The goings-on inside New York’s tabloids may no longer rise to the level of reality TV, but here’s something that will prick up the ears of even the most jaded old-timers: Richard Johnson is coming out of retirement. The legendary gossipmonger isn’t returning to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, where Johnson worked for the better part of four decades—much of it as the well-sourced and widely feared editor of Page Six—before hanging up his hat in 2019 at the age of 65. Rather, Johnson will begin writing for the Daily News, the Post’s age-old rival in the once-bloody tabloid wars. “Two years off was enough,” he told me. “I’m ready to get back to work.”
A few weeks ago Johnson got a call from Frank Pine, an executive at the News’ parent entity, Tribune Publishing. “We chatted,” said Johnson, “and he said, ‘What could you do for us? We want to get back in the game in New York.’ So I said, ‘I don’t wanna work full-time, but I would like to do one column a week.’” The first installment of that column, which Johnson will write on a contractual basis, is scheduled to debut Friday online and Sunday in print. “I hope it will be like the old days of Page Six,” he said. (For more than a decade, Page Six has been edited by Emily Smith, a Fleet Street import who previously worked for Murdoch’s Sun.)
Earlier in his career Johnson put Page Six on the map as a clearinghouse for scurrilous dish about celebrities and the power elite. He first joined the Post in 1978, but left for a couple of years in the early ’90s to work at a pre–Graydon Carter New York Observer and a then Robert Maxwell–owned Daily News. In fact, it was Maxwell, late father of alleged Jeffrey Epstein coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who hired him. “He was quite a character,” Johnson recalled. “Then he died, Mort [Zuckerman] took over, and when my contract expired, I went back to the Post.” Johnson also worked briefly at The Daily, the short-lived iPad publication that Murdoch funded from 2011 to 2012, at which point Johnson returned to the Post to write an eponymous gossip column.
Since May, Tribune Publishing has been owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that operates dozens of newspapers through its Tribune and MediaNews Group subsidiaries. As I chronicled in a feature last year, Alden has a bad rap for its strategy of buying distressed publications and cutting them to the bone to eke out profit margins. The News, already decimated by downsizing over the past decade, hasn’t seen any involuntary staff reductions under Alden just yet, but there was a round of buyouts when the sale went through. (Tribune’s previous management was planning to make the tabloid digital-only, according to someone familiar with the plans, but the print edition will remain intact under Alden.) I wanted to know how Johnson felt about going to work for the big bad wolf of journalism. “I’ve worked for a lot of people who are considered less than ideal,” he said. As for the column itself, I asked if he felt rusty after lying low for two years. Does Johnson still have sources? “I’m hoping they’ll come back once they know I’m in business again.”
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