The Press Box - Remembering Jonathan Gold, the Downsizing of the Daily News, and Is Women's Media a “Scam”? | The Press Box (Ep. 503)

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the future of the New York Daily News following their mass layoffs (03:00), the fallout from the Refinery29.com's "Money Diary" column (20:00), and the passing of Los Angeles food writer Jonathan Gold (37:45). Hosted by: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Produced by: Jim Cunningham Brought to you by: The Ringer Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, at 1124 on Sunday night, Donald Trump issued an all-caps threat to the president of Iran. Now, what I want to know from you is, if you had been issuing an all-caps threat at 1124 last night, who would you have been issuing it, too? Wait, let me Google. Okay, mine would be to IKEA president, Jesper Broden. around that time last night I was putting together my second IKEA wardrobe in a week and I would just like to

use this tweet as an opportunity to express my feeling of incomplete betrayal from IKEA because the first thing the last time I put together IKEA stuff

the Allen wrenches were there in the set and now you open it up in the first step on the instruction manual is have a bunch of rinsches and a drill this is awfully specific though

you just need to have the you just need a general thread toward IKEA you're right stay in the Stay in the Trumpian fan. Yeah. Two IKEA president.

Never ever betray the trust of hardworking, small apartment dwelling Americans again. Or we will send your beautiful furniture warehouses into the sea from whence they came. I've got two. First, two Showtime account on Amazon Prime. Because I want to watch Sasha Baroncone and I can't get it to work. And second, just kind of a general one. Two Wi-Fi. Why don't you work?

work in the bedroom of the apartment I'm staying in. Be cautious. We will be as cautious as we can. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to be an executive at Trunk. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer. David, your ringer syllabus for Monday.

How about Danny Chow with a lovely obituary for the late great food critic Jonathan Gold, who we're going to be talking about today. Loved it. We've also got Haley O'Shaughnessy, Ponderancey. the unanswerable question, what the hell is Carmelo Anthony going to do in the Rockets offense? I want to know. And finally, our very own Kate Nibbs, the New York offices, David's very own Kate Nibbs, writing about the fact checkers that could save the world, a really interesting piece that anybody

who's listening to this podcast will enjoy. But David, I've got three topics for you today. First, as we sit here in New York, we'll talk about the mass layoffs at the New York Daily News, the future of that paper and the future of newspapers, period. Second, a question raised by a diary in Refinery 29 and a piece in the New Republic is women's journalism is scam. And finally, our very own horchata toast to Los Angeles food writer Jonathan Gold. What did he mean to food writing and what did he mean to the great city of Los Angeles? Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But first, let's start with the daily news layoffs. This actually started at 140 a.m., speaking of late night tweets, with a tweet from Jim Rich, the now former editor of the Daily News, who tweeted, quote, if you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked in the dark,

then today is a good day for you. What happened today was that about 50% of the New York Daily News's editorial team was downsized, as they euphemistically say. This is an email, according to Tom Klut from CNN, an email from Trump

talent and engagement team. Geez. Informed the staff. There was in an extremely brief staff meeting that lasted less than a minute. The email went on to say we were reducing the size of the editorial team by approximately 50% and refocusing much of our talent on breaking news, which is the new pivot to video, right? Pivot to breaking news, which in my mind means pivot to aggregation. First stop, for your first thoughts on today's bloodshed. I mean, I always enjoyed the New York Daily News.

It's sort of hard to, I mean, my experience with the Daily News and with all of the New York papers is probably a little bit blindered by just, I mean, I guess my experience is more as a, as in New Yorker rather than a news consumer, you know, it's sort of hard to imagine that there's any, that there's any difficulty in making money when you just see these. newspapers every day in stacks and stacks, you know, it seems like this is like, you know, there might not be room for another one, but like it's hard to, they're just such institutions, you know? And we, and we caught the Daily News late. Sure. Late in its life cycle. I mean, it still felt we got here in the early aughts, right? It felt vital still. It felt part of the city. I don't know vital is the right word, actually. It felt like it was part of the conversation. Yeah. It was part of the city. But, and, and certainly the cover when you walk by the news, Stan.

Yeah. But it definitely felt like it was slipping into this kind of, you know, parallel universe of, oh, wow, the Daily News, yeah. Yeah, we talked about covers when the power of covers in a previous installment about Sports Illustrated, I believe. But the Daily News certainly had a place in the, in the Twitter sphere and may still as the sort of like go-to tabloid, like lefty tabloid, you know. Yeah.

So it had this kind of weird second life. as like a thing that people who hate Trump retweet. Yeah. Which was fairly pointless, right? Yes. It was fun but pointless. But, you know, yeah. I mean, I think that for some, like, political cartoons have been entirely dethroned by the political

cartoons that, but that like, that earn the cover of tabloid or the New Yorker or whatever else. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's, you know, I mean, it's important to stipulate, this is, this kind of goes without saying that there's a huge difference between, you know, website X pivoting to video, you know, websites that were largely already in on the, you know, social media rat race pivoting to video and a institutional newspaper cutting half of its staff in one fell swoop. Oh, for sure. For sure. And I think that you heard that in the, I mean, in the way that the, you know, the world reacted to these layoffs today. Yeah. I mean, I just don't,

Before, I want to hear, I want you to answer this for me. I want to know what you thought too. But like, is it really too much to ask when we sell these, when we sell media institutions to just not just put a put them in a box and put a bow on top and hand them to a private equity firm that's going to just necessarily just demolish them? Well, the weird thing is that Tronk is a media company. No, I know. But like, but functionally, I mean, what we're seeing over and over again is that that is that they want the parts or not even that. So let's let's like, let's recall the sale just very briefly. Yeah.

This happened in 2017. Mortzuckerman was the long time owner of the Daily News. He sold it for apparently for one dollar. Yeah. Because it was, you know, he was losing so much money. Yeah. Which made it funny to me today when people say, oh, if only a rich guy could buy the Daily News. The last owner of the Daily News was a rich guy. Yeah. And I got news for you. Wait till you learn who owns the post, right? It's another rich guy. And they're losing a ton of money. Sure. We need to come up, by the way, with this, with the name for the this idea that whenever a newspaper is in trouble, this fanciful billionaire who's going to come along and eat the losses and bring real journalism back and save people's jobs. Again, if that were to happen at many newspapers across the country, I would be absolutely overjoyed. But this idea that that is the thing that's going to cure the news business is sort of benevolent billionaire. What we go to how to marry a billionaire?

Is that the, I just want to know because I saw that on Twitter. He's like, no, no, the last guy was rich. he sold the paper to Tron. He got rid of it. I guess what I love about what I love, I don't want to do too past tense here, what I love, loved about the Daily News

and tabloids generally is that what they think is important is the opposite of what your quote-unquote respectable press thinks it's important. So with the Daily News, that could be anything from, there's a huge Yankees Red Sox series coming up. We are all in. It's like the U.S. just invaded a country.

Yes. Right. There's a Mike Loop of a column. In the old days, there was a Bill Madden column. We got like five guys at the game. We are just all over this. Right. It's on the back page. It may be, maybe it's on the front page two. And then, of course, the sort of wacko tabloid stuff. In fact, during our run here, and I looked this up, it was 2003. It was when a tiger was found in a Harlem apartment at 425 pound tiger. The Daily News is excellent headline was Room with a zoo. That's great. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure there was an alligator also found in the bathtub or maybe them mixing up my animal stories.

But just the idea that when that happens, right, we are scrambling the jets, triple byline, right? We got like, this is something needless to say if you were on the streets of New York and looking for the news that you want to know everything possible about. Yeah. But the serious part of this, and I think when you get to, when you talk about why people are reacting the way on Twitter is coverage of civic government, right? Yeah. Like that's not going to be so easily replaced when the Daily News has half of its staff slashed. And when like I said, when I hear breaking news, I hear, you know, somebody did, you know, something happened and we're going to aggregate it very quickly. We're going to hire young people who can just aggregate it.

Sure. Right. Like that's sort of what happens in these cases. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. I haven't read anything that explains what the exact plan is. I find it, my guess would be the exact plan is not fully in place, but my, my reaction, my guess is that, yeah, it's going to be a Twitter targeted news operation, instant react

stuff. And then the back end will be, if it exists at all, it will be heavily, it will be like the wire, you know? Yeah. That's the thing about a tablet, right? It's like for all the gonzo and goofiness, it was absolutely, you know, almost crazy. dedicated to a city. Yes.

And so, you know, you were getting this, you know, thing that was often nuts, often bad, you know, either lousy or written in this kind of weird way, but was so wildly dedicated to a city that you sort of admired it, right? I mean, it had a more, you know, intravenous drip to the city than the times ever, ever will. Yeah, for sure. And, yeah, the other thing I was like, you know, people that saw somebody on Twitter maybe says, you know, It's like, oh, and you know, when these things happen, you have to think like there's so much more media these days. Like New York will be fine no matter what happens to the daily news. Certainly something to think about when these kind of things happen.

But I guess my short term worry is what will the people at the daily news do without the daily news? Absolutely, yeah. Because, you know, again, I saw somebody on Twitter saying like, you know, hey, anybody who's hiring, man, you got some great people who were who were let go today. We do this every time. Yeah. Every time there's a layoff. A lot of talented people out there today. And again, it's like the magical journalism job giver is going to come around the corner, right?

They don't exist. Yeah. That's why people are getting laid off. Yeah. I mean, it's at the end of the day, you're right. I mean, the Daily News is a local newspaper, you know, and that's, and it's just as susceptible. I mean, it has a much bigger potential audience and, you know, more theoretical revenue streams maybe than, you know, a small town paper. in Iowa or something like that that's going under.

But yeah, at the end of the day, it's, it's subject to the same market conditions that all these other small, I mean, I just move back to New York. And the biggest, one of the biggest changes that's occurred since I've left is that, like, there's Wi-Fi or internet or, you know, cell phone access on almost every train that I've been taking. Yes. And that's a sort of small thing that you're just like, that's how local newspapers die. Because your local paper, I mean, I know you love reading the physical paper.

But for so many people, it's like an accidental luxury, sort of. It's like you make your New Year's resolution to read more novels. It's like when you find yourself without cell phone access and you have a copy of today's times or daily news or whatever, you can indulge in it in a way and sort of stop time. Or maybe you read that on the subway. Like that's what I was getting at. It's something that you're a little bit forced into, but it's an important part of your spiritual health to do it. And when you can like check Twitter instead of reading the daily news, that's just like one of the ways that this stuff, you know, all just disappears.

Totally. Because Twitter is kind of like the daily news. Yeah. But it has the urgent. Short bursts. Yeah. Crazy headlines. And that's, I'm sure, the way that they're, you know, pivoting.

But, but the, you know, the allure of the, of it happening on your phone, it just makes it feel more urgent, even if the material is not actually more urgent. In the saga of death of newspapers, that was one of the things. You and I came in New York early 2000s, as I said, two. to see in those early days, everybody on Subway was reading a newspaper book. Yeah. And then like five, ten, especially ten years later,

it was like they were all gone. Yeah. And if you were, it was almost an eccentricity to be reading a newspaper on the subway. Yes. Because everybody's looking at phones. Everybody's playing video games on their phones.

Yeah. It just was like, whoa. I had a short dalliance with like, you know, trying to find the right app to read the news. Like, you know, there wasn't access on the subway so you'd have to like download the morning's paper

and then you could pay. through it on your iPad or something on the phone. Ancient, yeah. Yeah, but that was, I was, I mean, I might as well have been like, you know, like a crazy outfit or something. People were just looking at me like I was nuts reading my iPad at that point on the, on the subway. But the, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, the times have changed a lot.

Couple notes on this, Frank Isola, the. Oh, man. One of the great scenery chewing local columnists, sports columnists in America. I was amazed, I was talking to Kevin Clark about this the other day. there's a dwindling number, and this goes directly with dwindling newspapers, there's a dwindling number of columnists of his type that are utterly, crazily devoted to the city they cover. Yes. That don't have like those kind of national pretensions in a way, though he was on ESPN and all that stuff.

And that wheeled the machete like he did, right? My short list would be like Dan Chonnessy and Mark Kisland, Denver, John Kanzano in Portland. But like that is an amazing archetype. and like I want that archetype to exist forever. You know, I grew up, I grew up with that archetype, right? It's like, that guy needs to exist everywhere. Mm-hmm.

And New York will miss that guy. The other thing was this John Travolta Pulp Fiction gift that just got put up on. So Tronk lays off half the staff, but then didn't get the password, apparently, for the Twitter account. Yes. So some...

They forgot to change the password after they laid off their social media team, which is just... Somebody on the social media team. It posed this thing. It was up for hours and hours, which was kind of an amazing one. Another does Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, was tweeting today about what a loss, the daily news was. I would like to remind everybody of the emails that were found from spring of 2015, published in the daily news where there was a rumor going around. The daily news was going to end its print edition and go online, right?

And de Blasio wrote in an email, that would be good for us, right? Because he gets a lot of flack from the Daily News. Or would that make the Post more dominant? Or conversely, would it hasten the demise of the post? Probably just wishful thinking. So privately, the mayor was happy to entertain the idea of the print death of the Daily News. Right. But it's now all, you know, sorrow and tears.

So anyway, I would just like to say a special go away. to build a Blasio today for celebrating the, for trying to chime in on the grief of the daily news. We don't need it. Yeah. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, weighed in too with a very sort of anodyne.

This is a terrible, terrible thing. And I urge Tronk to reconsider a statement. I actually agree with Cuomo in this one. Yeah, he seemed to be suggesting there was like government help if Tronk wanted it, right? We can work together to do this or some kind of subsidy or something like that. Yeah.

That was interesting. That would be the real sort of like future, like tech startup version of doing this is to just take over these companies and then say we're going to shut them down unless the city gives us money. That would be a great move. This is something even more evil than what happened today. David, come up with a scenario that's more evil than what happened to the employees of the Daily News. Congratulations. You've done it.

All right. Now it's time for our overword Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. David, can I start out with the not overworked Twitter joke of the week? Yeah, absolutely. It was so obvious. It was right there. But when I checked this afternoon, I only saw Justin Miller of the Daily Beast make this joke.

Here it is. Tronk to Daily News, drop dead. Classic Daily News headline. It was right there for the taking everyone in journalism knows that. And yet Justin was the only one that went there anyway. Congratulations. That's the not overworked Twitter joke of the week. And now they overword Twitter joke of the week, not shockingly from Trump's session,

uh, coutowing press conference with Vladimir Putin last week. When we spoke, he was in the process of coming back and cleaning up some of the remarks, right? He said, you know, he said, I don't see any reason it would be Russian. Then he came back and said, I don't see any reason why what I meant to say was I didn't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia. Right.

That's what I meant. I just, we've all had that moment, you know, public speaking. right? That was an enormous joke on Twitter. You can imagine substituting would and wouldn't and get some cheap laughs out of it. But the best. By far, singer-songwriter Richard Marks. You may remember him from a previous decade. Also from The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. Yes, he did have a run on that. A really fabulous tweet. He tweets, I misspoke. I meant to say, I wouldn't be right here waiting for you. That's it. And just left it with that. Congratulations to Richard Marks.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, before we talk about women's journalism and whether or not it's a scam, let's take a brief commercial break. You owe it to yourself, David, to experience the comfort and quality of a Burrow couch. Because once you experience Burrow, your relationship with your couch will never be the same. Burrow brings style and comfort to a whole new level and chips to your door fast and free. Burrow sofas are ergonomically designed and so comfortable. Customize your Burrow sofa to match.

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I was going to lord it over you that you moved away from that comfortable burrow couch, but now you've got your very own. lucky you. Customize your borough and get $75 off your order by going to burrow.com slash pressbox. That's B-U-R-R-O-O-W. dot com slash press box for $75 off your purchase. Burrow makes the luxury couch for real life. All right, David, our second topic today, which has been, it's kind of like a triple bank

shot of a topic. It went, story that people hated, or reaction to story people hated. Oh, yeah. And then reaction to the reaction, right? Mm-hmm. So should we start with this Refinery 29 column, which was one of their money diaries? Mm-hmm. And it was a 21-year-old HR intern.

And I'm borrowing the details from the reaction piece in the New Republic here. She pays, this woman's describing her life. She makes $25 an hour. She pays $2,100 a month for her share of an apartment in the West Village. She pays $23 for a goat cheese and avocado wrap. Okay. She goes to the Hamptons with her girls squad for a weekend of overpriced parties. Finally, we arrive at sunset beach, she writes, the water is rough, and we wish we hadn't taken out the dingy.

I would have much rather been on the big boat. All the rosé is gone by the time we raft up. On top of her intern salary, she went on to say that she gets $800 a month allowance and her grandpa, and my grandpa also wires me $300 every month. Hashtag blessed. that was the money diary in the new book I just want to stipulate this is many people

have pointed this out but hashtag blessed is one of the all time great hashtags many people have been using it forever anytime you see the people that use hashtag blessed on

Instagram or any form of social media are just a very very special sort of people and I'm grateful that they self-identify by using that hashtag yeah it's weirdly kind of a religious right it's like actually Absolutely.

The less religious you are, the more likely you are to use the hashtag blessed. Josephine Livingstone in a piece in the New Republic, excuse me, was not content in just making fun of the details. She wanted to make a bigger point, which he said, our anger at the diarist disguises a deeper and more diffuse anger over the way that companies like Refinery 29 exploit a branded version of feminism to make money off us, the casual reader. and then goes in to talk about all the product hashtags you can find woven into Refinery 29 content. And her piece got a lot of traffic because it said it was called Women's Media is a scam on the subtle horror of Refinery 29. So is women's media a scam? David, I ask you. Oh, man.

I think I'll tell you. I'll answer your question first. I don't think it's particularly a scam. I mean, I think under, I don't know, I don't feel like the new Republic piece really set its terms in such a way that, that, that, you know, made the case that it was a scam. I certainly think there's problems with it.

But my, with, I mean, if you want to set it, set apart, you know, women's media, you know, the response to this, I mean, the most prominent response is by, by Diana Moskowitz on Jezebel. And it said, if women's media is a scam, how come nobody ever calls sports media scam? And I think it's easy to say sitting in our chairs as media podcasters, but I don't think either piece made any sort of, you know,

breathtaking point. You know, so there is certainly a value in aggregating widespread feelings or arguments in these sorts of pieces. And sometimes, as we've talked in many other circumstances, those are the pieces that make the point to a broader audience in a way that is, and especially on an important subject,

that kind of gets that feeling out there. But I don't think that either of them, it's hard for me to feel like either one's a scam because I don't think there was anything that, I don't think anybody is that surprised by. I think that the, first of all, the term scam, I think is, is misleading. And I think I would, I wouldn't have that much of a problem with it because it's headline writing. But this is sort of the point that they're making that Josephine Livingstone is making about refinery 29 is that

I mean... She's saying it's compromised to its core essentially, right? That's what she means by scam? Yes. I mean, she certainly means it's compromised to its core. But also it's like the right I mean, there is a piece to be written that's just sort of an honest not to say this is dishonest but a kind of a simple

plea for more standards. and regulations in modern publishing, so these sorts of compromising situations don't arise organically. These granted opportunities? Exactly. But that doesn't have a, but women's media is a scam as a much more juicy headline,

you know, and you could certainly make a tangential but related argument that like, you know, old school headline-grabby journalism is a scam, if it's going to be like just taking completely, just taking things out of, I mean,

writing headlines just to grab you that don't really have, any bearing on the, you know, meat of a piece, you know, or is they're just trying to turn up the volume just to get your eyeballs? I think it's a great thing to do. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, we're all sort of, journalism is to get your attention is always a little bit scammy, right? I mean, it's always a little bit overboard. Oh, sure. It has been since the beginning of time. But I think that the more important thing that you see from this piece, I mean, from both the New Republic piece and the Jezebel piece, is that every targeted, media outlet in 2018 is, I mean, if something, if a target audience is substantial enough to support

its own website or, you know, journalistic enterprise of whatever sort, it's because there are people willing to pay to get their, to get their ads, you know, or to get their, to get their brands on there, right? So every, almost like every targeted journalistic enterprise is a scam, is, you know, is compromised in the sense that this is. And it's, it's, it's, it's, our responsibility as media critics or it's the, the reader's responsibility as wide-eyed readers to be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not. So I think Livingstone's point is that that's all true. I think Livingstone's point is that there used to be this world where essentially women's

magazines were in the thrall of their advertisers, which were often beauty products, right? So you could never really run, you know, a muckraking piece about those things because you would just cease to exist if you pissed off. those people. What she's saying now is that what's happened is instead of just being in the thrall of the ad that was running that the ad has just crept into the copy. Right. So she has this great sense where I like what she said once we had ads for shampoo, now we have sites pretending they aren't secretly running a branding agency from inside their feminist publishing prospect. It's like Coca-Cola trying to sell you self-care. It's what she's talking about is

just like a slippage from an already, what she saw, an already compromised sort of starting point. Yeah. To this, right? Where it just weaves it is literally in the copy.

Yes. It is hidden or out there. I think to the point about readers, you make about readers being needing to be on the lookout for this. That's sort of fascinating because I always wonder, A, how hip to how hip to this stuff are readers? Mm-hmm. And then the secondary question being, do readers care? Yeah.

Right. You know, if you told readers, oh, well, you know, there's a lot of like in this magazine, there's a lot of native ads for products and things like that, but there's also, you know, what we would call legitimate journalism in here too. Would they be mad? Do they have the same? Matt, I think, is an interesting question.

I think that in some way, readers are more wary of this kind of stuff than ever before, just because general distrust of the media. Distrust of the media and exposure to it. I mean, it's like we come, I mean, when we were growing up, if you saw a giant stack of a certain brand of toilet, paper at the grocery store. Your assumption was, oh, they just must have had too much of that toilet paper, so they're

putting it on display to move it. It didn't occur to you that, like, Sherman was giving the grocery store a buck a roll to, like, to sell this stuff and, you know, in volume. Yeah, my assumption was, look, someone just wanted to make an awesome tower of toilet paper at the end of the aisle. But now everybody that goes and buy something on Amazon, you know, is, like, is aware that, like, Amazon's trying to get you to buy certain things that do better for them, you know, that give, that do something that provide them some benefit.

that everybody is wary of this stuff. Or does it make them, would it make you mad? I mean, I guess, yeah. If you feel like you got scammed, it would make you upset. But I think that there's just general feeling that everybody has an agenda now. And I'm not, I think that there should, I think it should be more transparent by all means. But the, but the awareness of the audience is a really interesting thing because I don't think it's a simple yes or no question. You know, I mean, it, go ahead.

And even if, and even if the answer is, no, they don't mind or they don't mind so much, that doesn't necessarily follow that we should have no standards. Oh, no. It's not, our job is not like, do the, do the most craven possible thing that the audience will tolerate, right? As we've seen on cable news, the audience will go to a pretty high level of craven. It's not, it's not, the audience is pretty cool. You know, they're like, oh, okay, well, you know, what's on. I kind of like that guy. Well, I think that's the real question.

And I think that we do have to be, we do have to demand, you know, that media outlets, all down the line of the ringer are, you know, transparent about this sort of stuff. Because I think you're right. I mean, it's whether or not the audience knows is sort of secondary because it's a question that's unanswerable. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just curious. You know, I'm always fascinated, right? Well, yeah.

I mean, it is, it's a really interesting argument. I mean, a really interesting line of thought. I mean, for some reason, my reading this, my mind went back to. such a sidebar, but my mind went back to a million little pieces by James Fry, like the famous memoir that was he was like drummed out of the literary world because he was, because he

had published something as a memoir that was not entirely true, but like the memoir section of the bookstore is about, you know, roughly 55% lies, right? That's like the memoirs are built on lies. That's conservative, yeah. And that's not even, and I'm not talking about people trying to fool you.

I'm talking about the art of the memoir. Like, Mary Carr is like one of the greatest memoirs of all time. Bills are memoirs all. You know, I mean, it's the, the tension between true and untrue is what is built on. You know, Dave Eggers, same thing. You know, that's the great thing about the memoir form. But the question, but the issue with James Frye always seemed to be that he was fooling the reader. He was deceiving the reader. Or Oprah. Yeah, or Oprah in that case. And what he did was, you know, whatever. As someone who worked in publishing, it all made a lot more linear sense to me than someone outside of it. But I think that that's, it's a really

interesting question. I think that but the end of the conversation with James Frye as far as I was concerned was this all could have been avoided with an editor's note at the front of the book. If they had just said, a lot of this isn't true, but accepted it from the memoir section, that would have solved so many of the complaints. And I think that that's sort of where all this is leading is, what is the minimal disclosure that would alleviate all of these concerns?

You know? Right. But you could have something that's disclosed and still be garbage. Right. You know, it's like you could You could run a note on the top of Refinery 29 saying we have a lot of native ads in here. And a lot of the stuff that shows up in our tweets is, you know, a lot of hashtag stuff and these companies gave us money to do this. And then I could still look at Refinery 29 and say, thank you for just closing that. This is still bad. Yeah. That's also a possible outcome of this.

Let's talk a little bit about the Moskowitz thing, which I thought was an interesting piece. So what she does is sort of turn it around and say, wait a second. And lists all these things like look at all these things that happened in sports writing. Right, that we just, you know, look at, look at the player, look at the player's tribune, look at the way sports writers, certain sports writers do not challenge the foundation, the things we believe in about sports leagues, right? Mm-hmm. Why isn't sports? Why don't people call sports writing and sports journalism a scam, right, at its heart? Yeah. If you're willing, so, if you're so, if you're so with sports media, if we're so willing to so easily do that with women's media. Mm-hmm. As this New Republic piece said, why didn't we? go to sports media. My first reaction to this is I just feel fundamentally that people have called sports writing a scam as long as there has been sports writing. But this is the whole, to me, it's like, I understand the double standard she's pointing out in this specific case. There's a lot,

you know, there are a lot of people who will just like watch random insiders, you know, spitting out nuggets and sort of not be, think, oh, that's totally normal when the fact is maybe that's a little weird and strange. But, you know, the stuff about the toy department, I remember Robert Lipsite once telling me that the Times thought of the sports department as its comics, right? It was marmaduke to them, you know, this sort of weird entertainment that, you know, people sort of liked and maybe got a few people to read the paper. Yeah. Right. I just think, I think that has actually been. I agree. I, we have terminology for this, you know. We call, we call reporters homers if they're, if they're overly invested in the local team or, you know,

I mean, there's all, this is, it's a, it's not a, it's not a new part of the industry. Yeah. And that's just a small, small thing I would take issue with. One thing I do think is she does when you put this, she quotes this gossip writer, Elaine Lou talking about this, but when you put this masculine stamp on sports news, it can be just as daffy as anything. And yet it acquires this legitimacy, which I think is totally right. Yeah.

And I, you know, it's always fine to me when people, people say, oh, and I write about football as if that's like, you know, because football is tough as if that makes your journalism more legitimate. Yeah. Because it happens to involve a sport where people, where men hit each other. Uh-huh. Like, okay. Well, that's nice. Yeah. But it could still be weird and craven and compromised and all those things within football writing. And I think, and I think that it's the, the access is a point that she gets at that, that we've touched on a bunch of times. And that's, and that's, you know, you don't,

in some ways it makes the lies told by, you know, by women's, publications or whatever else seems sort of small beer, you know, like it's not, it's, it's, you want honesty and disclosure in your media, right? You want, and you want quality in this kind of stuff that you do. But like, if you're watching a food, a food show or a food spawn con on, on any website, and they're using, you know, they're cooking with a certain brand of olive oil because they're getting paid by that brand to use that, right? Whether or not you see through it, it's a little bit of, it's not, it's not the biggest deal in the world, right? They're not, they're not using, they're not necessary, as long as they're not using a shitty brand of olive oil just for the cash,

it could be any brand, they're just putting a bottle there. It seems like less of a big deal than someone saying, here is the truth about, you know, LeBron James making the decision to go to the Lakers, but this is all, but this has been, but the missing text is this essay has been vetted by LeBron James. Right, or dictated by. Right. Not that that has happened anytime recently, but just for example. Yeah.

I don't know. it's an interesting in the what is worse in the what is worse moral category you know this is like you coming up with something that's more evil than laying off you're right we're going we're going in too many

directions with this what so what's the I mean what's what's the takeaway I mean what is the what is the future of targeted journalism I mean is it is the answer that is not even journalism that we shouldn't be holding it up to such standards

or it's like it's a I think I would call it a quasi-journalistic product. Yeah. You know, because often, I mean, I read about sports television companies all the time, right? Stuff can occur in those, within those television companies that is absolutely journalism with the capital J. And other stuff can occur in those that is a partnership with the league, a branded partnership with the league.

And sometimes the branded partnership creeps into the capital J journalism. And sometimes it crowds it out. And there's space in between, there's gray area in there. even if something's false is not journalism by any definition, it still has journalistic value, right? I mean, we learn things from the Players Tribune because we, because we understand that that is one point of view, that that is one person's voice coming, I mean, that's, that's being expressed. And, and yeah, it's, it's, it's really hard to, I mean, I guess it's, I guess it's just coming at it from, as, as, when we started this, I said,

reading both of these essays, it was hard to be, to have the careers that we have and to feel particularly shocked by anything that was in either of them taken, you know, together having this discussion. It does, I feel like I should have a more, like a more firm moral argument here. But sitting where we're sitting in 2018, I'm, I find it a little bit difficult to muster outrage. I think that's probably. Is that the problem? Am I part of the problem? Well, I think it's probably a

widespread condition. I'll say that because I've never worked at a women's magazine, but I have been a sports writer from giant chunks of my professional life. I would say that anybody who is a sports writer who doesn't feel somewhat queasy about the pursuit at some level of their being

is doing it wrong, right? I mean, I've always felt that. I still feel that. You know, there are other things, there are other things in the world to write about, right? There are other things. I feel that way about the art.

Doesn't mean I don't love it. Doesn't mean I necessarily don't want to wake up tomorrow and do it. But I think that to me is like, you know, a sign that you're at least somewhat conscious about the discipline we work in. All right. Let's move on to our third subject. Jonathan Gold, David. Yeah.

The food writing poet of Los Angeles. So many, he died Saturday from pancreatic cancer. He, where should we start with them? Here's a couple lines. Let me give you a couple of props and we'll go from here. Danny Chow wrote a lovely obituary. So great, yeah. He says, let me quote you a couple of those lines.

He says, there's no one true Los Angeles, perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to finding that core is the vision of L.A. through the eyes, ears, and stomach of Jonathan Gold. Another thing that stood out to me was this second person voice that a lot of people referred to, right? He always says, you will walk into this restaurant and you will probably start with this. And then you will probably order this. Danny writes, reading one of his reviews was like reading a dispatch penned by your future self, someone hopefully more aware, more curious, more empathetic, and more insatiable than the person you are today.

I thought that was a lovely sentence. But for an even better evocation of the Jonathan Gold second person, I give you Sue Horton, an editor from Reuters who's quoted in New York Times. He's forming a bond with the reader. You and I are people who eat deer penis. So I thought that was really good. John the Gold is always going, going and eating strange things. Anyway, I thought that was lovely.

What does, why do you think he resonated so much? Let's, let's say that he was a lovely writer, that he had an interesting way of writing about, interesting and unique way of writing about food. Why do you think he resonated so much with people? I think there was a, I mean, he obviously was a music writer early in his career. Yes. Wrote about a bunch of different sort of things, but the, but the anecdote to keep. popping up is that he you know wrote about in w a early before they were a major

thing you know and caught him on the upswing I think that there's definitely a sort of punk rock aspect to his to his career you know I mean that as you know growing up I think that that that most people can sympathize everybody has their the things that they parts of the newspaper they go right to but the sports page was always the sports page and the comics page which we discussed both in the last segment always seemed very excessive the front page you understood what it was. But the, you know, arch reviews, the restaurant reviews for, in so many papers were just sort

of the stodgiest parts of the enterprise, right? And the most impenetrable, especially as a young reader. But even as you get older, it's for an audience, it's for an aging audience, you know. And Jonathan Gold was able to sort of revolutionize his, I don't want to take away credit. He was revolutionary in so many ways, but he was just able to find a voice that, just mattered more than the institutional voice of, you know, food criticism, for, you know, that was prevalent in newspapers and at that period in time. On the rock thing, it's amazing.

I think we've even talked about this before, but it's amazing how complimentary food criticism was in rock criticism turned out to be. Oh, yeah, you wrote about that, sure. But it's so true. And I think he was probably him and Anthony Bourdain, too, who was not a rock critic, but was sort of punk rock right in his aesthetic. Gold was like, you know, there's a certain sense that, like, the way, what people like about, liked about, what was put in the past tense about rock

criticism was you could discuss, you could talk about the world and the culture through this song, right? Yeah. And Donald Gold is essentially doing that and lots of food critics do today, including the aforementioned Danny through food. Mm-hmm. Um, the other thing people have talked about him is, is L.A., right? That he just is this kind of like, there are very few singular connective tissue

journalistic voices of Los Angeles. Sure. We're here in New York right now. There's a lot. right there's you know everybody from Pete Wells

who's his sort of analog over here to somebody like Mike Francesa right yeah that sort of New Yorkers

of different strata kind of all listened to and it's kind of a common language those people don't exist in LA in the same way

there are not that many of them and he was one of the guys who you know people had that I do that food guide on their living room table they come out

with every year yeah yeah the connective tissue in L.A and I don't mean this in a derogatory way but it's like the crazy days and crazy night. Like it's like entertainment bloggers or the people that,

and part of that is the, is this in the sense that they're kind of living a life and observing at the same time, but the living of the life is the more important part of it. Yes, the lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Food critic.

Dining out of going, in his case, going to that strip mall and finding that Southern Thai restaurant that nobody knew about. But he's also an heir to the sort of legacy of reporters both tethered to a beat and untethered like, you know, just general editors at large that sort of found, just found reasons to write really well. I thought of Pete Dexter when I was reading a lot of these obituaries and this sort of just like

local news person, local newspaper figure who you would just hand his collection of essays to anyone. It's like, I'm looking for a book to read here. Don't even ask what it's about. Right. And it would just seem so much bigger than the beat. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. I mean, the other interesting thing going back to what I was saying about the stodginess of, you know, food reviewing and stuff is that he did i mean gold was was cutting edge in being unstagy in a way that has that like he never became stodgy he was always accessible to new readers but his audience was like like in a lot of ways he he created the every man food world that like the food network subscribes to now right or the diners drive-ins and dives anthony bourdain for sure i mean he's in every man experiencing these sort of like out there things but all of these food shows that are all over the place they are own dave chang you know just the his embrace

bracing of Taco Bell and Dominoes and everything else. This is all part of the, you know, part of the same family. But it's funny because you see a lot of the people that are diehard fans, um, that I mean, a lot of the people that are that are die hard fans of Jonathan Gold are a little bit dismissive of some of the things that came after him. Yeah, but what's funny about him is that his reviews could be very, um, how should I say, I don't know, intellectual is the right word, but they could require a lot of knowledge. Yes. You know, and they were, you know, I was reading. I was rereading his David Chang review of Major Domo in Los Angeles. One of the moments I wanted to talk about because he writes this review.

It was a fascinating thing because he had this whole kind of like disclosure paragraph that he appeared on the Netflix show, went on to and to judge it versus places he'd been in Korea town in L.A. Yeah. You know, it's like it was a very, and there was a little bit of a New York L.A. thing going on there because it was Chang's first place in L.A. He was John the Gold could be sort of territorial. And another interesting one I thought was the Pete Wells came out and reviewed Locall, which is this burger place that services communities and employs people from the communities that don't have that kind of food, right? And Wells had written a piece saying in The New York Times saying, this burger isn't very good or it's not that great. And Gold had written this kind of reposte, very polite because there's obviously a lot of respect between them. But essentially saying, no, no, no, you don't understand.

This is about something more important than whether this is the best. burger you've ever had. Absolutely. It's a part, it's about community. And in those two things, you could see a lot of his touches, you know, and a lot of things to me he cared about. I think the other thing people really liked him is he was just such a character, a newsroom character from that truck that he drove around in the City of Gold documentary.

The fact that he could never make a deadline, which was in literally every obit about him, he was just this kind of tortured writer. And if you looked at him in that documentary, he would just be kind of like roaming. around his house looking through books, like hardback books that may or may not have anything to do with the subject, which who as a writer cannot identify with that in the moment you actually have to sit and run a piece. And I think people love that about him. Is he just seemed like a newsroom original? I'm glad that you mentioned the disclaimer at the beginning of the major DOMO review because I think part of part of the evidence of what makes gold so, made gold

so magnificent is that we really didn't care that he was compromised. He wasn't compromised because he built up this trust and because we're interested in him as a person and him as a writer. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and we're all compromised, whether or not it's through knowing the owner of a restaurant, it's through our, you know, predilections, like, the kind of thing. What do you actually like to eat, you know, or whatever? How do you feel that day? There's a million things, but he was, he was bigger than all that.

And, you know, in him, you talked about the documentary, he was, he, he, he, he, he, He forfeited his anonymity at a time when it was not particularly smiled upon to do so, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's still this anonymity over a lot of the food writers. But it's also like this thing of like the own, the people who work in the restaurants have 100, especially fancy restaurants, have 100% universal right. They have the old fashioned like photo in the back, right? You and I have a food writer. But like, so the only person he's anonymous to is his reader.

Right. Which is just a bizarre thing, right? So, like, the people who should be his fans and form some mild connection. But hey, look at that guy. I know who that is. By the way, I saw Jonathan Gold physically multiple times in non-journalistic settings in Los Angeles at Grand Central Market downtown. Yeah. He was a guy who just started, he was just ordering meat.

He just, he really did seem to be physically present in L.A. where you never run into anybody, right? because it's also spread out. And so, but he just weirdly seem to be physically present there. I also want to quote the great John Powers is a movie critic in LA who edited him for a while at LA Weekly, called him the Usain Bolt of Being Slow, which I thought was a really nice quote of his failure to meet deadlines. He also, I think the final, before we wrap this up, just I would say that he's like, he seemed to stand for,

and not just cultural exploration, which we could say about Borda and all these things, but just, a sort of ideal of coming together through food, right? He had this quote that they ran in the times. I'm not a cultural anthropologist. I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of just sticking to their one part of town, right? So just a larger, again, that resonates particularly in Los Angeles where it's easy and you don't want to get on the freeway ever. You want to stick into your part of town. Yeah. And people are constantly, I mean, constantly looking, trying to define what the connective tissue of this is. city is. And it's the absence of connective tissue and a lot of things. And as some people would say, it was like Jonathan Gold. There's also a nice idea there of, you know, togetherness that I think,

you know, P. Wells is incredibly talented. If Pete Wells is slaughtering a Thomas Keller restaurant or a Guy Fierry restaurant in Times Square, as good as those reviews are, they just don't have the same quality to them that we should all come together through food. it doesn't quite touch the same thing that Jonathan Gold would in a review. You know, there was this sort of kumbaya sense in him, even when he was, like I said,

even when he is picking at the Chang menu, he's, he's, you know, referencing Koreatown. And it's like, it's all about you should be out there eating this and this. And before you do this,

you should have gone to all these Ktown places and stuff like that. I just think that's a quality that drew a lot of people to him. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, it's, it's, it's easy when,

someone dies to say that he, you know, embodied a part of the, you know, American spirit that is sorely lacking today. But, you know, there's a way that the Pete Wells takedown of Guy Fierry is my favorite, when that came out, it's my favorite thing I'd read in a month. But there's, you know, there's a difference between that sort of writerly, uh, just tour to force and a body of work that, that adds up to something, you know? That's it for the press box this week back next week with more hot takes about the media thanks to our producer jim cunningham and to the great david shoemaker it's always so nice to join us here wow thanks man thank you for coming to coming to the office i i came all the way to new york to record this podcast we'll talk

soon david see you and i are people who eat your penis but you know yeah i mean i think that go away how should i say fun but pointless