Question of the Day: What to Do When Rupert Calls?MEDIA
• Rupert Murdoch personally called several reporters at The Wall Street Journal, including Tara Parker-Pope, Kate Kelly, and Henny Sender, to try and persuade them to stay with the paper. Some staffers are jealous, others asking whether the media baron is already overinvolved. [LAT]
• Despite its huge ad counts, the Times Magazine is cutting first and business-class flights for reporters. From now on they’ll have to get masthead-level approval to avoid us plebes back in coach. [Gawker]
• Former Jane staffers hope subscribers trash the Glamour issues they’re being sent as substitutes for the shuttered mag. How Jane of them. [NYP]
gossipmonger
Searching for Mrs. XHarvey Weinstein hired private eye Bo Dietl to try to figure out the real identity of The Nanny Diaries’ Mrs. X. New School prez Bob Kerrey seems likely to run for Senate again if Chuck Hagel quits. Jerry Lewis said that Merv Griffin deserved to die of prostate cancer. The fake feud between Kanye West and 50 Cent is officially over. Richard Gere thinks he could capture Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, even though NATO has unsuccessfully looked for him for a decade. (And James Brolin flies planes and builds houses.) Subscribers to the now-shuttered Jane magazine are getting Glamour instead, and ex Jane staffers are pissed. Katie Holmes fell and bruised herself after chasing Suri in Paris.
gossipmonger
The Future of the Species Depends on Paris HiltonParis Hilton has landed a starring role in a movie set in the year 2056, “when a plague nearly destroys the human race and survival is dependent upon being able to finance a pricey organ transplant.” Anne Hathaway got into a fight with her boyfriend (who is being sued by Ron Burkle) during a screening of her movie in East Hampton, but she stayed with him at the after-party until the cops shut it down at 1 a.m. Madonna strolled into the Reebok Sports Club on Columbus Avenue without checking in. Tyra Banks and her family ate at Serendipity 3. The two assistants from Jane who were cast in SoapNet’s Fashionista Diaries have been moved to CosmoGirl. Usher’s pregnant girlfriend, whom he was slated to marry on Saturday until a last-minute cancellation, checked into a hospital for “pregnancy complications,” though it may just be a ploy to get him back. Ivana Trump is set to get married for a third time, to Rossano Rubicondi.
gossipmonger
This Movie Is Innnsaaane!Danny DeVito is trying to make a movie about Crazy Eddie. One of Lindsay Lohan’s MySpace friends sold online correspondence between Lohan and Samantha Ronson to Star magazine. Philip Roth complained about showing up in “Page Six.” Jane staffers stole a lot of stuff from the fashion closet after learning the mag was folding. Former Jets QB Boomer Esiason may replace Don Imus as WFAN’s early-morning D.J. Gore Vidal is annoyed that Los Angeles Department of Water and Power tore out his solar-power system. Congressman Charlie Rangel is offering $1,000 to anyone who can prove he went on a “date.” Today show contributor Amy Jacobson was fired from her Chicago post after being caught on tape in a bikini at the house of a woman whose disappearance she was covering. Gisele and Tom Brady PDA’d at Palma on Cornelia Street. 50 Cent canoodled with Ciara.
gossipmonger
Gore and Sting, BFFAl Gore hung out at Sting’s apartment on Central Park West after the Live Earth concert. Roger Clemens got his hair highlighted for $120 at the Pierre Michel Salon. Jane Pratt feels vindicated now that Jane magazine has folded. Newly IPO’d billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and his wife dined at Club 55 in St. Tropez. A movie starring Alec Baldwin is set to hit theaters, even though he doesn’t want it released because he thinks it’s so bad it’s “unrecognizable.” Jon Bon Jovi took a helicopter to Ron Perelman’s party in the Hamptons. Teri Hatcher acted like a diva at Eva Longoria’s wedding. A clubgoer caught Paris Hilton smoking pot.
intel
‘Sassy’ Girls on ‘Jane’ Closure: People Don’t Care About Mags AnymoreJane magazine — the un-women’s-mag-like women’s mag founded by Jane Pratt in 1997 after her previous effort, Sassy, folded — is dead. Just a few months ago, Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer published How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, which was a love letter not just to the mag but also to its founding editor. (Pratt left the magazine two years ago and was replaced by Brandon Holley.) So what do two Pratt fans think about her more recent project’s failure? “You could argue that Jane was the only mainstream women’s magazine that spoke to a less mainstream woman,” Jesella told us today. “The slightly off-the-cuff, individualist tone for an independent, twentysomething woman wasn’t seen in a lot of other magazines,” Meltzer said. Jesella continued: “People don’t feel as strongly about magazines as they used to. I think there’s a quote from Dave Eggers that in the nineties, it felt like a magazine could change the world. People don’t feel that way anymore. With Jane, it was the one magazine with a real slash factor: People either loved it or hated it, but it was one of very few that people felt really passionate about.” But not anymore. —Emma Pearse
gossipmonger
Boobs at ‘Jane’Jane magazine asked girls to bare their breasts for a picture spread but canceled after a staffer mistakenly unveiled the identities of the participants. Jake Gyllenhaal and David Fincher had some “artistic differences” on the set of Zodiac. Phillip Bloch was not impressed by how Vogue’s André Leon Talley styled Jennifer Hudson’s thighs at the Oscars. Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselback got into (another) fight at The View, which ended with Hasselback (again) in tears. Graydon Carter and Jim Kelly hosted a book party for Kurt Andersen at the Waverly Inn, and a lot of media bigwigs showed. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are not looking to buy an apartment in the Dakota, according to a rep. Spike Lee hung out with Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall.