He wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice, held top jobs at Inc. magazine and Slate, and wrote a book about how the startup magazine The Industry Standard fizzled.
James Ledbetter, a former media critic who wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice in the 1990s, led Inc. magazine as its editor in chief and started an online financial technology newsletter, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
His sister Kathleen Ledbetter Rishel confirmed the death but declined to specify the cause.
At The Village Voice, where Alexander Cockburn had originated Press Clips, Mr. Ledbetter was a keen observer of local and national news media.
“Week after week, perhaps no one tops James Ledbetter’s razor-sharp dissection of the nation’s print media,” Seth Rogovoy of The Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts wrote in 1995.
Michael Tomasky, the editor The New Republic and a friend, said Mr. Ledbetter “was a voracious reader of the tabloids, all four of them at the same time,” adding, “He wrote Press Clips at a time when media criticism exploded into an industry.”
In a column about The New York Post in 1998, Mr. Ledbetter castigated New York State for approving a $12.9-million economic development grant to the newspaper to keep it from moving to New Jersey.
“Why, taxpayers want to know, should part of our hard-earned paychecks pamper the pockets of the paper that’s always complaining about everyone else’s welfare check?” he wrote. “Especially since that paper is owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch?”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
