In your head-scratching Tuesday media column: African-Americans simply can't appreciate Bill O'Reilly, more evidence of Tribune Co. hopelessness, GQ censors itself in China, and WSJ. magazine names a new editor.
• President Obama's first Congressional address drew in 33.6 million viewers last night, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. [ML]
• It was Chris Matthews who muttered "Oh, God" on MSNBC last night, right when Bobby Jindal was about to deliver the Republican response. [Politico]
• Fourth-quarter profit declined 77 percent at the Washington Post Co. [NYT]
• Remember the DABA Girls? Yea, well, much of what they told the Times was BS, which is why the paper issued a correction today. [Newsweek, NYT]
• The CW has renewed a bunch of shows, including 90210, Smallville, America's Next Top Model, and—most importantly—Gossip Girl. [Variety]
• Ex-Domino editor Deborah Needleman is "spending more time at the gym" in order to acquire "one of those Connecticut-housewife bodies," FYI. [MM]
• Jared Kushner may be cutting a deal to sell the Observer at Starbucks. [NYP]
♦ The opening of Elizabeth Peyton's New Museum exhibition on Tuesday was full of her friends and fans like Marc Jacobs (with boyfriend Lorenzo Martone, left), Glenn O'Brien, Amy Astley, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour, Hope Atherton, Cecily Brown, Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Gavin Brown, Barbara Gladstone, Debbie Harry, and Thelma Golden. [The Daily, PMc]
Somewhere out there is a budding female public intellectual destined to marry an embarrassingly oversharey lifestyle magazine editor1 who dribbles out in monthly editor's letters the grotesquely bourgeois details of their life, providing endless gossip fodder to media workers frustrated in their own loveless (if not as literal!) marriages to the consumerism bankrolling their profession. Until then, however, we will have to be satisfied with the likes former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose wife shares their home life with the readers of the New York Times—and smartypants Jacob Weisberg. The Slate group editor sleeps on a horsehair mattress covered in "beautiful heavy linen" and sheets from a special shop in London, all of which we know because his wife, Domino editor-in-chief Deborah Needleman, told Fashion Week Daily in excruciating detail (click thumb for a closeup) about the marital bed. By the way, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell introduced the couple! (Hey Gladwell, anyone ever tell you you were a "connector"?)
Deborah Needleman
"The paint-it-all-white thing is a total Domino trick," says Deborah, the editor of that magazine, of the Tribeca loft she shares with her husband, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, and their two kids. Good trick! Unless anyone ever has any kind of a period.
The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.
