These days, it can feel that the New York Times is so dominant that it has no newspaper to compete with but itself. And now it has a new internal awards ceremony that lets it do just that.
Late last year, people across the company were invited to nominate candidates for the inaugural Ochs Awards, honoring the top journalists and journalism of the year. (Masthead positions and desk heads were ineligible.) Awards would be given in 25 categories, from Best Scoop to Writer of the Year to Rising Journalist. There are also categories for beat reporting (in culture and lifestyle, in news) and Editor of the Year (culture and lifestyle, news, audio/visual). The finalists in each category would be selected by “relevant committees of editors,” and the masthead would then choose the winners.
On Monday, the finalists were announced, as staff were invited to join virtually to “raise a glass to the winners” — who will receive a cash prize — on the evening of February 10. “Unfortunately, we can’t accommodate the entire company at the event,” publisher A. G. Sulzberger explained in a previous email. “We’ll have room for finalists and winners, as well as their editors. The event will be livestreamed so that the rest of the newsroom and company can be part of the celebration as well.” Internally, staffers are rolling their eyes. “When it’s no longer possible to chew up our competitors (too diminished, if not outright demolished), of course we choose to sharpen our teeth on each other,” one Times reporter said. “This is really just a delightfully insane thing to do,” said another.
The awards are seemingly an effort to recognize a broader group of people at the paper beyond its multi Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters, media-celebrity podcast hosts, and, increasingly, video stars. “They did not succeed,” one staffer said. “It’s all the usual suspects.”
The Daily,The Ezra Klein Show, and Popcast are finalists for Best Podcast Episode. Maggie Haberman is part of two of the three teams competing for Best Scoop and is also a finalist for The Punch Sulzberger Award for Reporting Without Favor. (“First of all,” one reporter said, “who is reporting with favor? That’s hilarious.”) Lydia Polgreen, M. Gessen, and David French are the Opinion Writer of the Year finalists.
To be fair, not every finalist is a household name, and some categories seem designed explicitly to recognize less visible staffers, like the Behind the Scenes Award, Best Product Contribution, and various subsections of Best Editor. Several staffers said they were glad to see their colleagues get some recognition.
There’s long been angst in the newsroom around who gets to be a star. The Times is filled with talented people, and the corporate view is that you’re never bigger than the institution, which is why many who become stars eventually end up leaving for more expansive opportunities.
But the paper has over the years become more interested in marketing its individuals, as personality-driven content has become the dominant way to attract an audience. The Ochs Awards, a newsroom staffer said, is “a perfect way to read who the masthead has on their gold star list. Another way to make everyone more insecure.”
The Ochs Awards are merely the latest internal recognition prize. There’s also the Publisher’s Award, a quarterly honor recognizing particularly impactful stories and products, which also comes with a cash prize, and the Trifecta, a little Renzo Piano-red plexiglass plaque recognizing reporting that lands on the Times’ three marquee platforms: the homepage, The Morning newsletter, and audio.
Last weekend, staffers at Graydon Carter’s Air Mailgathered in Genoa, where one of the site’s editors was getting married in a high-society fête at a family palazzo. It was a fitting setting for a venture that aspired to give a glossy treatment to an online-only publication — think of it, Carter said at its launch in 2019, as “the weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily.” Catering to highbrow news consumers with travel recommendations and magazine-length dispatches from across the globe on fashion, art, scandal, and politics, it was a taste of Carter’s Vanity Fair for the digital set. The issue hits your inbox every Saturday, Maureen Dowd once wrote, “like something wrapped in cashmere.”
Now it will come wrapped in Puck. After weeks of negotiations the newsletter company officially acquired Air Mail in a deal that reportedly values it at $16 million — half as much money as Air Mail had raised since 2019. Carter and Alessandra Stanley, Carter’s co-editor, are stepping down, and Julia Vitale, the deputy managing editor, will take their place.
On its surface, the Air Mail–Puck deal — or AirPuck, as media reporters have taken to calling it — feels cosmically ordained. Air Mail will now be overseen by Puck’s co-founder Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair who was once Carter’s assistant; the merger could be seen as a marriage of mentor and mentee’s post–Vanity Fair newsletter enterprises. In truth, it has exposed bad blood between the two camps, as well as the gap between Air Mail’s ambitions and the reality of its struggling finances. Neither publication is profitable, and the deal is mostly a stock exchange.
The question of how Air Mail will be absorbed into Puck’s suite of newsletters — or franchises, as they are called — has been a particular source of anxiety among Carter’s staff. Puck CEO Sarah Personette said at a company all-hands that they would “not run two separate sites” but rather “think of Puck as sort of the master brand” and Air Mail “as a franchise underneath that,” according to the media newsletter Breaker. Puck has made such purchases before: Last year, it acquiredArtelligence, a Substack about the global art market by Marion Maneker.
Officially, Kelly is saying readers won’t notice much that’s different. “The experience of Air Mail is going to be really largely unchanged in substantial ways,” Kelly said in an interview, with the Saturday issue remaining the hero product. He added, “We would not buy Air Mail if we did not love it.”
Puck, too, is a flavor of Carter’s Vanity Fair. It was co-founded by Kelly in 2021 as “a new media company focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” — essentially the same purview as The Hive, a vertical of Vanity Fair that Kelly co-founded in 2016 under Carter’s leadership (and that new Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci recently shuttered). Each franchise is helmed by a writer who has an equity stake in the company, such as Matt Belloni’s What I’m Hearing, which covers Hollywood, and Lauren Sherman’s Line Sheet, which covers fashion. But unlike Air Mail, Puck is less a luxury product than gossipy catnip for insiders in various industries in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York. It has some 57 staffers, compared to Air Mail’s 30.
Air Mail once aspired to be purchased by deeper-pocketed buyers with a payday that would flatter Carter’s investment in the project. In February 2024, Semafor reported that Standard Industries — the glamorous roofing company that was an early investor in Air Mail — was in talks to acquire Air Mail for $50 million. A few months later, in September, the New York Timesreported that Air Mail had hired the boutique investment bank Raine to explore a sale; talks with Standard Industries had fallen through. Carter also planned to continue his involvement with Air Mail in the event of a sale, according to the Times.
But it’s not hard to see why Carter, who is 76, would not want to stick around now that his former assistant is part of the team in charge. “It was a very different thing for Graydon to build Air Mail than to go run it as a vertical inside Puck,” a source familiar with the discussions noted. “I think everyone would understand that.” They added, “Graydon would have preferred that whoever acquired Air Mail was thinking about investing in it at the level that he was investing in it. Whereas Puck I think is more of just a pure-play digital media company.”
What remains of Air Mail after Carter? The publication has built its own status (Larry David famously wore an Air Mail hat in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm) that could persist beyond his departure. For readers who want a dose of old-world charm with their stories about French political scandals and reviews of books about P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, Air Mail is one of the last of its kind. But the Saturday newsletter comes with the subject line “Graydon Carter here …” — the sensibility of the whole project enmeshed with his persona. If Puck viewed Air Mail as a larger and more significant version of its Artelligence acquisition, snapping up Air Mail’s subscribers and advertising dollars, it remains unclear whether those subscribers and advertisers will stick around now that Carter is gone.
Raine brought Puck the Air Mail opportunity in the spring. A key moment for Puck’s leadership came from an analysis, conducted by Raine, of the Puck and Air Mail subscriber files that looked for duplicate emails to see if there was much audience overlap. Some hypothesized it could be anywhere from 20 to 40 percent, given the shared DNA of the two publications. But the survey yielded a number in the single digits. “This was an opinion-elite audience that had loved magazines and had very few choices in the post-print era; it also was a product that had a number of endemic advertising opportunities, and we weren’t going to be buying an audience that was already subscribed to Puck,” Kelly said. “We knew we were going to bid on this.”
Carter was initially more compelled by another suitor, RedBird Capital, whose founder, Gerry Cardinale, had been in talks with Raine and Carter about acquiring Air Mail. But Cardinale is in the midst of trying to buy The Telegraph, and it became clear a few weeks ago that RedBird was stalled, leaving Puck as the remaining option on the table, according to a source familiar.
Lachlan Cartwright, the mischievous media reporter behind Breaker Media, has been a thorn in both parties’ sides throughout the deal. Cartwright was the first to report that Puck had entered into an exclusive agreement to buy Air Mail, far in advance of the planned announcement; Carter was giving a talk uptown at the Cosmopolitan Club when Cartwright called to say he was about to break the news. Multiple leaks about negotiations and interpersonal tensions continued to show up in the newsletter, and there has been a whirlwind of speculation around the source of the leak. Air Mail staff see Puck as “down-market,” according to one insider. Air Mail’s advertising team was thrown for a loop when, shortly after Breaker broke the acquisition news, Puck’s ad sales team sent emails to Air Mail clients, who include high-end retailers like Hermès and Prada, which caused confusion and in some cases concern with ad buyers.
Both publications are on track to lose money this year. What’s the theory that, together, they might lose less — or even, one day, make a profit? Perhaps Air Mail’s sales team will get over its reluctance to be associated with Puck and help it land larger luxury deals. A sales deck titled “Project Aviator” claimed that Air Mail has an email list of more than 500,000 people, about 50,000 of whom are believed to be paying subscribers according to Breaker, and if that’s true — and if those subscribers stick around after Carter’s departure — presumably there’s a slimmer version of the franchise that could break even. There’s cost-cutting to come, as what’s left of Air Mail’s 30-person staff, after presumed layoffs and departures, moves out of its Greenwich Village townhouse and into Puck’s offices in the Financial District. (Puck says Air Mail’s brick-and-mortar store in the Village will remain open.) At least five full-time Air Mail employees are interviewing at other publications, and some have already left, including head of communications Harrison Vail, who is now a partner at a communications advisory firm.
In October, Air Mail held a dinner party with journalists, authors, and celebrities at Carter’s Waverly Inn for its inaugural Tom Wolfe Prizes for Fiction and Reportage. The winners were Vincenzo Latronico, whose novel Perfection has been buzzed about for satirizing fashionable millennials, and Meghan Daum, who in recent years has become an essayist and podcaster in the anti-woke brigade. The prizes, for a moment, felt like the start of something new. They now appear to be a kind of swan song.
Like watching Rome burn,” one news anchor said as Donald Trump’s attack on the media industry entered a new phase. The president has never done well with criticism, constantly going after news organizations and private companies and individuals perceived to be insufficiently supportive or ingratiating. “This is the environment that we’re all operating in, and we’ve known this for a while, where, whether it’s legitimate or not, you have the government as an actor trying to control and shape coverage through a combination of means, one of which is threats,” the news anchor said. But lately those threats feel less empty: The assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has given the administration further opportunity to use its power to influence the media industry and its output — “consequence culture,” as they are calling it. So far, companies have largely shown an unwillingness to fight back. Coincidentally or not, this timidity comes at a moment of intense consolidation in the business, as David Ellison, right after taking over Paramount, sets his sights on Warner Bros. Discovery, with help from father Larry, a recent Trump ally who is expected to be a major investor in the American-owned version of TikTok.
On Wednesday, September 17, FCC chairman Brendan Carr dangled the possibility of punishing ABC over remarks Jimmy Kimmel had made days before about Kirk’s assassination; the late-night host had suggested “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” It happened quickly from there: Nexstar, which owns numerous ABC affiliates throughout the country, said it would pull Kimmel’s show from the airwaves; within minutes, Sinclair, another owner of ABC affiliates, followed suit; then an ABC spokesperson told the press that new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be “preempted indefinitely.” Trump and Carr took a victory lap, and the president seemed to suggest a similar fate for NBC late-night stars Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. On Thursday, Trump, who earlier in the week had sued the New York Times for $15 billion over articles questioning his success, issued another threat, musing that networks giving him negative coverage deserve to have their licenses revoked.
Inside the media and entertainment companies, the mood among those creating the content under attack is somber. “I haven’t seen a lot of comedy writers or hosts choosing to censor themselves after watching our colleagues get literally canceled. It’s more that we’re horrified and embarrassed by the cowardice of the networks and the choices they’re making,” said a writer for a late-night show. “The people who have the most money and power are the first to give up, and frankly that should be mortifying for them.” Said another late-night writer: “The broadcast networks are beholden to Trump’s FCC in a way cable channels aren’t, but that’s hardly reassuring.” (Cable channels, unlike broadcast, do not use public airwaves and therefore don’t require FCC licenses.)
The decision to pull Kimmel off the air came two months after CBS, following its settlement of a lawsuit with Trump, canceled Stephen Colbert’s show. The latter move at least appeared couched in financial reasons, some insiders I spoke to noted; The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was expensive to produce — more than $100 million a year — and reportedly ran tens of millions of dollars in the red. “We had no idea how much of it was business motivated,” a late-night staffer said of the Colbert decision. “But this is just cut and dry.” As one prominent talent executive put it: “The FCC commissioner threatened ABC and its station partners, and the station partners and ABC took an action based on that threat. It’s never been that clear before.”
Pulling Kimmel was a decision that came from the very top of Disney with CEO Bob Iger and head of television Dana Walden reportedly fielding concerns from advertisers and affiliates. Kimmel had planned to address Carr’s comments on air Wednesday night, but Walden and other senior executives feared that would further inflame the situation, especially as staff on Kimmel’s show had been doxed and received threatening emails, according to The Wall Street Journal. Nexstar, for its part, denied that its decision was influenced by Carr’s remarks or FCC pressure, but, notably, the conglomerate is in the midst of trying to get a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna approved by the agency. “No one is confused — this is all about Tegna and Sinclair’s regulatory approval,” said another talent executive. “It’s super-specific. But it has real impact if it’s not limited in scope.” Multiple executives across television and print publishing said the focus is on ensuring their staffers can continue doing the work. “This is just the latest, right? We are just keeping our heads down and doing reporting,” said one.
At all levels of the industry, the question hung in the air of whether this moment marks a turning point. On Thursday, Carr told CNBC, “We’re not done yet,” and suggested The View, another ABC program, could be subject to review. “Clients are scared for what it suggests is to come. If Kimmel can get fired for that, what might they get fired for?” said another prominent talent executive. Late-night writers are also in a precarious position. “Our show is not in a position to pretend nothing happened in the way that others might be able to,” said one. “If our format didn’t demand it, I think some people who work here would feel safer not putting a target on their backs by commenting on it — which is the point of political censorship.” This writer described feeling newly paranoid: “I haven’t liked or shared any political commentary on social media since Kirk’s killing last week. It all feels like evidence that could be used in bad faith for some future persecution.”
Many feel something fundamental is changing in the industry. “The consolidation happening in the media world is incredibly unhelpful to this. Everyone feels like there’s no safe space, no corporate parent that’s going to stand up for you or protect you,” said the news anchor. “I don’t know that anybody knows how it’s going to end, but I think everybody recognizes the danger that we’re all in.” The Ellisons loom large with reported plans to acquire the Free Press and possibly put founder Bari Weiss in a leadership role atop CBS News. A Warner Bros. Discovery deal would give the family control over CNN too. Some see media companies’ capitulation as yet another indication of their waning power — that in an effort to slow down their decline, they’ve accelerated it. “They’re continuing to remind the audience and the population of their growing irrelevance,” said one network executive. “Personally, I would be a lot more concerned if Jimmy Kimmel got canceled from YouTube.”
For now, there haven’t been explicit directives for journalists or late-night writers to pull punches. But the menacing environment is impossible to ignore. “It’s front of mind, and front of coverage, and you’re living it while also reporting on it,” said a veteran news editor at the New York Times. Still, the Times, in the face of Trump’s suit, finds itself in a better position than other organizations Trump has picked on. “We do not have millions of dollars of research grants from the federal government. We do not need to do business in front of the courts. We are one of the few institutions in America that he has no leverage over,” a Times reporter noted.
Times executives have come out forcefully in response to the lawsuit. Publisher A. G. Sulzberger called it “frivolous,” and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien described it as an authoritarian-like attempt to intimidate independent journalists. (A federal judge essentially agreed, calling the suit “improper and impermissible” as filed.) “The New York Times will not be cowed by this,” she said. “A.G. is the person who I feel like was kind of made for this moment and is increasingly alone in this industry,” said the veteran news editor. “In the past, we could, you know, join with the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, put out a statement about this. It does feel increasingly singular and not in a good way.”
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: New York Post
It’s hard to argue that the New York Post is exactly what it once was.
After Rupert Murdoch bought it and remade it in his Fleet Street image in 1976, the city woke up each morning faced with its brazen, often hilarious front page (a.k.a. “the wood”) and the fearsome, must-read “Page Six” gossip column. Everybody read it, from cop to CEO, and for decades it was the paper of record for the city’s id, helping set the agenda for the rest of the coverage, from glossy magazines to the nightly news, in the media capital of the world. Today, with information and outrage coming from a million different directions into your phones, that power is less so; the Post can often feel like it is playing catch-up to the internet. But by becoming more of a national tabloid — with lots of gossip, scandal, and right-wing spin — it’s doing better than most local newspapers, and even, in recent years, has claimed to be profitable.
Last month, I met up with Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, two New York Post veterans — Mulcahy from 1978 to 1985, DiGiacomo from the late 1980s to 1993 — who are out today with a 528-page oral history of the Post. We chatted over coffee at the Odeon, where copies of the New York Times, the Daily News, and, naturally, the Post were proudly — and somewhat anachronistically — displayed on the restaurant’s magazine rack, throwbacks to an era when everybody wasn’t just staring at their screens. Their book, Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, tells the story of the Post during the Murdoch era through the voices of more than 230 current and former staffers who lived it. (Read an excerpt here.) “I feel like we’ve got sort of the pros, cons, the good, bad, and the ugly,” says DiGiacomo, whose oral history of “Page Six” for Vanity Fair in 2004 formed the basis for part of the book project, which was originally Mulcahy’s idea.
You’re both quoted in your own oral history.
Frank DiGiacomo: Yeah, well, we were kind of inspired by the [George] Plimpton book on Edie Sedgwick. And he’s in that.
Susan Mulcahy: We didn’t want to put too much of ourselves in.Several of my quotes in our book are from Frank’s Vanity Fair piece. Then there were a couple places where we were putting this whole thing together about outrageous Steve Dunleavy drunk stories. And Frank and I are talking about it. I’m like, “I’ve got one. I’m going swimming at this health club and Dunleavy …” Then Frank had a very different experience covering Trump than I did because it was so much later. So that was appropriate for him to put in his experience covering Trump. I don’t think we’re in it that much.
When did you work at the Post?
Mulcahy: I was there in ’78, so I wasn’t there when he first bought the paper, but I was there a year later. There were a lot of things I liked about working there, but there were many things I hated and I wanted to get out. At a certain point, I was trapped. I left town for ten years in part because I just felt like I was typecast by New York. So it just was like “Page Six,” “Page Six,” “Page Six.” But there was some of it, the political incorrectness, yes, some of it was offensive, but some of it was kind of funny … There were also no women in positions of power in the Murdoch era. It was all guys.
DiGiacomo: I was hired for a tryout on “Page Six,” and I was part time forever.
What was it like then?
DiGiacomo: Working on “Page Six,” you get this map of the power grid of the city and you see who’s pulling strings where. I don’t think I could have had the career that I had afterward if not because of that. I knew who to call. I had a huge rolodex, and it just was good. I mean, working for [longtime “Page Six” editor] Richard Johnson, who is a very underrated editor and a very funny guy to work for. People would call him, and he goes, “I got it, it’s at the bottom of my pile.” And he had great stuff. So there was that. I also learned you learn to take very complex stuff and condense it, which is very helpful now in this age.
Mulcahy: We checked out everything. When we would say “Rumor has it,” it was not a rumor. And “Page Six” was checked more, not only by the lawyers, but Joe Rab, who was a very long-term features editor there, was the final read.
Did “Page Six” feel all powerful then?
Mulcahy: “Page Six” was sort of an entity unto itself. So the power of “Page Six,” it was amazing to me, the politicians — I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when there were no celebrities there. Trust me. Or the Inner Circle dinner. Have you ever been to that? Sometimes it can be amusing. It’s a big local political dinner. And the mayor always gets up onstage, whatever. And these politicians — they knew who I was, they all read “Page Six” — they’d have comments, and you’d get calls from their adviser. I don’t remember that I ever got a call from a specific politician yelling at me but from their advisers and political consultants.
DiGiacomo: Sean Penn — who then was at the height of his fame — calling to ask to “please don’t write this.” Or Mickey Rourke calling to say he was going to kick Richard Johnson’s ass. You had these people reaching out, and you were like, Okay, people are reading this. Robert De Niro called me a “fucking prick” once.
What happened?
Mulcahy: It’s different now. I mean, I still read “Page Six” and enjoy it and everything. But when I was doing it, it was like putting together a mini condensed version of a newspaper or magazine — media, politics, entertainment, Wall Street, society. You had to have a little bit of everything. You had to have a real balanced mix. And if you didn’t have any entertainment stories, you had to come up with one, because it had to be balanced. It was very powerful at the time.
DiGiacomo: The problem is that once the age of the internet hit, you had all of these sites coming up that were specialized. All of the subjects that “Page Six” covered and put together on one page were suddenly being taken away … And I discovered this when I went to work briefly for the Daily News. Once traffic became important, it just became about reality TV and the Kardashians. And I think it just sort of gives the sameness to things. But I will say this about “Page Six”: They get Elon Musk on the phone.
Rupert Murdoch directs coverage in the Post’s newsroom, 1977.
What was it like to cover Trump in the early days?
DiGiacomo:
Exhausting. I mean, that was really the heyday. It was the time of the “Best Sex I Ever Had” cover. And you would just be bombarded with stuff from all the desks. They were getting these tips, and they would come to you. And if the competition got it, and you didn’t, whether it was true or not, it just was like, “How did you miss that?” So that was a great deal of stress, and I was just exhausted by him.
How important was the Post in his rise?
DiGiacomo:
I can’t say the Post was solely responsible. I mean, because of the competition between the News and the Post, everybody wanted a piece of this. I think that’s why the Trump-Ivana-Marla thing still holds the record for the most woods in a row. It’s my theory that Trump learned to speak tabloid, which he still uses to this day — these very short, sort of general sentences that are exaggerated.
Has the Post lost too much of its New York–ness trying to make it on the internet?
DiGiacomo:
I do think that at least for the first period that Murdoch owned it, the Post did define New York. Graydon Carter says that when he came to New York, he read it to sort of know what he needed to know in the city and — especially with “Page Six” — the people he needed to know. And Letterman used it. Saturday Night Live used it. So I think it really defined New York then. And again, I think when he got it back, after breaking the union and stuff, there was that period in the sort of late ’90s and early 2000s where, again, it was really good at sort of capturing the Sex and the City era of New York. Now, I just feel that a lot of it is just creating fear.
It seems pretty obvious that Rupert Murdoch is less involved in the paper than he used to be.
Mulcahy:
He’s got so much else going on, and has had so much else going on, for such a long time. And at this point, it’s probably age. But you see, we had the anecdote that starts the book, when things were not going the way he wanted them, when Xana Antunes was the editor, he showed up at the editorial meetings and really chastised her in a public way.
DiGiacomo:
I think he gets involved when there’s an election at stake. I really do think that that’s when he’s really in it.
Mulcahy:
Although Gary Ginsberg told us that when Col Allan was the editor, he and Murdoch talked every day. So does he still talk to Keith Poole every day? I kind of doubt it, but I don’t know.
How did you go about asking people to participate?
DiGiacomo:
I think what was surprising was that a lot of people wanted to tell their stories. And the other thing that was very surprising is that even people who had been fired would say, “This was the best job of my career.” And there were those people who were difficult and some people just wouldn’t talk to us. And I think a few had NDAs or some issues —
Did you try Murdoch?
DiGiacomo:
Oh yeah.
Mulcahy:
We had his secretary’s email, which is way better than going through the PR person. And she strung us along for — how long? I don’t want to say “strung us along” — that’s not fair. But she didn’t say “no.” And so it was like at least two months, if not three. And I get these emails saying, “Well, I haven’t spoken to him yet. He’s out of the country.” Then, ultimately, I got a call from the PR people, and I thought, Okay, that’s the end.
DiGiacomo:
The other thing, I mean — it was frustrating, but I think understandable — was we approached a lot of celebrities who were stories and, to a person, except for Candice Bergen, they said “no.”
Mulcahy:
Well, we got John Waters and Isaac Mizrahi.
DiGiacomo:
It’s my opinion that no one wants to piss off the Post.
Mulcahy:
Alec Baldwin did talk to Frank for Vanity Fair but not for this book. No, he wouldn’t talk to us. Weird.
DiGiacomo:
Well, he was also going through a lot of legal stuff at that point.
Post legend Steve Dunleavy with Joey Buttafuoco Photo: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
What was the biggest challenge of doing the book?
DiGiacomo:
Well, I mean, constructing an oral history is super-hard. And we talked every Monday to sort of discuss, first, how are we going to break this up? Then what would happen was we’d each sort of work on chapters, then switch and add things, then we each sort of edited the chapters.
Mulcahy:
At the beginning, we did talk about — and we ran this by our editor — we were like, “Should we do a Dunleavy chapter; should we do headlines?” We did do a headlines chapter, but it worked chronologically. And at one point we had dates for every chapter. This chapter is ’78 to ’79, and it just didn’t work because we had so much, so what we ended up doing is breaking it into sections.
DiGiacomo:
I find it very frustrating when I read an oral history and it’s just quotes. Because you’re like, Where am I in the story, and the subjects keep changing? I mean, I do feel like we really worked hard to make this flow, if not exactly chronologically, close to it.
And also in the book people are — without knowing, obviously — in conversation with each other, just based on the way you’ve ordered it, which is so much fun.
Mulcahy:
We made sure we went back to everybody … Some of these phone calls were very difficult to make. I really like Peter Vecsey, and I like Phil Mushnick, but I had to call Vecsey and say, “Phil Mushnick says you’re a bully and a psychopath.”
And what was the best part about writing the book?
DiGiacomo:
While I was working there, I heard all these amazing stories and I was like, Are all these true? A lot of ’em were told at bars, and I was just like, “The stories are so great.” It was one of the reasons I pitched the Vanity Fair piece too. And the other thing, I mean, I was not exactly happy about it, but a lot of people we interviewed died because we were working during COVID. I feel a measure of pride that we got this stuff down. I don’t think the Post would’ve ever done it.
What’s your favorite story from the book?
Mulcahy:
I really got a kick out of so many of the Dunleavy stories. When I first started working here, I found Steve to be very funny. I enjoyed him as a character in the office, but he ultimately drove me out the door. I did not go to his funeral, but I did appreciate what a great character was. No one could believe he lived to be 81.
DiGiacomo:
Wayne Darwen’s story about Dunleavy having sex with his fiancée on a snowbank. I mean, that was a story that I’d heard forever. And it was like, “Can this really be true?” And it was.
Mulcahy:
The stories about the Christmas party in ’79. I was like a clerk on “Page Six” at that point — oh my God. The fistfights, the drinking, people just standing on desks and falling off. Then the next day, one of the two guys that got in the fistfight, Craig Ammerman and Daniel O’Donnell, one of them, I’m not sure which one, then got in his car, drove up on the West Side, then drove into the window of a big car dealership. I just thought, Wow, that’s not the kind of Christmas party I was expecting. So I love that my memory was valid because I thought I just remembered that being insane. And enough people who I talked to said it was like something out of a movie.
Looking back, do you miss it?
Mulcahy:
I think I had a love-hate relationship with the Post forever because I feel as though when I was a senior in college, when I started working there, I feel like I grew up there. Then doing this book made me appreciate some of the things that were positive about it. I’m still pissed off, but there was a little more positivity as I was remembering than at the time.
DiGiacomo:
I wouldn’t say it was necessarily a happy experience, but it was formative for me. And it really toughened me up as a reporter. And I also think that I was pretty naïve before I worked there. You lose that very quickly.
Mulcahy:
That’s true. You just have to have very thick skin.
Do you think the paper will survive after Rupert?
Mulcahy:
I don’t know that it’ll survive. If Lachlan becomes the definitive heir and the trust is broken up, I don’t think so. One person, Eric Fettmann, worked there for a long time. He says he thinks that Lachlan respects the Post brand and he would keep it going. But I don’t know. I don’t think the kids have the same attachment to it. That’s one thing that’s positive. Doing this book, we really learned there are obviously negative sides to Murdoch, but there are positive sides, and one of them is the guy loves newspapers. So that’s important. He also works really hard. That was amazing. People would talk about not only him in the office but calling — you never said to Murdoch, when he called in from wherever he was around the globe, you never said there’s nothing going on, because you would get an earful: “What do you mean?” You’d say, “We’re working on a great one.” If there’s a murder here, we’re following up on it. You never said there was nothing going on. So he really was very driven to have the paper be what he wanted it to be. But at this point, I don’t know.
DiGiacomo:
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think if Lachlan wins, there’s a chance. But if he’s not the sole, I think they’ll shut the Post down.
Ezra Klein at the DNC on August 20th, 2024. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
It was Tuesday afternoon at the United Center in Chicago, a few hours before back-to-back Obamas issued their impassioned calls-to-arms, and the famously sensible explanatory journalist Ezra Klein, who characteristically keeps his passions in check, didn’t have the right credentials to get into the arena. The Secret Service didn’t recognize the New York Times’ star Opinion writer and podcaster, who has had a bit of a glow-up lately with a salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham–esque haircut, but eventually after we met up was able to figure out how to get in to where he belonged. This is, after all, as much his convention as any journalist this time around, since its high-energy optimism turned on the fact that President Joe Biden no longer was leading the ticket. And, starting early this year, Klein platformed that Establishment desire, leading the coup-drumbeat.
It worked so well that Klein, 40, who has been an influential journalist for over half his life, is ready to come out from behind his computer, step out of his podcast studio, and into the spotlight. He tells me this is actually the first convention he’s attended since the Obama years. After spending his 20s writing lengthy blog posts on economics, he’s now become a tattooed middle-aged Brooklyn dad in Bonobos and sand-colored Air Force Ones who goes to Burning Man, where he’s headed next week.
“The thing I got right this year wasn’t that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection. Everyone knew that,” he told me in the back of a bar near his hotel in Downtown Chicago the night before. “The thing I got right this year was that the Democratic Party was an institution that still had decision-making capacity.” In February, Klein launched a series of podcasts and columns arguing that Biden should step aside. He also advocated for alternatives, like an open convention, and made the case for why Kamala Harris was underrated. Following his “prediction about the campaign” in February, as he later referred to it, Klein continued to take the pulse of the party. And while he didn’t get the open convention he was looking for, he did get what he called a “disorganized” mini primary in the veepstakes — and played a role in the unofficial auditioning process, too, having Gretchen Whitmer and then Tim Walz on his show in the days leading up to Harris’s eventual pick. (He also invited Josh Shapiro on, but the Pennsylvania governor turned him down. “And look what happened,” Klein says, seemingly joking.) He says he’s “very uncomfortable” with the amount of attention he’s received, though seems to be enjoying it just fine, even if Semafor was picking on him a bit for being too cozy with top-echelon Dems with a piece posted August 19 they titled “The New York Times’ Ezra Klein Problem.”
There is a historical tension between the newsroom and Opinion side at the Times, one that Klein doesn’t think is all that useful. “I think of my work as primarily reported,” he says. “My line for a very long time back when I was at the Washington Post,” he said, “was that the division between the news and opinion sides made it too hard for the news side to tell the truth and too easy for the opinion side to bullshit.” He adds: “I don’t really think my show’s lineage, so to speak, is actually inside that opinion-news divide.”
Still, the Times works hard to maintain its journalistic propriety. Following the debate, but prior to Biden dropping out, Klein wanted to have Times politics reporter and The Run-Up host Astead Herndon on his show to talk about Harris. But executive editor Joe Kahn shut it down. This was around the time the paper’s own editorial board had joined the chorus of calls for Biden to step aside, a moment when newsroom leaders felt the need to reinforce the division between the newsroom and Opinion side. “Newsroom people get resentful as he veers more into newsmaking,” one Times staffer noted. Said another: “I think he only becomes more powerful over time, since I’d argue the influence of the Times editorial board (and all ed boards, really) has waned over the course of the rise of the internet and social.”
But in general, Klein’s star status doesn’t seem to be a problem at all for the Gray Lady, which runs full-page advertisements for The Ezra Klein Show in the paper and is building out a video dimension to the podcast. He recently interviewed Nancy Pelosi in a room in the middle of Times HQ, footage of which prompted speculation — among media folk, Brooklyn mom group chats, etc. — about that glow-up. He dismisses speculation that he now has a stylist — he’s a man who respects the experts, after all — though notes that he’s been determined to spend “some time this year upgrading my wardrobe and my style, but it’s a thing that has not happened in my mind yet.”
Klein was not the first pundit to urge the president against running for reelection. Maureen Dowd said as much in the summer of 2022 (as did Mark Leibovich); Paul Krugman, too, in September 2023. But what made Klein more influential is “he is seen by many party elites as much more of a partisan figure, instead of just a columnist,” Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson told me. “It was someone pretty deeply steeped in the Democratic Party basically being the first one to break the taboo.” That The Ezra Klein Show is dominating the charts or has a cult following is not new; but the sense that he is plugged into the inner workings of the Democratic Party has imbued the podcast with greater importance.
“I mean, some things happened in public. It wasn’t all just behind-the-scenes reporting,” Klein says, between sips of a mezcal-soda at the hotel bar. “but I try to pay attention to who people pay attention to, and who’s earned that respect and credibility inside the caucus — or inside or among other donors, or among strategists. And you can feel those things.”
Every election cycle at the Times has a face, and Klein, despite being an Opinion writer, is this year’s. “I don’t think anyone notable’s behavior would change because of his podcast,” a Democratic strategist told me. But where he deserves credit, they said, is “helping to initiate that conversation a while ago” and keeping it in the media long after.
“This was not a fun process,” Klein says. “This was a really wrenching thing the party had to go through.” As for his role in it, heavy is the head. “Look, I recognize that in the rare moments when you want to say you’re right about something, you should agree and accept it, but it also feels like it always pins a target on your back,” he said. Klein seems broken up, though unsurprised, about the bridges he’s burnt. “When I did the February piece, I recognized it was going to fuck up a lot of my relationships in the Biden White House.” Still, he was “aghast” when I told him I’d heard that there was conspiratorial chatter among Biden officials after Klein’s piece, wondering who — someone in Obama’s camp? — had planted the idea with Klein. “I’m actually shocked to hear anybody would think that. That’s so dumb,” he said. “The only thing happening here was saying what everybody was seeing.”
It was through reporting, he said, that he came to that conclusion. “I talked to people and I understood that they could imagine that Joe Biden shouldn’t run, but they couldn’t imagine what would lead him to step aside and what to do if he did,” he says, noting he was frustrated by the “sense that this was going to be a stable situation — that people were not going to need alternatives.” He also felt he owed it to his listeners. “I don’t think people pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of nominating processes,” he says. “I was just trying to make people aware that this wasn’t done.”
Klein tells me he’s interested to see if this moment of collective action changes the Democratic Party going forward. “Institutions have muscles and the muscles atrophy when they’re not used and they strengthen when they are used, and the Democratic party did something collectively. It’s really unusual, functionally unknown about American politics.” The party proved itself “beyond the ambitions of any one person,” he says. “It’s not that I think the Democratic party is going to start knocking its candidates off or something, but it just learned it can act, in a way that I could tell you for a fact its members did not think they could.”
Talking to Klein can feel, at times, like listening to his show. He’ll casually go on a tangent about child-care policy or recall a cross-national study, and then he’ll become a normal person again, talking about the challenge of juggling his professional and personal life, married to Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey, with two kids, living in Brooklyn.
“I think I’m an interesting person on my podcast. I often wonder why I’m not more interesting at home,” he said. “Sometimes I think, Does my family get the best version of me? And the answer is often no.” I asked him what he does for fun. “A mix of very quiet and very loud,” he said. “I spend a lot of time quietly reading. I have very deep friendships. I go to a lot of shows.” This will not be his first time going to Burning Man.
He has been covering politics since he was 18, cutting his teeth as a policy blogger. He moved the blog from Typepad to the American Prospect in 2007, when he was 23. Then he went to the Washington Post, where he ran the popular Wonkblog. After five years he left to co-found Vox, the website that became the namesake of the multi-brand digital-media company that today owns New York Magazine, until departing for the Times in 2020. His popular interview podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, followed him there.
He considered going another route: selling his podcast to Spotify, starting a Substack. “I sometimes feel like a dumbass who’s left a ton of money on the table,” he admits. But he likes being part of institutions and seems, in a vaguely messianic way, to see it as his duty to support them. “It’s true that I could make more money doing this independently, but if all the people who do what I do decide to go and capture all of their revenue themselves, then what happens to all the parts of the industry that are frankly more important than what I do, but are not self-sustaining in that way?” he says, citing investigative and foreign reporting among the beats that haven’t quite figured out the newsletter format. It seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship: “The Times is a unique power,” he says. “If I had done the same pieces from Substack, would it have mattered?”
Going to the Times meant he didn’t have to manage anymore — “it feels almost decadent to only really have to worry about my own work,” he says — and could focus on what he wanted to do, as opposed to the biggest stories that Vox needed its biggest voices to cover. “That allows me to follow my own interests with a lot more authenticity than I would be able to bring otherwise,” he says. What some people love about Klein and what some people hate about him is that he makes himself a mini expert on everything, dipping in and out of topics, from AI to wellness to the Russia-Ukraine war. He has a Zadie Smith interview coming up, and will soon welcome back Richard Powers to the show. “Those are things that bring me a huge amount of joy, and it is really hard to imagine what else I could do that would allow me to explore my own interests broadly.”
“He’s an influential voice, but also generationally unique,” said Obama senior adviser Eric Schultz, citing traditional media’s fight for attention and relevance in an ecosystem filled with tweets and clips and trolling. Klein, has “found a sweet spot that I don’t think anyone else has been able to replicate. It’s like what the Sunday shows used to be,” said Schultz. “Now they’re consumed by the blow-by-blow, and Ezra is having the thoughtful conversations.”
Klein, who grew up in Orange County, California, moved from San Francisco to Park Slope, then Gowanus, a year ago to be closer to his wife’s family. The redwoods are still close to his heart, literally, as he has a tattoo of them on his shoulder. He recently added a second tattoo, a typewriter-font “Is that so?” printed on his inner bicep. “A reminder to not believe what you think,” he says, when I ask him what it means to him. “Sometimes people see it and they think of it as outwardly focused, but it’s inwardly focused,” says Klein. “The easiest person to convince of anything is yourself. And it connects to small Zen stories that I like.” It took him a while, he says, to get over the belief that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos, which he claims is “a complete myth” and tells me that I can read all about it in a Timesarticle.
This post-glow up Klein might seem like he’s ready to mingle at the joy-filled late-night celeb-packed party-ready DNC. But he says he’s not really planning on hitting the town (and I didn’t see him out either.) His first night in town was spent at dinner with his editor and a member of congress and then in his hotel room, where he watched the speeches. On Tuesday he watched the speeches from the floor — where, according to his boss, Katie Kingsbury, with whom he was standing, an usher recognized him but not her — but didn’t hit any afters after. “I doubt I’ll go to anything,” he texted me, when I asked him his party plans for the rest of the convention. “Going to watch from the floor each night then I record fairly early in the morning. So no real social calendar really,” he said. “Work, work, work.”
