Was the City Paper Mafia Just Having Some New Year’s Eve Fun?

By Jack Limpert

Jack Shafer, David Carr, Erik Wemple, and Andrew Beaujon all were editors at DC’s alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper, and they’ve gone on to write about the media for Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Poynter. Powerful guys, very talented, and in a post last year I called them the City Paper Mafia.

On New Year’s Eve, Wemple put up a piece about media transparency that was long (2,700 words), media heavy (CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Politico, AP, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, Gawker, Huffington Post), and interesting (60 Minutes, Benghazi, Martin Bashir, Jeff Zucker, Mike Allen, Bob Lewis). But while reading it, a light bulb kept flashing “City Paper Mafia, City Paper Mafia.”

In Wemple’s piece, Carr was mentioned 4 times, Beaujon 8 times, and Wemple (“Marty Baron welcomed the Erik Wemple blog into his office”) mentioned himself 11 times. Shafer? Zero mentions.

Do mafia guys keep score?

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