James Ledbetter, a pioneering media critic whose sharp analysis won him a large following across several publications, died Monday at his home in Manhattan of a heart attack. He was 60 years old, his family told the media.
A graduate of Yale, Ledbetter had a substantial media career. He wrote the popular “Press Clips” column for The Village Voice in the 1990s, a time when media criticism was beginning to fully blossom into the mainstream.
Before that, he was a speechwriter for Brooklyn DA Elizabeth Holtzman. He then became an editor at Seven Days magazine and a media critic at The New York Observer.
He joined The Voice in 1990, later becoming a senior editor at Time magazine, a web editor at Fortune and the editor of The Big Money, a business spinoff of online magazine Slate.
Ledbetter spent time as the opinion editor of Reuters, the head of content at Sequoia Capital, chief content officer of Clarim Media (publisher of Worth magazine) and served as 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.
Along the way, he also became the editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine, later starting a popular Substack column on financial technology.
In a memorable column about The New York Post in 1998, Ledbetter condemned New York state for approving a $12.9 million economic development grant to the newspaper in an effort to stop 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?”
Ledbetter was also an early champion of diversity in media, highlighted by a 1995 investigation decrying the “unbearable whiteness” of magazine and book publishing in New York.
“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.
Ledbetter became the New York bureau chief of The Industry Standard, a magazine which covered the internet. The publication, once fat with ads, crashed in the 2001 dot-com crash.
Ledbetter wrote about what happened to the publication and why in his book, “Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard.”
He also wrote the books “One Nation Under Gold” (2017) and “Made Possible by … The Death of Public Television in the United States” (1997).
He is survived by his sisters, Kathleen Ledbetter Rishel and Laura Baird; a son, Henry; and his parents. He was separated from his wife, Erinn Bucklan.
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