Ron Burkle and Earvin "Magic" Johnson have teamed up to purchase BlackBook Media, publisher of the 15 year-old BlackBook Magazine [Full disclosure: a previous employer of this writer.] as reported by the New York Post.

Over the last three years, BlackBook—a publication of which Burkle-extortionist Jared Paul Stern was still a contributor to not all that long ago—went from a downtown hipster fashion rag notorious for not paying freelance writers to a content machine, building out listings in cities across the world, and using those listings for custom app development for advertising buyers. These were some of the assets that proved attractive enough to get Mr. Burkle and Mr. Johnson to invest in the company:

The biggest plum in the newly acquired business is Access Network, whose software has been licensed to over 100 media operations. It allows clients to refine their database lists with curated material such as local restaurant reviews. Access Networks software is used by Corcoran Real Estate Guides, Maxim Guides, MTV’s “Jersey Shore” Guides and Bravo!’s Top Chef Guide, among others.

The duo also purchased Vibe Holdings last year. Incidentally, BlackBook's president Ari Horowitz stepped down as president of Vibe under different ownership in 2007 to focus more on BlackBook. The last time Mr. Burkle was involved in the ownership of a fashionable Manhattan glossy magazine, it was his partnership with Yusef Jackson—son of Jesse—in the third and final iteration of Radar Magazine, which was shut down and sold off to American Media in 2008. At the time, Gawker wrote:

There's really never been any evidence that Burkle loves magazines. Murdoch will take a loss for years on something like the New York Post. Burkle didn't give [Radar editor Maer] Roshan the five years he said it'd take to break even on Radar before he pulled the plug. Because if it's not subsidizing his lifestyle, it's not worth the cash. He's a capitalist, obviously, and Radar was not a charitable endeavor, but if we had his fortune we wouldn't mind wasting it on the talent Roshan brought together.

Given BlackBook's diverse asset basket, it's not likely they'll see the same fate, despite all of the incidental Manhattan magazine history at play (one would hope).

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

(Why was it so scandalous, again? Post-The Girlfriend Experience, prostitution is even The Huffington Post-friendly.)

The narrative is predictable mid-aughts fare (young woman, sexy magazine story, Gawker commenters, unwanted attention, sticky epithet) and while we hate that nowadays every controversial writing gig comes with an implied contract for a follow-up What I Learned piece elsewhere, this one is  fun because it reads like a blind item.

WHICH "top editor " offered Ms. Pilot a full-time job at his  "successful newspaper" in "Midtown, Manhattan," where she was a three-year freelancer, by saying, "Well, Ms. Pilot. I can't offer you $950 an hour" (a reference to her hipster hooker rate appraisal)?  HINT: The newspaper office has folding chairs.

WHICH "30-something" "successful media executive" was sentenced to a year's community service and fired from his job for harassing Ms. Pilot with phone calls, including one in which he threatened, "I'm watching you...I'm going to fuck you... then I'm going to kill you and then [pause], well, I'm going to fuck your dead body"? HINT: He is unemployed and sweeping the streets on the weekends.

Your guess is as good as ours!

Maer Roshan.

On or around April 5, a group of prominent New Yorkers—including Andre Balazs, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lindsay Lohan and Harvey Weinstein—received a curious group text.

It was from Courtney Love, and she was pissed. Maer Roshan, she said, was fucking unethical. He was not to be trusted. He’d secretly tape recorded her, she claimed, and sold her out to the Internet.

What had prompted Ms. Love’s fury was a rambling video that had been posted by Mr. Roshan’s recently launched website, The Fix, in which Ms. Love assailed Kelly Osbourne for calling her a crackhead on the E! Channel. “I’ve saved her life twice, physically,” Ms. Love fumed on camera. “Booze, Oxycontin and coke—foaming at the mouth … ”

A number of online outlets had immediately picked up the story. And since it was evident to any of the hundreds of thousands of viewers of the clip that it had clearly been recorded with Ms. Love’s full knowledge and consent, Mr. Roshan confronted her the next day. She replied via text. “I’m very sorryed,” she wrote. “Just Fuckkked upp. Hate the stuupid innternet. Want to hang out tonite?”

Did we mention this website is focused on sobriety?

I witnessed Mr. Roshan extinguishing any number of such flare-ups firsthand, back when I worked as executive editor of Radar, the energetic, endearingly scattershot magazine and website (I say without prejudice) that he launched to great fanfare in 2003 and then stuck with through one mercurial billionaire backer after another.

The new website marked a comeback for the editor, who’d watched helplessly as Radar’s backers sold the property out from under him in late 2008. The demise of the magazine had been brutal. At the end, he often seemed red-eyed and exhausted. And then we all packed up our boxes, and he disappeared. For a while, stories made the rounds among friends and colleagues (TV projects, big Web editing gigs), and then they didn’t. Anybody heard from Maer?

As it happens, The Fix’s subject matter was not chosen at random. Mr. Roshan had developed a serious drinking problem while struggling to launch and to then relaunch Radar and spent a good part of the past two years drying out in various rehabs, halfway houses and sober-living facilities.

A pricey treatment program “with trust-fund kids and rich celebrity people,” as he put it, didn’t do him much good. Eventually, he wound up at a rehab called Cri-Help, where the accommodations were spartan and many of the clients had arrived straight from jail. “It was in the Valley,” he noted meaningfully. “Need I say more?”

Mr. Roshan was standing in front of a crowded tea shop not far from his apartment off Union Square, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a light gray shirt open to the third button, black pants and black woolen overcoat. He looked much better than when I’d seen him last—thinner, healthier, more bubbly—though a notably round pot belly persisted.

One of his bunkmates was a skinhead, “a swastikaed young gentleman,” he said, named Jared. “Of course, he was delighted to learn that his roommate was this gay Jew. And yet we ended up getting along really well! Except I really didn’t like his music.”

The experience doesn’t seem to have affected Mr. Roshan’s mischievous sense of humor, at least, not to judge by The Fix, a sobriety site as only he would conceive it. Along with rehab reviews, various resources for people seeking help, and hard-hitting pieces by the likes of Susan Cheever and Chris Byron, the site runs more unlikely stories, such as “AA’s Most Annoying Cliches” and “The Argument Against Abstinence.” And then there’s Ms. Love, listed among The Fix's “hand-picked pros,” who maintains she’s been sober for years, even while admitting to the occasional sip of rosé or bump of coke.

Whether The Fix—which can sometimes seem jaw-droppingly lighthearted—effectively promotes sobriety for its readers (or for its editors) isn’t entirely clear. Debates on the subject rage in the comment forums. But nobody who’s followed Mr. Roshan’s extraordinary whirl on the media thrill ride is surprised by The Fix’s nervy tone. Twenty years ago, as the 24-year-old editor of a short-lived gay weekly called QW, he outed right-wing icon Phyllis Schlafly’s son John. The story was picked up nationally and led to Mr. Roshan’s denunciation by the family-values crusader on Meet the Press. His 1997 New York magazine cover story “Trophy Boys,” co-written with Eric Konigsberg, about a cadre of attractive young “male courtesans … living in higher style than Andrew Cunanan ever imagined,” prompted angry letters from David Geffen and finance writer Andrew Tobias and seems to have been scrubbed from the magazine’s website (it lives on via Google Books). Another blockbuster feature, “Power Girls,” which Mr. Roshan assigned to a young party reporter named Vanessa Grigoriadis, went off like a media-gossip I.E.D., dismembering a number of the city’s hungriest young lifestyle flacks and scattering goody bags far and wide.

Working with Mr. Roshan taught her “that writing a story is about making jokes and gossiping with your editor and then putting it all in the piece,” Ms. Grigoriadis said. “You get so spoiled writing for Maer because he cares so much, he becomes a partner. For a long time I thought that’s what all editors were like.”

Later, as editorial director of Talk, he commissioned a fashion shoot featuring Barbara and Jenna Bush look-alikes on a booze-fueled bender, leading the White House to issue a fatwa barring staffers from having any further contact with the magazine. If the boss wants buzz, you give her buzz.

One night during Memorial Day weekend, in 2002, Mr. Roshan sat in a carrel at the Astor Place Kinko’s working on a business plan. It was 4 in the morning. The place was bathed in fluorescent light. Talk had folded, and AMI C.E.O. David Pecker had reached out to Mr. Roshan to ask if he had any ideas for a new magazine. He bluffed and said he did, then grabbed a few colleagues from Talk, including Christopher Tennant and Drew Lee, and cooked up what would become Radar. The name was just a placeholder. They knew it was dumb.

He was, at that point, a media darling. “We’d watched the circulation at Talk rise by something like 19 percent in a few months,” he recalled. “If you read the press from that time, it was like, ‘It’s gotten good!’ Then 9/11 happened and they closed it. I’m like, ‘What just happened there?’”

Mr. Pecker never pulled the trigger. Mr. Roshan spoke with Jann Wenner about editing Us, but then took himself out of the running. Having a magazine of his own seemed like more fun. “In retrospect, it’s actually kind of bad-ass,” he said, draped over a chair in the crowded cafe and sipping an iced green tea. “But I was like, If I can’t find the place I want to work, I’ll just need to start something else.”

The process was draining. “I spend so much time with people at work that it becomes like a family,” he said. “So when everyone dispersed I was feeling really weird, like, ‘Where’s all my peeps?’ They went on to other things, and I went on to do this thing.”

While New York Post gossip writer Neal Travis was breathlessly reporting on Roshan sightings at the Four Seasons Grill Room (“One of the hottest media topics right now is where Maer Roshan will land next”), Mr. Roshan was mostly just waiting around for wealthy acquaintances to reply to his entreaties for funding.

“It was a lonely time,” he said. “And I remember thinking at one point: This would be a lot easier with a glass of wine. Because this is just not fun.” He let out a sigh. “That’s kind of how it started.”Full disclosure: I’m biased. I worked closely with Mr. Roshan for years under sometimes stressful circumstances. He assigned and edited two of my best stories and taught me more than any editor I’ve ever worked with—even if, O.K., he was occasionally a little bleary or zonked out on doctor-prescribed Klonopin (which as a recent article in The Fix points out, is one of the more destructive medications available).

Mostly, he was a blast to work for—mirthful, brilliant and routinely exasperating. Despite his editing prowess (he is amazing with structure and narrative), he types with two fingers and often leaves caps-lock on by mistake. He has yet to master the technical nuances of website bookmarking, and typically checks his own sites by typing in the U.R.L. He cares little for food and seems happiest with a tuna melt. “Maer has lived off pizza his entire life,” marveled Mr. Tennant, who recalled Mr. Roshan at a business lunch at Masa “holding chopsticks in his hand like a 4-year-old.”

He tends to smoke only a few drags of a Marlboro Light before firing up another, sometimes without extinguishing the first. He can be the same way with stories. I once arrived on a movie set in Williamsburg to profile a hipster porn star only to find another Radar writer who’d been sent for the same purpose. (Radar 2.0 folded before either piece ran.) During features meetings, he could often be counted on to propose pieces that seemed oddly familiar, leaving it to Mr. Tennant to remind him the story had run in an earlier generation of the magazine. That said, they were almost always a good idea, both times around.

At times, I was one Mr. Roshan’s most effective enablers. When his hands would shake, or he’d disappear for a while, I helped maintain the illusion that everything was fine, sometimes blatantly misleading colleagues about his whereabouts. Not that I invented the lies, but I dutifully repeated them: family emergencies, medical emergencies, much-needed vacations. It seemed like part of the gig.

I also cursed his name on a number of occasions, watching more or less impotently as the magazine he’d bled for went down for the final time, despite an ASME nomination for general excellence not six months before. That it later resurfaced as a shady Octomom gossip portal overseen—in an injustice that seems almost cosmic—by AMI’s David Pecker somehow made the whole thing worse, especially when they stripped the old content from the site and adopted a pink and green color scheme.

For those last few months of Radar, I was plagued by bouts of insomnia, episodes my wife took to calling “nightmaers.”

Conflicted doesn’t begin to cover it.

Then again, lots of people seem to be conflicted about Mr. Roshan. To read through Radar’s old press is to step into media steam room so cloudy with schadenfreude, you have to squint to make out the hazy figures in the corner and what exactly they’re up to. Kurt Andersen wrote a strongly worded critique of the magazine in 2005, nailing it for, among other things, its many similarities to Spy (“like a tribute band”), and published the piece in New York, the magazine where he’d hired Mr. Roshan as a senior editor a few years before.

Then there was Gawker—the outlet that had most assiduously followed the magazine’s ups and downs (branding its blanket coverage “The Greatest American Magazine Re-Relaunch”) even as the site’s own mordant take on media and celebrity arguably made the whole idea of Radar seem superfluous. Radar was a classic Gawker story. Despite having been a fan, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton remarked in a GChat, “We quite quickly made it a target. Such a lurid cast of characters.” He was referring not to the editorial staff but to the rogues’ gallery of backers, including Mr. Zuckerman and financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—news of whose proclivities are thought to have led Mr. Zuckerman to dump his share of the property—and subsequently supermarket tycoon Ron Burkle and his aide-de-camp Yusef Jackson (a beer distributor and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who perched on a stability ball during meetings and employed the disconcerting email sign-off “God Bless”).

“Radar was the charge of the light brigade,” Mr. Denton added. “Glorious, but not good business. It was a throwback.”

Somewhat infamously, Team Radar sought revenge during the magazine’s 2005 launch party when somebody pushed a pie into Mr. Denton’s face—a throwback sort of stunt, to be sure, but one that made for a good photo op and a Drudge pickup. Not that it quashed the beef. At one point, Gawker writer Choire Sicha posted an item suggesting Radar wasn’t paying freelancers (we were), without mentioning that he himself had freelanced for and been paid by Radar not long before. “Don’t your readers deserve to know that?” I demanded over the phone, to which he replied that it could all be sorted out in the comments. Eventually, he did append an update: “Good news! We haven’t heard from any other contributors to the new Radar who’ve had trouble! Isn’t that lovely?”

That it had by then become easier for a freelance writer to fire off an anonymous complaint to Gawker than to return an assignment contract seemed indicative of the weirdly intimate love-hate relationship a certain group of journalists had developed with Mr. Roshan. Shortly thereafter, when Mr. Sicha wound up as a Radar colleague, it seemed not only farcical but somehow par for the course. It was always complicated with Radar.Mr. Roshan’s first serious dalliance with magazines occurred in the late 70’s, and it seems to have made a powerful impression. He was a Jewish kid growing up in prerevolutionary Tehran, the son of a Persian-Jewish father and an American mother. The Roshans subscribed to Time—but their issues inevitably arrived late and incomplete.

“I don’t know how they found the time to do this,” Mr. Roshan recalled, referring to the Shah’s regime, “but they would go in and cut out everything they didn’t like, so you’d get magazines with whole articles missing.” Tidy though it sounds, Mr. Roshan’s subsequent career can be seen on some level as an ongoing campaign to shovel copy, the more provocative the better, into those mysterious blank spaces.

This did not always please Radar’s various backers, who might have wished he held certain of their sacred cows in higher regard. During my tenure, Hillary Clinton was the most sacred of all (Bill was, at the time, a frequent flyer on Mr. Burkle’s 757, “Air Ron”). I recall one dramatic showdown over a fairly tame web roundup of Hillary’s “cronies.” The story ultimately ran, but at some cost to Mr. Roshan’s relationship with our funders.

“Some would say it’s a little reckless but he does what he believes in,” noted Mr. Tennant, who pointed out that Mr. Roshan had gleefully alienated the gay mafia with “Trophy Boys” just when he was set to become a made member. “He could have been sipping Cosmos at Calvin’s beach house!” Mr. Tennant said. “And it would probably more advantageous not to put Courtney in The Fix. But to his credit, Maer is always ready to absolutely piss someone off.”

“If I’d been more willing to compromise, I probably would have gotten a lot further,” Mr. Roshan conceded.

Another formative and cinematic memory: It’s the Fourth of July at the Community School in Tehran, an academy for the children of American expats. As Maer and his schoolmates look on awestruck, a helicopter buzzes into view and hovers over the school’s courtyard, whipping up a swirl of dust. The chopper’s door slides open. The children raise their eyes to the blue sky, and McDonalds hamburgers rain down.

Meanwhile, demonstrations against the Shah were gathering steam: fevered protest marches passing right outside the school’s gates, guys beating themselves with chains, tanks rumbling in the streets, people throwing rocks and lighting piles of garbage on fire.

In 1979, Mr. Roshan’s mother whisked him and his two younger brothers back to her parents’ house on Long Island while his father stayed behind to deal with the family’s property. The Shah’s puppet government soon fell, and Ayatollah Khomeini was swept into power. Mr. Roshan’s father escaped seven years later, but the once-colorful figure was diminished. He died of cancer within a year.

After arriving on Long Island, Mr. Roshan’s mother set up a flea market booth at Aqueduct racetrack, peddling $3 belts to make ends meet. Somehow she eventually earned enough to buy a house in Five Towns and to send Maer and his brothers to an Orthodox yeshiva. Though he wasn’t religious and already knew he was gay, he seems to have fit in well. His second year, he ran for vice president of his class, and despite having to deliver his Hebrew campaign speech phonetically, he won.

Before long, he was zipping into town on weekends with a female friend to hit the nightclubs he’d read about in New York and Interview. Their first such excursion was to Area. The high-schoolers took one look at the crowd outside and quickly determined that standing at the back of the line would never do, especially if they wanted to be home for curfew. Instead, they planted themselves at a distance from the scrum in front and pretended they didn’t want to go in at all. “The bouncers were like, ‘You,’” Mr. Roshan recalled incredulously.

Inside, the theme was Religion. A guy was hanging from a cross. There was a pool of fire on the dance floor.

Mr. Roshan attended N.Y.U. as a journalism and politics major and got to know club kids Lisa E. and James St. James. Dressing for a night out was a two-and-a-half-hour process and often involved the company of a posse of drag queens. Asked to describe his look at the time, he said merely, “I wouldn’t want those pictures to surface, that’s for sure.”

After a short stint in Key West, where Mr. Roshan covered the police beat for a local paper (making sure to boldface the names in the crime blotter), he became an editor at Interview. His first article to cause a stir was a freelance piece, an exclusive Q&A he landed with Liz Smith for Outweek, despite the fact that the magazine had excoriated her for months over her refusal to come out as a lesbian. “I was being attacked constantly!” Ms. Smith recalled. “But Maer was so convincing. I honestly don’t know how he did it.” The cover story, entitled “Liz Smith: ‘I Hate Outweek!’” ran in June 1991. “I was prepared to think of him as an adversarial reporter,” Ms. Smith said. “But he was so intelligent and nice and sweet. I’ve followed his career with a great deal of proprietary interest ever since.”

The story helped win Mr. Roshan the gig as editor-in-chief of QW, his first of many start-ups. The AIDS crisis was at its height, and major staff battles over politics were routine. “There was this contingent that was, like, ‘Magic Johnson is not our hero!’”Mr. Roshan recalled.)

Mr. Roshan was part of the generation that had been educated about safe sex, he said, “which didn’t make it any less scary. But I got to see the transformation of a community,” from one that was underground and marginalized to one that was aggressively visible—a dynamic he sees happening now for addicts, and that The Fix aims to capture and accelerate.

After QW’s owner died of AIDS, Gil Rogin, the legendary managing editor of Sports Illustrated and co-founder of Vibe, hatched a plan to bring a retooled version of the magazine to Time Inc., to be called Tribe. But after Mr. Roshan presented a prototype, and then another, to the company’s board, the project was shelved, in part, it was speculated, due to fear of a boycott by the Christian right, which had recently targeted Sassy.

Mr. Roshan was subsequently hired by Mr. Andersen at New York, eventually becoming deputy editor under Caroline Miller. He became known there for an uncanny ability to nail the city’s zeitgeist, and for a playful streak. “His stories were always brilliantly full of angles,” said Ms. Brown, who was then at The New Yorker. For instance, he spearheaded a singles issue with companion-wanted ads by Star Jones, Marcus Schenkenberg, Ann Coulter and Ed Koch on the cover. (“They all got a ton of responses but Star only got three letters!” he recalled. “Poor thing.”) For a package, Gay Life Now—a first for a mainstream magazine—Mr. Roshan invited just about every prominent homosexual in town to pose together on the cover, then wrote a provocative piece wondering why so many had demurred. He initiated a column with Mayor Koch and Senator Al D’Amato kibitzing about politics at the Four Seasons, and another, “Cindy Undercover,” in which gossip writer Cindy Adams would take a job as a bartender at Scores, or a waitress at Katz’s.

“He knew absolutely everybody,” Mr. Tennant recalled. “The phone would ring every five seconds. ‘Hey, it’s Candace [Bushnell], where’s Maer?’ ‘It’s Ed Koch, where’s Maer?’ It was like, ‘Please hold. Please hold … ’”

Mr. Roshan nabbed the first postscandal interview with Monica Lewinsky, by accident. “We were at a club, and she was like, ‘You look really familiar,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s funny, you look very familiar as well!’” He also wrangled a profile of Denise Rich and noted proudly, “I think I’m the only person who was simultaneously friends with Denise, Monica and Lucianne Goldberg.”

“God bless Maer,” offered Ms. Goldberg. “He’s smart and kind, and he doesn’t stab people in the back.” They remain friends, though they steer clear of political discussions, added Ms. Goldberg, who now runs a right-wing website, Lucianne.com. “What we do is laugh about life’s situation. He’s hilarious.”

A lot of people say that about Mr. Roshan.

“He’s the most fun ever,” Ms. Grigoriadis gushed. “We would just hang out in his office, laughing all day. There’s a whole new breed of editors now who just want to email back and forth. They don’t dish. But that’s not the way to get people to tell you stuff.”

Lisa DePaulo, who wrote the Lucianne Goldberg and Denise Rich profiles, called Mr. Roshan the most enthusiastic editor she’d ever worked with. “You can’t lose your erection when you’re working with him,” she said. “The best stories in the world are the ones where you have these amazing conversations before you write. That’s Maer. You cannot not be excited. It’s impossible to punt.”

Bigger jobs soon beckoned. In 2000, Jason Binn tried to hire him to run Gotham. Mr. Roshan agreed. But after he resigned from New York, his new boss presented him with a list of “friends” who he said should be treated gently in print. There were more than 30 names on it.Mr. Roshan quickly dashed back to his old job.

Tina Brown came calling a year later, after deciding to step back from editing Talk and concentrate on the books and conferences divisions. She saw Mr. Roshan as an ideal replacement. “He just knew how to spin the news, and he could go high or low,” Ms. Brown said. “He could do hard news but he also had a great sense of humor.”

After a bit of high-level negotiation (Ms. Brown would send a limo driver over with terms, which Mr. Roshan would review, mark up and hand to the driver for the return trip), he took the job. Ms. Brown granted him the right to tinker with the magazine as he saw fit, and he engineered a redesign, changing the trim size, adding new sections and hiring a new columnist, Tina Brown.

Which isn’t to say he had total control. “Our biggest fight was she wanted to have this cover line, ‘My Aching Vagina,’” he remembered with a laugh (the story was an excerpt from Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of genital pain). “And I was like, ‘That’s not happening.’” He adopted a voice I’d heard him use before when channeling Ms. Brown, a voice that sounds absolutely nothing like her: “‘I don’t know why! It’s a very important story! I’m sure if it was called ‘My Aching Penis’ you’d have no problem with it!’”

“That sounds like Maer’s fevered imagining,” Ms. Brown said.

In the end, they went with “Susanna Kaysen’s Private Parts.”

“But those disputes were very few and far between,” Mr. Roshan went on. “I really do love her, There’s nobody more fun or funnier to work with,” he said.

To those who don’t know him, Mr. Roshan’s penchant for such dish can sound snarky. But he relates these stories with deep affection. “He just has a great eye for the tragicomedy of New York,” Mr. Tennant said. “But it’s from a good place. He has a huge heart.”

Harvey Weinstein, despite having shut down Talk not long before, was impressed enough with Mr. Roshan to join an investment group to back the original test issues of Radar. "Maer has an unbelievable weather vane for what’s going on," Mr. Weinstein said. "He had this incredible energy, and his people really loved him. He always made sure people who worked for him and with him had fun."

Mr. Roshan has always had a soft spot for “damaged-wing birds,” as Mr. Tennant put it. And in the latter days of Radar, he was well on his way to becoming one of them himself.

“You’re going to tell the steak story, aren’t you,” he declared one afternoon last month as we walked down Broadway toward Union Square.

“Probably,” I replied. “It’s kind of a funny story.”

The steak story, on reflection, isn’t all that funny. Basically, sometime in 2008, Maer and I went out to lunch at the Palm on Second Avenue. He hadn’t been himself. His skin looked yellow. He’d had a break up with his boyfriend, Matt, who’d refused to see him anymore until he got sober, and he was having bouts of paranoia, raving that Matt was secretly draining his bank account, which nobody who knew either of them believed for a second. My goal was to try to persuade Maer to quit Radar—to become a figurehead, go get well, and allow me to take over the magazine. I was looking out for him, but also for myself. It was complicated.

He promised to think about the idea. And then he looked down and declared that his steak was … moving. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “My God, look at that.”

Entering Union Square Park, we grabbed an empty bench on the west side.

“Whatever,” he said. “Just don’t make it your lede. And you might note that hallucination was a side-effect of Klonopin, which my doctor prescribed.”

“Okay, but you’re actually not my editor on this,” I taunted.

“Thank God!” he said with a hearty laugh.

Mr. Roshan was going to be late for an interview with The New York Times, but first he had something to show me. He pulled an iPad out of his satchel. He wanted to give me a taste of his latest project, a tablet magazine called Punch, after the satirical British weekly. The project’s partners include Dany Levy, the creator of DailyCandy, David Bennahum, ceo of the American Independent News Network, and designer Luke Hayman, of Pentagram, who was responsible for the last redesign of Radar.

Whether Punch would be a monthly with a daily component or a series of individual apps was up in the air. But Mr. Roshan, who has taken quite a few meetings with investors over the years, was at it again. Most of the major publishers in town had seen it and were impressed. Mr. Roshan was hopeful. Hamburgers actually fall from the sky more often than people think.

“You’re going to love this,” he said excitedly, punching at the touch-screen and loading up a feature about drunk driving Hollywood celebrities. “Pick a star,” he prompted. The options were Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen. I chose Lindsay, and her face appeared in the rear view mirror. He selected a car for her; then he “picked her poison.”

“Now she drives drive home through LA and tries not to hit any pedestrians,” he explained.

Punch looked awesome—by far the best iPad magazine I’d seen, and probably what Radar was always supposed to be. Still, I wondered what the recovery community would think of the game.

He took a deep breath. “That will be interesting,” he said. “But you know, I never really wanted to be a poster child for alcoholism. The Fix is a project that needed to be done, but it’s not my life’s calling. I don’t really see myself on Oprah’s couch, do you?”

Mr. Roshan cracked up. Then he added, “Is this not the fucking coolest thing ever?” and he tapped the gas.

agell@observer.com

But we didn’t expect that it would take long for Maer Roshan, Radar’s editor, to get up to a new trick. However many times he’d fallen before, he’d also proven, with dogged determination, that year after year he’ll return. Sure enough, in the weeks after Radar shut down, he tried, furiously, to get the last issue printed. It never hit the presses.

But then things got quiet. We heard that Mr. Roshan had gotten a gig as editor at large with the Daily Beast. There was a byline in February about red carpet snafus, then radio silence. No one knew quite where Mr. Roshan was, other than that he might be in Los Angeles.

In May, he resurfaced! A Keith Kelly item in the Post told us that Mr. Roshan had landed at The Week, where Daily Beast editor Tina Brown’s hubby, Harry Evans, is an editor at large. The item reported that Mr. Roshan was going to be the online editor of theweek.com.

But then, we didn’t see him on the masthead.  

So we decided to check in with Mr. Roshan. We found him late Monday afternoon on his cell from Los Angeles.

“It’s kind of great here! It’s sunny!” he said.

Mr. Roshan said he was never the online editor.

“It was an acting editor job,” he said. “It was to give [The Week] a little direction. It was never supposed to be a long-term thing. It was a consultancy job.”

So what does one do out in L.A.?

“You do things like go to the beach and work out,” he said.

Isn’t that the sort of stuff of which L.A. dreams are made!

More seriously, Mr. Roshan said he’s working on some TV projects

“I’m working on a project which has me here for four or five months,” he said.

Naturally, he wouldn’t give us a tell-all, nor even a hint of what it is he’s working on, but he told us he originally moved out to L.A. with TV in mind. And, he said, the TV gig is looking good. “Things have firmed up since I’ve been out here,” he said.

Does that mean he’s giving up on the city for good?

“I still have my apartment in New York, and I still love New York,” he said. “I’m not giving that up.”

jkoblin@observer.com

“People kept telling me that they were bored with the Internet,” said Choire Sicha, an “ancestor of ephemeral Gawker” and soon-to-be published book author (not to mention a former Observer editor and columnist), who was calling into The Observer from his “home office” in the East Village this afternoon.

“It’s sort of like, it’s so compartmentalized and pushed into little categories into what can be covered and what can’t be covered. I like being surprised! That’s the great marvel of Matt Drudge,” he said, referring to the still ubiquitous editor of The Drudge Report. “Like he’ll always tell you about the supernova or something. Everything is exciting and weird and unexpected.”

“I thought like, 'Oh, good, I want to do something that helps people not be bored,'” he continued. “That’s sort of not a business plan but it’s a great direction to go in.”

This morning, after a week and a half behind a password-protected wall, Mr. Sicha and Alex Balk, both former editors at Gawker and Radar Magazine's defunct Web site, radaronline.com, launched TheAwl.com, a blog that covers news, ideas and obscure Internet minutiae of the day. The tag line: "Be Less Stupid."

“It was birthed from the following thoughts,” according to the 'About' page on the site. “What if there were a website that zippily surveyed a wealth of resonant, weird, important, frightening, amusing bits of news and ideas? And what if it weren’t totally clogged with reality show linkbait?”

“We don’t have a specific category to fill,” Mr. Sicha explained to The Observer. “We don’t have a beat to target. We’re interested in what does spike our fancy or our brains or whatever—or what’s left of them.”

Although there will be some overlap with Messrs. Sicha and Balk’s familiar territory of “Manhattan media insiderness,” as Mr. Sicha put it, they’ll cover a broad range of subjects. “I don’t want friends of mine horribly mystified when they arrive at the Web site,” Mr. Sicha said. Today the site offered a post mapping Gawker’s office seating chart, a video of a Miss USA contestant responding to a gay marriage question from Perez Hilton, and an item linking to a Reuters article about physicist Stephen Hawking being taken to the hospital.

Also along for the ride are Mary HK Choi, former editor of Missbehave magazine, who wrote about food (“which bacon-flavored treats are the right ones”), and former Gawker editor and author Emily Gould on “Social A’s”—a response to The New York Times' 'Social Q's'.

“It’s almost like the Huffington Post model, but we don’t have a house in LA where we throw all these parties… or a paycheck,” Mr. Sicha joked.

Or hefty venture capital funding, which The Awl tried to raise, according to David Cho, the site’s business manager. Mr. Cho worked on business development at Radar with Messrs. Balk and Sicha before it folded in October 2008 and its site was sold to AMI.

Mr. Cho said the site has been in the works since then, but the team struggled with building a space that would be attractive to advertisers. Mr. Cho told The Observer that the The Awl had a few false launch dates because advertisers had signed on only to pull out at the last minute. Their current advertiser, Butterfinger, came in at the 11th hour, according to Mr. Cho.

So they launched out-of-pocket, with a bare-bones site (design-wise), that will evolve however their audience, and possibly advertisers, want it to.

The site is already getting feedback. BoingBoing writer Joel Johnson recently IMed Mr. Sicha: “He was like, 'This is the ugliest website I have ever seen!”

“I was like, ‘Yay, thank you!'” Mr. Sicha said. He explained: “We wanted it to be super paired down because we can pop stuff on it, rip it off, tear it apart. I think it’s sort of entertaining to grow in public.”

“I think because we false started so many times, we tried to give people this pre-made site for people to invest in, based on what we thought people would like, rather than what are people responding to on the current site,” Mr. Cho said. “We just want to create quality content without infringing on it with advertising."

“In a great, ideal world, [The Awl] would become something of a newspaper. Will that happen? Maybe!” Mr. Sicha said, before adding, “I want to make this an Anti-Tina Brown-y launch. We’ll grow as it grows, or not. It’s not exactly as low level as an afternoon Tumblr project though, no offense against the Tumblr projects of the world.”

For a site covering such broad topics, Mr. Cho said he is courting advertisers based on the site’s voice, which distinguishes it from other aggregating sites like the Huffington Post or the editors' old site, Gawker. “Media buyers in New York know this: there is a type of New York person, a person who wants to kind of have all these little nuggets of information to keep up with their friends on a day-to-day basis,” he told The Observer. “What we have is Choire and Balk’s voice, which helps people kind of feel a greater sense of attachment to the site.”

“In a lot of ways, it’ll be like if Choire or Balk were IMing you and are like, ‘Hey look at this,’ and also, 'Emily Gould says this,'” Mr. Cho continued. “Balk and Choire are so good at writing on the Internet, they are probably two people who do it best.”

He'll be covering covering a variety of things: his old beat in television; he'll respond to the day's news when he's got something to say; and he'll be digging through FOIAs and courthouse documents for topics "that align with the stuff Gawker does," something the Web site has long been after but hasn't found anyone with the time or resources to do.

And Mr. Cook, a writer whom Nick Denton has coveted for some time, seems like he has finally relented to Mr. Denton's way of thinking.

"Look, if the Daily News isn't there in three years or in two years or in however many years it takes, there's still going to be an appetite for the things they do and there will be places like Gawker to fill that role."

Mr. Cook said that Gawker will pick up the slack from fading newspapers and magazines.

"Nick and [Gawker editor] Gabriel [Snyder] and I had been talking about—and this is Nick’s term—is iterative reporting, or iterative journalism," he said. "One of the things we want to do is the kind of story that would be potentially a two-, a three-, a four-, or five-thousand-word investigative-type story that might be in a magazine or newspaper but do it one post at a time and toss seeds out and threads out and see what happens."

He pointed to the Josh Marshall method.

"We don’t want to do things that are long," he said. "That stuff doesn’t work. I was accustomed to doing the kind of thing where you spend six weeks reporting and working on a story and developing sources and finding new information and doing all the things you do for a 5,000-word story, and then you sit down, you collect it all and you write it, and it's edited and published. You take that amount of work and the amount of the skill that it requires and here you'd just do it live. You start with whatever your first nugget of information is and put it out there and see what develops. It's an opening-up-the-notebook kind of thing."

Mr. Cook has been out of work ever since Radar folded last September. He was a longtime ally to Maer Roshan, so we wondered if he's been sitting on his hands the last few months waiting and hoping if Mr. Roshan would be developing something else he could jump on board for.

"Radar went under nine days after my son was born," he said. "I got a call, while I was on paternity leave, that said come in and get your stuff. And so the upside is, I've been able to raise him for his first couple of months. The downside is, I didn't have any income from my side. Maer’s an editor at large for the Daily Beast and I’ve talked to him about stuff about the Daily Beast and freelance stuff. I haven’t been waiting for his next move."

And would Gawker's notoriously stressful pace finally drive Mr. Cook back to cigarettes? No, he assures, his Nicorette pack will take care of that.

"I'm chewing it right now," he said. "It increases efficiency."

It starts with the ragtag pioneers, moving in with their funky friends and their bohemian pursuits, seeking life on the cheap in some desolate space. Then comes the progression: artists give way to creative professionals, lofts give way to loft-style co-ops, expensive cheese stores give way to more expensive cheese stores. The neighborhood has arrived; there it goes.

Today, we look around and learn that, according to Technorati's 2008 State of the Blogosphere (that word brings back such fond memories!) the Web indexing site now keeps track of 133 million blogs. For some perspective, imagine the entire population of Canada sharing its thoughts on politics, pop culture, and kittens. Now add in France. And Belgium. And New York. And most of Texas.

To paraphrase The Bard: Nobody goes to the blogosphere anymore: It's too crowded.

Today, Media Mob is no more. Make no mistake, observer.com will continue to bring readers breaking media news and analysis from our brilliant, tireless, attractive, and humble media team, but these stories will no longer exist under the old rubric. We'll be breaking our long-practiced omertà in favor of sharing our news breaks and takes via the main Observer homepage.

Media Mob is dead; Long Live Media Mob.

By way of eulogy, in no particular order and with no bias towards author or medium, here are some of Media Mob's 'greatest hits' (and, with that, all mafia puns get whacked once and for all):

- Juicy Bits Surfacing in Rather Case: In 2004, CBS Considered Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter Independent Panel

- For an Airplane, a Tragedy; For a Writer, an Opportunity

- Empty Nast Syndrome: Condé Nast Cutting Five Percent of All Magazine Staffs; Future of Men's Vogue In Doubt

- Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace: 'He Was the First Person Who Ever Called Me "Mister"'

- Pure Imagination: In Which a Boy From Alabama Talks About New York, The Times Book Review, and the Future of Fiction

- Radar Shutting Down (Again)

- It Takes a Nation of Nerds to Make Jimmy Fallon a Late Night Host

- Inside the Fox News Green Room in Denver, Close Quarters, Big Stars, and Observer Clumsiness

- Observer Softball Report: What If 9-0 Never Happened?

- The New York Sun Folds

- A Look Back: The Daily Beast's First 100 Hours

- At Jack McWethy Memorial, the Ghost of a Famous Grin

- Breaking: 58-Year-Old Woman Not 25; Or 30; Or 40

- John Updike Dies at 76

- Doomsday in L.A.: The L.A. Times Cuts 150 Newsroom Jobs

- Maureen Dowd: The Mirror Has Two Faces

- Only Connect: Silicon Alley Insider Honors Silicon Alley 100

- Longtime Times Book Review Senior Editor Dwight Garner to Join Kakutani and Maslin in Daily Paper

"As of 3 P.M. all Radar staffers were expected to leave from their East 45th Street office.

"According to a source, editorial staffers have spent the last 90 minutes or so boxing up their belongings, laughing and drinking from bottles of Stella Artois."— Radar Staff Drinking Bottles of Stella As They Pack; Gathering at East Village Bar, by John Koblin, The New York Observer, October 24, 2008.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

These days, Ms. Brown’s aggregator site creates as many as 10 original stories a day, and the Beast’s roster of writers reads a bit like a list of the recently laid off. She’s like Schindler, in a skirt-suit.

Recent fallen Radar-troops like Choire Sicha, Neel Shah and Adam Raymond also have bylines (though Mr. Shah has recently started a new gig at Page Six). Mr. Roshan himself was lucky enough to find himself a job there as editor at large. And he’s been recruiting as well.

“[Former New York Sun editor] Seth [Lipsky] and Maer are the first people I call about young talent anyway, and I immediately emailed Seth and said, ‘Who should we look at?’” Ms. Brown told Off the Record. “And he gave me six or seven names of people he thought were very talented.”

Ah, The New York Sun! The newspaper, which printed its last issue on Sept. 30, has matriculated the bylines of Ira Stoll, Kate Taylor, Julie Satow, Ross Goldberg, Benjamin Sarlin and Russell Berman into Ms. Brown’s freelance budget.

Of course, these freelancers are not operating at the level of her marquee talent. For every Neel Shah or Kate Taylor item, there are many more posts from Tucker Carlson, Christopher Buckley and Peter Beinart, all of whom are on contract. Ms. Brown said it’s like a magazine-style contract, just different (more items, less pay).

Now it’s time to get servicey! How much can you expect to be paid for a piece at the Daily Beast if you just sort of wash up, tempest-tossed, from the vast dark sea of recent unemployment?

“We’re not offering big fees,” Ms. Brown said. Posts are generally good for $250. One recently laid-off staffer who’s been pitching the site was told posts could get $300 to $500—others say it’s closer to 50 cents per word. Seven hundred words? Three hundred and fifty bucks. Another tells us that there are bonuses for reporting.

But not too much reporting!

“They want celeb-focus and featurey stuff that’s light and fun to read,” said one recently laid-off staffer who contributes. “They’re less interested in the scoop and more interested in the fun, light read. They like stuff with celebrities attached with little lists: five of this, five of that.”

Sensibility, darling!

“Clearly we’re not in a bigger place and people can’t have their major writing here, but we do give people an opportunity to write,” Ms. Brown said. “You know, to get their bylines out there and develop their voices, and if they’re productive, they can use it as part of what they’re doing.”

jkoblin@observer.com