Writers, artists to make charitable ‘pitches’
PLAY ball!
The 71st Annual Artists and Writers Charity Softball Game is coming up on Saturday, and the Writers, hoping to keep their threeyear winning streak intact, are importing former NY Ranger star Ron Duguay to bolster the lineup at the event — held at historic Herrick Park in East Hampton.
“He’s written his autobiography,” said Writers co-captain Ken Auletta from The New Yorker, batting away charges that he’s importing a ringer. Auletta is once again sharing managerial chores with starting second-baseman and author Mike Lupica. Duguay’s playing days ended two decades ago, but he’s a hockey analyst for MSG Network.
Best-selling author Walter Isaac
son is expected to fill in for veteran journalist Carl Bernstein — who’s overseas — and expects to catch starter Benito Vila.
The legendary magazine designer Walter Bernard, who created the logos for the hats and shirts, returns to spearhead the Artists. He just finished writing the book “Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines” with longtime design collaborator and boss Milton Glaser. Bernard had started out as a student of Glaser’s and joined him at New York Magazine shortly after Glaser and Clay Felker launched the weekly in 1968.
He tells Media Ink that, among his favorite covers from the New York years are the infamous nose of Richard Nixon as an eggplant, the “Radical Chic” cover for a Tom Wolfe article and “The Mafia at War.”
“Mag Men,” from Columbia University Press, hits in December. “I’ll probably only play an inning or two,” said Bernard. The Artists are in the midst of a youth movement with up-and-coming stars like model and organic skin-care entrepreneur Rebecca Underdown and 23-year-old social media influencer Sean O’Donnell rounding out their roster.
The stalwart Leif Hope once again will single-handedly manage the Artists. “Only the Writers need two managers,” sniped Hope.
Also making the scene: Dan Rattiner, longtime editor-in-chief of Dan’s Papers, who just celebrated his 80th birthday and the 60th birthday of the founding of the Montauk Pioneer, which evolved into the modern Dan’s Papers. The party at Gurney’s Star Island (aka the Montauk Yacht Club) had current Dan’s owner Richard Burns commissioning a larger-than-life statue with a plaster of Dan’s head imposed on a Lady Liberty figure with a replica of the Montauk Point Lighthouse held aloft instead of the traditional torch. “Two East End icons,” said Burns of the Statue of Liberty Dan with the lighthouse.
Rattiner won’t be playing, but will be calling balls and strikes as an umpire. Game time is 3 p.m. and admission is $10 with proceeds going to several East End charitable organizations.
Recount round
The NewsGuild, the nation’s largest journalism union, has tossed out the results of the last election for its national president and ordered a new one after finding that more than a 1,000 members in Canada never received ballots.
Insurgent Jon Schleuss, 31, who was an organizer in the successful unionization drive at the LA Times in 2018, will once again battle incumbent President Bernie Lunzer, who has held the job for the past 11 years and was seeking a new fouryear term. Lunzer, 61, won the nowtossed election by 271 votes in May.
The NewsGuild has over the past two yeas been adding members at big papers, including the Chicago Tribune as welll as New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and digital outfits BuzzFeed and Vice Canada (The larger American wing of Vice Media unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East).
The union has 22,000 members — up a net of 2,000 over the past three years.
But Schleuss, a data and tech reporter at the LA Times, said that the HQ was slow to get support when organizers there made their initial outreach.
“In organizing, we need a plan to organize and represent every media worker and journalist in the US and Canada. Full stop,” said Schleuss. “For a decade, headquarters was asleep at the wheel and wasn’t organizing effectively. We need to starting thinking big. The Writer’s Guild of America swooped in and organized digital shops while Lunzer dozed. That’s unacceptable.”
The LA Times voted overwhelmingly to join the Guild in January 2018, but they still don’t have a contract. Schleuss noted that the Chicago Tribune, which voted to unionize in April 2018, has only recently sat down with management to start negotiations. Lunzer counters, “Jon has to make a negative argument so he has something to campaign on. I disagree with it. I’ve bbeen on the frontlines with all the battles and I think members will recognize that experience.”
He also said that he is engaging in “chain negotiations” at big publishers where more than one newspaper is unionized.
Ballots for the next election are slated to go by mail to members’ homes in October with a final tally slated for December under auspices of the American Arbitration Association.