The message came from Rafe Bartholomew, an editor at the sports website Grantland who’s writing a book about McSorley’s Old Ale House, to be published by Little, Brown in 2014. Mr. Bartholomew (who is a childhood friend of the Transom’s) didn’t come by the assignment by chance. His father, Geoff Bartholomew, has worked behind the stick at the saloon for the better part of 40 years, and Mr. Bartholomew the younger takes a shift slinging beers from time to time. McSorley’s is a fine bar to have grown up around, of course, if you want to write a book about the experience.

The tradition-bound barroom was honored in a poem by e. e. cummings and made immortal by Joseph Mitchell, who thought the bar was a last vestige of the old town, even in the ’30s. McSorley’s has now long outlived cummings, Mitchell and other regulars as well. The originals are long gone—they started dying off in the late 1970s, the elder Mr. Bartholomew told the Transom on New Year’s Eve—replaced by tourists who duck in for a taste of old New York and young people looking for a down-market drink in the now-upscale East Village.

Nevertheless, McSorley’s still sells two quaffs and two quaffs only, light and dark beers pulled into short mugs from taps topped by silver-colored busts of the eponymous old man. It still closes at 1 a.m., still has sawdust poured on the floor.

“We never really were a big New Year’s bar,” Geoff Bartholomew told the Transom, and indeed, the end of 2012 produced a mild crowd. In the back room, patrons dined on leg of lamb and cheeseburgers; in the front, they swilled lights and darks by the armful.

Still, business was brisk enough to limit the Bartholomews to halting conversation.

Rafe, clad in the traditional gray waiter’s jacket, recounted a recent work trip to Las Vegas to watch Filipinoboxer Manny Pacquiao, who was knocked out by Juan Manuel Márquez last month, then wrapped each hand around eight mug handles and disappeared into the bar. Geoff, a strapping, bald-headed man with a trim mustache, kept his hands in near-constant motion, managing the phalanx of clean mugs before him, shoveling full beers to the end of the bar for a waiter to collect.

“That young man at the bar,” he said, pointing out a drinker in glasses and a Yankees hat, “is the nephew of one of the old-timers. He was a marine and a firefighter, the old man. I wrote a poem about him.”

Mr. Bartholomew sidled off, removed a chalkboard from in front of an ancient cabinet, took out a book and handed it across the bar.

Rafe isn’t the only Bartholomew with a literary bent. Geoff has written two books of poems—The McSorley Poems, volumes I and II. They sell for $10 a pop behind the bar, and around the corner from the bar at St. Mark’s Bookshop. “Otherwise, you have to order them online,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll quit my day job.”

“Your night job,” corrected a colleague behind the bar.

The midnight hour was approaching and McSorley’s was getting crowded. The time was nigh to abandon our piece of real estate.

Out on East Seventh Street, we caught up with Ben Fay, the young namesake of the old-timer in Geoff Bartholomew’s poem.

“McSorley’s is the greatest bar in New York,” Mr. Fay told us. “It will always be the first place I come on New Year’s, St. Patrick’s Day, or anything like that.”

What did he think of the poem, we asked.

“It was perfect,” he said. “It was just how he was.” —Patrick Clark

Have we come to the day when Gawker Media's hard up for pictures of an Olympic swimmer's pool noodle (a euphemism for "penis")? Maybe it's just decided to use that money to hire people (like its competition). And speaking of budgets, do we know what really rocked the relationship between Sally Singer and T to its anticlimactic end yesterday? We don't, but does someone else? Do you? Did we put "Gawker Media" in the headline instead of "Deadspin" because more media wonks will read it? We have the answer to approximately 3.4 of those five questions, but will only answer two, right here in your Wednesday Evening Press Clips: 

Website's Hot Pursuit of Penis Photographs Goes Limp: Haven't you heard? In the spirit of the Brett Favre story it once broke, Gawker Media sports blog Deadspin would like to get its hands on Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte’s penis photographs, which are apparently out there. The site put it (i.e. the matter of these penis photographs) to its readers yesterday, asking them to donate the potential funds to buy said pictures from the enterprising individual who apparently has them. The donations amounted to $141, and as such, Deadspin will be declining to purchase said pictures. This is either a important and intelligent step in the great history of checkbook journalism, or a hilarious negotiation tactic meant to nickel-and-dime someone so someone else won't have to dip into the discretionary bonus money pool and use it to get his hands on a penis photograph. The question of whether or not these photographs of a penis leak out notwithstanding, it did produce something very important: a photograph of some Gawker Media staffers who opted to gather around a desk to examine a picture of a famous person's penis. In the photograph above, you can see (from left) Gawker Media photo-illustrator Jim Cooke, Deadspin writer Dom Consentinoand Gizmodo's resident nihilist Sam Biddle, all three of whom are (so far as we know) straight men clearly having a great time. The rest are people we don't recognize, but to be fair, they're either unimpressed, bemused or simply not nearly as captivated as the other three. Also, Deadspin writer John Koblin, who has a far better reason to be there than anyone else (it is his desk, after all).  [Deadspin]  

Grantland(s) Two More: Meanwhile, in news of sports websites whose penis budget has yet to fully take shape, Grantland is adding a few more names to its murderer's row of writers: SI.com's The Point Forward blogger Zach Lowe and Pitchfork, Salon and A.V. Club contributor Steven Hyden are joining up as staff writers. [via @sean_fennessey]

The Sally Tally: WWD's Amy Wicks did a fantastic job breaking the news of Sally Singer’s departure from T Magazine yesterday, and today she broke the news down even further after getting the shove-off from both Singer and Times executive editor Jill Abramson. Basically, the ad sales team couldn't close on Singer's vision of T, budget issues, etc., etc., but very, very richly, the money quote:

Times executives just wanted a magazine that could make money without the hassle of getting involved in arguments over art direction.

Don't we all? Whether or not she stepped down or left isn't sussed out, though it sounds like it was a pretty mutual parting either way.  Especially when you take this into account:

Then there were her well-known clashes with Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times Magazine. Singer was said to have angled to take over the magazine as well as T, while Lindgren reportedly wanted fashion to be folded back into the Sunday magazine to boost its ad pages.

In a power struggle, there's always a winner and a loser, even if the stakes aren't the same and both participants aren't actively engaged in it. As for this particular situation, the question now is: what happens to the winner, and the Times’s expectations of him? [WWD / MemoPad]

What Does It Take to Get Fired From Yahoo News? Now you know. [Politico]

Further Progress in Editor/Publisher Relations: How does xoJane editor in chief Jane Pratt answer her CEO's question of where she is at the moment? Well, here is a photograph of Jane Pratt, tweeted out by Jane Pratt, of Jane Pratt, in her own words "double fisting." [Instagram via @JanePratt]

What, You Didn't Hear About The Huffington Post's "Oasis" Scandal? So maybe you learned today about how the Huffington Post is offering massages at the Republican National Convention? And how those doing the massaging supposedly weren't getting paid?! Well, for one thing, we learned that they're actually volunteers or what have you, they work on tips, and the Huffington Post made a donation to their cause. For another, Rachel Sklar, erstwhile Huffington Post media writer, stopped by the Oasis. Now you know. [Huffington Post]

Music Writer Finally Reads Other Music Writers: So, which blog post for a certain major-city publication made one music journalist write the words "Related: I don’t want to be a music writer anymore." Luke O'Neil  is, in all likelihood, not alone. [Bullett]

NYT Corrects Sentence Regarding Superhuman Speed: 

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this column misstated the average pace at which women in the University of Exeter study were able to run after 10 weeks of training. Most were able to run for 30 minutes at a pace of about 12 or 13 minutes per mile -- not 12 or 13 miles per minute.

Somehow, here, "an editing error" manages to sound euphemistic. [NYT Well]

- - -

That's all we've got today. What do you have? Free, nonprofit subsidized back-rubs? The first piece of non-redundant information in the last 20 years of political conventions? Tips? Story ideas? Beats, rhythm and life? Send ’em here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Manifest Fennessey: The Bill Simmons run and ESPN-bankrolled playpen of top-notch writing talent, Grantland, has plucked their newest editor straight from the depths of Conde Nast: Sean Fennessey, the web editor at GQ—or, more simply, the editor of GQ.com—is a young man headed west. He'll be joining Grantland as an editor. Slightly late to this one, but of note no less: prior to GQ, Fennessey was a music editor at Vibe and worked on the editorial side of eMusic.com, when not writing for the likes of the Village Voice, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Vulture. All career passport stamps and plaudits aside, Fennessey is well-regarded by colleagues and known as nothing but a nice guy. New York's loss is LA's gain. Finally we could refrain from being all "called it," but it's Tuesday so whatever: Media Poachable, Class of 2011, turn your tassel, you just got paper'd up.

Off-Campus Housing: The Columbia Journalism Review is moving downtown, off of Columbia's campus, reports Capital New York. The offices will supposedly be better. They are in Times Square. From someone who works in Times Square, let me welcome you to the area by reminding you that there is no more an anxiety-inducing part of this city to commute to short of Rikers Island, and that your health will legitimately suffer for it.

The James Games: Under questioning by the government in Foggy London Town, James Murdoch continues to try to throw Colin Myler under the bus.

Portrait of a Terry Complicated Relationship: Here is a rare picture of notorious New York photographer Terry Richardson and his girlfriend of somewhere around a year, Audrey Gelman, posted to Richardson's blog. Why are there so few pictures of them? Ms. Gelman has an image to manage. Not hers, of course, but that of her boss: Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, widely considered a contender in the 2013 New York City mayoral election. She's his press secretary. Stringer might be able to pull the likes of Scarlett Johansson to support his campaign, but Gelman doesn't do too bad with her own press: We hear the good friend of Lena Dunham has a cameo in the first season of HBO's Girls.

Daily Boos: The NY Daily News just unleashed new social media guidelines unto their staff. Enjoyable moment: "Beat reporters and editorial staff who cover particular areas may not maintain personal blogs or social media accounts focusing on the areas they cover." Then: "Using a personal blog or social media account to link to Daily News content is permitted." How kind of them! Also, Patrick Gavin at Politico has a nice catch on this.

An Idea For Financing The New York Times Involving People With Money: Friend of The New York Observer Felix Salmon (also a Reuters columnist) has an idea for making money, if you are the New York Times. He asks: "How much would hedge funds pay to be able to see the NYT’s big investigative stories during the trading day prior to the appearance of the story? It’s entirely normal, and perfectly ethical, for news organizations, including Reuters, to give faster access to the best-paying customers." This is Felix Salmon, trying to troll a lot of people. It is fun.

Weekday With Bernie: Watch Bernie Goldberg take a shot at the Washington Post's Erik Wemple on TV, questioning Wemple's credibility. Bernie Goldberg is a media analyst whose desperate need for vanity is so strong that he is willing to go on Fox News and tow their hyper-euphemistic "Fair and Balanced" tagline as an ostensibly objective media analyst so long as they let him say things on TV, because going on TV is, to some reporters, a really validating thing. Erik Wemple has the whole of Bernie Goldberg's credibility in his deformed left hand (if Wemple's left hand were deformed).

Pulling for Pulitzer? After the Wall Street Journal was mostly snubbed by the Pulitzers (again), something we're told the Journal editors ostensibly don't care about (again), Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi told Jim Romenesko that not only did he take a buyout from the Post, but also, a gig at the Wall Street Journal as a senior writer. And that is how you take a buyout.

Rocket Fuel: Here is a picture of The Daily's own Media Bachelor Hall of Famer and digit-al lovemaking expert Justin Rocket Silverman's desk. Looks about right.

Media folks of New York, don't forget to donate your job-related id and ennui to the needy.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The snack craze that swept the nation!

Sure they are crunchy and delicious, and maybe the appearance of the popular snack on Sunday's Mad Men was a little disconcerting. (Who knew they had Bugles in the 60s? Or Jewish copywriters?) But Fat Betty Francis' favorite snack has become something of an obsession to writers over at Vanity Fair, who have taken their hunger pangs to a whole new level.

Now, let's be fair. In the recaps of Tea Leaves, nearly everyone writing about the show mentioned the Bugles-versy. From Grantland comes Mark Lisanti's Faulkner-esque take:

Oh, and the Bugles! The Bugles, the Bugles. If (Betty) has just been eating the Bugles in the bathtub, true mind-scrambling, pathos-drowning perfection would have been achieved.

...to Twitter, which immediately saw the creation of @FatBettyFrancis:

But it was the Conde Nast publication that really took the cake (and Bugles). The paper's resident wunderkind Juli Weiner started it out with an innocent tweet:

This snowballed into an entire post about junk food from the Mad Men era by Bruce Handy on VanityFair.com yesterday. Banana Wackies, Whistles and Daisys, Space Food Sticks...when will these all be making an appearance on the show, Mr. Handy asks. Or maybe he just wants to reminisce about his favorite childhood snacks.

Either way, we think that it's time that the writers over at Vanity Fair get their annual allotted lunch-break.

ESPN and Grantland have contracted McSweeney's to handle the production and distribution (which, in retrospect, explains why Dave Eggers is a Grantland contributing editor).

As such, the basketball leather-bound books will harbor twee custom moving parts, like posters, a pull-out section, "old-school baseball cards" and mini-booklets. The first volume is available through the McSweeney's store; individual issues cost $19.95 and a year-long subscription (four issues) is $48.

In addition to some of the more memorable Grantland features (Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout and Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker, for example), the first volume includes an original column by Mr. Simmons and new fiction from Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets.

Grantland Quarterly has always been a part of the ESPN-sponsored website's business plan, according to Mr. Fierman.

"If our site has a problem it's that we move so fast that readers miss stuff," he said. The print journal serves up the site's greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism. Plus, nostalgia runs rampant among Grantland's roster of magazine writers.

"I miss the feel of print," the former GQ editor told The Observer. "It’s good to be back in it."

It began in November 2009, when Mr. Pierce reviewed Mr. Simmons’s book, The Book of Basketball, on Deadspin. He took the opportunity to knock the messianic sportswriter down a notch.

“He did not reinvent sportswriting,” Mr. Pierce wrote, while allowing that Mr. Simmons was “an amusing writer who saw the vast potential of the Internet before just about anyone not named Gates or Gore.”

When the book came out in paperback in late last year, Deadspin noticed that Mr. Pierce’s name and his own book, Sports Guy, had been removed from The Book of Basketball’s bibliography. A footnote that had mentioned him in the original had been replaced with one referring to “one GQ writer.”

“Bill seems to have a much thinner skin than those work-a-day sportswriters whose efforts he’s made a career out of deriding,” Mr. Pierce told Deadspin.

Mr. Simmons responded on Twitter.

“Hey CPP: took you out of TBOB cuz you trashed it without ever mentioning that you used to email me all the time until I told you to eff off,” he wrote, adding that this pre-existing relationship made the review “dishonest.”

“You came off like a spurned lover in that piece,” Mr. Simmons added. “But seriously, good luck with your red-hot career.”

At the time, Mr. Pierce was writing a column for The Boston Globe and serving as a writer-at-large for Esquire. Not too shabby, if you ask us. But the arrangement had earned him a wrist slap from the Globe. Mr. Pierce wrote in an Esquire blog post that Christine O’Donnell was “a slideshow freak,” “a crackpot,” and “a deadbeat.” Globe policy forbids writers from making insulting personal comments about politicians, even in other publications.

It has no such policy regarding insulting other writers.

“And right back at you, you mendacious, whiny little thin-skinned bag of breeze, you,” Mr. Pierce wrote on Boston.com. “I’ve been thrown out of better joints than your bibliography.”

Yesterday Mr. Pierce told CommonWealth magazine that the dispute with the Globe was one of the reasons he left. He planned to contribute full-time to Esquire’s politics blog, and, yes, contribute to Grantland.

Mr. Simmons could not be reached for comment.

Jonas Wood's "Bullets" (2007) (Photo: Anton Kern Gallery)

“Pro sports teams are a lot like works of art," New Yorker scribe Malcolm Gladwell writes in an article on the NBA lockout, published on ESPN’s tony new Grantland.com site.

According to Mr. Gladwell, NBA owners, who are trying to trim player salaries in response to declining profits, are treating their teams like straightforward businesses, ignoring the psychic benefit--surplus pleasure above and beyond simple profits--that they derive from them.

This psychological enjoyment, Mr. Gladwell writes, is the reason why a team like the Warriors, which was valued by Forbes at $363 million, recently sold for $450 million.

The Tipping Point author uses the art world to provide a succinct explanation of of his point:

“The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment... And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent. In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning."

Art collectors acknowledge that psychic surplus when purchasing artworks, Mr. Gladwell says, while team owners do not. Indeed, art collectors generally deny the investment value of their purchases: pleasure alone is, at least ostensibly, supposed to be the reason for an art purchase.

Mr. Gladwell emphasizes:

"Basketball teams, of course, look like businesses. They have employees and customers and offices and a product, and they tend to be owned, in the manner of most American businesses, by rich white men."

We'll let you decide the degree to which those observations apply to the art world.

Update, 4:00 p.m.: As a colleague notes, the basketball and art worlds have collided frequently over the years. David Hammons made a basketball-hoop sculpture, Jeff Koons suspended basketballs in aquariums in early pieces, Haim Steinbach placed Air Jordans on one of his shelves and Jonas Wood has painted basketball scenes. (An example of the latter is posted above). And in 2009, NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal curated a show at Chelsea's FLAG Foundation. The exhibition's title was "Size Matters," which is also the name of a combative essay by artist Robert Morris.

Logo, by Jacob Weinstein, coming to a chip clip near you. If you live in Brooklyn.

Yesterday a Kickstarter announced the arrival of The Classical, yet another daily web publication dedicated to the burgeoning world of alternative sportswriting. This one is the brainchild of a cerebral fraternity of sports and culture bros, including Bloomsbury editor (and rumored pub-trivia powerhouse) Pete Beatty, Pitchfork and Village Voice vet Tom Breihan, Yahoo! blogger Eric Freeman, Wall Street Journal columnist David Roth, and University of Michigan fellow (and former New York Sun editor) Tim Marchman.

Judging from the pitch, The Classical will out-Grantland Grantland. In addition to regular columns and quickie blog posts, the editors have threatened a 25,000-word piece on 1938 Hall of Famer Pete Alexander, as well as contributions from prizewinning novelists and “guys and girls we went to school with who are unappreciated geniuses.”

“We will strive to someday publish something as amazing as Colson Whitehead's Grantland dispatches from the World Series of Poker,” Mr. Beatty wrote Off The Record.

Like Grantland, The Classical’s name is an obscure reference. The name refers to the first track off The Fall’s 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

“It is probably fair to describe The Classical as post-punk sports journalism,” Mr. Beatty said.

Unlike Grantland, which is published by ESPN, The Classical lacks big corporate funding (hence the Kickstarter idea).

“We're way smaller, way more seat-of-pants, with no giant corporate funding (yet),” Mr. Beatty said. “The more natural comparison for us is The Awl (but about sports).” Most of the contributors have at one point been in the orbit of Bethlehem Shoals, who wrote the sports blog FreeDarko and now contributes to the Awl.

In order to make a safe space for smart sportswriting (and commenting), they’ll have to raise a steep $50,000 in Kickstarter pledges. According to Mr. Beatty, the founders have constructed a first-year budget based on web infrastructure costs, paying a publisher—a shadowy figure still working out an arrangement with his full-time employer—to rustle up advertising, providing a “nominal” staff salary, and manufacture of “at least several hundred chip clips," a gift for donors.

As of this writing, they’ve raised $9,234, including support from those who have been there: Longform.org founder Max Linsky, Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, and Awl founding editor Alex Balk.

Do not read it looking for a definition of the term "bro!" Such a courtesy would make the fatal error of including Grantland readers in the lexicon of Hipster Runoff--a blog whose relevance depends on convincing as many people as possible that they are in on an obscure joke that the shrinking majority of the world is not.

(For the record, "bro" is a pejorative term for a man at ease in mainstream culture and traditional gender roles, coming from the ironic use of their homosocial term of endearment.)

Instead, the author substitutes the word "bro" for most personal pronouns, many adjectives, and even some syllables that rhyme with "bro" (yielding the neologisms "broment" and "metamorphbrosis") across an otherwise unremarkable recap of the show's first two episodes.

Maybe it's a language immersion kind of thing.

We appreciate that Grantland is paying entrepreneurial Internet writers print wages to do their idiosyncratic Internet thing. (Molly Lambert has even imported the This Recording image-and-text device.) GQ has been doing the same and it's been a success, insomuch as it alleviates boredom and generates discussion.

But it also requires editing. How many times can a writer use a word ironically before it loses its critical edge and becomes a phatic display of one's, in Carles' terms, "alt"-ness? Would you say fewer than 50 times? Because "I don't "Want to Bro Up, I'm an Entourage Kid" uses the word "bro" 83 times. That's more than five percent of the total words in the piece.

We can't even credit this piece with ruining  "bro." It lost its bite so long ago that by 2009's I Love You, Man, Paul Rudd and Jason Segal--the kind of real life Hollywood bros guys Entourage fictionalizes--were mocking them for mass-market audiences.

Nicole Kidman (Getty Images)

"Are Red-Haired Women 'Evil'?" --The Daily Beast, July 2011, a seven-slide slideshow that fails to come down on either side of the question (descriptors used: "shock of wild red hair")

"Caught Redheaded," --The Daily, July 2011, a collage of famous redheads in which only modern-day Cyndi Lauper looks even slightly evil (descriptors used: "subtle highlights," "pink," "scarlet," "punky," "cough-syrup rouge," "Maraschino cherry," "auburn," "red-brown")

"The Ginger-Haired Jezebel: Julianne Moore's Eleven Most Adulterous Performances," --Grantland, July 2011, a listicle in which it is implied that Ms. Moore's hair color denotes, if not evil, then a certain sexual unscrupulousness (descriptors used: "ginger-haired," "naturally red," "flame-haired")

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_