Gawker: jim impoco

Portfolio managing editor Blaise Zerega takes...

abalk — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:20:56 EDT

Portfolio managing editor Blaise Zerega takes the deputy editor slip vacated by the firing of Jim Impoco. Zeraga will work out of San Francisco, leading a source to tell the Post's Keith Kelly, "He's being called deputy but it doesn't look like he will have any serious management responsibilities. Have you ever heard of a deputy 3,000 miles away?" Zeraga will be replaced by New Yorker managing editor Jacob Lewis. Is this some kind of signal from Conde Nast about their continued confidence in Portfolio? Last week, we were told that Lipman wasn't really going to fill Impoco's position—writers expected that she would now take this opportunity to mess with people's copy more than ever, and that this was a sign of her complete inability to delegate and her inability to recognize, you know, actual writing. [NYO]

Will Jim Impoco Return To The 'Times'?

Doree Shafrir — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:17:48 EDT

We hear that New York Times Business honcho Larry Ingrassia is trying to lure fired Portfolio deputy editor Jim Impoco (whose bio is still on Portfolio's website) back to his old Times home in Biz. That would be an interesting, if not entirely unpredictable, turn of events. (Where is there to work, anyway?) And they have something in common. When Ingrassia left the Wall Street Journal for the Times, one of the great benefits for him was getting away from Lipman.

It couldn't have thrilled him that Impoco left the Times to go to Portfolio in the first place; Impoco's firing would only cement his opinion of Lipman. (We're going with "controlling bitch.")

Earlier, we noted that there seem to be two prevailing impressions of what went wrong between Impoco and Lipman. But we'd like to propose the not-so-radical idea that these two impressions (Impoco is "pugnacious," says Lipman's camp; Lipman "thinks she is 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time," says an Impoco defender), are not mutually exclusive. (Crazy, right?) Two very opinionated, and not very tactful, people coming into conflict. When one of them is the boss, and regards being the boss as being the Imperial Lord, things are going to get ugly.

Still, this is a man who, when he was at the Times, was known to call people's ideas "fucking stupid" in meetings, a source tells us. Sigh. Our fragile egos could never take such abuse! But we hear they do things differently over in the "old media."

Late Friday, former Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald...

Choire — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:20:24 EDT

Late Friday, former Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald bailed out of Portfolio. The magazine's second issue arrives this week. We can only guess at Eichenwald's motivations, but it certainly came hot on the heels of the firing of Jim Impoco, the mag's non-lapdog deputy editor who dared to disagree with editor Joane Lipman. Who's going next? Weirdly, a number of people have called or emailed us to ask us what we think will happen in the long run, as if we know anything. Our prediction: Lipman goes jobless just before Christmas, but the mag doesn't fold. Because it shouldn't. If someone could actually edit it, and stop second-guessing every single story, it could be just dandy. Random bonus prediction: Before Labor Day, Lipman disposes of a key staffer. Better-informed speculation than ours welcome. [NYO]