The rumor mill is churning full throttle that TimeWarner chief Richard “Dick” Parsons is eyeing the mayor’s chair after Bloomy is finished pooping in it. Interestingly enough, Parsons is actually better suited for the switch than Michael Bloomberg given his past as an aide to Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. This all must be pretty amusing to Carl Icahn, the mega stockholder-barbarian-at-TimeWarner’s-gates. Ask Icahn what kind of job Parsons has done with TW and you might get a face full of venom-tinged spittle…
AdAge recently reported that Laurel “corny feather boa” Touby’s website MediaBistro may be up for sale. According to the item, “Estimates of the company’s revenue from people familiar with the process vary, from less than $2 million to $5 million to $8 million.” Considering that a little birdie tells us that some bloggers for the site allegedly make little more than $1500 a month, it sounds like Touby is making off with some pretty good scratch. In the meantime, if the sale does in fact go down, this may free up Touby’s in-house blogbot/Gawker wanna-be Dylan Stableford to pursue his true ambition of being an ironic rock star playing Williamsburg’s most hipsterati coffee houses. The real intrigue here is wondering what recently departed MediaBistro editor Elizabeth Spiers is thinking about the sale talk. After starting with Gawker, moving to New York magazine, then MediaBistro and now her own venture (DealBreaker), Spiers is surely weary of watching everyone else in blogging get rich off the spark she lit so long ago. Somewhere Nick Denton is cackling maniacally…
Someone needs to suggest a stress relieving high colonic for Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff. In the magazine’s latest issue, the acerbic scribe rips The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger a new one when he says, “The vulnerability that the Times critics see here—one that causes people inside the Times to gulp—is that difficult, less-than-humble, not-ready-for-prime-time descendants of 19th-century newspaper owners have been the cause of the decline and fall of a great many newspapers.” Ouch! But then Wolff loses all credibility when he continues by ripping the NYTimes.com website, “The whole idea that an old-time business can morph seamlessly into a huge, speculative entrepreneurial enterprise is a kind of quackery.” We smell another damn-I’m-bitter-I-didn’t-cash-out-during-the-Internet-boom hater. Or it could be that Wolff is still smarting from his high-profile media fau paux when he failed in his bid to purchase his former employer New York magazine. Watching the title rise to a new level of quality after his departure surely smarts. Proof of said scarring was revealed just a few months ago in an interview with I Want Media’s Patrick Phillips when Wolff admitted, “I never read New York magazine. I never let people talk to me about New York magazine. It does not exist in my universe… It no longer, as I say, exists in my world. It broke my heart. My family is banned from reading it or mentioning it.” It looks like we are all— Sulzberger included—doomed to suffer because of a media mogul wanna-be scorned. But hey, it’s New York City, what else is new?
