New York Magazine

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

When I think of Clay Felker, which is often, it’s at the Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. I had just come to The Observer in 1994 and I was scared and sweating. Clay offered to meet with me once a week and kick around story ideas. I used to bring a stack of napkins. They were, by the end of breakfast, black with scrawl: call David Garth, Milton Glaser, Mrs. Astor; water, Moynihan, women and money, Brooklyn as the new Paris, Columbia vs. N.Y.U., water mains, Murdoch, CBS News, power.

Clay would sit at the Waldorf and dictate. His Felkerian takes on the world, as many have said, added up to a nonfiction novel embodying Clay’s worldview: power was his subject, exuberance was his drive.  read more »

“The secret of a magazine is passion.”

So said Clay Felker, a giant of journalism who died Tuesday morning in Manhattan at age 82. And the passion which most animated Clay was New York, the city he loved and understood so much that he founded a magazine by that name and mentored more than one generation of the city’s best writers. And while the names he minted—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin—may loom large, Clay’s true legacy rests in his tireless and electric commitment to young journalists; where other editors saw employees, he saw passion that could be plumbed for new ideas, and channeled into the deep gorge of ambition that rumbles day and night beneath the city.  read more »

Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.  read more »

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine)

In a signed editorial by Francis X. Clines in today's New York Times, we learn that gentrification is changing the Lower East Side. While Mr. Clines concedes that this is an old story—"Hasn’t that been the case ever since this sliver of Manhattan was laid bare more than a century ago as the crammed tenement haven for immigrants?" he asks—he does seem to feel that the changes in the neighborhood are once again a pressing crisis:

As gentrification rushes in, the neighborhood is fortunate to have the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, so tourists can still walk through the way things were. A preservationist urge is also evident on the streets — from demands for tighter zoning to an “egg rolls and egg creams” block party this Sunday by The Museum at Eldridge Street.

As coincidence would have it, the blog EV Grieve recently posted a scan of Craig Unger's May 28, 1984 New York Magazine cover story "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." (This comes via Gothamist.)  read more »

Will Leitch, editor of Gawker Media's popular sports blog, Deadspin, is joining New York Magazine as a contributing editor. In a farewell post, Mr. Leitch writes:

It is with heavy heart — yet mirthful disposition! — that we announce that our time as Deadspin editor is about to draw to a close. After almost three years of plugging away around here, we are leaving as editor of Deadspin on Friday, June 27. We have accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine. We're excited about it, but, obviously, this has been our baby and our life every day for three years — which is about four decades in blog time — and we're too emotional about the whole thing to get into much more detail about how we feel about the whole matter.

Earlier this year, Mr. Leitch and Vanity Fair's Buzz Bissinger had a very public argument about the differences between journalism and blogging on HBO's Bob Costas Now.

"Brownstoner’s posts tend to read like the reportage of a particularly smart and opinionated community paper. The comment section, by contrast, has become a rolling transcript of the borough’s new anxieties, shameful prejudices, and secret fears. For a long time, those anxieties centered on being left out or pushed out—hopeful buyers or displaced renters thwarted by prices rising out of control."–The What You Are Afraid Of, Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine, May 25, 2008.  read more »

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »

A "Make Ready" of this week's New York Times Magazine just arrived, featuring the much buzzed about cover story by former Gawker editor Emily Gould. The story is headlined Exposed and features three photos of Ms. Gould excluding the cover. (One photo shows just her hands at a laptop, an Instant Message window and a web page on the screen.)

The article is heavily diaristic; for a magazine that exists to explain "The Way We Live Now" every week, it's light in sociology or cultural grasping, focusing instead on the writer's relationships and her job.

Samples after the jump:  read more »

Yankees slugger Jason Giambi admitted to Portfolio's Franz Lidz that when he goes into a slump he wears a lucky thong. Not a jockstrap. A thong. Sometimes when other Yankees go into slumps—like Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Robinson Cano and Robin Ventura—they've worn his tiger-striped thong too.

And here's how the papers and blogs headlined it over the weekend:  read more »

A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is leaving the newspaper to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, according to an internal memo distributed yesterday. (Radar had reported a rumor to this effect.)

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."  read more »

Byron Dobell, one of the most respected and accomplished editors in New York magazine publishing history, is also a painter, and his seventh solo show, “Recent Works,” is currently on view at Chelsea’s First Street Gallery (526 West 26th Street). Mr. Dobell, who’s 80 (but doesn’t look a day over 65!), worked as an editor at many important magazines in the city, including Time, Esquire, New York and American Heritage, and edited writers like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam before they were household names. But 17 years ago, Mr. Dobell left the media world to pursue a lifelong passion: portraiture painting. Over the years he’s painted many friends and colleagues, including New York magazine founder Clay Felker; Tim Forbes, chief operating officer of Forbes, Dominique Browning, editor in chief of late House & Garden, and feminist icon Betty Friedan (the Friedan piece now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery).

At his Recent Works’ opening last week, Mr. Dobell dressed in a sharp navy jacket, an eye-catching tie and round, thin-framed spectacles. The room was noisy and bustling with his friends, mostly graying folks from the magazine business, who braved the biting cold to make it to the party. They held their hands behind their backs and considered Mr. Dobell’s small, sketchy “Life Study” chalk drawings of his less famous models lounging, seemingly in mid-air. There are also serene landscapes inspired by his travels to Scotland, Rome and New Hampshire. In some paintings, little trees sway in front of fuzzy bushes swirled with strands of India ink.  read more »

How did this go unnoticed for so long?

In Kurt Andersen's New York magazine column, published Monday, he casually spills the beans on Roger Ailes' preferred method of press control. Mr. Andersen writes that the Fox News chief "once threatened to send a camera crew to stalk my 3- and 5-year-old children in preemptive retaliation for a magazine story I was writing about his man Rush Limbaugh."

Thanks to Gawker for reading to the end.

Because here at Media Mob we never miss a trick on the Rather beat...here are a couple of the best revelations from former Observer reporter Joe Hagan's New York magazine piece about the Category-5 newsman's $70 million lawsuit against his former bosses at CBS, and what he hopes to get out of it:

Most notably, Mr. Hagan reports that within months of leaving CBS, Mr. Rather hired a team of three investigators to try to shed light on the ultimate mystery surrounding CBS's September 2004 flawed story on President Bush's National Guard service--that is, the origin of the documents at the heart of the controversy.  read more »

Adam Moss stood with a glass in champagne in one corner, Look Book's Amy Larocca was in another, and social princess Ally Hilfiger was sitting on a plush couch catching up with old high school friends ("We took retarded math!" exclaimed one. "Like, we did decimals" she replied). But as for familiar editorial faces, there was only a handful last night at the Bowery Hotel, as Mr. Moss' New York magazine celebrated its newly published Look Magazine with a party for fashion and advertising types.

New York publisher Lawrence Burstein, who went much of the night without a drink, and didn't look to be having much fun, said that his magazine goes without any competition, but also said that he reads Vanity Fair, The Economist and The New York Times Magazine.

Lockhart Steele and Nick Denton were sitting at the bar as the free drinks came to an end around 8:30. Asked about the lack of familiar media faces, a New York spokeswoman said, "Well, we can't invite everyone."