Business

Pecker picks pecs

(
)

This is either a great rags-to-riches story or one of the zaniest stunts yet to materialize at the often chaotic American Media empire, home to the National Enquirer, Shape and Muscle & Fitness.

CEO David Pecker has hired Mona Muresan — a Romanian beauty, competitive bodybuilder and owner of the Nebraska Steakhouse in the Financial District — to be the new editor-in-chief of Muscle & Fitness Hers.

When she is not running the Stone Street establishment, Muresan has been busy winning seven state and national bodybuilding titles since 2008. That earned her the cover of the September/October issue of M&F Hers.

Pecker, who earlier this year began consolidating AMI’s operations in a new headquarters downtown, stopped by Muresan’s steakhouse a few blocks away.

It wasn’t long before he invited the September cover girl to be editor-in-chief in the wake of Allan Donnelly’s decision not to make the cross-country move to New York from the title’s former base in Woodland Hills, Calif.

While Muresan knows her way around a gym, some insiders are alarmed at her total lack of editorial experience. She arrived in the US 20 years ago from Romania and taught herself to speak English.

She worked her way up from the coat check counter to bartender at the Nebraska Steakhouse & Lounge. When the founder, identified only as “Peter,” said he wanted to sell about six and a half years ago, Muresan stepped up and bought the establishment with the help of her husband — a Wall Street executive she is in the process of divorcing.

“I learned English working in a bar and talking to people,” she said.

Muresan said she picked up editing skills for the bodybuilding magazine on the fly as well. Asked if she had any magazine background, she said, “Not really, but I know a lot about the business because I’ve been competing and hanging out with editors for five or six years. I’m still learning, but I’m ready to go.”

“I’m here to prove everyone wrong,” she said, adding that she plans to run the restaurant by night and edit the magazine by day. “I would not take a job that I could not represent.”

An AMI spokesman insisted her lack of editorial background was no drawback. “There are 12 professional editors there. She will be the face and the spokesperson representing the magazine,” he said.

Katrina kid

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, “Salvage the Bones,” won the prestigious National Book Award for fiction Wednesday night.

The novel is told through the eyes of a young girl who is with her family in an impoverished Mississippi Gulf town as it braces for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina.

Publisher Bloomsbury said it is already going back on press for another 50,000 copies, nearly triple the initial printing of 18,000 copies. In her acceptance speech, Ward said the death of her younger brother inspired her to become a writer.

“When I committed myself to writing,” she said, “I did so for several reasons. I was in my early 20s and my younger brother had just died. And since living through my grief for my brother meant understanding that life was a feeble, unpredictable thing, I wanted to do something with my time here that would have meaning.”

Ward was signed by literary agent Jennifer Lyons, who read the author’s first unpublished novel when Ward was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 2005. But it wasn’t until 2007 that tiny Agate Press in Chicago bought her first novel.

“I faced a lot of rejection in that time and I almost gave up,” she told Media Ink. Even when she was tapped as a finalist for a National Book Award, Ward said she never expected to win.

“As a young writer, you’ll face a lot of rejection, but you should never give up. Remain true to your vision. Sometimes it pays off.”

Among other awards, poetry is usually the most easily overlooked category, but Nikky Finney wowed the crowd with her speech after winning for “Head Off & Split” from the tiny Triquarterly imprint.

Stephen Greenblatt won for non-fiction for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” from W.W. Norton.

The Young People’s Literature prize was won by Thanhha Lai for “Inside Out and Back Again” from HarperCollins.

Rough stuff

Two of the city’s major groups for journalists — the Deadline Club, which is the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the New York Press Club — were sharply critical of the way the New York Police Department and Mayor Bloomberg handled the evacuation of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park in its raid early Tuesday morning.

“As police officers acted to remove Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, several reporters protested that they were the victims of harassment and that their rights under the First Amendment were violated,” Gabe Pressman, a veteran WNBC correspondent and president of the New York Press Club Foundation, wrote in a letter to Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. “The actions of some police officers were not consistent with the long-established relationship between the NYPD and the press,” Pressman said.

The remarks echo a Deadline Club statement which said it “condemns the actions of the New York Police Department in detaining journalists who were covering the Occupy Wall Street protests on Nov. 15 and Nov. 17, 2011.”

Mayor Bloomberg said that journalists were moved away from the evacuation for their own protection in the early Tuesday raid. At least seven journalists and photographers were among those arrested.