What Does $1,000 Buy You At <em>Page Six</em>?

Following the latest wrinkle in the Jared Paul Stern-Page Six Fix scandal, Nello's Nello Balan defended his $1,000 gift to Page Six's Richard Johnson in this week's New York magazine. "Parties, strippers, $50,000 trips, and what everybody focuses on is that Christmas gift in 1997. It's impossible that I was thinking if I give a Christmas gift that would influence someone's opinion of me or do something for me. There's nothing behind that Christmas gift. It's not an obligation. It's a thought." We asked three former Page Sixers Jared Paul Stern, Fernando Gil, Ian Spiegelman what, exactly, $1,000 could buy you at Page Six. Stern said something about Col Allan's "y-front" pants. Gil dodged the question ("I think that money would be better spent on weed.") Spiegelman, though, gave us this answer: The plain fact is that it would buy you nothing. All the cash and trifles in the world never have bought anyone a thing at Page Six. No one cared about any of that. It just came with the job. None of us really noted any of it. Our problem was always that we brought home the most valuable page (and, later, two pages) in the entire paper, and they still paid us as if we were just a few more totally replace-able business reporters. The extras, the baubles, we really did just sniff at them. Our gripe was always that the paper paid us just a little above what they paid the average city reporter, and often less than what they paid some of the really scheming bizz and real estate reporters, though not one of them except Braden ever broke a story, let alone a sweat. But those asses always came along with some dubious degree and some dubious connection. They were the rich infiltrating our blue-ish collar paper. And they impressed the fuck out of the [News] Corp. lapdogs, not to mention a few of the last surviving American editors who were mostly young and horribly ivory, just like Lach-lame. RELATED: Jared Paul Stern Wants Post Job Back

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What Does $1,000 Buy You At Page Six?

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