Inside The Adam Moss-Hugo Lindgren Rivalry: WWD

There is a media dust-up brewing between two of New York's bastions of print. When New York's number two Hugo Lindgren left his longtime boss Adam Moss to helm Moss' old gig at The New Times Magazine, everyone knew the rivalry would eventually come to a head.

Yeah," Lindgren told WWD, "there's a healthy rivalry."

WWD has a profile on the differences that drove the two editors apart. A prime example was when Moss asked Lindgren is he could alter a pull quote the night before publishing, a question which prompted Lindgren to explode:

There was a great deal of screaming and cursing, and plenty of staff in the New York office witnessed and heard the magazine equivalent of a domestic quarrel.

When Moss lead the New York Time Magazine in 1999, he brought on Lindgren, then a New York editor, to overhaul the front section of the magazine. And when Moss took over New York in 2004, Lindgren came with him. Why, after so many years of working together, did the editors break up? A few highlights from the article:

Lindgren: "We definitely had our share of disagreements and things that built up."
Moss: "Hugo became unhappy in that job for whatever reasons," said Moss. "And when he got unhappy it became unpleasant. It became unpleasant for him and it became unpleasant for me.
Lindgren: "I guess I grew older and more experienced and I had a lot of other ideas myself that I thought were as good as his ideas, or whatever."
Moss: "He was just much more sensitive...He took things harder. A year before, he would have laughed it off. I would push him a little bit, he would resist me a little bit, and that kind of dynamic -- that process -- that under most circumstances feels ordinary suddenly took on perhaps more meaning."