The Power Broker

The Times’ David Carr goes local and explains how the city’s major editorial boards slid into the tank for the mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

. . .

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.

“The only thing that my clients have been talking about for the past few weeks is the fiscal dilemma that this city is facing,” said Mr. Rubenstein, the public relations mogul who helped broker a deal in 1975 involving Abraham D. Beame, then mayor of the city, and Governor Hugh L. Carey back when the feds told the city to more or less drop dead.

“I did step up because I want to see the city survive and prosper,” Mr. Rubenstein said, “and I think we all agree that he is the person who we would like to see leading us through this crisis.”

In mid-September, after a year of talking on and off, Mr. Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, met for dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side and sealed a deal. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, had two breakfasts with the mayor, and although no specific commitments were made, an understanding was reached.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, said he had no trouble throwing his support behind Mr. Bloomberg. He said there had been no cabal, no conspiracy, just three newspaper publishers all arriving at the same conclusion at a critical juncture in the life of the city.

“Suggesting that the publishers can decide who the next mayor is is a little like being a 90-year-old named in a paternity suit,” Mr. Zuckerman said on the phone. “I only wish we had that kind of power. I think he has been a remarkable mayor, we face tremendous challenges as a city right now, and it’s clear that he is the person for the job.”

If Only Joel Osteen Were Around He Could Probably Consolidate Some Of Them, But I’m Sure Then The City Council Would Try To Pass Some Sort Of “Wal-Mart Of Churches” Bill, And Then . . .

The City Section takes on spirituality and nail salons in one article:

As noon approached on a recent Sunday, the mostly Jamaican congregation of New Life Tabernacle gathered in its small storefront on White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx. Women in elaborate, wide-brimmed hats and men in dark suits filled six rows of pews and two dozen wooden chairs. The pastor’s wife, Paulette Randall, wearing a violet dress and holding a microphone, stood before the congregation.

“Is your soul right with God?” she asked the crowd of about 60, her voice exploding into the microphone. “That is the question.”

. . .

If this were not enough spiritual fervor for one block, worship at three more storefront churches was also about to begin. As the afternoon wore on, the worshipers became increasingly ardent, cries of hallelujah turned to shrieks, and White Plains Road between 239th and 240th Streets, home to seven houses of worship in all, throbbed with the ardor of believers readying their souls to meet their maker.

The abundance of churches in Wakefield is not limited to this block, which sits opposite a desolate strip of auto body shops. Amid the retail stores on the two-mile stretch of White Plains Road that runs from 240th Street south to East Gun Hill Road, there are about 30 storefront churches.

While the faithful often attribute the proliferation of churches to the will of God, a few earthly factors help explain their numbers in this particular part of the Bronx.

Starting in the 1970s, in a trend echoed throughout much of the city, Wakefield was plagued by crime that drove many of the neighborhood’s residents, among them large numbers of Italian and Irish families, to the relative safety of the suburbs. In response to their departure, many of the butcher shops, travel agencies, pharmacies and other small businesses along White Plains Road closed, leaving behind empty storefronts.

During the 1980s, immigrants from the Caribbean began replacing residents who had left. The immigrants brought with them faiths like Pentecostalism, and they established fledgling churches in the cheapest and most convenient places they could find, the White Plains Road storefronts widely available at low rents.

The houses of worship do not, however, inspire praise from all quarters.

. . .

While the churches offer their members spiritual reinforcement that helps them endure life’s trials, some neighbors view the sheer number of houses of worship with exasperation.

“There are too many churches,” Mario Ferrante, the gray-haired owner of Fairbanks Lumber and Home Center, said one recent afternoon as he stood outside his lumber yard, flanked on either side by a church. “How many gods are there?” he asked with a shrug. “How many popes?”

Donna Stewart, owner of Salon Express, a business sandwiched between two storefront churches, would agree. “Business could be better,” said Ms. Stewart, who was working near four hair dryers that sat dormant. “If we had other kinds of businesses around, we’d have more people walking by.”

According to Ingrid Gould Ellen, a director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, there may be some truth to this claim. “They fail to attract the 24/7 street traffic so critical to urban retail,” she said of the churches, which are typically shuttered most days. “Retailers want to be around other retailers.”

Yet there are other reasons business could be better here. Nail and hair salons, seemingly immune to laws of supply and demand, are in oversupply on White Plains Road, and shoppers seeking more options head north to malls in the nearby suburbs. And on this particular block of White Plains Road, auto body shops and a New York City Transit yard add to the desolate mood.

I guess storefront churches are to the Bronx what banks are to Manhattan . . .

Like A Good Novelist Or Sculptor, Deborah Solomon Molds And Crafts Her Raw Materials Until The Finished Product Is Just Right (Read: She Asks And Reasks Questions And Edits Down The Answers Until The Interview Says Exactly What She Wants, Which Is Roughly The Same As Making Up Stuff, When You Think About It)

Matt Elzweig explains in the New York Press how the Times Sunday Magazine’s Deborah Solomon comes off as such a pain in the ass in those preciously bratty Q-and-A features:

When I began my reporting three weeks ago, this story was slated to be a benign profile of an incisive, witty, cantankerous, high-profile-but-not-quite-famous, powerful, puzzling, playful, combative contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Through Deborah Solomon’s weekly column, a Q-and-A interview that has become a popular staple of the Times’ Sunday magazine since its launch in 2003, the former art critic and author of two biographies has developed a voice easily as distinctive as the ones she features.

Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects — Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003 — the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.

“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.

Both experienced journalists, Glass and Dickinson accused Solomon of violating basic ethical standards by making up dialogue never said during their conversations with her — conversations Solomon taped. Dickinson (in a tape-recorded telephone interview) described an exchange that she says “didn’t happen” during her interview, that she said Solomon put together using her quotes. Glass went even further; of one exchange, he said that “she never actually asked that question,” and added that Solomon “was changing context in a way that changed what I meant.” In Glass’s case, he told a fact-checker for the magazine about the distortion of the interview, in an attempt to have it corrected. “I made my case as forcefully as I knew how,” Glass said in an email to me last week, “but I guess he just disagreed with me.”

Yet With “Ramone And Groan,” The Daily News May Trump Both The Times And The Post . . .

On the one hand you have “Hey Ho — You Owe!”. On the other we see “Hey! Ho! Let’s Sue!” Now care to guess which is the Post and which is the Times?

First Came Times Select . . . Now, A New, Improved Unfoldable Op-Ed Page!

But that’s OK because that middle column was usually boring anyway:

The New York Times is moving to a smaller format starting Monday, cutting 1.5 inches from its width and moving to what is becoming a newspaper industry standard of 12 inches.

The change, which the company originally announced a year ago, will result in cost savings of about $10 million per year, spokeswoman Diane McNulty said.

Several other major newspapers have already adopted the 12-inch format, including The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., which went to the new size at the beginning of the year; The Washington Post; and the Los Angeles Times, published by Tribune Co.

The change at The New York Times was originally expected to occur in mid-2008, but McNulty said the company was able to get its presses reconfigured sooner than anticipated.

The look of the paper will remain essentially the same, she said, though the headlines will become slightly smaller. The news columns will also become slightly narrower.

The change will result in the space for news being reduced by about 10 percent, but the paper will make up for about half of that decline by adding extra pages. Additional pages may also be added from time to time to accommodate major news stories, she said.

So between a 25-cent increase on weekday issues (translating to a 25-percent cost increase) and a ten percent decrease in news, that’s a 35 percent turnaround, right?