange way of showing his affection. Former City Paper staff writer Michael Anft offers an in-depth look at the man who now writes a conservative column for the Baltimore weekly he once owned. Smith has said that "if you wanted to find a list of his enemies, all you had to do was pick up the Baltimore white pages," Anft says.
The alt-weekly contrarian launches a new weekly column this week in City Paper under the header "Right Field." Smith will also continue writing his "Mugger" column for New York Press, which he sold late last year. But he and his family left Manhattan to return to Charm City, where he co-founded the City Paper (it was originally called City Squeeze) in 1977 and sold it a decade later.
Johns Hopkins Magazine says Smith led a university newspaper staff "fueled by coffee, beer, and drugs." Several former fellow underclassmen express shock that the devotee of Hunter Thompson has morphed into an acerbic conservative columnist. The alumni magazine calls the The New York Press, which Smith founded in 1988, "a gadfly: loud, vulgar, self-indulgent, disrespectful, and bracing." Smith's "Mugger" column "can veer from political diatribe to vitriolic media critique to accounts of Smith's domestic life, all in one week," Dale Keiger writes. Smith recently sold the paper and has plans to move from New York City to Baltimore.
Russ Smith tells Baltimore City Paper, which he co-founded in 1988, that he plans to return to the city and write full-time. Smith recently sold New York Press and tells City Paper he's tired of the "high-octane" Big Apple, where his TriBeCa apartment was uninhabitable for weeks after Sept. 11. "I'd like my boys to have a real backyard and house, Melissa [his wife] to have a garden, all that stuff. Also, I'm 47 now, and it's not like I go out to clubs at midnight anymore," Smith says.
New York-based Avalon Equity Partners is now the majority owner of both the New York Press and Window Media, which operates a number of gay weeklies, including the New York Blade News and the Washington Blade. Cynthia Cotts of The Village Voice writes that the gay media worries about Avalon's ownership, fearing a private equity company with no gay credentials will undermine the integrity of their product. David W. Unger, co-founder and managing partner of Avalon, insists that neither the Press nor the gay publications will lose their identities simply by being connected through a mutual investor. Unger says the Press should make money "with just a little hands-on management."
Keith Kelly reports in today's New York Post that Russ Smith discussed selling his paper to Taki Theodoracopulos, one of its well-heeled columnists, for $5 million. (In a letter to Jim Romanesko's Media News, Smith said Kelly's story is "wrong.")
New York Press loses its Web site after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Publisher Russ Smith also was evacuated from his apartment a few blocks from the site of the terrorist attacks.
