![nicksummers:
INSIDE THE MEDIA HIRING BUBBLE
“I didn’t feel like I was being interviewed for a job,” said the AP’s Ron Fournier, about the lunch that would lead to his becoming the next editor ofNational Journal.
“It was not a job interview,” said The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle, about meeting Tina Brown for coffee before agreeing to go to work for her at Newsweek.
“It wasn’t an afterthought, exactly, but …” saidGQ’s Joel Lovell, about the job offer from Hugo Lindgren at The New York Times Magazine. The two friends had been talking about how to reinvent the title so much that when they made it official, the moment was a bit of an anticlimax.
Three major media moves of 2010; three courtships best described as “meh.” Can’t a sought-after journalist at least eke out a fancy meal these days?
“The days of going to the Four Seasons and wooing someone are over,” Mr. Lovell said via cell phone from a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he was nursing a nasty bout of pneumonia.
“Instead you do it over email, or you meet somebody at some crappier restaurant, or over a beer rather than a $300 bottle of wine.”
The expense account days are long gone, it’s true. But what the blizzard of media hirings that closed out 2010 proves is that for the select few publications that have the money to expand, it is a hirer’s market. The media-jobs thaw that The Observer first noted in April has reached a stage that might best be described as like poaching fish in a barrel. Editors like Ms. Brown, Mr. Lindgren and Matt Winkler of Bloomberg News are getting the talent they want, when they want it, and with little foreplay. They are raiding dilapidated shops like The Washington Post—which lost Howard Kurtz, Robin Givhan and Blake Gopnik to Ms. Brown in recent months—as well as powerhouses like New York, where Mr. Lindgren plucked away Sam Anderson and Adam Sternbergh in the quiet days before Christmas.
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nicksummers:
INSIDE THE MEDIA HIRING BUBBLE
“I didn’t feel like I was being interviewed for a job,” said the AP’s Ron Fournier, about the lunch that would lead to his becoming the next editor ofNational Journal.
“It was not a job interview,” said The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle, about meeting Tina Brown for coffee before agreeing to go to work for her at Newsweek.
“It wasn’t an afterthought, exactly, but …” saidGQ’s Joel Lovell, about the job offer from Hugo Lindgren at The New York Times Magazine. The two friends had been talking about how to reinvent the title so much that when they made it official, the moment was a bit of an anticlimax.
Three major media moves of 2010; three courtships best described as “meh.” Can’t a sought-after journalist at least eke out a fancy meal these days?
“The days of going to the Four Seasons and wooing someone are over,” Mr. Lovell said via cell phone from a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he was nursing a nasty bout of pneumonia.
“Instead you do it over email, or you meet somebody at some crappier restaurant, or over a beer rather than a $300 bottle of wine.”
The expense account days are long gone, it’s true. But what the blizzard of media hirings that closed out 2010 proves is that for the select few publications that have the money to expand, it is a hirer’s market. The media-jobs thaw that The Observer first noted in April has reached a stage that might best be described as like poaching fish in a barrel. Editors like Ms. Brown, Mr. Lindgren and Matt Winkler of Bloomberg News are getting the talent they want, when they want it, and with little foreplay. They are raiding dilapidated shops like The Washington Post—which lost Howard Kurtz, Robin Givhan and Blake Gopnik to Ms. Brown in recent months—as well as powerhouses like New York, where Mr. Lindgren plucked away Sam Anderson and Adam Sternbergh in the quiet days before Christmas.
[read more]
