“Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” is back — this time on Contrarian Boston, local journalist Scott Van Voorhis’ Substack newsletter. Emily, Scott and I kick around one topic: the epic media scandal that has engulfed Olivia Nuzzi and her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, over Nuzzi’s non-touching sexual relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Nuzzi was pushed out of her high-profile job at New York magazine last year after Oliver Darcy of Status News broke the story about her affair. Although the magazine claimed it had uncovered no conflicts of interest, they were gilding the lily. Nuzzi wrote a devastating takedown of then-President Joe Biden before he ended his re-election campaign and while Kennedy was running for president in his own right. Later she penned an oddly sympathetic profile of Donald Trump while Kennedy was angling for a top job in a possible future Trump administration.
Nuzzi’s back in the news because she “wrote” a “book” called “American Canto,” which sold only 1,165 hardcover copies during its first week — a debut that an anonymous publishing insider told Politico was a “debacle of epic proportions.” Lizza, himself a political-journalist-in-exile, has claimed in his own newsletter that Nuzzi also had an affair with South Carolina politician Mark Sanford while she was profiling him and embarked on a catch-and-kill mission to prevent stories critical of Kennedy from being published.
The upshot is that Nuzzi’s temporary gig as West Coast editor for Vanity Fair will not be renewed when it expires at the end of the year, and her hoped-for comeback has pretty much fizzled. And I should note that Lizza himself was forced out of The New Yorker several years ago following “me too” allegations (which he denied) and left a later job at Politico following the Nuzzi revelations.
“Beat the Press,” winner of several prestigious national awards, was canceled in 2021 following a 22-year run even though it was the top-rated show on GBH-TV (Channel 2). Emily later revived it as a podcast for what proved to be a limited run. I’m not sure quite what she and Scott have in mind for version 3.0, but I’m happy to be part of its debut.
Cambridge Day cuts back on Somerville news
Cambridge Day, which has been around since 2009 and has been in expansion mode since converting to a nonprofit in 2024, is cutting back on its coverage of neighboring Somerville. The move was revealed in a post on Reddit earlier this week by Jeff Schwom, one of the Day freelancers who were affected.
Schwom published an email from the Day’s new editor-in-chief, Michael Fitzgerald, who cited “a tightening budget and the need for the publication to focus on Cambridge.” Fitzgerald added, “We get very little financial support from people in Somerville.”
I asked Fitzgerald what had happened, and he sent me a comment that he tried to post on Reddit but that apparently didn’t take. The comment says:
Let me state clearly that Cambridge Day is not stopping coverage of Somerville. For now, we are not going to cover the weekly committee and city council meetings. I want us to revamp our Somerville coverage to cover the city from the perspective of issues shared by Somerville and Cambridge. I have made other trims to the publication’s coverage, as well, so that we can deploy our limited reporting resources to better serve our readers. I apologize to our contributors in Somerville for framing my note so it emphasized financial giving rather than budget issues.
When I followed up by phone with Fitzgerald, he clarified his comment by explaining that “financial” issues pertain to the overall funding of the site — a matter for the board — whereas “budget issues” refer to his priorities in allocating resources.
For now, he told me, the Day, a longtime digital outlet that has added a print weekly, will not cover regular meetings of the Somerville City Council and other government boards — although political matters on which Cambridge and Somerville officials work together will be covered. He added that it’s possible the Day will return to covering Somerville politics at some point.
“If we’re going to be Cambridge Day, we need to be doing a good job of covering as much of Cambridge as we can,” Fitzgerald said. “Cambridge has a lot going on. I felt like we had some opportunities to redeploy and cover some stories that are in our core wheelhouse.”
DigBoston co-founder Jeff Lawrence dies
Jeff Lawrence, who co-founded what was to become the Weekly Dig (and, later, DigBoston) in the late 1990s, has died. The Dig was a feisty and profane competitor to The Boston Phoenix, where I worked for many years, and actually outlived it.
Chris Faraone, who wrote for the Dig, moved to the Phoenix (which closed in 2013), and led a group that took the helm at the Dig in 2017, has written a remembrance for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. DigBoston ceased publication in 2023, a victim of the COVID pandemic, although much of its DNA lives on at BINJ News.
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