dogtown commons

So tie-shy Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein is leaving the Editor’s post for a new “editor-at-large” position with that sounds like part strategic planning for the Hearst papers, part community representative for the Chronicle, and part writer/editor/whatever for the Chronicle and SFGate.com. SFGate’s story on his move
neglected to mention whether he wore a tie during his newsroom announcement today, or whether he will start wearing one more often in his new role, but it did note that he once wore scuba gear in a hunt for an alligator (no word on whether the alligator hunt is what prompted a Komodo dragon to bite his toe in 2001 — a gesture of reptilian solidarity, perhaps?).

Hearst laid off 90 of the Chronicle’s 400 newsroom employees last year. How many of those salaries could have been paid with the small fortune Bronstein will probably earn in his vague-sounding new job?

If I’m ever a presidential candidate, and you are the editor of a big city paper who is coming to interview me in a formal setting at the St. Francis hotel, and you happen to be male, then I just have one request: please wear a tie! That applies even if you are known for your hunky looks and your marriage to Sharon Stone.

(San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein, Barack Obama, and Editorial Page Editor John Diaz on January 17th before or after a long interview with the Chronicle Editorial Board at the St. Francis Hotel.)

I promise, no more posts about Bronstein’s sartorial choices for a while. I’m not usually in favor of dress codes and the like, but I think Bronstein looks pretty silly in that picture. This white shirt/dark suit/no tie trend isn’t my favorite in the first place, but in a newsroom it’s fine. At a formal interview in a nice hotel, it’s ridiculous. So please, if I’m ever a presidential candidate, just do me this one little favor…

Or, why the New York Times is still indispensible:

Meghan Elizabeth O’Rourke and James Michael Surowiecki were married last evening in Fairfield, Conn., at the home of Eleanor and Andrew Beer, friends of the bride’s parents.

…Ms. O’Rourke, 31, is keeping her name. She is the literary editor of the online magazine Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris Review. She is the author of “Halflife,” a collection of poems that was published this year by W. W. Norton & Company.

…Mr. Surowiecki, 40, is a staff member at The New Yorker, where he writes The Financial Page, a business column. He is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” (Doubleday, 2004) and the editor of “Best Business Crime Writing of the Year” (Anchor, 2002).

Full announcement can be found here. (Connecticut gazetteer may come in handy.)

In related news from a couple of weeks ago:

IT was no billet-doux. Certainly, there was nothing in the e-mail message Andrew Solomon sent John Habich six years ago, as they were arranging their first meeting, to suggest that they would one day publicly wed at an English country house.

“I understand you might write something about my book,” Mr. Solomon — the author of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” (Scribner 2001), examining depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms — recalled writing to Mr. Habich, then on the staff of The Minneapolis StarTribune. “Do let me know if you have any questions of a nature such that the author might be of assistance.”

Solomon (himself an erstwhile New Yorker writer) and Habich wed at Althorp, Princess Diana’s family estate, with Uma Thurman there to lend the shabby venue some needed glamour.