T A B L E_.T A L K

Table Talk is experiencing technical difficulties. We appreciate your patience as we fix it.

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Lights, camera ... Miami!
By Robin Dougherty
With his new CityVision, Barry Diller is gambling that a city can be a star
(07/13/98)

Under the Covers
By James Poniewozik
Brown and out in New York
(07/09/98)

Buzzing about the buzz machine
By Susan Lehman
Colleagues offer kisses and poison darts for the departing Tina Brown
(07/09/98)

Rotten banana
By Bruce Shapiro
While the media race to condemn the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who hacked into Chiquita's voice mail, they're forgetting who the real villain is
(07/08/98)

Why the Time/CNN nerve-gas debacle was inevitable
By Ted Gup
A former Time reporter argues that until the newsweekly becomes more concerned with getting the story right than making a buzz, its credibility will never return
(07/03/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

Did Slate's editor blow the New Yorker editor's job by not leaping immediately into S.I. Newhouse's lap?

BY BRUCE BARCOTT | While New Yorker staffers quaffed champagne to celebrate the ascension of staff writer David Remnick as the magazine's new editor, the rest of the media world burned up the phone lines this afternoon trying to figure out if the story was true. Not the story about Remnick, but the one about Slate editor Michael Kinsley, the man who did -- and then didn't -- get the job. In a fit of either uncommon pique or canny spin control (or maybe just the gesture of a regular guy fed up with having his chain yanked), Kinsley laid out the details of his weekend negotiations with New Yorker owner S.I. Newhouse in an e-mail composed Sunday night and sent to Slate staffers and to his Microsoft overseers -- CEO Bill Gates, new media honcho Pete Higgins and corporate strategist Peter Neupert. The memo immediately jumped the fence and by Monday afternoon was running worldwide:

-----Original Message-----

From: Michael Kinsley

Sent: Sunday, July 12, 1998 7:32 PM

To: Slate Magazine Team; Bill Gates; Pete Higgins; Peter Neupert

Subject: My Career As Editor of The New Yorker

9:55 pm edt Sunday July 12, 1998

Friday about 11:00 am pdt. We are about to have a SLATE staff meeting and "morale lunch." I get a message to call Si Newhouse. I call him. He wants to see me the next day. I race home and to the airport for a 12:45 plane to NY. So much for the morale lunch. Also for the weekend hike I was dressed for.

Saturday 11 am edt. I meet Si at his apartment. We talk there for a couple hours and at lunch at a nearby restaurant for another hour or so, and then he says, "How would you react if I offered you X?" I say, Are you offering me the job? He says yes. I say I will tell him yes or no w/in 48 hours. He is unhappy with that, so I say we'll settle this by first thing Monday morning. (He wants to announce something Monday.) He then invites me to dinner with his brother and family. I say I would make a counterproposal at that time.

Sunday. We talk by phone and I send him a fax about various things. He says come by the apartment before dinner at 6:30. I come by, present my counterproposal, he counters back, I say that sounds fine, I probably accept, but I promised Pete Higgins [Microsoft VP] I'd check with him before definitely accepting and I needed a night to sleep it over. He says fine.

We go to dinner with his wife, son, brother, brother's wife and son. Talk virtually no business. Parting at the restaurant door, I say, I'll call you first thing tomorrow morning. What time do you get in? He says, I'm in by 6:00. I say, I'll call you at 7:30. He says, fine.

Maybe 15 minutes later I get back to the hotel room and there's a message: Call Si Newhouse. I call and he says, You seem reluctant. I say, It's a big decision, but if I do it I assure you I'll be energetic and enthusiastic. He says, I'm starting to feel reluctant too. I think it would be better to call it off. No apology.

After some stunned mumbling, I say, This is going to be embarrassing to both of us. He asks me to say that I had withdrawn my name. I say I'm not going to lie about it, but I'll decline to discuss it. He mumbles something and I mumble something and we hang up.

On reflection (about two minutes' reflection), I decided I was not inclined to do him the favor of not discussing it.

Slate staffers confirmed that they did in fact receive this e-mail from Kinsley. Assuming that his bizarre tale is true and not a weirdly convoluted and self-lacerating hoax (arguments for the latter interpretation include Kinsley's being dressed for a "weekend hike" on Friday morning), there are many ways to read it, including tragedy encountered (HAMLET MISSES BIG CHANCE) and tragedy averted (HOW I ALMOST WORKED FOR A JERK). The most telling frame to put around the whole episode, however, is that of farce.

Consider: If Newhouse announced his choice of Remnick to the New Yorker staff on Monday morning, he had to have been negotiating concurrently with Remnick and Kinsley over the weekend. And just for the door-slamming hell of it, why wouldn't he have kept a third contender in the waiting room, say New Yorker columnist and former Spy and New York editor Kurt Andersen.

It's a setup to make Feydeau weep: Media magnate invites three prospective editors to his lushly appointed Manhattan apartment and entertains each in separate parlors. Trades insider chatter about "Armageddon" with Andersen, murmurs worriedly with Remnick about Russia's IMF loan and swaps hiking tales with Kinsley, who's still dressed, with strangely premature sartorial zeal, in REI's off-the-rack finest. Keeps dashing off to attend unexplained emergencies. Candidates none the wiser.

Act Two: Lunch at the restaurant. A tough scene to pull off, set-wise, but with the help of a knowing waiter, Newhouse keeps his prospects in the dark. All three have been offered the job.

Act Three: Denouement and a bitch of a scene to mount. Requires services of three "families" and complete five-course dinner. Many near-catastrophes and kitchen-scuttling. At evening's end, host leaves all three candidates beaming at their good fortune: They, and they alone, are the new editors of the New Yorker. Two of them are wrong.

Or, in Kinsley's case, one.
SALON | July 14, 1998

Bruce Barcott is a staff writer for Seattle Weekly.