MEDIA WATCH. Last week Gawker reported that Nick Sylvester and James Ridgeway were both out of The Village Voice. In the paper's current issue Sylvester and Ridgeway remain on the masthead, but Ridgeway's Mondo Washington seems to have gone the way of Press Clips--it's disappeared!

If Ridgeway is gone, I'll miss his presence. I've admired him ever since I read his book Blood in the Face, an overview of hate groups in the USA.

There is also a new Help Wanted in the letters column. (The one for an Editor-in-Chief is gone.) The Voice is now seeking a staff writer who understands "the difference between magazine-style reporting and the hurried factoid-finding of daily papers."

I haven't noticed any letters in the Help Wanted section.

In other media news, here's Poynter coverage of the Katie Couric/Meredith Vieira shuffle. Couric is heading to CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes and, I suspect, a higher profile on Late Show with David Letterman. Vieira's shift to NBC (at least to some degree) poses another challenge for ABC.

And it looks like Condé Nast has shelled out big bucks to give its top editors ultra-cushy places to live. Gawker links to the New York Observer's coverage of the story.

Photo: David Marc Fischer