The New York City Marathon always attracts a fair number of media types to compete, and when it was canceled Friday by Mayor Bloomberg many of them turned their attention to relief efforts.
Within two hours of the cancelation, a Facebook page, called New York Runners in Support of Staten Island, had sprung up to bring badly needed supplies to hard-hit areas of Staten Island such as New Dorp, Oakwood Heights and Crescent Beach.
“Once we got to Staten Island and saw the devastation, we realized that canceling the marathon was absolutely the right thing to do,” said Jeanne Meyer, senior vice president of communications for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and one of the organizers of the relief effort. “The devastation looked like New Orleans, post-Katrina.”
And since many areas were still flooded, the runners simply loaded up backpacks with supplies and began threading their way to the Staten Island Ferry and from there fanned out to shelters and other devastated areas. By Saturday, 1,200 volunteers had boarded the ferry carrying badly needed supplies.
Among the publishing types who joined the relief effort were: sports medicine doctor and Rodale Books author Dr. Jordan Metzl; Self Editor-in-Chief Lucy Danziger; Michael Clinton, Hearst’s president of marketing; Vanity Fair beauty director SunHee Grinnell;
Karen Schuchardt, Martha Stewart’s senior vice president of digital sales; and Tracey Lomrantz, who blogged about her experience on Glamour.com, as did Grinnell for VanityFair.com.
Meanwhile, many of the publishing outlets in lower Manhattan are back up and running even as the city braces for the next Nor’easter slated to hit today.
Martha Stewart staffers, whO finished putting together the January issue from space at one of the company’s law firms, returned to their flooded headquarters only yesterday afternoon.
Penguin, the book-publishing giant on Hudson Street, returned to its offices on Monday after power was restored. The same went for Harry Potter publisher Scholastic on lower Broadway.
Forbes Media Chief Product Officer L
ewis DVorkin said that the corporate offices were closed all last week, but the company had gone to press with Forbes magazine a day early to get ahead of the storm.
Forbes.com, using the Campfire community tool, was able to keep its editors and writers connected and its bloggers posting. DVorkin said power came back Saturday and the office was running full tilt by Monday.
Not quite so lucky was American Media at 4 New York Plaza, near the World Trade Center on Water Street.
CEO David Pecker said he’s rented temporary space from Reader’s Digest Association in White Plains, NY, and a number of production people are housed in the offices of printer RR Donnelley at Two Grand Central Tower.
AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer, Shape and Star, sent about 50 of its 250 New York staffers to its main office in Boca Raton, Fla. About 100 are split between White Plains and Manhattan, while 50 are working from home.
Pecker said Sandy flooded the building lobby with 3 to 4 feet of water. The building also serves as the headquarters of Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News.
The News, which put out smaller editions of the paper last week, also had to contend with a flooded printing plant in Liberty View, NJ.
Other papers, including the Hartford Courant, the Jewish Week and the New York Times, which ran off 125,000 copies Wednesday, pitched in to help the News put out a printed edition .
By Friday, the printing plant was running again. News President William Holiber said that some editors are now working out of the plant, while reporters are operating remotely or out of bureaus since the main newsroom is still dark.
He told the Capital New York website there was no timetable for when the landlord would allow the newsroom to re-open.
“I got the impression talking with the landlord that it is going to be four to six weeks,” said AMI CEO Pecker.
Gray Lady exit
Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of the New York Times, is exiting at year-end.
Heekin-Canedy had been one of the inside candidates who was passed over in the Times’ quest to find a new CEO. Mark Thompson, the former director general and editor-in-chief of the BBC, is set to take the reins next week, despite the fallout from the BBC’s botched handling of a sex-abuse scandal involving the late talk show host Jimmy Savile.
Heekin-Canedy has been with the Times since 1992, except for three years he spent at the Los Angeles Times. He is credited with being one of the people who pushed for the digital paywall around the Times website.
“It is with a mixture of sadness and gratitude that I share with you the news that Scott Heekin-Canedy will be retiring from the company at year end,” said Times Chairman Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr. in a memo to staffers.