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?”
Mr. Ledbetter also wrote feature articles, including a punchy, two-part investigation in 1995 in which he examined “the unbearable whiteness” of magazine and book publishing in New York. He compared the “overwhelmingly white” makeup of the New York Fire Department to the similarly white demographic at magazines like New York, The New Yorker, Ms. and The Nation as well as in publishing houses.
“New York’s print media industries have at least one significant trait in common; like firefighting, they’ve been shielded from the demographic shifts in New York over the last several decades,” he wrote.
Mr. Ledbetter left The Voice in 1998 to be the New York bureau chief of The Industry Standard, a startup magazine that covered the internet economy. It had brief success, booking $200 million in advertising in 2000, but it folded during the dot-com bust of 2001.
Mr. Ledbetter chronicled its short existence in the book “Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard.”
His other books include “One Nation Under Gold” (2017) and “Made Possible by … The Death of Public Television in the United States” (1997). He also edited a collection of Karl Marx’s newspaper articles in The New York Tribune.
James Lester Ledbetter Jr., was born on Oct. 9, 1964, in Manchester, Conn. His father was, at various points, an accountant, a banker, a business executive and a clinical social worker. His mother, Mary-Gail (Smith) Ledbetter, became a fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations.
In 1985, while attending Yale University, Mr. Ledbetter wrote an exposé for The New Journal, a student magazine, about a new right-wing group called Accuracy in Academia, which had a goal of weeding out 10,000 Marxist professors on American campuses by recruiting students to monitor what they said.
To write the piece, Mr. Ledbetter impersonated a young conservative, becoming a “liberal infiltrator of the New Right,” he wrote.
Mr. Ledbetter adapted the article for one in The New Republic magazine.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the philosophy of history in 1986, he became a speechwriter for Elizabeth Holtzman, the Brooklyn district attorney at the time, and for the New Democracy Project, a liberal think tank. He was an editor at Seven Days magazine and a media critic at The New York Observer before joining The Voice in 1990.
In the 2000s, following his short time at The Industry Standard, Mr. Ledbetter was a senior editor at Time magazine; a web editor at Fortune and later the editor of The Big Money, a business spinoff of Slate, the online magazine. The Big Money had the misfortune of starting in September 2008, as the stock market was tanking.
Nonetheless, he told The New York Times, “I think there’s a real opportunity now to tap into people’s interest and even anxiety about the economy.”
Jacob Weisberg, a Yale classmate of Mr. Ledbetter’s who was the chairman of the Slate Group, said that Mr. Ledbetter’s interest in business journalism most likely began at The Voice.
“My sense is that drew him into business questions around media,” Mr. Weisberg said in an interview. “Going back to college, he read Marx and was interested in political economics and the larger questions of the economic structures that undergirded institutions.”
Over the next 15 years, Mr. Ledbetter was the opinion editor of Reuters; editor in chief of Inc. magazine; the head of content at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm; chief content officer of Clarim Media, which publishes Worth magazine; and executive editor of Observer Media, which publishes the online successor to The New York Observer. Most recently, he was an editor at the management consulting firm KPMG.
In addition to Ms. Rishel, he is survived his son, Henry; his parents; and another sister, Laura Baird. He was separated from his wife, Erinn Bucklan.
In 2020, Mr. Ledbetter started James Ledbetter’s FIN, a weekly Substack newsletter that covered financial technology subjects like artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and digital banking.
“When Jim launched FIN, his writing style and accessibility as a clear thinker had an immediate impact on the audience, and it became a top 10 tech newsletter on Substack,” said Holly Sraeel, who succeeded Mr. Ledbetter last March as the publisher and editor in chief of what is now called FIN: The Fast Forward in Fintech. “That was a reflection of his ability to communicate big thinking and how it would influence society.”
The post James Ledbetter, Media Critic and Business Journalist, Dies at 60 appeared first on New York Times.
