Joe Hagan

Vanity Fair has added New York contributors Vanessa Grigoriadis and (Observer-alumnus) Joe Hagan as contributing editors to its fantastically sizeable masthead, WWD's Irin Carmon reports this morning.

She also writes that it is expected that they will continue as New York contributing editors as well.

Because here at Media Mob we never miss a trick on the Rather beat...here are a couple of the best revelations from former Observer reporter Joe Hagan's New York magazine piece about the Category-5 newsman's $70 million lawsuit against his former bosses at CBS, and what he hopes to get out of it:

Most notably, Mr. Hagan reports that within months of leaving CBS, Mr. Rather hired a team of three investigators to try to shed light on the ultimate mystery surrounding CBS's September 2004 flawed story on President Bush's National Guard service--that is, the origin of the documents at the heart of the controversy.  read more »

Oh, what joys they have to look forward to! Governor Pataki is reappointing Kevin Rampe to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, this time as chairman (he was the president for two years until last spring), while builder Frank Sciame has been put in charge of a "Memorial and Master Plan Design Committee" and is apparently supposed to break the backs of the architects and bureaucrats down there.

The way the press release describes that task suggests how accurate Joe Hagan's description of thin men in black jackets and square glasses arguing with one another really is:

Sciame will convene the Memorial and Master Plan Design Committee of Michael Arad, Peter Walker, Max Bond and Daniel Libeskind and work in coordination with the LMDC, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the WTC Memorial Foundation to ensure the memorial is brought in line with the $500 million budget. The Governor and Mayor have set the end of June as the deadline for resolution.

Enjoy your stay, fellas!

-Matthew Schuerman

The days when the New York Observer's Joe Hagan owned the Gore-TV story are past, sadly, and so are all illusions that the former Vice President is going to create a liberal version of Fox. It's more, it seems, that he wants to be a liberal Bob Vila.

That's what we gather from this email to the Brownstoner, a Brooklyn real estate blog:  read more »

"I am producing a piece for Al Gore's new cable channel Current TV on the present real estate boom and the consequences for folks 18- 34. I'm looking to profile a young couple looking to buy their first home in Brooklyn...."

Once again, we're proud to have our byline on the same page as Joe Hagan's. Hagan, the Observer's TV writer, is way, way deeper into the CBS/Dan Rather/Bush National Guard story than any other reporter, and this week he's reporting from Texas with an antidote to the official version in which blameless corporate executives were cruelly betrayed by their, perhaps biased, subordinates in the news business.

Hagan has come across some taped conversations with the detective CBS hired, supposedly to determine the truth of the mysterious documents and of the whole story.

He reports that the detective, Eric Rigler, "went on to say that interviews with former National Guardsmen were leading him to believe the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity."

But for a variety of reasons, CBS apparently wasn't that interested in where Rigler was headed.  read more »

"This is not a real investigation," Rigler said on one tape.