Conor Friedersdorf, in his annual roundup of the year's best journalism, spotlights two very different pieces from alt-weeklies as exemplary work. First, Mark Groubert's "Box of Broken Dreams," which appeared in LA Weekly in January, gets a nod for "Exceptional Storytelling," along with pieces from This American Life, the Washington Post and Esquire. Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi's New York Press takedown of Thomas Friedman -- "Flat N All That" -- gets the nod for "Best Rant," with Friedersdorf writing that it puts Friedman "so far up a creek he'll need three shovels and a steering wheel to spelunk himself out."
"Manhattan Media has thrived as the media landscape has fragmented," Crain's New York reports. The privately-held company, which owns a stable of community weeklies and local specialty magazines, says revenue has grown fivefold since 2002 and advertising revenue for its newspapers is up this year over last. Crain's doesn't make much specific mention of the Press, which Manhattan Media purchased in 2007, except to note that "the company is still tinkering" with the alt-weekly.
The papers won a total of 24 awards in the New York Press Association's annual Better Newspaper Contest. Long Island Press won eight awards, including the Sharon R. Fulmer Award for Community Leadership and first-place wins for Coverage of Elections/Politics, Feature Story, Headline Writing, and In-Depth Reporting. Syracuse New Times and the Ithaca Times won five awards each, with New Times taking first for Advertising Excellence, Special Holiday Edition and Sports Action Photo and the Times placing first for Coverage of the Environment and Coverage of Local Government. The New York Press also won six awards.
At an event in Santa Barbara last week, the host of the Travel Channel program No Reservations touched on his early brush with journalism in New York City. Bourdain said that the first piece he ever sold was to the New York Press, but it was never published. "Week after week after week I kept getting bumped," he said. "And in some moment of drunken hubris I called up [the Press] and was like, 'Fuck you man! I'm pulling the article. I'm going to the New Yorker.'" The New Yorker ran the piece, and as the Santa Barbara Independent puts it, "from there, it was a quick hop to best seller list status and worldwide fame."
Armond White, who recently took over as the new chairman of the NY Film Critics Circle, has tastes and opinions that have proved controversial in critic and fan circles. There's even a blog, "Armond Dangerous," devoted to "parsing the confounding film criticism of Mr. Armond White." But White says he doesn't mind, and that he's not stirring the pot just to stir the pot. "I don't say these things to call attention to myself or to get a rise out of people. I say them because I believe them," he tells New York. "We're living in times when critics get fired if they don't like enough movies. People don't need to hear what mouthpieces for the movie industry tell them. They need to hear the truth."
Turner Publishing has just released Leonard Jacobs' first book, Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater 1850-1970. For the hardcover book, Jacobs chose 240 photographs, organized them into coherent sections, and wrote accompanying text. Calling the book "at once concise and comprehensive," Curtain Up's reviewer writes that "historic photos of Broadway's showplaces and show people need a historian to guide us through these pages with facts and anecdotes, and Leonard Jacobs is just the man to make these pictures come to life."
Armond White will replace Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. White, who previously held the same post in 1994, becomes the third African-American to chair NYFCC in the group's 75-year history.
Replacing David Blum as editor-in-chief of the Press is Jerry Portwood, who was previously the paper's managing editor. Blum becomes editor of 02138, the bi-monthly magazine acquired in May by Press parent company Manhattan Media. Blum's move coincides with a major re-launch of the luxury lifestyle magazine for Harvard alumni.
"The New York Press' early years involved a lot of tough slogging, making pitches to recalcitrant advertisers (most of whom are out of business today), attracting writers for minimal fees and continually missing the deadline for our printer in the Meatpacking District," writes founder Russ Smith. "But mostly, we had a lot of fun." He talks about the history of the paper, the future of alt-weeklies, and how his conservative political commentary often got the paper -- which also ran pieces by liberal stalwarts Alexander Cockburn and David Corn -- mislabeled as a "Republican paper." As part of the cover package, the Press also published a timeline of notable events in the paper's history.
Back in 1982, Press editor David Blum -- who was then a Wall Street Journal reporter -- was part of a team that published the one-off satire Off the Wall Street Journal, and now he and the Press have published the sequel: My Wall Street Journal, which is published "in honor of Rupert Murdoch's ever-expanding media empire." The project brings Murdoch's tabloid sensibilities to the legendary paper, with results like a full-page spread of a bare-breasted Ann Coulter; a gossip section entitled "Page Sex;" and headlines such as "Cleaning Lady Sees Virgin in Merrill-Lynch Q4 Loss." The team also produced a fake YouTube video of Murdoch reacting to My Wall Street Journal. Read more from the New York Times and Editor & Publisher.
