Friday, November 29, 2013

RIP: Peter Kaplan, Editor Who Gave Snark a Good Name


Peter Kaplan, Who Brought a Cutting Edge to The New York Observer, Dies at 59

Wow, completely stunned and saddened to read about this one. Had only heard he went to Fairchild after leaving the Observer a couple years ago, had no idea he was even sick. The city has lost another one-of-a-kind.

From his NYT obit:
Among Mr. Kaplan’s greatest coups was hiring a little-known freelance writer named Candace Bushnell to write a column about the hunt for love, or something approximately like it, in the urban jungle. Ms. Bushnell’s column, “Sex and the City,” which appeared in The Observer from 1994 to 1996, became the basis for the hit HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker.  
“The more cancellations we got for her column,” Mr. Kaplan wrote in an essay in New York magazine in 2011, “the more the paper knew we had hit the jackpot.”  
Though he went on to help carry The Observer across the digital threshold, overseeing the creation of its website, Mr. Kaplan was regarded by those who knew him as a throwback to an earlier age — to the New York of the Stork Club, the Automat and the Algonquin. He revered the stuff of that era, from classic black-and-white films that portrayed the city at its noirish finest (he knew the credits of nearly all of them by heart) to newspapers as they were originally conceived: damp, sweet-smelling and black and white, or, in his case, black and pink.
RIP, Peter.

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