Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman is apparently unhappy with advertisers’ response to the new four-color paper, and the word inside is that more editorial cutbacks will follow.
Decisions about the cuts are expected to be made today.
New Editor-In-Chief Kevin Convey is said to be prepping key staff reductions in the paper’s Washington, DC, bureau that houses five people, including Bureau Chief Thomas DeFrank.
When contacted by Media Ink, DeFrank was noncommital: “I don’t talk about internal matters.”
Sources tell us DeFrank, with more than a decade at the News and an earlier career at Newsweek, is not in danger but that two or three staffers may be.
Bob Kappstatter, who was the Bronx bureau chief, has already been transferred to “the police shack” covering the NYPD from downtown Manhattan. Sources say it is the first step in dropping edit pages dedicated to Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
Photographers are also said to be worried that their ranks will be thinned.
Calls to Convey were referred to a spokeswoman, who had not returned our calls by presstime.
Spiked at VF
Vanity Fair Editor-In-Chief Graydon Carter is putting the finishing touches on the March Hollywood issue that hits Feb. 2.
But one story that won’t be in it is a piece on the gossip wars pitting Nikke Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood against Sharon Waxman‘s The Wrap and Janice Min‘s re-invented The Hollywood Reporter against slumping grande dame Variety.
Writer Cari Beauchamp penned a 5,000-word story, but sources say it was spiked “because it wasn’t catty enough. They wanted a catfight story.”
A VF spokesperson confirmed the story was spiked, but said it was a matter of space: “With so many articles trying to get into the issue, it didn’t make the cut.”
Kurtz delay
There are still some aftershocks stemming from the way Howard Kurtz, the Daily Beast’s new Washington bureau chief, handled a story correction — with the correction appearing a month and half after the original mistake.
The story appeared to be an interview between Kurtz and Rep. Darrell Issa, the “GOP’s New Top Cop.”
However, Kurtz apparently never got the congressman on the phone, only his spokesman, Kurt Bardella. Kurtz published his piece on Nov. 27, believing it was Issa he had interviewed. A few days later, Bardella e-mailed to let him know about the mix-up.
But Kurtz didn’t do anything about Bardella’s e-mail until The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza started sniffing around the story recently.
Most observers were shocked not only that a veteran Beltway insider would make such an error but that he didn’t bother to ‘fess up when he learned about his gaffe.
New York magazine’s Daily Intel labeled it a “comedy of errors.”
“I definitely want to know what Tina’s reaction was when he finally did tell her,” said one insider, referring to Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast who will also oversee Newsweek after the NewsBeast merger.
Initially, Brown reaped a lot of favorable publicity when she raided the Washington Post to hire Kurtz.
The top brass at the Daily Beast are not happy and have apparently given him a stern talking to.
“I screwed up,” Kurtz told the Web site Politico.com. “I was so puzzled by the note that Bardella sent — about my not having talked to the man I repeatedly called congressman, and who identified himself as Darrell Issa — that I wasn’t sure how serious he was. He didn’t ask for a correction, which he certainly is entitled to if I wasn’t in fact talking to Darrell Issa. Then I got busy with other things and I let it slip, and that was a mistake on my part.”
The correction ran Wednesday on the Daily Beast site, but Kurtz is still a little baffled by a few things — like how, “if the misunderstanding was on my side, why Bardella did not simply point this out when I sent him a note saying, ‘Hey, thanks for getting me the congressman so quickly?’ ”
Bardella told Politico, “I just assumed he reached the congressman somehow, and I wasn’t aware of it.”
Media Ink reached out to Brown via e-mail and copied Executive Editor Ed Felsenthal to get their reactions to the star columnist’s flub.
“Tina and I have both talked at length to Howie about this,” Felsenthal e- mailed a short while later. “It was a mistake that should have been corrected right away. It wasn’t, and it has been now. Howie, of all people, knows that, has apologized, and we are confident it won’t happen again.”
What could we say to that but, “Thanks, Tina!”
To which Felsenthal quickly replied, “That’s from me, not her [but we are in agreement].”