“Speaking of which: The news that Bar Rafaeli topped Maxim’s “HOT 100” list has no legs, but lots of leg, and a bare bottom, and a pretty face. A shot of Rafaeli lying nude on the beach is only tenuously connected to any of the material inside: a guide to local beaches and a “SEEN & HEARD” item in which Rafaeli is photographed with a pilot on a flight to Los Angeles. Pretty skimpy!” - Tom McGeveran in The Front, his daily assessment of New York’s tabloids.
Real talk from Tom McGeveran on the John Travolta news:
New York Post: The latest news about John Travolta is that two more people are saying he’s gay. There is a history of this stretching back decades, which depending on your point of view makes it either more likely to be true (where there’s smoke, lots and lots of smoke …) or less likely (there’s a market for shipping “Travolta is gay” material, and relatively little risk involved). And, yes, the real news is that two male masseurs have accused Travolta of touching them inappropriately or demanding sex acts from them.
That’s news on its own, but if the masseuses had been women, the news would have been the fact that he is accused of assault. The most newsworthy element of the story, given that the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit are men, is that if they’re telling the truth, Travolta’s gay.
Windolf, 48, is a recent addition to the group of people who are behind Punch!, a new iPad publication that is, for now, mostly a sparsely populated “bookshelf” of interactive games and visuals and other little graphic toys on the broad themes of contemporary politics and pop culture news. (It’s free at the App Store, here.)
“The web is increasingly feeling like noise and bother,” he said. “I mean I read it, all day. But I don’t always feel so good afterward.”
What he sees in Punch! is the possibility of creating a successor to Spy, the seminal late-’80s monthly-magazine brainchild of Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter that was a turning point in the culture of magazine-making and reading. It was a relatively short-lived, money-losing proposition that, in the final stages of its growth, scattered its seed across Manhattan like some kind of plucked dandelion, sprouting nasty bits of yellow everywhere it landed.
“On the other hand, I used to read Spy and not feel great afterward, either,” he said. “That’s something people forget.”
Terry McDonnell, editor of Sports Illustrated, at last night’s National Magazine Awards ceremony:
“I think that being an editor right now is the most interesting time to be an editor because of all the possibilities that are coming. When the challenge is basically, ‘change, or go home,’ my response to that is, no fear. Bring it.
“I really like this work. I really like your work,” he continued. “I like how it’s fluid, and I like how it’s nuanced, and I like how it’s ironic, and I like how it has so much craft in it, and it has its own tides, it’s own seasons, and it has bogeymen, and maybe it even has magic sometimes when it all comes together. … I think all of you know all of that, and you like that, too.”
“HuffPost is my baby,” she said. “I feel that it’s a long time since it played it’s first cute kitten video, and here it is now seven years later winning a Pulitzer.”
On the Upper West Side, Dan Rather finds an audience for his campfire tales
“What I’ve tried to do, as I’ve said to you, is tell you stories that I tell my friends and family when we’re around the fireplace or outside around the campfire and just tell stories,” Rather said. “Yes, I do include the circumstances under which I left CBS News, a low time in my life, but let me say it to you directly, I’m not complaining and I’m well past it. But I’ve seen rain I’ve seen fire, I’ve seen sunny days, and yes, starry nights. And life goes up and down and I fully understand that.”
“WE JUST CAN’T STOP THE BLEEDING! WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO STOP THE BLEEDING! And we roll this guy over? He was bleeding from his back!”
Alberi gave a thorough lecture in the techniques of “care under fire,” “tactical field care,” and how to make a “primary assessment” of one’s injuries. Are they awake? Are they bleeding? Do they have a pulse?
Then it was time for drills. The journalists broke into smaller groups and assembled in different sections of the gallery space. One group learned about clearing a person’s airways on a dummy with two exposed lungs. Another practiced how to safely roll and drag the wounded. A third, out on the back patio, did CPR.
“You don’t wanna be too low on the sternum, because you could push that little bone into something,” an instructor warned.
More exercises like this were to follow throughout the rest of the day. The next day’s training would address general medical issues and how to deal with being sick in a war zone. Friday will be the grand finale—an outdoor simulation of a conflict-reporting scenario with all manner of loud warzone noises: screams, helicopters, explosions, gunfire. Amid this cacophony, the students will have to drag and treat a 185-pound dummy with fake blood oozing from a puncture wound, for which a raw turkey will provide the simulacrum.
Sebastian Junger, famous author-journalist and friend of the late Tim Hetherington, is training journalists in the Bronx on how to save each other’s lives in combat zones
‘Out’ lays off its entire editorial staff
Editor Aaron Hicklin wants to hire ‘most’ back into his new startup.
BIG! EXCITING! NEWS! Our very own Joe Pompeo is a Mirror Award finalist for his profile of the Huffington Post, post-AOL merger. Congrats to Joe (and his editor, Tom) for their hard work! Winners will be announced June 13.
Read Joe’s story: The road ahead for The Huffington Post: Nine months and a merger later, ‘Capital-J Journalism’ is still a work in progress
![A brief history of what the Village Voice meant to New York, and why someone needs to buy it back from Phoenix | by Tom McGeveran
It’s the post-Koch New York that formed the basis for the best version of the Voice in the last three decades. All that history with the beatniks, the folkies, the hippies, the downtown New School smart set, were part of the formation of the paper’s personality, but it was under the ownership of Carter Burden and afterwards that the Voice becomes the hometown paper of the downtown club scenes, the practitioners of experimental theater, the Soho galleries, the Christopher Street gay scene (only after protests, though!). Those strands joined Andrew Sarris’ highbrow film criticism, Nat Hentoff’s eccentric beautiful harangues, Jules Feiffer’s soft lacerations of New York speech acts and national policy both; together, they became something exciting, rebellious and different.
If the alternative newsweekly had its heyday in the 1960s and early ’70s, they had another in the late ’70s and early ’80s, one that was just different. Because the pisse-copie of New York’s downtown life, its ethnic subcultures, its academic and intellectual avant garde, was being written differently by then, too.
The Times, and New York Magazine, and even Esquire were writing about these neo-Bohemians, these foreign films, these avant-garde artists and performers. When the National Endowment for the Arts got into its big skirmishes in the 1980’s with artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, the mainstream media ate the story up, but told it all in a McCarthyish vein that was hard to take for anyone living here in New York.
That the newspaper that had brought Norman Mailer into uptown living rooms now brought the city’s David Wojnarowiczes there only makes sense.
Menand, again (emphasis mine):
[The] reader implied by a magazine’s interests and attitudes is rarely the magazine’s actual reader. If the actual Voice reader played the bongos or wore a leotard, the paper would not have lived for a year, because very few advertisers will pay to reach coffeehouse musicians and modern dancers. As McAuliffe explains, by the time the Voice began making money, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, the typical reader was thirty years old and had a median family income of $18,771 (about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars today). Almost ninety per cent of Voice readers had gone to college; forty per cent had done postgraduate work. Most had charge accounts at major department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s. Most owned stock. Twenty per cent were New Yorker readers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian.It was the ponytail on the man in the gray flannel suit.
The newspaper as counternarrative, as the voice of cranky, artsy-fartsy, nonconformist New York, the nagging New York conscience of even the city’s power elite, has no place in the Village Voice Media formula. The Phoenix formula is earnest, and meant to serve. Its chief proponents value journalism, and see the same need in every big market: To serve as an alternative to the mainstream media. Not so much to fight the creeping automatism, but to dodge it.
That means that right now we have a Voice that should be producing long, provocative, unreported-but-beautifully written columns about Ray Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policies; that provides an intelligent counternarrative to the war between the corrupt teachers’ unions and their opponents who are actually enemies of the public-school system in do-gooder’s clothing. It is a Voice that has nothing much to say to Washington, or Madison Avenue, or the fashion industry, or the music industry, or Hollywood, or Europe. It is, in vast topical areas, a Voice without a voice.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2dregOt001qc0o3ko1_r1_400.jpg)
A brief history of what the Village Voice meant to New York, and why someone needs to buy it back from Phoenix | by Tom McGeveran
It’s the post-Koch New York that formed the basis for the best version of the Voice in the last three decades. All that history with the beatniks, the folkies, the hippies, the downtown New School smart set, were part of the formation of the paper’s personality, but it was under the ownership of Carter Burden and afterwards that the Voice becomes the hometown paper of the downtown club scenes, the practitioners of experimental theater, the Soho galleries, the Christopher Street gay scene (only after protests, though!). Those strands joined Andrew Sarris’ highbrow film criticism, Nat Hentoff’s eccentric beautiful harangues, Jules Feiffer’s soft lacerations of New York speech acts and national policy both; together, they became something exciting, rebellious and different.
If the alternative newsweekly had its heyday in the 1960s and early ’70s, they had another in the late ’70s and early ’80s, one that was just different. Because the pisse-copie of New York’s downtown life, its ethnic subcultures, its academic and intellectual avant garde, was being written differently by then, too.
The Times, and New York Magazine, and even Esquire were writing about these neo-Bohemians, these foreign films, these avant-garde artists and performers. When the National Endowment for the Arts got into its big skirmishes in the 1980’s with artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, the mainstream media ate the story up, but told it all in a McCarthyish vein that was hard to take for anyone living here in New York.
That the newspaper that had brought Norman Mailer into uptown living rooms now brought the city’s David Wojnarowiczes there only makes sense.
Menand, again (emphasis mine):
[The] reader implied by a magazine’s interests and attitudes is rarely the magazine’s actual reader. If the actual Voice reader played the bongos or wore a leotard, the paper would not have lived for a year, because very few advertisers will pay to reach coffeehouse musicians and modern dancers. As McAuliffe explains, by the time the Voice began making money, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, the typical reader was thirty years old and had a median family income of $18,771 (about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars today). Almost ninety per cent of Voice readers had gone to college; forty per cent had done postgraduate work. Most had charge accounts at major department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s. Most owned stock. Twenty per cent were New Yorker readers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian.It was the ponytail on the man in the gray flannel suit.The newspaper as counternarrative, as the voice of cranky, artsy-fartsy, nonconformist New York, the nagging New York conscience of even the city’s power elite, has no place in the Village Voice Media formula. The Phoenix formula is earnest, and meant to serve. Its chief proponents value journalism, and see the same need in every big market: To serve as an alternative to the mainstream media. Not so much to fight the creeping automatism, but to dodge it.
That means that right now we have a Voice that should be producing long, provocative, unreported-but-beautifully written columns about Ray Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policies; that provides an intelligent counternarrative to the war between the corrupt teachers’ unions and their opponents who are actually enemies of the public-school system in do-gooder’s clothing. It is a Voice that has nothing much to say to Washington, or Madison Avenue, or the fashion industry, or the music industry, or Hollywood, or Europe. It is, in vast topical areas, a Voice without a voice.
In the early 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered it pertinent biographical information that The New York Times’ Tom Wicker suffered from “mental halitosis.” Since this is not, strictly speaking, a medical condition, they qualified the classification with “apparently.”
Internal documents obtained by Capital New York through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the bureau began keeping tabs on Wicker, who died last November, after he published a wide-ranging article for the New York Times Magazine asking, “What Have They Done Since They Shot Dillinger?”
The 1969 article took the F.B.I. to task for expending its resources on bank robberies and sensational murders that garnered them publicity while doing little to no work investigating criminal syndicates and the nuanced financial crimes of much more consequence to the national public interest. Wicker laid the blame at the feet of the man who embodied the bureau—its one and only director, J. Edgar Hoover—for being a practiced P.R. man more than a crime fighter, too concerned with bureaucratic protocol, too slow on civil rights, and too long in the job to right the bureau’s course.
With that article, the F.B.I. began a file on a man they had ignored as “a screwball” despite his having been the Washington bureau chief for the most influential newspaper in the country. It would contain rumors from an unknown third-hand source, a hunt for ulterior motives, and the director’s general disdain. In short, Wicker’s file provides a case study of the personal terms in which the bureau dealt with critical journalists in the final years of Hoover’s reign.
What J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. thought they knew about Tom Wicker of the ‘Times’
In 2012, Vice is still free, and you can still find it on the floors of record shops, and it still has all of that other stuff, too. But the Brooklyn-based monthly also has something that the Vice of the early 2000s probably never would have envisioned in its wildest dreams (or worst nightmares): A chance at beating The New Yorker (and New York, and GQ and Bloomberg Businessweek) in this year’s National Magazine Awards.
Vice, meet The Establishment.
Of course, the two are already well acquainted.
