A year ago, it wasn’t uncommon for writers far too qualified to even have their prose appear in the same e-mail exchange as ours to get in touch with your Daily Intel editors, asking for jobs or freelance opportunities. Rather than ego-boosting, this was a terrifying experience that made us want to crawl underneath our cubicles — weird old croutons and rusty thumbtacks notwithstanding — and chain ourselves to the legs of our desks. If these people were desperate, it seemed, surely it was inevitable that soon enough we would all be laid off and forced to go stand on a corner in midtown wearing a sandwich board, lying to strangers about a “sample sale” occurring just around the corner. But then, somewhere around the beginning of the year, people started moving again — leaving jobs because they got hired elsewhere, not because of staff reductions or magazine closings.
Since then, the media hiring thaw has increased at an almost startling rate. Take today for example: There’s a lot of big movement on the media front.
• Gawker reports three people are leaving the Post, two to jobs at the rival Daily News. (Though the site attributes the departures in part to dissatisfaction at the tabloid.)
• Condé Nast and Parade are planning to launch a new food magazine (in print!), according to WWD.
• Journal foreign-policy reporter Peter Siegel is returning to work at the Financial Times.
• MediaWeek editor Michael Burgi is leaving for Canoe Ventures, says the Wrap, and will likely be succeeded by in-house editor Jim Cooper.
• Defamer founder and Movieline writer Mark Lisanti was snapped up by Yahoo!, also per the Wrap.
• The Wrap’s own CEO Kevin Davis has been snapped up by the new Investigative News Network, according to Romenesko.
• Obama health-care spokeswoman Linda Douglas is heading to the Atlantic to rejoin the mainstream media, the Washington Post reports.
And that’s just the news from this morning! We should also add that the one New York Post reporter who is not moving to another outlet is our old friend (and former Intel gossipmonger) Neel Shah, who has been toiling at “Page Six” for a couple of years now. He’ll be headed to Los Angeles, where he has a plush staff writing gig on the new NBC sitcom Friends With Benefits. He escaped! Our feeling upon hearing this news, if you’ll indulge us for a second, is a little bit akin to the way Yossarian feels at the end of Catch-22, when Orr turns up washed onto the shores of Sweden. There is hope after all! Bring us crab apples and horse chestnuts, Danby, before it’s too late!
