Results tagged “graylady”

The NY Times' article about presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's superclose relationship with a young, attractive female lobbyist (more about her here) has drawn a lot of criticism, especially from McCain himself. His campaign seized the moment to raise money for his campaign.

After a turbulent couple of months at Gawker, the New York Times Style section is checking the media website’s pulse and wondering, with equal parts hope and desperation, if Gawker has finally jumped the “snark”. The Times’s uptick in Gawker stalking mirrors their aggressive game of catch-up with “teh internets” by increasingly emphasizing blogs on their website, and the article finds the Gray Lady digging a nice, cozy grave for Gawker owner and editor Nick Denton, pictured, to curl up and die down in, thereby releasing his zillions of page views to the cosmic trough.

On the heels of the NY Times' Alex Williams calling Brooklyn "over" -- Park Slope has been named one of the 10 best neighborhoods in the country! Take that Gray Lady. In fact, "the historic area, just steps from Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is the only New York City neighborhood to make the first-ever list from the American Planning Association (APA)." Which would mean that a Brooklyn 'hood bested a Manhattan 'hood -- though the latter did get on the "Best Street" list with Harlem's 125th Street (which the Daily News goes into here). As for the Slope, here's a bit of reasoning behind the decision:

"It's got a lot of past, but it has also evolved and has a lot of vibrancy in the present," said association spokesman Denny Johnson, citing the area's architecture and proximity to such cultural spots as the main library. "People in Park Slope care about everything from big to small," said Fifth Avenue Committee executive director Michelle de la Uz, who cited residents' interest in such things as where a bike lane should be built and protests over the war in Iraq.

With Election Day in a little more than two weeks, candidates are pushing into the home stretch by rallying their supporters and looking for undecided voters. The NY Times made some more big endorsements. The Gray Lady threw support behind Eliot Spitzer for Governor and Andrew Cuomo for Attorney General. The Spitzer endorsement was enthusiastic and hopeful, while the Cuomo one...well, here's a bit from it which contrasts Cuomo with the embattled Republican Jeannine Pirro:

The race to succeed Eliot Spitzer as New York’s attorney general has come down to a riveting if uninspiring brawl between two flawed candidates, the Republican Jeanine Pirro and her Democratic opponent, Andrew Cuomo. Both candidates have strengths. Their records also contain glaring weaknesses, making either seem an uncomfortable fit for the state’s top law enforcement job...

Continue reading "Election Day Coming Soon"

THEATER: The Mint Theater, which has earned a formidable reputation by yanking old, forgotten plays out of oblivion, has struck gold again with their latest production of John Ferguson, an intense melodrama about a poor Irishman who will lose his farm unless his daughter marries some creepy tool. A 1919 edition of The Times called it a “smashing play”; 87 years later the Gray Lady stays regular with “thoroughly engrossing”.

Got time over the next week? Here's an interesting way to spend some of it: On June 30 Sothebys is going to be auctioning off reams of the personal documents of Martin Luther King, Jr. from between 1946 and 1968. Everything from report cards - he didn't get straight A's - to drafts of his "I Have a Dream" speech are on the block (as a collection only) and for the next week it is available to be seen by the public for free.

Rockaway, Queens. Just hearing its name makes us smile. Some of our happiest high school memories involve sitting on its beaches looking out at the Atlantic, content in the knowledge that we were still in the City and that Manhattan was but an A train away. But will it always be? That's the question posed by today's News in a story that might as well have been written by Chicken Little. Short answer: For now, but watch those hurricanes.

As World Cup fever slowly infects its way across the five boroughs (we can't be the only ones who've found ourselves standing for hours in bodegas staring at soccer matches when we've already bought the beer we came for) the city has announced its own new competition, and we're pretty pumped for it, too! Using one of the few remaining large vacant properties in the city's portfolio, the Bloomberg administration and an architects' group are announcing today "a competition to pick an architect and a developer to build an apartment complex on vacant city-owned land in the South Bronx." (specifically on Brook Avenue and East 156th)

The criteria to be used by the jury of architects, developers and city officials that will select the winning plan will put a premium on design quality, affordability and factors like energy efficiency and the use of renewable resources. Then the city will give the winning team the site, a 40,000-square-foot former railyard, for about a dollar a lot for the two lots involved.

Continue reading "A Development Competition Grows in the Bronx"

Thank you Gray Lady for reminding us, everybody mark your calendars, next Sunday is Manhattanhenge!

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today and the old Gray Lady takes three, but the Washington Post won four (criticism, beat reporting, explanatory writing, and investigative reporting). However, the real story might be the awards for Hurricane Katrina coverage, a public service award shared by the Sun-Herald in Biloxi and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, breaking news photography award for the Dallas Morning News and a breaking news reporting awards fro the Times-Picayune.

This morning we woke up not at all surprised to see Jared Paul Stern still flagellating himself over at Gawker. But to be honest, we were getting kind of bored with the whole thing. The best part of JPS's first post was his last line and the first comment: "And, just in case you were wondering, yes I can tell who's really posting the Comments. I am, after all, the Editor." Followed by Nick Denton commenting "Um, actually, commenters are anonymous, if they want to be. I am, after all, the publisher." We read that, laughed and went to eat an Easter meal with our family. When we got back a few hours later those two lines were gone, and Gawker went a little cray-cray.

With obvious glee today's Times and Daily News went to task covering the Page Six payola scandal in greater detail.

slow news day yesterday, or the Times gave a very generous gift to Six Editor Richard Johnson on his wedding day today, devoting more than a fifth of its front page to the story, including a super classy photo of Johnson with Sharon Stone (Who doesn't like free publicity, right?). Not to mention the Gray Lady's brief history of the the gossip sheet and its lingo ("the labels it pins on the people it covers can be zingers, as the actor Alec Baldwin and the actress Cheryl Tiegs learned when Page Six dubbed him a 'bloviator' and her a 'superannuated supermodel.'") and a look at Ron Burkle the California billionaire who opened this Pandora's box.

As expected Darryl Littlejohn has been indicted for first-degree murder in the killing of Imette St. Guillen.

If you ran the city, what would you do? That's basically what the Times asked a bunch of New Yorkers back in November. The Gray Lady then picked their favorite bits of advice and asked the city what could be done about them. Some of the ideas are plain silly (uhm, a high speed underground moving walkway instead of the the never-going-to-get-built 2nd Avenue Subway?) and some of them are highly controversial (hello, reserved residential parking!) but some of them are actually good ideas. These were our two favorites:

short, to being "above the fold" on the NYTimes.com website is nine days! We doubt The Lonely Island/SNL gang was up at 8AM to see the "Lazy Sunday" article, "Nerds in the Hood, Stars on the Web," take the prime position on the Gray Lady's Less Gray Website, but Gothamist did. And we love the internet. Apparently the Lonely Island guys, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, along with Chris Parnell, wrote the sketch together and shot it all over West Village and Chelsea in the week before it aired. Parnell takes the time to tell the NY Times that his raps about crushes on Britney Spears, Kirsten Dunst, and Jennifer Garner have been mostly well-received by the stars, though he hasn't heard from Britney Spears. The article does not, however, mention the short's impact on sales of Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, Mr. Pibb's, Red Vines, or the Chronicle of Narnia movie tickets (or the chronic, for that matter).

- Check out the sponsored link beneath our Braunstein coverage from yesterday... indeed (thanks Joe!). Did we mention that Peter Braunstein got busted?

"Let me preface this with some full-on full disclosure. I love Maureen Dowd. I love her not just for her columns and their brash, fearless intelligence. I also love her for being a woman in a man’s world, where even at her liberal Gray Lady’s office of eight columnists and one public editor, she is the only woman. I love her for knowing how to be sexy, smart, and every shade of the spectrum between the two.

Advertising Age asked some designers how they would give the Old Gray Lady a facelift and change the New York Times broadsheet, and the answers are practical, hilarious, and just wacky. The most common suggestion is to make the paper more compact and tabloid size for portability (gasp) to putting more gossipy stories in between hard news on the front page (GASP), to having a co-branded "Times Cafe" with a coffee house to hiring new photographers. Oh, and eliminating the paper all together. Gothamist agrees that making the Times easier to fold (we never got the "how to fold the NY Times" curriculum in our school) would be at the top of our list, especially given all the different sections on a weekday, but we actually like how it's sort of dated and serif-y... in fact, the NY Times' stubbornness to not change that much (remember when color photographs started to appear?) and be the Paper of Record on high reminds us who is boss when it comes to newspaper coverage in this town. If making the type face rounder is a solution, then everyone should throw in the towel.

New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee? Is that for real? Can anyone change their middle name to a number if they want?