Skip to Main Content Media Rusty Foster might never ever reside in New York. His hit newsletter, Today in Tabs, is a long-lasting fixation of the city's media class.
By Steven Kurutz, New York Times Service
Rusty Foster in his component at his home in Peaks Island, Maine. Greta Rybus/ The New York Times
PEAKS ISLAND, Maine– In a time when the headings are controlled by wars and a dissentious governmental project, the magazine-world competition in between The Atlantic and The New Yorker does not total up to much.
You may have missed it when, on April 2, The Atlantic beat The New Yorker in 3 huge classifications at the 2024 National Magazine Awards in New York City.
To Rusty Foster, who narrates the media market and web culture in his day-to-day newsletter, Today in Tabs, The Atlantic's triumph was huge news.
Soon after the awards event, which occurred at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, Foster tapped out a fanciful report for his audience of media obsessives. Under the heading “Shutout at the TK Corral,” he composed that David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, “solemnly folded and consumed each of his ready speeches as he saw The Atlantic win every classification.”
Foster then turned his attention to Anna Wintour, editorial director of Condé Nast, the publishing giant that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and other publications, composing that she “put on an emergency situation 2nd set of sunglasses” in response to the business's bad proving.
An unexpected aspect of Today in Tabs– which has an understanding, satirical tone that has actually made it a sustaining hit amongst media experts– is that Foster composes it from the agrarian setting of Peaks Island, Maine, which is where he was when the National Magazines Awards event happened.
He states he discovers New York's continuously sound and crowds tiring, and his latest see to the city remained in May, when he and the youngest of his 3 kids remained at a Times Square hotel and saw “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway.
Among his good friends, Paul Ford, an author, editor and tech business owner, kept in mind that Foster, the individual, appears to have little in typical with the media chronicler these days in Tabs. “He's a brand-new England guy,” Ford stated. “When you fulfill this guy, if he informed you he's going to make a wood canoe, you ‘d go, ‘All right.'”
With his canine, Sam, on Casco Bay. Greta Rybus/ The New York Times
A Peaks islander
Foster, 47, began Today in Tabs in 2013, when the market he covers with a mix of love and reject was going through a crisis induced, in part, by the increase of digital innovation.
The news media service remains in even worse shape now.
