When I first relocated to New York City nearly two decades ago and knew just one person in the entire city, New York magazine served as my surrogate best friend. Each issue of the publication, then run by a legendary editor named Ed Kosner, was a “must have”, particularly to a newcomer trying to get his bearings in this bigger-than-life city. The articles were as incisive as they were well-written; I still have a particularly smart cover story Kosner ran November 2, 1992 about the deleterious effects of noise and its emotional impact on New Yorkers.
Kosner inexplicably resigned the following year, sending the magazine into a nosedive. A succession of editors came and went, each one eventually leaving the publication a little worse off than it was when they arrived. Over time, my former best friend became an acquaintance and then a stranger and ultimately, irrelevant to my life. The final straw was the issue featuring Montclair, NJ on the cover and likening it to the gentrified Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Showcasing any place in the Garden State in a magazine called New York was an abomination to me. Deriding New Jersey is one of my few simple pleasures (and frankly, what makes me feel most like a “real” New Yorker).
In early 2004, however, hope arrived in the form of Adam Moss, a wunderkind editor formerly with The New York Times Magazine. Shortly after he took the helm at New York, the magazine became worth reading again. Mr. Moss even ran a cover story about noise, and while it wasn’t nearly as good as Kosner’s original, at least the magazine wasn’t still trying to upgrade New Jersey to our sixth borough. For a while, it seemed my old best friend had returned.
But something has since gone awry.
It started with a rather critical feature about Matt Drudge, whose right-leaning Drudge Report website has emerged as a potent political force, much to the chagrin of the more left-leaning, “old school” media. The New York article let it be known early on that Mr. Drudge is “said by some to be gay,” and then gratuitously revisited the issue later with a rather nasty reference from PR man-turned-journalist Michelangelo Signorile who the magazine said “has broken down many a closet door.” (New York misspelled Michelangelo’s name, but I guess when you are heaving muck, factual accuracy is not as important as simply hitting the target).
Mr. Drudge, according to New York, denies that he is gay. I realize that Mr. Drudge is hardly the beacon of journalistic fairness himself, but do his own editorial shortcomings and misfires make him fair game for mainstream colleagues who want to color outside the bounds of fairness when covering him or his site? I don’t think so.
Then there was the photoshopped cover photo of President Clinton dressed as Jackie Kennedy with the caption: “Bill Clinton, First Lady.” I considered the cover to be an awkward and unnecessarily disrespectful depiction of a two-term president. As I don’t read New York to garner national political insight (The New York Times says I should be reading Mr. Drudge’s site), I never got around to reading the article. New York subsequently made mention of a yearbook photo showing President Clinton and a male buddy wearing dresses and holding each other, so perhaps I’m on shaky ground taking issue with the cheeky cover.
More recently, and most jolting of all, was New York’s cover story two weeks ago by Vanessa Grigoriadis about “the foul, bloggy sewer of Gawker.” For the uninitiated, Gawker is a snarky and sometimes mean-spirited blog that regularly lampoons, mocks, and otherwise savages celebrities and journalists like Ms. Grigoriadis who are far more accustomed to skewering others than being carved and filleted themselves. If Mother Theresa was alive and well in New York, even she’d be fair game for Gawker!
Ms. Grigoriadis apparently didn’t take too kindly to a Gawker posting mocking an article about her wedding in The New York Times. Her article – or more accurately her revenge piece – was a journalistic cocktail of vitriol and venom the likes I don’t ever recall reading in a major magazine. Ms. Grigoriadis didn’t just go for the jugular – she also fixated on the groin. She adroitly disclosed that one of Gawker’s male reporters allegedly has performance problems and talked about how New York Post’s Page Six has been “emasculated.” She also dutifully let us know that Gawker owner Nick Denton is an “upper class gay Jewish Briton” with an African-American boyfriend. Although Ms. Grigoriadis’ father also is an immigrant, I strongly suspect that her reference to Mr. Denton’s Commonwealth roots was not intended as a subtle form of endearment.
Given New York’s growing practice of outing prominent website owners (although my “in the know” journalism friends tell me Mr. Denton makes no secret of being gay), I got to wondering about Mr. Moss. A quick Google search reveals that he, too, is openly gay – and I’ve since learned that I apparently was one of the few people in New York who didn’t already know that. Then again, I also didn’t know that The New York Times Magazine is “pretty gay”, as Mr. Moss is alleged to have once described it, though he later pleaded the “taken-out-of-context” defense.
Still, I don’t accept that being openly gay gives Mr. Moss – or anyone else with a keyboard, microphone, or soapbox for that matter – the license to deny another person his or her right to privacy about something as intrinsically personal as their sexuality. And he is badly deluding himself if he somehow believes that Ms. Grigoriadis’ Gawker diatribe was journalistically dignified simply because it was published on fine paper stock. One of the dangers of peeking into sewers is that it’s all too easy to fall into them.
In its latest issue, New York excerpts a telling letter it received from reader Mary-Thomas Turnock of Larchmont who the magazine says “probably spoke for many”:
I’m so glad that I’m over 50 and Gawker.com is not part of my sensibilities. My sympathy to those in younger generations. Life is difficult enough without the gratuitous viciousness/bitterness described in this website.
Perhaps New York’s Westchester subscribers receive a different version of the magazine.
2:26 pm
I agree that New York has taken a nosedive recently but I actually think it is coming out of it and arching toward relevancy. The Bill/Hillary morph cover shot is just a magazine asking for attention, and rather clever. The Gawker piece was written according to its subject. Can you write a cover story about Gawker that is droll and above the belt? The reporter was fascinated with Gawker, like a car crash, trying to figure out why we are drawn to high-snark and downright nastiness – almost addicted to it. And she freely admits that Gawker has endured and now occupies its own exalted spot as top dog media scandal/gossip blog, increasingly integrating with Denton’s other properties. My free subscription to New York just ran out and I decided to re-up. It gives me a nice balance to the New Yorker, when I don’t want to think so hard. And the magazine is developing an editorial toughness that I appreciate. At least I am finding features worth reading outside “best place to get dog biscuits.” Hey, Eric, maybe New York was your mistress when you first came to New York and the thrill is not the same. It doesn’t mean it can’t be a casual friend.
10:01 am
I forgot that they compared Montclair to Park Slope … As if. I didn’t mind the Gawker piece. My issue with it was that it never really rose above the irrelevent but juicy details to give us insight into some broader picture. There was very little context for Gawker’s rise/popularity. You could feel the author was still smarting from her run-in with the site and forgot that most of us don’t care if her mother was an immigrant artist, or if Nick Denton is gay.