"I Invented That!"

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

At a 15th anniversary NY1 reunion last night (covered, of course, by NY1) former morning anchor Brad Holbrook claimed of the program's enduring segment, In the Papers, "I invented that!"

Success has a thousand fathers and all that, and had the counterintuitive feature (in which morning anchor Pat Kiernan literally reads from items in the NY morning papers) been a failure, no one would be claiming paternity. And to his credit, Holbrook shared the credit with the network's first news director, Steve Paulus, "[who] gave me the permission to do it. So whatever it has become today, I was the originator!"

Got it.

Lord knows you've got to ring your own bell sometimes (and what are you doing now, Brad?) and my mother used to tell me not to hide my light behind a bushel (I was never sure what that meant but it sounded dangerous). But in NY media success has a million fathers (or just as often, mothers).

In my time here I have met several people who claim to have invented Page Six -- the first was former NY Post gossip columnist Susan Mulcahy though previous editors James Brady and Neil Travis have also claimed parentage. And at the peak of its success, and before its namesake went to jail, there were no shortage of women out there who really edited Martha Stewart Living. One of those was Susan Wyland, who did in fact invent Real Simple before being forced out the door at Time seven years ago.

Real Simple has gone on to great success - though I doubt it's one that Wyland would want to take credit for.

by Sean Elder

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