The New York Observer » Bill Keller http://www.observer.com Just another WordPress site Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:30:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Puppy Love for Jill Abramson The news of buyouts the Times was just one element of the perfect storm of press that descended upon Ms. Abramson last week, including a Ken Auletta New Yorker profile and a deluge of critical slobbering over her recently released “dogoir,” The Puppy Diaries. It was reviewed in the Thursday arts section and in The Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/10/puppy-love-for-jill-abramson/ Refreshing the Paper of Record Fiona Spruill was on the subway headed to work from her apartment on the Upper West Side when the first plane went in. Web production for The New York Times was her first job after graduating from Duke and she, then 24, had recently been promoted to digital news editor.

By the time she got to the web newsroom, then housed a few blocks from the paper’s historic home on West 43rd Street, it was evident that news was breaking. But the overnight editor and the business editor, the only others in the office, were in a state of confusion. They were seeing things on television, but the reports were unconfirmed, and they conflicted. Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/09/refreshing-the-paper-of-record/ Amy Waldman’s The Submission: Not a 9/11 Novel Amy Waldman did not read most of the 9/11 novels before she started writing her own. DeLillo, Amis, Updike, Foer—she didn’t need to read them. Ms. Waldman was in New York on the day itself, in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and in South Asia as the United States dug in to combat in Iraq. Having watched the new world order evolve both here and abroad, the book that she eventually decided to write is more a synthesis of her firsthand experience as a reporter than an examination of collective memory. But what’s remarkable about her new counterfactual novel about the World Trade Center, The Submission, is that it will likely be remembered as one of the first satires of post-9/11 New York City: a place where tragedy is exploited by the ambitious and powerful to self-interested ends. Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/09/amy-waldmans-the-submission-not-a-911-novel/ Mitt Romney’s Iowa Diet

A corn dog.

A hot dog.

He was, sadly, Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/08/mitt-romneys-iowa-diet/ How to Get a Better Reaction Than #AlloftheDiscussed Two things tend to be givens in the modern-day 24-hour news cycle: One, that something sad and tragic will invariably happen; and two, that when something sad and tragic happens, someone with a large social media following will not hesitate to immediately crack an inappropriate joke about it. (Too soon? Never on Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/07/how-to-get-a-better-reaction-than-allofthediscussed/ Bill Keller’s ‘Let’s Ban Books’ Column Deemed ‘Hilarious’ by NYT Writers After Bill Keller, the lame duck executive editor of The New York Times, wrote a column lamenting all the books written by Times writers, we thought some of these writers might be annoyed. We thought wrong. “I laughed out loud,” wrote the business columnist Joe Nocera, author, with Bethany Maclean, of All the Devils Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/07/bill-keller%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98let%e2%80%99s-ban-books%e2%80%99-column-deemed-%e2%80%98hilarious%e2%80%99-by-nyt-writers/ Same Names and the City: Dan Abrams, Bill Keller, David Chang (Not the Ones You Think!) Mess With Celebs’ Personal Brands “Dan Abrams and I emailed a bit about possibly trading our Twitter handles,” said Dan Abrams, a writer/producer in New York, of an exchange with the ABC News analyst three years ago. “I probably would have—he was like, I’ll take you out to dinner. I wasn’t at a point where my name was a Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/07/same-names-and-the-city-dan-abrams-bill-keller-david-chang-not-the-ones-you-think-mess-with-celebs-personal-brands/ Rapture Schmapture: This Week’s Real Storm We can all breathe a sigh of relief, now that the judgment has come down and failed to derail the future of humanity. Yes, The Hangover II will open today, despite the best efforts of Mike Tyson's copyright-happy tattoo artist to stand between America and her traditional Memorial Day blockbuster featuring full-frontal male nudity.

While Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/daily-transom/rapture-schmapture-weeks-real-storm The Situation and the Story: Press Corps Parties While White House Makes History It was Wednesday morning at 9:47 a.m. in the White House Press Briefing Room. The president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, took the podium. Major television networks had interrupted coverage to broadcast the president's address. "Now, let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can't get the networks Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/situation-and-story That’ll Do, Week, That’ll Do "French warplanes" is a phrase you don't hear too often, so when we read it on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, we knew it was time for another friendly invasion, or at least the punishing imposition of another no-fly zone, which given the deployment of the notoriously non-bellicose French pilots, Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/thatll-do-week-thatll-do Will Bill Keller’s Multi-Platform Approach Pay Off? It’s an article, it’s a Nook! It's Bill Keller's Wikileaks piece available online, in print and for download.

The 8,000 word opus went online on Wednesday, will appear in the NYT Magazine on Sunday and, for $5.99, can be read on the Nook as “Open Secret: Wikileaks, War and American Diplomacy.”

The Nook edition is Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2011/will-bill-kellers-multi-platform-approach-pay Jill Abramson Returning to Role of Managing Editor Ahead of Schedule Back in May, Times executive editor Bill Keller announced that managing editor Jill Abramson would be taking a detour from her managing editing duties to immerse herself with life on the web. The detour was scheduled for six months while Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet, business editor Larry Ingrassia and foreign editor Susan Chira Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2010/media/jill-abramson-returning-role-managing-editor-ahead-schedule In Other News…: Patrick McMullan Gives Bill Keller Proverbial Middle Finger - If you look at one thing today, let it be this. Patrick McMullan a) doesn't know who Bill Keller is and b) misspells Arthur Sulzberger's name. It's genius.

- So, apparently the Titanic was sunk by human error. Nice try. We've seen Titanic enough times to know it was HUBRIS, plain and simple, Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/other-news-patrick-mcmullan-gives-bill-keller-proverbial-middle-finger Internal Memo: Les Hinton I have little recollection of my time as head of News International. I simply do not know or do not remember the circumstances relating to the hacking of various voice-mail accounts of sundry royals, officials and celebrities that occurred four years ago, which is quite a long time. At the same time, I do not Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/internal-memo-les-hinton 9/11 Christian Center Pastor Hates Everyone But the Press According to Newsweek, one constituency accounted for a surprisingly large portion of the crowd that gathered to hear Bill Keller's inaugural speech as the head of his fledgling 9/11 Christian Center: a third of the 70 people attending were reporters.

Keller announced that he would host a weekly sermon to "preach against Islam and Mormonism Read More

]]> http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/911-christian-center-pastor-hates-everyone-press