Today, the New York Times is premiering a revamped version of its “Nocturnalist” nightlife column. It will expand to six to eight events twice a week thanks to a staff of stringers and borrow some attitude from the axed “Boldface Names” column, with a focus on the personalities that populate the city’s exclusive circles. With its new celebrity bent, what distinguishes “Nocturnalist” from, say, “Page Six”? “The tabloids do what they do; our take is not really theirs,” Sarah Maslin Nir, who’s been penning the column for the past year, told Intel. “The same names may show up in my column as they do in other papers, but the similarities end there.”
Nir added, “‘Nocturnalist’ has always been about painting a portrait of what makes this city so vibrant, from scuba diving off the coast of Brooklyn with a retired police diver to trotting with horses in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. I’ll still be shining the same light into corners of New York, just different, perhaps more dazzling ones.” In other words, more emphasis on the debutantes and less on the horses they rode in on. Hey, you gotta get those youths past the pay wall somehow.
