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      The Metropolitan Opera Guild Will Wind Down Amid Financial Woes

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      The organization, founded in 1935 to support the opera house, will lay off 20 employees and stop publishing Opera News as a stand-alone monthly magazine.The Metropolitan Opera Guild, a nonprofit that supports the storied opera house and publishes the magazine Opera News, will wind down its operations and lay off its staff this fall in the face of financial troubles, the organization announced on Tuesday.The guild, which was founded by Eleanor Robson Belmont in 1935 to help the Met survive a funding shortfall caused by the Great Depression, has supported the company and its education programs ever since, bringing thousands of schoolchildren to dress rehearsals each year and working to promote interest in opera through the publication of Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music publications in the United States.Opera News will end its run as a stand-alone monthly magazine. The Met and the guild said it would continue in a different format, under new editorial direction, as part of a new section in Opera magazine, a British publication, focused on the United States that will bear the Opera News logo. The magazine will be sent to guild members and Opera News subscribers in the United States.Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music magazines in the United States, will cease publication as a stand-alone magazine. The British publication Opera magazine will increase its coverage of the Met and opera in the United States, and will be sent to Guild members and Opera News subscribers.Opera News“We greatly appreciate the valuable efforts of our employees over the years, but it is no longer economically viable for us to continue in our current form,” Winthrop Rutherfurd Jr., the Guild’s chairman, and Richard J. Miller Jr., its president, said in a statement.The guild will be reclassified as a supporting organization under the Met; it will no longer operate as an independent nonprofit. The guild said that it would provide severance to its 20 employees, and that it expects the Met to hire some of them. Its board members will be offered positions on the Met’s board.Under the guild’s membership program, patrons pay $85 or more per year for benefits including subscriptions to Opera News, access to dress rehearsals and advance ticket sales.The guild, like the broader opera industry, has faced serious financial pressures in recent years. It draws much of its revenue from its roughly 28,000 members. But contributions and grants have fallen in recent years: they totaled $8.1 million in 2021, compared with $9.1 million a decade earlier. And to some extent the Met and the guild found themselves competing for support from the same opera lovers.The Met, grappling with its own financial woes as it works to recover from the pandemic, said it would continue some of the guild’s offerings, including the program that brings schoolchildren into the opera house to watch dress rehearsals.Guild events including the annual Opera News awards and luncheons at the Waldorf Astoria, such as this one in 2006, will be discontinued. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesUnder Peter Gelb, who became the Met’s general manager in 2006, the company has expanded its oversight of the guild. Gelb said in an interview that the changes came after several months of discussions. He said the problems facing the guild reflected the “difficulties for nonprofit performing arts companies,” including the Met.“It’s the same pressure that, on a large scale, the Met feels,” he said. “We tried to find a way forward that would enable some of the programs of the guild to continue, even if the guild in its current structure would not continue.”The partnership with Opera magazine that will replace Opera News — which began publication in 1936 and has a circulation of about 43,000 — will start in December. The Met will not have editorial input but will provide a share of fees paid by guild members to help offset the magazine’s production costs, as it did with Opera News. Opera magazine named Rebecca Paller its U.S. editor; since 2003, Opera News has been led by F. Paul Driscoll.John Allison, the editor and publisher of Opera, vowed in a statement to preserve the “rich editorial history” of Opera News. He said in an interview that he hoped to engage former Opera News writers when possible.“Coverage of opera at the Met and throughout the United States will continue to be just as comprehensive as guild members and Opera News subscribers have grown accustomed to over the years,” he said.Opera fans reacted with concern to news of the guild’s demise on Tuesday, saying that it was another sign that the art form was struggling.Posy Ryan, a guild member, said that she was “very surprised and deeply saddened” by the changes, including the end of the stand-alone Opera News.“It’s an institution that will be missed,” she said. “For me, it was an introduction to so many young American singers. I’d see a feature, a review and then research them on YouTube. I’ll miss that.” More

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      Bill Zehme, Author With a Knack for Humanizing the Famous, Dies at 64

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      A prolific biographer, he charmed his way into access to, and insights about, Frank Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, Johnny Carson and many others.Bill Zehme, whose biographies and magazine profiles humanized the celebrities he described as “intimate strangers” — the “shy, succinct” Johnny Carson; the “blank” Warren Beatty; Frank Sinatra, whose “battle cry” was “fun with everything, and I mean fun!” — died on Sunday in Chicago. He was 64.His partner, Jennifer Engstrom, said the cause was colorectal cancer.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Frank Sinatra, published in 1997, was a best seller, and he and Mr. Sinatra remained close.Mr. Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) conducted what is widely believed to have been the last major interview with Johnny Carson, whom he called “the great American Sphinx” and whom the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite called “the most durable performer in the whole history of television” when Mr. Carson retired in 1992 after some 4,500 episodes of “The Tonight Show.”Mr. Zehme’s “Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait” was published in 2007, but he never completed the full-fledged biography he had planned.The Chicago-born Mr. Zehme was often said to have cultivated recalcitrant sources with his Midwestern charm. His portraits were not hagiography, but neither were they tell-alls, and he remained close to some of the subjects he interviewed, including Mr. Sinatra and Mr. Hefner.“Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” David Hirshey, a former deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said by email. “What interested him was more subtle than that. Zehme looked for the quirks in behavior and speech that revealed a person’s character, and he had an uncanny ability to put his subjects at ease with a mixture of gentle playfulness and genuine empathy.”That’s why,” Mr. Hirshey continued, “Sharon Stone covered by nothing but a sheet allowed Bill to interview her while lying side by side as they enjoyed a couples massage.”Mr. Carson, Mr. Zehme wrote in an essay for PBS in conjunction with an “American Masters” documentary on him, “rose to reign iconic as the smooth midnight sentinel king whose political japes and cultural enthusiasms mightily swayed popular taste at whim or wink.” That wink, Mr. Zehme noted, transmitted “surefire stardom to aspiring personalities, especially comedians, and privileged co-conspiracy to regular viewers who became his spontaneous partners in sly mockery.”Andy Kaufman, Mr. Zehme wrote, was “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”Delacorte PressOf Mr. Beatty, Mr. Zehme wrote: “He speaks slowly, fearfully, cautiously, editing every syllable, slicing off personal color and spontaneous wit, steering away from opinion, introspection, humanness. He is mostly evasive. His pauses are elephantine. Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses. He works at this. Ultimately, he renders himself blank.“In ‘Dick Tracy,’ he battles a mysterious foe called the Blank. In life, he is the Blank doing battle with himself. It is a fascinating showdown, exhilarating to behold. To interview Warren Beatty is to want to kill him.”Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”He described the unorthodox and at times controversial comedian Andy Kaufman as “the pre-eminent put-on artist of his generation” and “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”William Christian Zehme was born on Oct. 28, 1958, the grandson of a Danish immigrant. His parents, Robert and Suzanne (Clemensen) Zehme, owned a flower shop in Flossmoor, a village south of Chicago and not far from South Holland, where Bill was raised.Mr. Zehme in 2017. “Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” a colleague said. “What interested him was more subtle than that.”Loyola University Chicago School of CommunicationHe graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1980 with a degree in journalism.One of his first books was “The Rolling Stone Book of Comedy” (1991). In 2004, he won a National Magazine Award for his profile of the newspaper columnist Bob Greene.In addition to Ms. Engstrom, Mr. Zehme is survived by Lucy Reeves, a daughter from his marriage to Tina Zimmel, which ended in divorce; and a sister, Betsy Archer.Mr. Zehme bridled at being identified as a celebrity biographer, although most of the people he profiled had been famous long before he wrote about them. They had not, however, seemed as familiar as next-door neighbors until Mr. Zehme wrote about them.“The celebrity profile is the bastard stepchild of journalism, and I’m embarrassed sometimes to be associated with it,” he told Chicago magazine in 1996.“The truth is, I have never written about a celebrity,” Mr. Zehme wrote in “Intimate Strangers.” “I have always written about humans, replete with human traits and foibles and issues, who also happen to be famous.” More

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      New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

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      The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      Rolling Stone Hires Daily Beast Editor as Its Top Editor

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      Noah Shachtman, an experienced online journalist with a newsy sensibility, will lead the pop music bible founded in 1967.Rolling Stone has chosen Noah Shachtman, the top editor of the news site The Daily Beast, as its next editor in chief, the magazine announced on Thursday, calling on him to continue the transformation of the 54-year-old pop music bible into a digital-first publication.Mr. Shachtman, 50, said in an interview that he plans to bring along The Daily Beast’s newsy approach and web metabolism when he starts his new job in September.“It’s got to be faster, louder, harder,” he said. “We’ve got to be out getting scoops, taking people backstage, showing them parts of the world they don’t get to see every day.”Mr. Shachtman will succeed Jason Fine, who stepped down in February after five and a half years as the top editor to take a job overseeing Rolling Stone’s podcasts, documentaries and other media ventures.The selection of Mr. Shachtman was driven by Gus Wenner, Rolling Stone’s president and chief operating officer and a son of Jann S. Wenner, who co-founded the magazine as a 21-year-old college dropout from a San Francisco apartment.The elder Mr. Wenner sold a majority stake in Rolling Stone to Penske Media, the publishing company led by the auto-racing scion Jay Penske, in 2017. Two years later, Penske Media bought the remaining stake from BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore.“I love that his strength is in an area where we need to get stronger,” Gus Wenner, 30, said of Mr. Shachtman. “But he’s certainly got the skill set on long-form pieces, and that’s going to continue to be super important, too.”“Five years from now, I want Rolling Stone to be at the forefront of content creation across any platform: films, podcasts, the website, the magazine,” Mr. Wenner added. He cited, among other things, the Rolling Stone channel on the gaming platform Twitch.Before becoming the top editor of The Daily Beast in 2018, Mr. Shachtman covered technology and the defense industry as a freelance journalist and an early blogger. He later founded and edited the Wired blog “Danger Room,” a winner of a National Magazine Award in 2012.He brought to The Daily Beast a hard-hitting style reminiscent of New York’s tabloids. In recent years, the site, which the editor Tina Brown and the media entrepreneur Barry Diller started in 2008, kept a close watch on the Trump administration, the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case and conservative media outlets.Tracy Connor, The Daily Beast’s executive editor, will serve as interim editor in chief after Mr. Shachtman’s departure next month, the chief executive, Heather Dietrick, announced in a staff memo. Ms. Dietrick added of Mr. Shachtman: “Under his guidance, we made a bigger impact and reached more people in diverse formats than ever before. He was at our helm but also in the trenches every day.”Mr. Shachtman said that Rolling Stone would continue to cover pop music, digital culture and the entertainment industry, and that its outlook would often be skeptical. Some critics have contended that the magazine has sometimes veered away from journalism into fandom.“Rolling Stone’s at its best when it’s both celebrating great art and taking down bad actors,” Mr. Shachtman said, adding that he has little interest in cozying up to celebrities.In a statement, Mr. Penske said of Mr. Shachtman: “His experience, journalistic integrity and thought leadership make him the ideal choice to take this iconic brand into the next phase of growth and innovation.”Mr. Shachtman in Brooklyn with Rolling Stone’s chief executive, Gus Wenner, who said the magazine had become profitable again.Guerin Blask for The New York TimesA money-losing enterprise as recently as three years ago, Rolling Stone is now profitable, Mr. Wenner said. The monthly print edition, with a circulation of roughly 500,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, is profitable by itself, he added.In 2018, the magazine returned to its old large-size format, 10 inches by 12 inches, after a decade on newsstands in the more common 8-by-11 size. Rolling Stone started charging for online access last year. It attracts around 30 million unique visitors each month, Mr. Wenner said.Mr. Shachtman and Mr. Wenner are white men at a magazine known for publishing in-depth articles on white male rock gods like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger when the baby boom generation was ascendant.“We’re in a different era now,” Mr. Shachtman said. “No one appreciates the legacy of Rolling Stone more than me. But legacy is very different from future.”Mr. Wenner said he had considered “a very diverse and wide range of candidates” for the job of leading the magazine.“Diversity continues to be one of our biggest priorities, and it’s something Noah and I and Jay discussed at great length,” he added. “Continuing to bring in incredible leaders within the staff from all backgrounds will be a top mandate and priority of Noah’s.”Although he is a longtime journalist, Mr. Shachtman knows his way around a chord progression. From college into his 30s, he played bass in a series of ska, reggae and dub bands, including the 3rd Degree and Skinnerbox NYC. Along the way he played New York’s CBGB, Washington’s 9:30 Club and other storied venues.“He was good at appreciating the groove and holding things together,” said Jon Natchez, a saxophonist in the rock group the War on Drugs, who played alongside Mr. Shachtman in a ska band called Stubborn All-Stars.Mr. Shachtman, who lives in Brooklyn, said he had kept tabs on the latest in youth culture through his two sons, noting the social gaming platform Roblox as an example.“Getting into the spaces that are too weird, too confusing and too dangerous for parents to be in — that’s where Rolling Stone’s got to be,” he said. More

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      From Britney Spears to Janet Jackson, the Era of the Celebrity Reappraisal

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      Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Texture Fabrik (torn paper)Skip to contentSkip to site indexSpeaking of Britney … What About All Those Other Women?Monica Lewinsky. Janet Jackson. Lindsay Lohan. Whitney Houston. We are living in an era of reappraisals.Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Texture Fabrik (torn paper)Supported byContinue reading the main storyMs. Bennett is an editor at large covering gender and culture. She was previously gender editor.Feb. 27, 2021Updated 10:07 a.m. ETIn 2007, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton were apparently fueling enough of a debate among parents about children and “values” for Newsweek to publish a cover story titled “The Girls Gone Wild Effect.”The article described the ubiquitous images and stories about these women — their partying, their rehab stints, what they were or weren’t wearing — and how they could be affecting young fans.I was a junior reporter at Newsweek at the time, just a couple years out of college, around the same age as those so-called train wrecks. I wasn’t quite sure what bothered me so much about the article, but I knew I didn’t like it.Perhaps it was that the editors of the magazine at that time rarely seemed to put women on the cover, so the fact that it was these women said something. The article claimed, according to a poll, that 77 percent of Americans believed these women had “too much influence on young girls” — but weren’t these just young women? And then there was the male lens of it all, from the entertainment executives who molded them to the paparazzi who photographed them to the editors who put them on magazine covers.More than a decade later, we are once again talking about those women — this time through a modern lens. After years of fans fighting to #FreeBritney from the conservatorship over which her father presides — and now with a popular new documentary on the subject — the rise and fall (and rise again?) of Britney Spears is being viewed with fresh eyes.At the same time, a litany of other female celebrities of the ’90s and aughts are being — or perhaps ought to be — re-examined: Ms. Lohan, now out of the spotlight and living in Dubai, where for the first time in her life, she has said, she feels safe; Ms. Hilton, who in a 2020 documentary detailed emotional and physical abuse she suffered as a teenager; Janet Jackson, who was blacklisted after the 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” that left her breast exposed, while the man who exposed it, Justin Timberlake, went on to further fame (and was even invited back to perform at the halftime show in 2018). Brandy, the singer and “Moesha” star, has described faking her marriage for fear that being an unwed mother would threaten her career. Anna Nicole Smith, the troubled actress and model, was labeled “white trash” while she was alive and “obtrusively voluptuous” in her obituary when she was dead. And then there’s Whitney Houston, whose marital problems and battle with drug addiction were broadcast to the world in an early-2000s Bravo series.“I lived through Britney on television, and when she shaved her head, I remember thinking at the time, ‘Why is everybody acting like she’s OK? Like, how is this funny to people? How is this presented as entertainment?’” said Danyel Smith, the former editor in chief of Vibe magazine and the host of the podcast “Black Girl Songbook.”“I felt the same about Whitney,” she said. “It was astonishing to watch the amount of glee being taken in watching her fall apart.”Such reappraisals have become common over the past several years. In the midst of #MeToo and a reckoning over racial injustice, people have begun to re-examine the art, music, monuments and characters on whom cultural significance has been placed. But this current wave revolves not around individuals so much as the machine that produced them: the journalists, the photographers, and the fans — who were reading, watching, buying.“To me, the question is, what do we do when a whole culture essentially becomes the subjugator?” Monica Lewinsky said in a recent interview. “How do we unpack that, how do we move on?”‘It Was a Different Time’In his book, “The Naughty Nineties,” David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, described how the market for humiliation thrived in the early ’90s, a trend that can be traced, in part, to the rise of tabloid talk shows such as “The Jerry Springer Show.”Gossip magazines ruled during this time, which meant that the paparazzi did, too. They photographed under skirts, chased cars down winding roads, competing, often dozens at a time, for images that could fetch millions. But the race for the most salacious shot was never an equal-opportunity game. It was not young men who appeared in photos with their bra straps showing and their makeup smeared, or had their breasts enlarged in postproduction without their knowledge, as was the case for Ms. Spears on a 2000 cover of British GQ, according to the photographer, who recently posted about it on Instagram. While white women were scrutinized on the covers of magazines, Black artists were told, as Beyoncé was, that they’d never get covers at all — “because Black people did not sell.”“Magazines in that era were driven by damsel-in-distress narratives,” said Ramin Setoodeh, the executive editor at Variety and the author of “Ladies Who Punch.” “It was almost like a sport to watch a woman self-destruct.” This was the time before stars could talk to their fans directly, of course. There was no clapping back on Twitter, no hosting an Instagram Live to tell one’s side of the story.In a 2013 interview with David Letterman that has recently resurfaced, Ms. Lohan was grilled to the point of tears about a looming trip to rehab, for laughs. (“She’s probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed,” Donald Trump told Howard Stern in 2004, when the actress was 18.) When Ms. Hilton’s sex tape was leaked without her consent, nobody was using the phrase “revenge porn” or talking openly about emotional pain as trauma. Terms like “accountability,” “consent,” “fat-shaming,” “mental health” — these weren’t part of the pop lexicon, said Susan Douglas, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan and a co-author of “Celebrity: A History of Fame.”For the celebrity press, at least, such framing would have served no useful purpose. Disaster and personal tragedy sold.As Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, put it in 2006: “Britney is gold. She is crack to our readers. Her life is a complete train wreck, and I thank God for her every day.”“It was a different time,” Rosie O’Donnell, who interviewed Ms. Spears on her talk show in 1999, said in a phone interview. “You’re a level-headed girl,” she told her back then, “and I hope you stay that way.”‘We’re All Collateral Damage’In recent years, there have been Hollywood reappraisals of Anita Hill, a law professor who now leads the Hollywood Commission on sexual harassment, decades after her own high-profile case was dismissed; Tonya Harding, the former Olympic figure skater whose rivalry with Nancy Kerrigan, and its violent climax, were cast against a story of childhood abuse; and Lorena Bobbitt, whose physical harm of her husband has been reframed in the context of years of domestic abuse.Some women have retold their stories themselves. Jessica Simpson published a memoir in 2020 about her time in the spotlight, including her battle with alcoholism. Christina Aguilera described the feeling of being pitted against Ms. Spears — “Britney as the good girl and me as the bad” — in a 2018 story in Cosmopolitan.But Ms. Lewinsky was perhaps the first of this era of women to reclaim her story.After being excoriated in the press for her affair with President Clinton as a 21-year-old intern, she went on to earn a master’s in social psychology. She carefully re-emerged in the public eye in 2014, with an essay and TED Talk about public shame. Now she’s producing a documentary on the subject, and how it permeates society.“We tend to forget the collective experience,” Ms. Lewinsky said by phone. “We direct this kind of vitriol and misogyny toward one woman, but it actually reverberates to all women. We’re all collateral damage, whether we’re the object or not.”These days, that view is more widely held. Abuse and discrimination are now generally seen as systemic issues, and those who endure it are lent more credibility and sympathy. Contemporary artists speak candidly about mental health; their seeking help tends to be applauded rather than ridiculed. And social media has enabled stars to take back some control (while also opening them up to further scrutiny in other ways).“The legacy media star has dimmed,” said Allison Yarrow, the author of “90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality. Lizzo, for instance, posts photos on Instagram that align with the body positivity her fans admire. Billie Eilish speaks frequently and frankly about mental health. FKA Twigs, when asked about her allegations of abuse against her ex, Shia LaBeouf, and why she didn’t leave, can choose not to answer: “The question should really be to the abuser, ‘Why are you holding someone hostage with abuse?’”Now, entertainment journalists who worked through the tabloid era are looking back on their coverage through a critical lens; some are expressing regret and even issuing apologies.Steven Daly, who wrote the infamous 1999 Rolling Stone cover story on Britney Spears, said that in hindsight, having a 17-year-old girl show him, a man in his 30s, around her childhood bedroom was slightly creepy.But he is more troubled by the photos that appeared alongside his piece: Britney in a bra and hot pants holding a Teletubby; Britney in a pair of white cotton underwear surrounded by her bedroom dolls; photos the pop star — rather than the photographer or editors — was often asked to defend.“These were soft-porn pictures of an underage girl,” said Mr. Daly, now 60. “If you did that nowadays, you’d be put through a wood chipper.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Sorry, Britney’: Media Is Criticized for Past Coverage, and Some Own Up

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Britney Spears’s Legal BattleControl of Spears’s Estate‘We’re Sorry, Britney’Justin Timberlake ApologizesWatch ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in the U.S.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Sorry, Britney’: Media Is Criticized for Past Coverage, and Some Own UpConversations about the relentless focus on the pop star’s mental health, mothering and sexuality have begun anew following The New York Times documentary “Framing Britney Spears.”Media outlets and fans are re-examining how Britney Spears was questioned and written about during the years leading up to her personal crises.Credit…Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 1:50 p.m. ET“Help Me,” the cover of Us Weekly blared in all caps, below a photo of Britney Spears with her hair partly buzzed off. People Magazine promised to take readers “Inside Britney’s Breakdown,” teasing details of “wild partying, sobbing in public, shaving her head.” OK! Weekly tempted potential buyers with a firsthand account of an “emotional cry for help.”In 2007, the celebrity magazines stacked up in dentists’ waiting rooms or on the racks by supermarket checkout lines had a favorite cover story: the trials and tribulations of a 25-year-old Britney Spears. That breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of her travails by glossy magazines, supermarket tabloids, mainstream newspapers and television shows alike is now being re-examined in the wake of a new documentary about Spears and her troubles by The New York Times.Fourteen years after Spears’s most publicized crises, some see the hypercritical fixation on her mental health, mothering and sexuality as a broad public failing.“We’re sorry, Britney,” read a post on Glamour’s Instagram this week. “We are all to blame for what happened to Britney Spears.”Spears was a frequent cover star on celebrity weeklies in the mid-2000s.The tabloids had been obsessed with Spears since her days as a teenage bubble-gum pop sensation, but the coverage reached a new level of intensity during her mid-20s. There seemed to be a vicious cycle at play: The relentless paparazzi that followed Spears nearly everywhere left her exasperated and helped fuel public displays of frustration, which magazines then covered aggressively, interviewing a host of tangential characters, including the owner of the hair salon where she shaved her head and a psychologist who had never treated her.“Her story hit at a time when print magazines were hunting for the story of the week,” said Jen Peros, a former Us Weekly editor, “and when you found a celebrity — I hate to say it — spiraling or acting abnormally, that was the story. And we knew it would sell magazines.”A new episode of The New York Times Presents, on FX and Hulu, coming Friday, Feb. 5, at 10 p.m.CreditCredit…Ting-Li Wang/The New York TimesSome are now asking for direct apologies from people who made jokes at Spears’s expense or interviewed her in ways now viewed as insensitive, sexist or simply unfair. On social media, there have been calls for apologies from prominent media figures, including Diane Sawyer, who, in a 2003 interview grilled Spears on what she might have done to upset her ex, Justin Timberlake; Matt Lauer, who pointed to questions about whether she was a “bad mom”; and the comedian Sarah Silverman, who made off-color jokes about Spears at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.These demands are encapsulated in another phrase spreading on social media: “Apologize to Britney.”Silverman, who had joked on MTV that Spears’s children were “the most adorable mistakes,” did just that on an episode of her podcast that was released on Thursday, saying that, at the time, she had not understood that big-time celebrities could have their feelings hurt.“Britney, I am so sorry. I feel terribly if I hurt you,” Silverman said. “I could say I was just doing my job but that feels very Nuremberg Trial-y, and I am responsible for what comes out of my mouth.”And on Friday Timberlake issued an apology to Spears on Instagram, writing that he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right.” (He also apologized to Janet Jackson, with whom he appeared in 2004 at the Super Bowl halftime show.) The new documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” which premiered on Hulu and FX last Friday, traces the origins of Spears’s conservatorship, the legal arrangement that has mandated that other individuals — primarily her father — have had control over her personal life and finances for the past 13 years, following her 2008 hospitalization after a three-hour standoff involving her two toddler sons and her ex-husband Kevin Federline.It wasn’t just the paparazzi and the tabloids that reported — sometimes breathlessly — on Spears’s marriages, children, substance abuse issues and mental health challenges: So did The New York Times, as well as other newspapers, television news outlets and late-night comedy programs. Even the game show “Family Feud” found a way to work Spears in, asking contestants to list things that she had lost in the past year (“her hair,” “her husband”).In an interview, Samantha Barry, the editor in chief of Glamour, said of society’s treatment of Spears, “Hopefully we’re in a place where we won’t do that again, where we won’t lift up these celebrities — in particular women — and then proceed to rip them down.”Spears onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2016. In 2007, the comedian Sarah Silverman joked about the singer’s children at the awards show; this week, she apologized in a podcast.Credit…Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressPeros, who started as a reporter for Us Weekly in 2006 and ultimately became editor in chief, believes that with a decade and a half of hindsight, the media would treat Spears differently now. Weekly magazines are “much more sensitive and handle stories like this more delicately,” she said, pointing to coverage of celebrities like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, who have spoken more openly about mental health and substance abuse. Part of the evolution stems from the fact that these subjects are less stigmatized, but it’s also the result of journalists and editors understanding that aggressive media coverage would inevitably receive backlash now, Peros said.Us Weekly was one of the magazines that poured resources into relentlessly covering Spears. In a March 2007 cover story that read like a play-by-play of a natural disaster and its aftermath, the magazine interviewed a diner at a sushi restaurant that Spears’s mother visited, a clubgoer at a karaoke party Spears dropped in on, and cited an anonymous source in Antigua, where Spears briefly checked into a rehab clinic.“That was a time when she was making so much money for these magazines that we had the money to send a reporter to Antigua,” Peros said.Back then, it was Peros’s job in New York to search for nuggets of insight into Spears’s life by interviewing dancers or lighting assistants on her tour, searching through the Yellow Pages for their contact information and typically granting them anonymity to share things that they probably shouldn’t. If the reporters had the same awareness about mental health that they have today, they might not have dug so aggressively, she said.The main difference between then and now is the rise of social media, which has diluted the power of weekly magazines as the primary way to learn about celebrities’ personal lives. In some ways, social media can give celebrities more control over what people see: For Spears, her Instagram account is a repository for improvisational dancing, photos of her and her boyfriend, silly skits and random curiosities — all blasted out to an audience of 27.7 million followers.There may be fewer professional photographers following celebrities like Spears around now, but at the same time, almost everyone is armed with a smartphone and has the potential to become an amateur paparazzi. Instead of sending a reporter to go to Antigua to find out what Spears was up to, Us Weekly would now be scouring social media for photos of her there walking around town or eating at restaurants.Dax Holt, who was a producer at TMZ for over a decade and now co-hosts a podcast about Hollywood, said that he doesn’t necessarily blame the media for Spears’s breakdown but rather an American public that had an incessant curiosity for all things Britney. Still, Holt, who used to sift through paparazzi photos of Spears in his time at TMZ, said it made him sad to watch the documentary and see all that Spears had to endure.“I can’t even imagine what it would be like being a focal point of the world’s attention for so many years,” he said. “One little misstep and the whole world is laughing at you.”So far, the public has heard little from Spears herself about the documentary and the reactions to it. On Tuesday, she seemed to indirectly address the film in social media posts when she wrote, “I’ll always love being on stage …. but I am taking the time to learn and be a normal person.”This time, more people seem to be accepting that she is one.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More