In another blow to the Gray Lady’s prestige, veteran New York Times columnist Frank Rich said he is exiting the paper after 31 years to join Adam Moss and New York Magazine.
Rich will start writing for the magazine in June.
The opin-meister will be an editor at large at New York and write a monthly column on politics and culture as well as edit a monthly section anchored by his column.
The 61-year-old will also be a commentator on nymag.com.
Talks between Moss and Rich were said to have begun just over a month ago and progressed fairly quickly. Rich has apparently been getting restless and was looking around for over a year before deciding to jump ship. He had preliminary talks with several parties but his long relationship with Moss is what seems to have prompted him to finally make the switch from the Times.
Said a former Times colleague, “I think he was just kind of sick of the place.”
But the jump was no overnight decision. “I have been mulling over a next path for about a year, eager to find a post-column change of creative pace,” he told Media Ink.
In his memo to staffers, he said: “After 17 years in my second career there, as a columnist, I feel much as I did after nearly 14 years in my first, as chief drama critic — both the satisfaction that I’ve given a great job all I had and a serious hunger to move on to fresh and expanded writing challenges after having done the same assignment for so long.”
He credited Moss, who was then editor of The New York Times magazine, with getting him to move from art criticism to broader essay writing in the late 1980s. The two worked together to broaden the paper’s culture coverage in the Nineties.
Rich, who spent time as a critic for Time magazine and here at The Post after graduating from Harvard, had been the chief drama critic at the Times from 1980 to 1993 before becoming a columnist.
“This is his next chapter,” said Moss in a statement.
Wenger walks
Daily News Editor-In-Chief Kevin Convey has lost a few more key people.
Scott Wenger, promoted to managing editor, money and investing, as a way to keep him on board just about a month ago, told staffers via memo yesterday that he is exiting.
He is going to become one of a number of editorial directors at SourceMedia, the Investcorp-owned business magazine group that was sold by Thomson back in 2004. He’ll be overseeing three of the company’s titles — Financial Planning, On Wall Street and Bank Investment Consultant — as well as working on the conference business. He’d been at the paper for nearly 13 years.
“I wasn’t looking,” he said. “I had a fun ride here, but this was a tremendous opportunity.”
He’s not alone. Amy DiLuna, the deputy features editor who was in charge of much of the paper’s Fashion Week coverage, is jumping to become a senior editor on NBC’s Today show.com.
“I start on March 15,” she told Media Ink.
The moves come a few weeks after the recently decimated Washington DC bureau, which had been chopped down to three people from five in a recent round of cut backs, lost one of its remaining key staffers. James Gordon Meek, its well-respected anti-terrorism reporter, jumped to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security, chaired by Rep. Peter King (R-NY).
The bureau is said to be searching for a replacement.
E-mail flap
Also down in Washington, Kurt Bardella, the press aide to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), has been fired for turning over e-mails from other reporters to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich for a book project.
“Though limited, these actions were highly inappropriate, a basic breach of trust with the reporters it was his job to assist and inconsistent with the established communications office policies,” said Issa in a statement. “As a consequence, his employment has been terminated.”
Leibovich is working on a book for Simon & Schuster.
Bardella did not respond to a request for comment.
Bardella had given prior notice to Issa about working with Leibovich on the book project, but is involved as one of several sources, not as a collaborator or a co-author.
“In explaining his intentions in participating in Mark Leibovich’s book, Kurt has told me he saw this as an opportunity to contribute a narrative about what a press secretary does on Capitol Hill and was not about offering salacious details designed to settle scores or embarrass anyone,” Issa said in his statement.
The lawmaker said he is continuing his investigation.
In an earlier and unrelated controversy, Bardella played a role in an incident with The Daily Beast Washington Bureau Chief Howard Kurtz, who had conducted an interview with Bardella, believing he had actually spoken to the California congressman — and reported he had spoken to Issa in a story that ran on Nov. 27.
The embarrassing part for Kurtz was that although Bardella called a few days later to inform Kurtz of the mix-up, the columnist did not get around to writing a correction until six weeks later — just as The New Yorker was about to go to press with a story that mentioned the screw-up.
Kurtz said he forgot to post the correction, but also noted that several times in his conversa tion he had referred to Bardella as Issa — and the press secre tary never bothered to correct him.
Kurtz had not reacted to Bardella’s sudden axing by press time.