Stefano Tonchi Takes Over W
In your tendentious Tuesday media column: W magazine names its new editor, The Onion gets a TV show, haters be hating on Christiane Amanpour, and a win for Brian Tierney, newspaper champion.
- As expected, W magazine's new editor is Stefano Tonchi, the former editor of the NYT's T style magazine. "I share a set of values with the Newhouses," Tonchi said, in a quote that is more fun out of context. Everyone, send your applications to be the new editor of T to the NYT immediately, where they will be trashed.
- The Onion News Network is getting its very own real TV show on IFC, if you consider IFC to be "real" TV, which we do, but which T. Herman Zweibel likely would not.
- Cats still be talking shit about Christiane Amanpour taking over This Week on ABC. Our only complaint was that cable TV news is, in general, uninteresting. That said, Christiane Amanpour is one of the realest journalists to be found anywhere on US cable TV. So of course TV critic Tom Shales calls her "the opposite of the perfect candidate" (pithy!). Try this evidence on for size: "A Web site devoted to criticism of Amanpour is titled, with less than a modicum of subtlety, "Christiane Amanpour's Outright Bias Against Israel Must Stop," available via Facebook." Via Facebook? Discussion: over.
- The owners of the bankrupt Philly papers won an appeals court ruling yesterday that will make it easier for them to hang onto the papers, rather than turn them over to creditors. Good news, since Brian Tierney has done such a job with them thus far.