Man Bites Murdoch by Bruce Guthrie

Author:Bruce Guthrie [Guthrie, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780522858488
Google: x3pLFLEApCsC
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T02:39:37+00:00

III

Sixth Avenue to Southbank

19

New York, New York

Our glamorous new life in the world’s most exciting city began on the footpath outside Scores gentlemen’s club around midnight in mid-September 1997. Janne and I had our two small children in tow as the cab-driver deposited us and our luggage outside the strip club, watched by about a dozen men queuing to go inside. Some years later, Scores and its pole dancers would come to national prominence for having hosted a drunken Kevin Rudd and New York Post editor, Col Allan, on one of Rudd’s overseas study tours before he became prime minister. Our travel agency must have liked the place too, because they had booked us into an apartment virtually right above it.

I had come to New York for a series of job interviews with senior editorial executives of Time Inc., the largest magazine publishing company in the United States, which took its name from its flagship, the weekly news magazine Time, established by company founder Henry Luce in 1923. Time Inc. was now part of the huge Time Warner media conglomerate.

Eventually I would do four interviews, the first with Henry Muller, then his boss, Norman Pearlstine, the former Wall Street Journal managing editor overseeing all Time Inc. magazines as editor-in-chief, and then Landon Jones, the long-time People editor who had offered me the Who Weekly job four years earlier in Sydney. Finally I was ushered into the office of Jones’ successor at People, the highly formidable—and highly successful—Carol Wallace, like me a former newspaper editorial executive, who had moved from New York’s Daily News to People with great success. We hit it off, even though many others didn’t. At one point during her tenure, the New York Post carried a gossip item on the hard-driving Wallace and her occasional clashes with staff. It was headlined, ‘Editor is not a People person’ and asked: ‘Is Carol Wallace the “editor from hell”?’

Time Inc. was very much an Ivy League company, full of Brooks Brothers suits and proud of its arcane traditions. Its great appeal to me was that it took immense care over its journalism, believing that if you got that right, the audience would follow. In that sense it was closer to Fairfax than, say, the News empire, which just went for numbers. If News could get there through journalism, that was a happy coincidence; if they couldn’t, they would try nearly anything else to build an audience.

Henry Muller had decided that People was a better fit for me than Time. I was happy either way: while my head said Time, my heart said People, particularly as I was fond of popular culture. In the end, we agreed I would come over for two weeks in the new year and ‘kick the tires’ to see if I liked the place. It would also give them a chance to size me up.

The enormously successful People had started life as a column in Time that delivered bite-sized information about prominent people, especially celebrities. After

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