Last night Time magazine had their big fancy shindig for its "100 Most Influential" list and many of the anointed showed up to Jazz at Lincoln Center to be rich, famous, and beautiful together.
Our invitation must have been lost in the mail, but we did send fictional freelancer Betsey Morgenstern to ask everyone some…
Give Joe Biden a high five. The Vice President of the United States turns 67 today. (Let's all hope he gets through the day without any more accidents.) The oldest member of Congress, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, turns 92 today. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton is 61. Mike D of the Beastie Boys…
Vanity Fair's "New Establishment" list, an "annual ranking of the top 100 Information Age powers," appears on the web this time around, not in the actual magazine as in previous years. [Update: An abbreviated version appears in the October issue; the full list is online.] And while there are a few surprises to be…
Here's encouraging news for Kathy Freston: The hardcore vegan and dieting devotee may finally be able to let Oprah go as her most famous devotee now that it appears she may have found someone else willing to try her 21-day cleanse. Harvey Weinstein's wife, fashion designer Georgina Chapman, told a reporter at…
Kathy Freston has been popping up everywhere touting her new diet book, which is why it was hardly surprising to see she'd parked her skinny behind on the Good Morning America couch this morning. What was a little surprising? That she continues to brag about having Oprah Winfrey as a devotee, even though Oprah tried…
You've seen the slideshows of celebrities on the Oscar red carpet. Here's how various media moguls dressed up for the big occasion. Lots of really boring black tuxedos after the jump.
Former MTV exec Christina Norman has been tapped by Oprah Winfrey to run her new cable network, OWN, but it turns out Norman wasn't the daytime queen's first choice. Fortune reports that honor goes to Tom Freston, who first got a call from Oprah while vacationing in Burma in 2006 but turned down offers to run both…
Tina Brown's party earlier this week to celebrate the launch of her new site, The Daily Beast, could have just as easily served as an early birthday bash: The famed editor turns 55 today. Indie film powerhouse Christine Vachon is turning 46. Bjork is 43. Goldie Hawn is 63. Publicist Mara Buxbaum is 41. Retired…
♦ Hairstylist-to-the-stars Orlando Pita paid $3.416 million for an condo at 101 Warren Street, the 35-story Tribeca building developed by Ed Minskoff. [Cityfile]
♦ Tom Freston has taken his Upper East Side townhouse off the market, just a week after he reduced the price from $38.5 million to $35 million. Freston…
Arianna Huffington's new book - Right Is Wrong - is as partisan a piece of political writing as any during this political season. The subtitle says it all: "How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe." At Friday night's book party at the Chambers hotel in Midtown…
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang may finally be starting to ease into Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's bear hug. But just in case Yang goes suddenly frigid, Ballmer is ready to turn Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo from surly to hostile. TechCrunch reports Ballmer has a list of candidates for Yahoo's board ready to go. The…
The former Viacom CEO was born in 1945 and attended college at St. Michael's in Vermont. Following business school at NYU and a short stint in advertising, Freston moved to South Asia for nearly a decade. He then returned to New York in the '80s and took a marketing gig at the nascent MTV, a year before the cable…
Former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston's suit against the City of New York goes to the Supreme Court today. "[T]he central question of the case: Must parents of special-education students give public schools a chance before having taxpayers reimburse them for private-school tuition?" Freston's son has attention deficit…
· Thumbing its nose at coldhearted, Spielberg-disrespecting corporate partner Viacom, DreamWorks Animation names legendary Sumner Redstone shitcanee Tom Freston to its board of directors. That'll teach you not to fuck with a national treasure, unfeeling new CEO Phillppe Dauman! [Variety]
· Now here's some casting…
How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually…
The recent staffing changes over at MTV Networks made us curious: What exactly is going on at everyone's favorite former home of music videos? A former Viacom staffer is on hand to answer our questions. After the jump, analysis and what's probably a little axe-grinding. Either way, it's not a pretty picture. Much like…
We have no idea what any of this means, and we could probably care less, but it does include ousted Viacom CEO Tom Freston, former AOL head Bob Pittman, and, uh, Kate Spade, so, you know, we'll slap it up here. Also, it says "embargoed news," which is a pretty good way to get your press release up on Gawker. So it's…
We once again do that thing where we throw out something totally unconfirmed and let knowledgeable sources deny it. Anyway, a correspondent corresponds:
Monday's NYT Media section brings news of two recent events in the industry: First, David Carr tackles those John Mellencamp "This is our country" car commercials that ran approximately five times for each Tiger pitching error during the World Series. You may have heard about it elsewhere on the Internet, but it's…
Yesterday's Tom Freston-kebabing powwow was an event the likes of which we rarely see, with the world's greatest media titans gathered beneath the roof of the Pierre Hotel in New York to toast their associate with a steady stream of laughter and uncensored ribaldry, interrupted only by the occasional jab at the…
