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Encounters | Michael Musto: Michael Musto, After The Village Voice

June 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Musto was about to be a bartender.

But this was not just any bartending job. His ouster had been lamented by much of the New York media (“The @villagevoice firing @mikeymusto amounts to @villagevoice firing itself: auto-da-fé,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch), and the outrage had begun to open some surprising doors.

Mr. Musto would soon be mixing drinks for the actors Ethan Hawke and Aaron Tveit on Andy Cohen’s talk show on Bravo, “Watch What Happens Live.” The role had previously been filled by Broadway actors, reality TV stars, an Olympic athlete and the guy from that salad dressing commercial whose shirt keeps coming off.

“You’re the king,” Mr. Cohen enthusiastically told Mr. Musto.

“You’re very kind,” a seemingly touched Mr. Musto responded.

Before the show went on the air, Mr. Cohen explained how Mr. Musto, 57, ended up as the evening’s mixologist.

“When I heard what happened, I said to the booker, ‘I want him on as soon as possible,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “He is the kind of ‘legends of New York’ we embrace.”

When the cameras rolled, Mr. Cohen wasted no time in expressing his opinion.

“I was shocked, shocked last week when The Village Voice laid off the entire reason for reading their newspaper, gossip columnist Michael Musto,” he told his audience.

“Wait. You were shocked?” asked Mr. Musto, the camera catching a look a mock surprise as the applause died down. “And first of all, I got this bartending job.”

Earlier, in the green room getting ready to go on, Mr. Musto said he was overwhelmed by the coverage of his departure (one sample, from The Daily Beast: “The Village Voice Was Crazy to Fire Him: 5 Reasons Why Michael Musto Matters”) and by the stunning end to his column, La Dolce Musto, after nearly three decades because of cutbacks at the weekly.

“It was horrifying,” he said. “That paper was my heart and soul.”

But bartending wasn’t his only offer. Mr. Musto said he was starting a weekly question-and-answer interview column for Gawker (“with a scandal celebrity or someone promoting something, or someone who has made a mark on the culture”) and a column named “Musto! The Musical!” on Out.com, the first installment of which appeared on June 3.

“The Out column will be similar to my Voice column,” he said. “A breathless romp through all the scenes that make New York tick.”

Mr. Musto also appears on “Theater Talk” on Channel 13, where he will be doing a post-mortem on the Tony Awards on Sunday. And there had been an appearance on “Smash,” an NBC series that was just canceled. “Did you see me on the last episode?” Mr. Musto asked. “I was adorable.”

Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he started as a freelancer while at Columbia and never looked back.

“I’m married to my job,” he said. “I don’t even have a potted plant to take care of. It’s a roller coaster of fun, work, fun, work. I get to go to parties, to movie premieres, to fashion shows and write whatever I want.”

Mr. Musto describes himself as a cultural anthropologist, a social worker and a gossip columnist, a title that he noted was often shunned by others. La Dolce Musto’s trademark blind items became popular guessing games among Voice readers (“I used to joke that if you guessed Courtney Love, you were usually right,” he said). And, proving there is no such thing as bad publicity, nightclub denizens lobbied to be included in the “Ten Biggest Nightmares in New York.”

“I’m primarily a humorist,” he said. “I don’t have investigative skills. People read me for my take on things.”

While Mr. Musto was the first to report on a club-kid murder in the mid-1990s, as well as chronicle the sometimes delicate dance the news media did with gay celebrities who were not yet out, his forte was mapping the downtown social scene. The column put the transsexual performance artist Amanda Lepore and the party promoter Susanne Bartsch on the same level as Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

“I wanted to champion people who made New York night life worth visiting despite the city’s best efforts to push it down,” he said.

At 11 p.m., Mr. Musto went on the set and for the next 30 minutes fulfilled his wisecracking bartending duties with aplomb. When Mr. Hawke tutored Mr. Cohen on the name of his trilogy of movies tracing a couple’s relationship (“Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Before Midnight”), Mr. Musto toasted the actor with “Before Tequila Sunrise.”

The show over, Mr. Musto exited into the sultry night and took off the two locks anchoring his no-frills bike to a parking sign. It was midnight and he was about to head uptown to the XL Nightclub on West 42nd Street. Billy Porter, the Tony-nominated star of the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots,” was going to be there.

It might make a good item for his next column.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/fashion/michael-musto-after-the-village-voice.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Michael Musto and Robert Sietsema Leave Village Voice

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The news was first reported on the Web site Gawker.

The high-profile departures follow news last week of the resignations by Will Bourne, the paper’s editor, and Jessica Lustig, the paper’s deputy editor. They said they were leaving because they could not carry out the layoffs the weekly’s owners, Voice Media Group, had asked them to make.

Jaimen Sfetko, a spokeswoman for the Voice Media Group, noted that in addition to Mr. Musto and Mr. Sietsema, The Voice’s longtime theatre critic, Michael Feingold, would be leaving. But the paper is adding employees to boost its film, food and restaurant coverage, she said.

“The net effect of these changes will be to slightly reduce the number of editorial employees at the publication — by less than one full-time position — and better align The Voice with the long-term business and editorial goals of the company,” Ms. Sfetko said. “This restructuring will allow The Voice to continue offering superior content and products to its New York audience — specifically film, music, restaurant, and breaking news easily accessible across both print and digital platforms — while also ensuring the sustainability of the publication.

Like many print outlets, The Village Voice, founded in 1955, has suffered from a steady circulation decline; the circulation was 148,862 in December 2012, down from 240,102 in December 2007, according to data collected by the Alliance for Audited Media.

News spread on Twitter about the departures of Mr. Musto and Mr. Sietsema, with many readers noting this was a major loss for The Village Voice.

Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker wrote on Twitter, “The @villagevoice firing @mikeymusto amounts to @villagevoice firing itself: auto-da-fé.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/business/media/michael-musto-and-robert-sietsema-leave-village-voice.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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With Kindle Singles, David Blum Jump-Starts His Career

April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

He does not get a lot of fawning press. After he was fired by The Village Voice and left The New York Press, Gawker Media in 2009 pronounced him “a sad bumbling doctor for dying New York City weeklies.”

But four years is an eon in the digital realm, and in that time Mr. Blum has transformed himself from doctor of the dying to midwife of the up-and-coming. As such, he is a man whom authors want to court.

Mr. Blum is the editor of Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service that is helping to promote a renaissance of novella-length journalism and fiction, known as e-shorts.

Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a store within the megastore of Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of 5,000 to 30,000 words that come from an array of outside publishers as well as from in-house. Most sell for less than $2, and Mr. Blum is the final arbiter of what goes up for sale.

It is also a small, in-house publishing brand — analogous to a grocery store that makes an in-house brand of salsa to compete with other manufacturers. Mr. Blum comes up with his own ideas or cherry-picks pieces from the more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts he receives each month. He then edits them and helps pick cover art.

Amazon Singles usually pays nothing upfront to the author (there are rare exceptions) and keeps 30 percent of all sales. Yet it is an enticing deal for some authors, because Singles now delivers a reliable purchasing audience, giving them a chance to earn thousands for their work. (A quick calculation shows that the authors make an average of roughly $22,000, but the amount varies widely by piece.)

“Every day I become more obsessed with how brilliant the concept is,” Mr. Blum, 57, said over coffee at the Lamb’s Club in Manhattan, crediting the idea entirely to Amazon.

For him, the brilliance is that authors can now share in the profits instead of getting a flat fee. “The idea that writers would participate in the publishing model is just very bold,” he said.

Amazon says the Singles store is profitable, having sold nearly five million copies since it opened in January 2011. But the program is as much about gaining entree into the literary world as it is about revenue.

Amazon has become the bête noire of the industry, using its market share to keep the prices of books lower than publishers and authors would like. Its New York publishing branch, founded in 2012, has struggled partly because of that enmity, as brick-and-mortar bookstores have refused to carry its works. Amazon has also had to pay large sums to attract even second-tier authors.

But because Singles is filling a literary terrain not crowded by other retailers, it has established itself with far less resistance than Amazon’s other publishing branches did. With magazines folding or shrinking because of financial pressures, long-form storytelling has few places to flourish, and the company has leapt firmly into that void, along with other digital publishers like Atavist and Byliner and even some traditional houses like Penguin.

Still, little that Amazon does fails to arouse suspicion. Authors are intrigued and covet the stream of money, but some are still afraid that they will alienate their book publishers by using Singles for novella-length work. Publishers are watching closely to see whether Amazon is building a next generation of talented authors who will have no connection to them — and in the process acquiring legitimacy in literary circles.

Already, reliable best-selling authors like Stephen King have turned to the site for their own purposes. In January Mr. King published an 8,000-word essay on gun control as an Amazon Single. He opted for Singles because of its speed, he said. A week after he offered the script, it had been copy-edited, had cover art and was for sale online.

Publishers point out that the best-selling Kindle Singles, like “Second Son,” by the British thriller writer Lee Child, come through them and are also distributed across other Web sites that sell fiction of similar length, like Apple and Barnes Noble.

However, more than 250,000 copies of “Second Son” were sold through Singles, by far the largest share of the market.

For now, it falls to Mr. Blum to allay the suspicions, and he is using his deep connections in the New York media world to try to do so.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/books/with-kindle-singles-david-blum-jump-starts-his-career.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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