Jared Kushner Was My Boss
By: Aaron Gell
Tags: Culture, Jared Kushner, Work, Power

“At the end of the day,” I came to learn, is Jared’s favorite phrase, a mantra he employs so often it might make more sense to call it a nervous tic. For most of us, it’s just a way of noting that things take time to unfold. For Jared, it’s an all-purpose rationalization, a statement of faith that the ends can justify just about any means. He said it when defending his father’s sleazy plot against a family member. He said it to dismiss ethical concerns about his White House tenure earlier this year on the Laura Ingraham show. And on countless occasions when we worked together, he said it to me.

Spend enough time riding around in a helicopter, gazing down at whole neighborhoods and picturing luxury co-ops in their place, and maybe you start to see reality as a minor inconvenience. At the end of the day, this is all high-rises. I came to suspect that’s how he looked at the Observer, as a parcel of land he’d bought in a giddy fever without realizing the old building that occupied the space was a cherished landmark.

And yet, despite all this, Jared seemed unable to grasp what everyone else in media knew: that the social capital the newspaper afforded him and his family, still crawling out from under the wreckage of his father’s scandal, was far more valuable than any revenue he would ever wring from it. The truth was, few New Yorkers actually read the paper, and many of those who did got it for free. I always found it strange that I wasn’t privy to sales numbers, but once I convinced a colleague on the business side to share them, I understood why: Newsstand sales had dipped into the three figures.

Even so, the readers that remained were a devoted, wealthy, and influential crew. Jared could blow millions a year funding the business, and the opportunities and clout that would naturally accrue would more than cover the losses. Alternatively, he could flip the Observer to someone who recognized its potential. But Jared was adamant that he didn’t want to sell. He was stubbornly fixated on proving (presumably to his father) that he could actually transform his minuscule media property into a profitable business, either by starving it of funds it or turning it into something else entirely.

As I settled into the editor’s office, Jared seemed supportive. He put me in touch with a good friend of his, Ken Kurson, to use as a sounding board. Ken was a personal finance writer turned GOP political consultant who’d worked in communications for Rudy Giuliani’s consultancy and had ghostwritten the ex-mayor’s memoir. He seemed an odd choice for a consigliere, but he seemed a pleasant enough guy, and, as he often mentioned, he was once in a punk band.

My first one-on-one with Jared was a breakfast meeting at Casa Lever, a Park Avenue power spot with Warhols on the walls and an interior that evoked a Hollywood spaceship. Once we’d ordered, he quickly got to the point, asking me how I proposed to “totally transform” the operation. I threw out a few suggestions: bringing on new columnists, adding a lifestyle section, widening our editorial focus to capture a national online audience. “Yeah, yeah, okay,“ he said, making a face. “I’ve heard those a million times from Elizabeth and everyone else. I want to hear a whole new vision, something nobody’s ever done before.”

To me, the choice seemed clear: Come up with a plan that got him excited enough to invest in the operation, or take my place among the paper’s pallbearers.

I got to work, churning out a succession of strategy memos. I relished the chance to prove that I could succeed where so many had failed — inventing a winning strategy, earning the publisher’s trust, and tossing some kindling onto that dying flame. In one 23-page effort, I vowed to turn the Observer into “Vice for rich people,” which was really just a catchy way of saying that it should be what it had always been.

Even as he was demanding endless blue-sky ideas for monetizing a newspaper that was so routinely described as “perennially money-losing” it may as well have been the tagline, Jared was bleeding the operation dry.

Looking back, I cringe at my increasing desperation as I sought the magic formula — distribution in top hotels, a scheme to build “the Reddit of opinion,” an interactive Wall Street fantasy league — that might strike Jared as a “totally new vision,” without completely extinguishing the swiftly cooling cinder cupped in my hand. Still, such was my faith in the magic of a persuasive argument that I actually thought I could get him to bite. I didn’t yet realize that his demands for a bold new vision were probably just his way of masking his cluelessness about the industry.

Even as he was demanding endless blue-sky ideas for monetizing a newspaper that was so routinely described as “perennially money-losing” it may as well have been the tagline, Jared was bleeding the operation dry. During some fallow periods, our phone bills were ignored so long that our service was disconnected. The pizza place that supplied dinner for our weekly closes eventually cut us off due to nonpayment.

Much as I tried to reassure the staff and put out a good paper, the cubicles around the office were steadily emptying out. People worked at the Observer because it was fun or because it was prestigious or some combination of the two. As both payoffs dwindled in value, they decided it was a stepping stone, and they stepped.

Recruiting replacements wasn’t hard. The problem was getting approval to hire them. Jared never exactly said no to any of my candidates, but he never really said yes, either. Top prospects hung in for months before finally moving on.

As for editorial decisions, Jared mostly left me alone. He clearly entertained the fantasy of playing evil press baron, like his friend and mentor Rupert Murdoch, and repeatedly pressed Kyle and then Elizabeth to slant the paper’s coverage to settle scores or reward friends. But they’d fought him successfully at every turn — or so we thought — and by the time I took over, six years on, he’d largely given up.

But not entirely. He’d often send story ideas my way, and sometimes they were good. A suggestion to cover a popular Manhattan restaurant made sense to me — even if I suspected Jared might be trying to curry favor with the reservationist. Another pitch gave me pause. Jared was eager for us to profile John Rhea, the head of the New York City Housing Authority. “The guy’s getting killed in the press,” he told me. This was dicey territory. Given the family real estate empire, Jared had plenty of reasons to want to do the Bloomberg administration a favor by defending an embattled commissioner. And we obviously couldn’t print a glowing piece about an agency that was failing the city’s poorest residents, especially in a publication aimed at its richest. On the other hand, Rhea was an important figure, plainly worthy of a profile.

It was the hardest call I had to make, but having seen my two predecessors take a confrontational approach — Kyle had called the company “a shitshow” in one memorable staff meeting — and wind up demoralized and frustrated, I tried threading the needle instead.

I asked our real estate editor, Matt Chaban, to look into the idea, and was careful not to suggest an angle or acknowledge our owner’s role. Since Jared had never asked to see a story before publication — I like to think that had he done so, I’d have had the sense to walk — I resolved to print whatever Matt filed. Jared might not like it, but he’d never explicitly demanded a puff piece, nor had I promised one.

Matt dug in. He talked to a variety of sources, and interviewed the chairman for a few hours before filing an impeccably nuanced piece. Until I sat down to write this essay, I never told him where the idea originated.

“I loved the in-depth article and learned a lot from it,” Jared emailed me after it ran. Did the piece benefit him? Indirectly, it probably did. Did I do the right thing? Maybe.

Other critiques I batted down more aggressively. “I can tell you — our print readers probably don’t care about DJ’s or hip chef tv personalities,” Jared wrote me in one email, adding, “I think the paper today was a bit too edgy in a hipster way.” I reminded him that we were also trying to grow our web presence, and that Joshua David Stein’s epic takedown of Guy Fieri (whom he accused, with uncanny prescience, of “using patriotism as a Trojan Horse for his infectious and insidious garbage“), had gotten favorable pickup in the Times and elsewhere.

“You might be right on the chef front!!” Jared replied. “I’m happy to be wrong!”