NY Glossies Rally Around Their Own
They “play softball every year,” are “downstairs neighbors” and have an “affectionate rivalry”: That’s why Vanity Fair, wringing a few more drops from the controversy surrounding Barry Blitt‘s cartoon lampooning a mujahideen presidency on the cover of The New Yorker (which, like VF, is owned by the parent company Conde Nast), posted this parody cover of a geriatric John McCain in the Oval Office as a sign of solidarity — while across town, the New York Times featured the Conde Nast chairman SI Newhouse on the cover of its business section, trumpeting the titan “who presides over a multibillion-dollar empire built on gloss.” Good feelings all around. New York magazine recently celebrated their fallen founding editor Clay Felker (which made for stimulating copy), but also provided a little contrast to the backslap set with a piece last week by John Lombardi about Hunter S. Thompson, which pointed out that the Gonzo journalist who found solace in Colorado fought to have his “name taken off the masthead” of Rolling Stone after he felt the magazine had been reduced “to a Gap catalogue.”