February 24, 2009, 2:38 pm
Liz Smith Bids City’s Tabloids Goodbye
By James Barron
Updated, 5:15 p.m. | After Thursday, the gossip columnist Liz Smith will not have a home in a New York City tabloid for the first time in 33 years. The New York Post – which has published her gossip column since the days when Donald was still married to Marla and Christie Brinkley was still married to Ricky Taubman – is dropping her column, citing hard times.
“Like so many other newspapers around the nation, we are buffeted by unprecedented economic gales,” Col Allan, the editor in chief of The Post, told Ms. Smith in a Feb. 9 letter that said he was not renewing the contract for what he called her “legendary column.”
Even for Ms. Smith, who turned 86 on Feb. 2, tabloids are so last century. She plans to concentrate on that newer medium, the Internet. She is a founder and part owner of the 11-month-old site wowOwow, for “women on Web,” and said she looked forward to posting scoops there – “free,” she said, “from the constraints of newspaper deadlines.”
Or newspaper cutbacks: Last year The Post reduced her schedule to three days a week from six. “I protested,” she said. “I had meetings with everybody. I carried on. Didn’t do any good. Mr. Allan is firmly at the helm of The New York Post, and I was never under the impression that I was his cup of tea.”
Asked for his comment on the matter, Mr. Allan said in a statement late Tuesday afternoon: “The Post is grateful to have been able to publish Liz Smith’s legendary column for so many years. We wish her the very best for the future.”
But wait. She is Liz Smith. She has everybody’s phone number. Didn’t she call Rupert Murdoch?
“Oh, yeah, I had a meeting with Rupert,” she said of the chairman of News Corp, which owns The Post. “He said he wouldn’t interfere with Col Allan. Well, isn’t he right? Shouldn’t publishers believe in their editors?”
So she leaves the world of New York newspapers with what sounded like a tongue-in-cheek prediction: “I figure that without having to pay my salary, The Post will immediately go into the black.” She said The Post was paying her $125,000 a year.
She said she would write her column five days a week for syndication to newspapers around the country. She will also write a twice-a-week column for Daily Variety. And she has signed on as a contributing editor of Parade magazine, which has a circulation of 33 million through more than 470 Sunday newspapers – one of which is The New York Post.
“I just love the newspaper business,” she said, “and this has been quite an adjustment in the last year since we invented the Wow site.” (Interestingly, four years ago, Ms. Smith wondered aloud what blogs and the Internet would mean to a gossip columnist’s future.)
The women behind WowOwow are famous enough to be mentioned in a Liz Smith column. Among them are Lesley Stahl, a correspondent on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” and Joni Evans, a former literary agent and book editor who is the site’s chief executive.
“The specialness of this for us is that it’s Liz all the time, anytime,” Ms. Evans said. “There was a time when she was a five-day-a week person and then she became a three-day-a-week person. If somebody had a really great piece of news or gossip and it wasn’t her day, she couldn’t run it, and that would drive her insane. On the Web, information can flow through to her by the minute and we can post it by the minute.”
