Joe Dolce, Former ‘Star’ Editor, Gets a Taste of ‘Culture’MEDIA
• Former Star editor-in-chief Joe Dolce resurfaces, bringing Culture & Travel magazine back into the spotlight. [WWD]
• Former Seventeen editrix Atoosa Rubenstein resurfaces, bringing Alpha Kitty back into the spotlight. [HuffPo]
• And for those wondering how to keep tabs on colleagues who are masthead hopping, check out e-newsletter Gorkana, brought to your in-box by friendly PR people. [NYT]
intel
Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Editorial Assistant?So you want to be an editorial assistant to Seventeen magazine’s editor-in-chief? Before you commit yourself to long days of low-paid work, you can now try the experience on for size with Editor’s Assistant, an online game offered on Seventeen’s Website. We asked two New York editorial assistants to take a spin and evaluate how closely the game tracks real life.
company town
You Know, For KidsMEDIA
• Seventeen will introduce an online game for teen girls called “Editor’s Assistant.” Well-heeled parents not required for play. [WWD]
• Daniel Menaker, the editor who signed Ben Kunkel and Gary Shteyngart, will step down as executive editor-in-chief at Random House. [NYT]
• First they came for the book reviewers. Now it’s the classical music critics. [NYT]
intel
Jane Pratt Spurns Hagiographers, Disses AtoosaJane Pratt can’t seem to take a compliment. Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are the authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, a just-published 128-page mash note to the dearly departed title founded by the precocious Pratt in 1988. They sent a galley copy to Pratt and might have hoped for a few kind words. Didn’t happen. “There has been no ‘good job,’ or ‘I love the book,”” says Jesella. “She spoke to our editor. And she did have a bunch of [factual] changes that we eagerly changed. And then there were some matters of, um, opinion. Which we did not change.” But Pratt did make one thing clear when she was interviewed for the project: She — and not former Sassy intern and Seventeen topper Atoosa Rubenstein, whom the authors dub “Jane Pratt #2” — was the younger editor-in-chief. “[Pratt] would note that she was only 24 and Atoosa was, what, 26?” said Meltzer. And another onetime Sassy editor is quoted noting that Rubenstein “was rejected for every position” she applied for at Sassy. Now you know. —Emma Pearse
it just happened
Ann Shoket Named ‘Seventeen’ Editor, Despite Midwifing MediabistroThe Hearst Corporation — whose cafeteria, we’ll point out now that we’ve finally been to it, can kick the ass of Condé Nast’s Frank Gehry bauble any day of the week — today announced a new editor-in-chief for Seventeen, the teen title Atoosa Rubenstein abandoned in November for this newfangled Internet. (Indeed, Atoosa’s new venture was announced with a MySpace page, and she now has a whopping 42,487 MySpace friends; Seventeen has only 33,304.) The new Seventeen editor is Ann Shoket, who has been executive editor of Hearst’s CosmoGirl! Before that, Shoket was editorial director of CosmoGirl!’s Website, which was no doubt seen as a big plus by Hearst execs. But, then, people might want to think more carefully about the value of Internet experience: As we learned in August 2005, Shoket also “has the distinction of having come up with the idea for the original mediabistro.com web site way back in 1997.” What, Cathie Black must now be wondering, hath Shoket wrought?
