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5 items tagged "editors"

Related tags: hell [+], From [+], the [+], starlets [+], new [+], are [+]

Gawker

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  Screaming Arianna Breakdown Ahead Of Maddow Show? [Editors From Hell]

  Posted: November 17th, 2008, 4:39am CST by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  editors From hell  

  Arianna Huffington is guest-hosting Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC tonight, and the lineup looks impressively ambitious: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, stat-whiz Nate Silver and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor to whom the internet publisher was once rumored romantically linked (absurdly, her staff thought). The high-profile lefty gig is an appropriate laurel for an ambitious woman whose left-leaning site produced landmark coverage and gangbusters traffic amid the 2008 election. But as former Huffington Post staff can attest (and have), television appearances also mean a frenzy of last-minute research for editors like Roy Sekoff or Colin Sterling who prepare Huffington's talking points. With an entire, hourlong show to host, rather than a brief guest appearance, it would be reasonable for staff to fear another of the screaming, teary emotional breakdowns described to us by several former HuffPo staffers.

  Among the tips that poured in after we started really asking questions about Huffington last month, in the wake of a New Yorker profile of the onetime socialite, was one claiming Huffington "had a breakdown (like bat-shit crazy person breakdown) in front of one male staffer who was working on Right Is Wrong," Huffington's recent political book. Another ex-HuffPo staffer subsequently confirmed the account to us, saying the staffer in question was shaken up, and pointing to Republican strategist Ed Rollins' book for more examples (it's on order!).

  This second staffer said many HuffPo staffers are, at some point in their employey, witness to such breakdowns: Yelling, followed by an enraged denunciation of the person's skills and/or value as an employee and/or as a person, then tears and, perhaps, a later attempt at reconciliation.

  Several other ex-HuffPo insiders said that general description of the quality and quantity of Huffington's rages met with their experience. "The breakdowns entail screaming and crying for a drawn out period of time," one said. Another:

  Breakdowns are frequent... Although it's not so much crying as this wail-y, near-crying, cracked voice she employs when she is quite literally shaking with rage. When you hear that voice you know you're well past the point of no return.

  Some breakdowns arose during Huffington's work on books, serious and stressful extracurricular projects that in many ways resembl, say, hosting a top-rated MSNBC show for a night. From that perspective, staffers have good reason to walk on eggshells (when not running personal errands) in the runnup to the Rachel Maddow Show gig tonight. It can't help Huffington's mood that she'll be working for a network where she was once reportedly banned for attacking Meet The Press host Tim Russert, the longtime Huffington enemy who has only grown more revered since his passing.

  On the other hand, multiple former staff said Huffington's fits were often set off by trivial matters, disproportionately including minor issues with cars and drivers.

  Take the subway, Arianna, for everyone's sake! Your show sounds fun.

  If anyone knows how Huffington is doing, today, this week or at some point in her long past, we'd love to hear from you.

  Prior Huffington coverage: The Huffington Posts

  
  
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  The Return Of Bonnie Fuller? [Editors From Hell]

  Posted: October 22nd, 2008, 6:18am CDT by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  editors From hell  

  The last time we checked in with Bonnie Fuller, in August, the ex-Us Weekly editor was seeking "partners, financing and advertiser support" for a website aimed at women 20-40. That can't be going well right about now. Which might explain how OK! magazine could afford to bring on Fuller as a consultant, as CoverAwards is reporting, even though she was recently pulling down $2.1 million per year as editorial director at American Media Inc.

  It's not clear how much Fuller is doing for OK!, other than hiring proper flacks to take up former editor and celebrity publicist Rob Shuter's PR duties. But recently-installed general manager Kent Brownridge was recently rumored keen to bring her on as editor. And it sounds like he's only become more desperate since:

  According to multiple industry sources, sales for OK! have been very low. For example, last week’s issue featuring Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens was dramatically under 400K on the newsstand.
  

  Already shaken by heavy turnover across the top of the masthead, Fuller's prospective underlings can't be happy at the prospect of working for a legendary office bully. Perhaps they should revive the "I Survived Bonnie" website as a preemptive strike.

  
  

  

  
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  Arianna's Most Tortured Attendants [Editors From Hell]

  Posted: October 9th, 2008, 10:55am CDT by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  editors From hell  

  We asked, earlier this week, if "editors are 'retards' and servants to Arianna" Huffington, subject of an all-too-squishy New Yorker profile this week. After hearing from still more Huffington Post insiders, it would seem the answer is a resounding "yes." And an obvious "yes" to those who have come to appreciate that the ambitious divorcée draws few boundaries between her own professional and personal lives, working manically, phoning and emailing editors in the middle of the night, obsessively arranging the order of stories on HuffPo's front page and in its various sections, and hollering at her staff over an intercom in her Brentwood mansion even while she has her nails done. The only clear line, it seems, is between the smart, charming image Huffington projects to her celebrity friends and the world at large and the rather nastier and more careless Arianna seen inside HuffPo.

  On the strength of its left-leaning political coverage, the Huffington Post has become a breakaway success, with more traffic than Drudge and more inbound links than TechCrunch. But advertisers hate politics, Arianna's favored and strongest topic, so the site is trying to diversify. As it does so, Arianna's skills — and flaws — as a manager will become more visible and more important.

  Why does Huffington push herself to the point where, as both the recent New Yorker profile and those who have worked with her made clear, she has few, if any, serious friends outside of HuffPo? Why is she focused on her project to the point where associates wonder when she could find time for an affair with Cory Booker, as was bizarrely (in their eyes) rumored?

  There is speculation as to the reasons. Bipolar disorder, perhaps? (There is no known evidence, only the guesses of laymen.)

  Or maybe Huffington's priorities come from the teachings of the cultish Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, with which she has long been involved, for which her frequent contributor Russell Bishop launched a lucrative series of corporate "Insight" courses, and to which her live-in sister Agapi is said to be an especially fervent devotee?

  Or perhaps Huffington is driven simply by ego. Within her publication it is understood, after all, that videos of her own media appearances are to be posted posthaste, top priority.

  The cost of Huffington's poorly bounded ambitions are not born by her alone but also by her beleaguered staff, including aspiring journalists who until recently were hired, some claim, with no knowledge whatsoever they would take on some of the duties of administrative assistants or household servants. Duties like:

  • taking heavily accented email dictation,
  • arranging haircuts or troubleshooting BlackBerrys for Huffington's daughters,
  • fetching lunch or coffee,
  • or writing talking points for Huffington's television appearances.

  There are far worse jobs, to be sure, than editor and part-time admin for one of the top sites on the internet. But a great many of those who have worked with Huffington seem bruised, and compelled to talk about — vent about — their experiences and those of others. (And yes we, of all sites, should know this sort of thing when we see it.)

  From their stories one can piece together a kind of coterie of miserable self-sacrifice. Here are three members of that dubious clique:

  The Passport Mule

  Huffington is known for forgetfully leaving essential gear behind as she jots around the world, including, most frequently, between her Brentwood home office, HuffPo's New York office and the Mercer Hotel in SoHo. The most infamous example of this, multiple sources said, occurred when Huffington, or more likely a carelessly-instructed housekeeper, neglected to pack Arianna's passport for a trip from Brentwood. Once in New York on the first leg, Huffington realized she needed the passport to enter Canada for a fast-approaching trip to Toronto.

  There was no time. An unnamed female HuffPo staffer was dispatched in the wee hours on a flight to New York. She delivered the passport to the Mercer and was promptly placed on a return flight to Los Angeles, another 18-hour day in the service of Arianna's Vortex. She may or may not have been treated to lunch in between!

  Young Colin Sterling

  Sterling became blog editor at the Huffington Post, and a top conduit between Arianna and the New York office, following the departure of two seasoned journalists, BBC's Elinor Shields and Rolling Stone's Frank Wilkinson, who did not fit into the publishing culture Huffington had created. Maybe Huffington couldn't let go of the site and provide them sufficient autonomy, or maybe they just couldn't mesh with Web publishing, it's not clear. (They each lasted at most a year.)

  Today in his mid-20s, Sterling earned Huffington's trust as a researcher for her out West. By all accounts, his new job, with crushing demands from the very top, has taxed him. Called upon to, say, cram together TV talking points on less than half an hour's notice while riding herd over a massive, oddball stable of blog contributors, most of whom will be relegated to vertical sections far from the coveted front page, Sterling has been known to pound his desk with his fists and yell curses (a simple "Fuck!" being a favorite) immediately after hanging up on a call from Arianna, an act guaranteed to be noticed in HuffPo's open-plan 15-person Gotham newsroom.

  Sterling is also, at times, short tempered with those underneath him: The public yelling and cursing are not directed only at the Gods in the wake of Arianna's calls, it seems. His "nasty" temper has made enemies, one person said, and contributed to a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere during the three or four weeks of each month Huffington is not in New York. Other observers are much more sympathetic, but still concede his personality seems to have bent sharply to fit that of his loved and hated boss.

  In fairness, it should be noted that Huffington is said to have her own short temper. Though no one has been able to confirm that she called one editor a "retard" before he quit in protest, as we reported in our last HuffPo story, none doubted she would have said it, and some insiders said it would be in keeping with other nasty slights — calling people "fucking" liars, incompetents and worse.

  Thanks to Arianna's manic work schedule, hours never quite end at HuffPo for anyone on staff, by all accounts. Fairly or not, Sterling seems to have become a bit of a poster child for the ill effects of that phenomenon.

  Roy Sekoff

  This is the man who, everyone seems to agree, writes Arianna's blog posts, the ones she pledged would "never" be ghost written. The process will be familiar to anyone who has similarly ghosted a column for an EIC: Huffington briefly sketches an idea, Sekoff (or perhaps, on occasion, another editor) researches it and puts it to words, and Huffington does a quick check prior to publication.

  Sekoff also happens to be HuffPo's top, founding editor and Huffington's right-hand man, based in Los Angeles. A family man in his late 40s, he is described as not only older but more loyal than Huffington's other editors, many of whom are in their 20s. Thus eyebrows were arched when he gave this quote to the New Yorker, implying that Huffington is often unfamiliar with the topics she is called upon to discuss on television:

  I’ve literally seen her stand somewhere, look at a piece of research, and then—boom!—go on TV and, word for word, nail the three most important points and leave out everything else.

  One wonders how often the research in question came from Sekoff himself, and if his quote to the New Yorker wasn't a bit of subconscious revenge on Arianna for taking credit for so much of his own work.

  If anyone has more information from inside the Huffington Post, for example on the clubby process of front-page story selection, or on the parade of editors through New York, we'd love to hear from you. And we're not even sure we could stop you guys from writing in at this point if we wanted to.

  
  

  

  
• 

  Fewer Editors, Moar Success [Journalismism]

  Posted: February 18th, 2008, 10:06am CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  editors  

  With all the layoffs that just about every major newspaper has gone through over the past few years, reporting staffs have already been chopped to the bone. Or all the way through the bone and out the other side, in some cases. So when the next round of layoffs inevitably comes, where do the cuts come from? A provocative, insightful, and obvious idea: How about firing some more of those freaking editors? Or at least making them do a little more work.

  Sure, it goes without saying that smaller staffs suck. If every paper could return to its decades-old glory days of reporters on every metro micro-beat, digging for weeks on corruption in the various sub-offices of the municipal Water and Sewer Authority, our democratic republic could flower once again. But that scenario won't be back any time soon, if ever. So instead of cutting the reporters, who generate actual content, why not cut all those stupid higher-up levels of editing?

  As Alan Mutter points out, it's not unusual for a major newspaper story to go through five or six levels of editing. Whereas news aggregators like Google have no editing staff at all, and most blog operations have zero or one editor. And both of those types of organizations are the reason papers are having all the layoffs in the first place.

  The underlying problem is bureaucratic structure. In the news business, the only place for most reporters to get promoted is the editing staff. So old-line news outlets are full of career employees who've "earned" an editor's chair. And naturally, no story can make the front page without being subjected to their collective wisdom. Make those people start writing again! Content is King, etc. There are very few news stories that can't be fully edited by one copy editor and one assigning editor (who can theoretically be the same as the editor-in-chief). Reserve the editing jobs for people who are actually good at editing, and allow talented reporters and writers to move up to investigations, or column-writing, or full time blogging. Where they don't need editors, by the way. [via Romenesko]

  
  

  

  
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  'Radar' Celebrates John Varvatos All Over Maer Roshan's Body [Patronage]

  Posted: December 5th, 2007, 10:30am CST

  Tags:  editors are the new starlets  

  Why did Radar honcho Maer Roshan look so good at last night's Radar party at the New Museum? Was it all the drinks I had? Was it that I was sucking up to him for a job? Or was it his suit? Yes. It was his suit. Turns out it was a narrow peak lapel, two-button flannel suit from John Varvatos' Fall/Winter 07 Collection. We hear that rather than pay the $1,495 tag price, Roshan worked out a deal to have his outfit sponsored by the designer. Crafty!