Elizabeth Spiers

Elizabeth Spiers, who ran The New York Observer as EIC from January 2011 to August 2012, has announced the first of her new gigs after leaving the paper: She'll now be the editorial director for Flavorpill.com, a site which she has worked on and off with since its founding days.

"As of next week, I’m acting Editorial Director at Flavorpill," Ms. Spiers wrote in her Spierslist newsletter, which hit our inbox a few minutes ago. "I’ve been an advisor to the company for a while and have worked with co-founders Mark Mangan and Sascha Lewis before, launching Flavorwire for them a few years ago. Now I’m coming back to help grow the site and integrate what Flavorwire is doing with Flavorpill’s other products and services."

When reached for comment, Ms. Spiers did not divulge any more details about her upcoming plans (which include consulting) but said she'd be happy to talk when there is anything further to report.
Full email below:

As of next week, I’m acting Editorial Director at Flavorpill. I’ve been an advisor to the company for a while and have worked with co-founders Mark Mangan and Sascha Lewis before, launching Flavorwire for them a few years ago. Now I’m coming back to help grow the site and integrate what Flavorwire is doing with Flavorpill’s other products and services. (The gig isn’t full-time--I’m still working on my own projects--but it’ll probably feel like it to Flavorpill staff since I’m going to be camping out in their offices five days a week. I hereby promise not to monopolize the conference room.) We’ll be staffing up Flavorwire a bit and gearing up to do more original content, more reporting and more of the great cultural commentary that Flavorwire is already known for. I really love working with Flavorpill--they’re smart, creative and agile--and it’s been exciting to see them evolve over the last 10 years. (I first started reading them in 2002, when I was still writing Gawker.com.) So I have a few positions to fill and one is listed below, under the jobs heading.

The mini-broadsheet is a shorter, narrower version of the traditional broadsheet, the format of The Wall Street Journal. The Observer switched to the tabloid from its original broadsheet in 2007.

"We're keeping the classic Observer design elements but moving to a format that has a bit more of a premium feel," said editor in chief Elizabeth Spiers.

Printing will move from Expedi Printing, in Brooklyn, to Advance Publications, Inc., in Staten Island. Advance Publications is the parent company of Condé Nast.

The newspaper will be divided into two sections; the second will be focused on fine arts. There will be a full page ad unit on the back cover of the second section and blue chip ads will run in 1/6 page units on pages 2 and 3.

It will still be salmon.

Note: An earlier version of this post said that The Observer would be a "Berliner," a format technically smaller than the "mini-broadsheet," which is not just a term we made up to make this announcement more literal and less jargon-y, and, in fact, what we will be. The Observer regrets the error.

The app features drink recipes from mixologiest Elayne Duke, who is also a "Spirits Ambassador" for the alcohol company Diageo, which happens to own all of the brands of liquor used in her recipes (for example Ciroc, Ketel Citroen, Bulleit bourbon and Don Julio tequila). Ms. Duke insisted that she chose those brands because they work best in the drinks she created and for no other reason. She told Ms. Severson that she is not paid for mentioning Diageo brands.

Elizabeth Spiers, an executive producer for the app (also known as a founding editor of Gawker), told Ms. Severson that she didn't know about Ms. Duke's affiliation with the liquor company.

She also said that Gourmet Live had no business relationship with Diageo. “When we do have sponsored content it will be very clear,” she said, calling it a matter of credibility to make it explicit when editorial content has been produced in cooperation with advertisers. “If we don’t do that, our readers won’t trust us.”

Ms. Spiers is right, and if this was an honest mistake, fine. It isn't the first time that a contributor to a magazine has had some untoward corporate connection that wasn't immediately obvious. But it seems especially important for Gourmet Live, which is the first venture in a new area for magazine publishers, to stay sparkling clean. Whoever is overseeing the app really should know who his or her contributors are becuase that's what distinguishes a slapdash, freelancer-based new media launch from a quality new product by an established brand.

Whispers of New Yorker staff writer Ben McGrath's forthcoming exploration of all things Nick Denton have been circulating since mid-summer, when he began to hit up many of the writers who have, at one point or another, worked under the blog baron.

But the McGrath piece in The New Yorker has yet to materialize. Michael Idov's piece in this week's New York hews close to past glimpses into Denton's soul. Idov's profile traces Denton's climb, from his falling in with a group of journalists deemed the "Young Chiefs" while at Oxford, to his time covering the revolution in Hungary for the Financial Times, to his bid for success in the start-up boom in San Francisco. 

The piece bears some resemblance to the 2007 Vanessa Grigoriadis cover piece in the same magazine that explored a past Gawker, one not as firmly entrenched in the media power structure as it is now. Despite the time gap, similarities between the two articles still abound; for instance, Idov mentions in his lede the Soho restaurant Balthazar, the very location that Grigoriadis informed readers was Denton's "unofficial office." The most notable difference, perhaps, is the fact that Denton seemed to have actually cooperated with Idov. Grigoriadis quoted mostly from the comments he left on Gawker posts. 

Presumably, The New Yorker has (had?) something along these lines in mind for its Denton profile. Hours after it went up on New York's website, Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers took to her Tumblr in response. 

This is actually a pretty good Nick Denton profile. I almost wonder if it’ll scoop the New Yorker one. (Requisite disclosure: I talked to the NYer reporter, who I like and know, but don’t know well. And I neglected to call Michael Idov back after we missed each other via phone.) 

So, if McGrath really did reach out to so many people about Nick Denton, where is this mythical piece? Is it still on the docket, or has it been killed? And now that we have another old-media-versus-new-media article on Denton that ties together his Fleet Street past with his hankering for Balthazar bread, is another profile of the Gawker kingpin really necessary? 

She wore a fetching strapless dress, carried a flashdrive of music from a friend (which she threatened to use as a switchblade, or maybe a Taser), and urged guests to try the deviled eggs distributed throughout the room (like Easter eggs, sort of, she said).

When Moby arrived, he greeted her like an old pal. David Schwimmer also put in an appearance: He was overheard outside the party saying that he had only come to retrieve his girlfriend, which he swiftly did. He wore a hat pulled low, presumably to shield partygoers from the glare of his celebrity.

In general, though, the boldfaced names skewed more internet-famous than I Love the Nineties. Lockhart Steele (Curbed), Alex Balk (The Awl), and Jessica Coen (Jezebel) all came. As The Observer caught up with Crosley, ur-Gawker Elizabeth Spiers sat across the room, threatening to share embarrassing stories.

"Is this a free book party?" asked Steele, prompting a half-serious dispute with Coen over the ethics of getting friends' stuff for free. Shouldn't you be willing to support their efforts, Coen wanted to know? Steele said he just wanted a copy with Crosley's signature and her number. Crosley liked this idea: for the last book, she'd drawn cakes when giving autographs, but the recipients tended to think the pictures were little houses or something.

Drawing is not among her talents, but throwing parties is no problem. The Vintage/Anchor publicist assessed the gathering with a practiced eye.

"I underplayed the ratio a little," she said, explaining the bustling-but-not-oppressive crowd on the restaurant's second floor. If it had been someone else's party, she'd have invited 30 percent more people than she expected to actually come. This, she noted, was the same factor by which one should overstate Bookscan figures.

How did it feel to be promoting her sophomore collection?

"You don't take lots of pictures of the second baby," said Crosley.

But she swore she did not mean this in a negative way! She wasn't jaded or anything.  Besides, there are advantages to having a bestselling debut (I Was Told There'd Be Cake) under one's belt. The Times, which had "ignored" her first book, paired this one with Emily Gould's for a review in last Sunday's paper. And while others objected to the pairing, Crosley claimed not to mind--it wasn't like the paper had panned one and loved the other, after all.

Her only reservation was the large, glinting cuff bracelet she wore to the photo shoot.

"I look like I'm She-Ra, Princess of Power," Crosley said.

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA.

Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the first black artist to be given a one-man show at MoMA. (That was in 1937, when Edmondson was about 63 years old, about six years after the retired hospital janitor had begun carving stone with a railroad spike and hammer.)

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA. The poems are by Ms. Spires, and they are indeed easy to read; some of them are merely Edmondson’s own words arranged in stanzas. And the sculptures … well, the artist thought he was divinely inspired (“I’se just doing the Lord’s Work. I didn’t know I was no artist till them folks told me I was”); I may be a card-carrying atheist, but I wouldn’t want to argue with him: His figures are limestone brought to life.

I Heard God Talking to Me comes together in splendid harmony—a beautiful book, simple and powerful. Like Edmondson’s sculpture, it’s a work of art without being in the least artsy.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR the Philip Pullman blurb on the cover, I would assume that no atheist could properly appreciate David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives (Pantheon, $20), a collection of imaginative prose doodles about what could happen after we die. I found myself very occasionally amused, in particular by the scenario that has the virtuous rotting peacefully in their graves while the iniquitous endure suburbia for all eternity: “Only sinners enjoy life after death.” (Nice choice of verb.)

A neuroscientist who has three more books coming within the next two years, all of them purely scientific, Mr. Eagleman is a capable writer. But his ideas about the hereafter aren’t nearly startling enough. Almost all of them presuppose some kind of supernatural agency—which means I immediately lose any real interest. Inertia and mild curiosity kept me reading, even after the repetition of the standard formula “In the afterlife …” began to grate.

The author’s most successful trick is to play on our preconceived sense of scale. Humans, in this vignette, “are merely the nutritional substrate”:

“There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn’t exist—but you’d be wrong. It’s simply that He doesn’t know we exist. He is unaware of us because we’re at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.”

Wow. Takes me right back to those dorm-room bull sessions.

FROM DANIEL ZALEWSKI'S very long and somewhat solemn profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker (Feb. 23, $4.50): “The idea of an afterlife, that we’ll meet again in some … theme park? There seems no good reason to think so.”

Mr. Zalewski’s best moment:

“McEwan’s presiding interest has always been psychology, and, like many scientists of his generation, he has shifted his intellectual allegiances. At first, he studied perversity; now he studies normality. His first god was Freud. Now it is Darwin.”

Mr. McEwan’s, saved for the very end:

“You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

Mr. Snyder quotes Joshua Karp, who founded the company and is working to put out the paper with a staff of nine ("mostly unpaid interns," according to Wired), as saying, "Why hasn’t anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?"

While not a newspaper, there have been some attempts to turn digits into dead trees, like Sarah Boxer's recent book, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, which Sewell Chan, writing for The New York Times' City Room Blog, described as "aspir[ing] to be a sort of Norton Anthology of Blogging, with excerpts from 27 blogs, 9 of them by people living in New York City."

Then there's Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, edited by Kevin Smokler and published in 2005.

That book contained an interesting piece by Gawker's founding editor Elizabeth Spiers called Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog, all about the titular Mr. Krucoff's attempt to turn his blog into "a print publication that he and his friend Chris Gage would produce from the bedroom of his Lower East Side apartment."

At the time, Ms. Spiers described the prospect of this "amazing paper weblog" as follows:

According to The Times' David Leonhardt and Marjorie Connelly, "two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today." Twenty-eight percent answered that they've been falling behind financially in the past couple of years.

But if you enjoy the occasional steak at Palm Too, you already knew the economy was in trouble.

In a Fortune magazine column penned by Dealbreaker founder Elizabeth Spiers this week, the writer cites a friend, "a former real estate investment banker who got out of investment banking comfortably before subprime mortgages hit the fan," who contends that the price of filet mignon at Palm Too is a serious indicator of inflation.

The former banker, who's named only Dana, but whose description bears a passing resemblance to Mergers and Acquisitions author and reported Spiers "B.B.F. (best blog friend)" Dana Vachon, insists that if filet mignon at Palm Too goes from $36 to $38 "inflation is spinning out of control."

Dana discovered this upon returning to New York after a month in Paris—hey, maybe he hung out with Wes Anderson, whom our Transom colleagues tell us is doing "great" in the city of lights!—and finding "himself 'aghast' that everything's so expensive" back home. Laugh if you must, but according to a 2007 Observer profile of the banker-turned-writer by Lizzy Ratner, the poor chap can't even afford socks to weather this wintry economic climate.

Slate—the irreverent online magazine that, since being launched by Michael Kinsley in 1996, has established itself as a fixture in the crowded landscape of opinion journalism—plans to start a separate site next year, devoted exclusively to business news and opinion.

Slate deputy editor David Plotz told The Observer he believes there’s a clear opening for Slate’s distinctive editorial voice. He argued that while political journalism has diversified with the arrival of blogs and other independent sites, business journalism is “still dominated by the big brands. We think there’s an opening for a really smart, analytical, opinionated Web site that could be Webby and fast and agile.”

Mr. Plotz cautioned that the new project is still awaiting final authorization from Post company executives. Assuming it goes forward, it will likely capitalize on the Slate brand with a logo at the top of the home page. He would not comment on the projected budget for the site.

According to a source at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the publishers of Slate, the new site, which does not yet have a name, could go live as early as next summer. It was born in part out of the recent launch of Slate’s newly branded video Web site, SlateV, which Post executives are pleased with. Plans call for it to follow the same basic staffing model that has helped make Slate a success—using a few editors and assistants to run the operation, while relying for content mostly on freelancers.

No one’s been hired yet. According to a different source, Slate editors offered the top job to Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of both Gawker and the business blog DealBreaker, but were turned down*. They’ve since asked both Ms. Spiers and Daniel Gross, Slate’s regular business columnist, among others, to write for the site.

Slate does start the new project with one advantage. Thanks to its annual Slate 60 Conference, in which financial heavyweights discuss philanthropic strategies with the magazine’s editors, it already has ties to important business-world figures like Carlos Slim, Laurie Tisch and Justin Rockefeller, who could serve as advisers, sources or even writers for the fledgling venture.

*This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version.   

The Gawker Media Buddy List (with apologies to Slate).