Well! Oxfeld's attempt to break through the threshold from the mere peasantry of a walk-in right to a prime time table was chronicled by Eater:

I feel Oxfeld's pain, as someone who has both been through the intense process of trying to get a goddamn steak and as someone who used to take reservations for Keith McNally's restaurants. Full disclosure!

Without revealing any of the top secret, Pandora's Box-esque Black Voodoo BloodMagik that goes into getting a table at one of his places, know that it can be done. But Oxfeld, who—Mazel Tov!—was recently named the new theater critic at the New York Observer, wasn't getting one. And he wasn't about to take that shit lying down, or past 10PM.

It sounds like he tried to get a reservation exchanged, and was a little too aggro in dealing with the reservationist on the other line. Note to all New York Diners: be nice to your reservationists. Otherwise, you might end up getting it blogged, and the owner of the restaurant will consequently call you out for being an asshole. Like this:

I just investigated the Jesse Oxfeld claim and discovered that most of what he said is quite true. However, according to Hannan, the reservationist who took his call, Mr. Oxfeld was so pushy and aggressive on the telephone that she took it upon herself to distort the reservation policy to ensure that someone as unpleasant-sounding as Mr. Oxfeld would not be eating at Minetta Tavern.

I'm personally so upset not to have someone as unpleasant and aggressive on the telephone not eat at Minetta Tavern that I'd like to now take this opportunity to offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies to Mr Oxfeld.

Sincerely,
Keith McNally

Zing! For those of you outside New York who are still wondering what the everloving fuck is so important or amazing to deal with the trouble of getting a reservation at a place like Minetta, well, departed New York Times dining critic Frank Bruni, in a review noting Minetta as "the best steakhouse in the city," also wrote:

Where Mr. McNally goes, models, movie honchos and magazine scribes follow, because they're sure to find themselves among other members of their slavishly fashionable tribe, coddled in an environment that's as much stage set as mess hall.

Also, the french fries are cooked in Lorenzo's Oil and the salads are topped with Weapons-Grade plutonium flakes: it's the new Foie Gras. Mind you, this is a city that will wait for hours for a goddamn hamburger, rain or shine.

New York, New York. It's a hell of a town. If you need any further explanation, this should help.

Very faint bright side for Current reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling, recently sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp: experts doubt they will actually have to do "hard labor." Uh, that's kind of good, I guess! "I think they will be kept in special facilities which would be quite comfortable for a North Korean farmer - but which may not be very comfortable for a suburban American," says one. Uh, slightly better than terrible! Rush to the rescue, Al Gore.

Former Gawker editor Jesse Oxfeld, who got laid off from New York back in December, has a new gig: executive editor of Tablet Magazine, a "new online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture." May it find success with Jews and heathens alike!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.We heard about two additional victims of the New York Observer layoffs: Jesse Wegman, managing editor; and Nati Deleon, receptionist. Also, Interview magazine editorial director Glenn O'Brien, has left the company. We hear there may be more restructuring to come at Brant Publications.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.US advertising spending was down 12% in the first quarter, according to a new Nielsen report. "The situation remained grim for national newspapers, where spending was down almost 28 percent. National magazines slumped about 21 percent, while business-to-business and trade publications witnessed a nearly 30 percent decline." But fast food ad spending is up! America is fat and broke as usual.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Stolid NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd is going to write a book about "the first few years of the Obama presidency." Boy does that sound boring.

Graydon Carter, who was the founding editor at the Observer, noted that Kaplan lasted far longer than he thought he would: "I think it's one of his great accomplishments that he managed more than a dozen years with Arthur (Carter)...My version was the black-and-white sketch of what he did, but he gave it color and vibrancy that I never got a chance to."

New York Times rich people reporter Alex Kuczynski couldn't get an in at the place for a while: "'I was like 23 or 24, and I kept sending these blind pitches to the masthead, signing them Alex Kuczynski. And, finally, after a year, Peter apparently stands up in a meeting and says, "Somebody call this guy Kuczynski.'" He also put a little bit of juju on Kucznski's tenure at the Times: "When I left for the Times, he kept smacking his forehead. "Alex! Alex! Alex! You're making a huge mistake!" He has this habit of smacking his forehead. "You'll never write in the first person. You'll never write about yourself. You'll never write with color. You'll never use any interesting language. Or at least I highly doubt it."

Finally, former Observer senior editor and (as of recently, former) Rolling Stone deputy editor Jason Gay remembers one of Kaplan's more distinct skills: "His gift for headlines is unmatched. Do you remember the piece George Gurley wrote about Ann Coulter, where she joked about Timothy McVeigh neglecting to bomb the Times? Peter stared at the screen for hours trying to come up with the exact right line. We'd settled on a pretty lame headline, but at the last minute, Peter's face looked like it was about to explode. "COULTERGEIST!" he said."

Kaplan's on his way to Conde Nast Traveler, where his first day as creative director is Monday. He served as a mentor to many a New York reporter, "many of whom now populate the city's more remunerative newsrooms," writes Oxfeld, and it's true - even current Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder is among them. Snyder's tribute to Kaplan's legacy on this site is here, Oxfeld's piece is here. Both are must-reads for New York Media junkies. The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Kaplan - who oversaw the Observer's flimsy entry into the Internet Age - is inevitably going to have to work with Traveler's digital strategy; he claimed in the aforementioned Snyder post that he's excited about this, but really, you gotta wonder what's in it for him other than a steady paycheck, and more time with his family (the original reason he gave for leaving the Observer before speculation arose that owner and heir-about-town Jared Kusher pushed him out). That could well be enough for Kaplan, who nobody's ever accused of being lazy or phoning it in. He's worked for a long, long time, and he's probably tired. But for a guy who spends that kind of time in the newsroom, reporting on a world he loved as much as he influenced and covered, isn't he going to get restless? Kaplan's story in New York's media timeline, and his reach on it, can't quite be over yet. Not like this, anyway.

Peter Kaplan at the Observer: An Oral History [Daily Intel]

Yeah, Jesse! He interviewed the newly not-so-rotund Hilton for The Daily Beast (how fitting!) and got the maven to spew some of his same old shit—shit that celebrates idiocy and aspirational grubbiness, as emboldened by the lives of the saints "hiltons," a term he's "coined" to describe the talentless wonders who market themselves into various forms of frothy sadness.

And you give twelve steps to becoming one.

The first one in the book is “be a skinny bitch,” and that’s one that I took to heart this past year. I probably lost over 50 pounds. I’d rather be Nicole Richie than Kirstie Alley any day. And it’s one of the harsh realities if you want to be a hilton. Another is, you’ve go to put the “ho” in Hollywood. If you’re a D-lister, one of the easiest ways to increase your own fame is to date up. Look at Katie Holmes. She pretty much was, I’d say, like C-minus before she started dating Tom Cruise. Now they’re married, having a baby, and she’s pretty high up there. Or Miley Cyrus. You can never be too young to unleash your inner ho.

You had a co-writer on the book. How much of that work did you do?

Jared Shapiro, who’s the news editor at Life & Style—I actually knew him from years ago when we worked at Star magazine together. He would just talk with me for hours at a time, transcribe everything I’d say, send it over to me. I’d tweak things, I’d send it back to him, he’d send it back to me, so it kind of worked like that.

So did he basically shaped it out of stories that you told him?

We shaped it together.

Hm! "Shaped together"! Like he and his fat doctor recently... um, shaped... him... together. I. Uh. Never mind.

Oxfeld was here back in the good old days, co-editing Gawker with Jessica Coen. He left in 2006 and went to New York, where he and Carl Swanson edited the front-of-the-book Intelligencer section. But New York is cutting back like every other magazine, although they're being quieter about it.

We hear the magazine plans to use more of their online Daily Intel content for the magazine, so they felt they could cut back on editor positions. They're also trying to cut back on their freelancer budget, and have their many, many contract writers fill up their full allotment of words.

Sucks, Jesse.

[UPDATE: More info from Jeff Bercovici]

The chief political correspondent for The New York Times since 2002, Adam Nagourney, is gay, as is his predecessor in that job, Rick Berke, who started in the paper's Washington bureau in 1986 and is now a top-level editor in New York. Likewise the Times’s lead Barack Obama reporter, Jeff Zeleny, its lead Hillary Clinton reporter, Patrick Healy, and the man who ambled behind George W. Bush in 2000, Frank Bruni, now the paper’s restaurant critic. (Jeremy Peters, a rising star in the Albany bureau, occasionally joined the campaign crew for those nights out at The Garden and Des Moines’s two other gay bars, the delightfully named Blazing Saddle and Frat House.) There’s Michael Finnegan, a campaign heavyweight at the Los Angeles Times, and Jonathan Darman, Newsweek’s 27-year-old wunderkind political scribe; there’s Candy Crowley’s producer at CNN, Mike Roselli, his fellow CNN producer Chris Welch, who was the network's off-air in Iowa, and producers from CBS’s The Early Show, ABC’s Nightline, and, of course, Logo.

That sounds like kind of a lot, right? Well, the story begins with only four of them at one of Des Moines three gay bars on New Years Eve, a kind of sad picture, if you ask us.

The campaign trail is, of course, a sexed-up nonstop sex romp, for the rest of the press, but there aren't enough gays to join in on the "long tradition of flings, affairs, and liaisons among reporters cooped up with only each other for so much time." See? It's not all fun and games being a gay.

But, still, The Gays are suited for campaign coverage, because they are forbidden by the politicians they cover from getting married, so, you know, no nagging wives telling them to come home and be food critics or something.

Our Boys On the Bus [OUT]

Reporting to editorial director Ben Williams, Coen will oversee all of the daily online content, which will have her working closely with former Rush & Molloy stringer Chris Rovzar, who has signed on to edit the online Daily Intelligencer column (with a co-editor to be hired). What enticed our former co-worker Coen to leave the warm embrace of Conde Nast? Maybe the slow pace of change at 4 Times Square? Maybe the large chunk of change they've offered her at New York? We've heard whispers about both those possibilities, but the lady isn't saying. But if her magical vagina works as well on the job front as it does in her personal life, expect VF.com to either take off like a rocket or sink like a stone right after she leaves.

Cruising Gawker [WWD]

Valentine served as a pint-size MC for a beauty pageant at age 7, he told Wilner, and he claims he was a full-blown TV icon by 11. Olga reports she was a V.J. Intrigued, we promptly hit the Web in search of adorable (or, okay, embarrassing) early pics of the Slavic Macaulay Culkin and Anna Paquin. But a strange thing happened: The more we looked, the less we knew about the flaxen-haired pair. Not YouTube nor Google nor any other Web searches turned up evidence of these seemingly quite public childhoods.

Socialite Rank Saga, Continued [Daily Intel]

[Voice editor David] Blum has approached a number of journalists to revive the Voice's dormant media gossip column, Press Clips. "I've talked to people," said Blum, "and have yet to find somebody that I'm ready to offer the job to." Our sources say, however, that few writers have shown much interest. New York magazine's Jesse Oxfeld, the New York Observer's Michael Calderone and Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post were among those rumored to have met with Blum - although none seemed eager to abandon their current jobs.

STRUGGLE TO FIND A NEW VOICE [NYP]

Daily Intelligencer [NYM]
Earlier: 'New York' Unable to Find Blogging Shabbos Goy

New York

Oy.

Jesse Oxfeld To New York Magazine [NYO]