Emily Jane Fox: How did you each meet Jared Kushner?
Elizabeth Spiers: I actually met Jared Kushner two weeks after he bought the New York Observer. I had a Wall Street site called Dealbreaker, so Jared and I met to talk about a potential partnership. That conversation didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t talk to him again until he approached me about revamping the Observer’s website—that led to me being editor in chief of the paper. My first impression was that he gave me a big spiel about everything that was broken with media from a business perspective. Nothing he said was wildly off. He talked about a broken ad model. I think that was apparent to everyone who works in media. What I was struck by was how little he understood the sensibility of the paper. He told me a specific anecdote about wanting to do a competition with street musicians and declare who the winner would be. It’s the kind of story that would have been good for another publication, but it made me wonder if he had ever read the paper he bought. It raised some questions.
Tom McGeveran: I am the person he was complaining about to Elizabeth, who had to quash what he called the hobo fight of street musicians. When I first met Jared, I had an extremely positive impression. We’d been looking for a buyer of the Observer…There had been a few back-and-forths with different luminaries of different kinds. Then Jared Kushner appeared. It was sensitive because I had been writing a lot of stories about Charlie Kushner, his father, who’d been trying to get the chairmanship of the Port Authority. The first time I met him and shook his hand, he said something that struck me as sophisticated and surprised me, given what I’d heard about him at the time. He said, “Hey, listen. You might be the guy who cost my dad the Port Authority chairmanship,” sort of laughing, “but Howard Rubenstein always told us that you were fair, and I guess that’s the job.” I thought, Wow. Not all publishers are that sophisticated.
Michael Calderone: I was a reporter at the Observer. We were worried about the future of the paper. There was a particularly depressing editorial meeting where people who were interested in funding the paper had fallen through. It was really uncertain who was going to buy it. So my initial impressions were positive. Here was this rich kid, who was about the age of many people on staff, although in a very different place in terms of his wealth. He did say a lot of the right things early on…He seemed a fairly benign presence, at least in the beginning…. Obviously things started changing when Jared took more of an interest in how the paper looked, switching from a broadsheet to a tabloid, but at least, early on, it seemed not so problematic to have Jared as the owner. We were a very underpaid staff, and people were happy that Jared would buy us pizza every Tuesday night.
How did the newspaper change?
McGeveran: It wasn’t an antagonistic relationship, but it was like tennis between Peter Kaplan and Jared. We’d sit down and we’d say, “Oh, no, there’s an email from Jared” … We basically had to choose what we would do and not do. One thing I remember was a thing called “Celebrity Smackdown.” That was going to be a bracketology thing with New York socialites, where people voted. At the time there were society websites, and I think he was a little jealous of their currency among friends. I suggested that there was a website that was separate from the paper. I remember the night I spent 36 hours writing the bios of the people. It was a little bit soul-crushing, but doing that meant we could say no to other things, and we were trying to preserve our relationship with him. Also, the publisher has a right to say what kind of paper he wants. A sophisticated publisher doesn’t get in the way of the truth and the brand that he bought, and he needs advice from his editors and people on the ground. The negotiations got more frequent and recriminatory. The thing that always came through is that writers and reporters can’t do anything worthwhile in society but want the benefit of traveling in those circles. In a weird way, as much as it was about coverage, it was a little bit personal. You could see the seedlings of how his hatred of the media manifested itself. It turns out, in the hatred of the media he developed, in retrospect, it seems like we were naive not to understand his purchase of the paper was a way of getting his own against the people he thought had hurt his family.