The New York Ghost has a stealthy launch

An alternative non-paper paper has been launched, more or less by stealth, in New York. It is called the New York Ghost and is a pdf filled with rambling and apparently unrelated bits and pieces of information (ed: a newspaper, in other words). According to a story in the New York Times, it is published by Ed Park, an editor at the Believer and a former editor of the Village Voice. He apparently started it making its rounds to his friends and it has taken off.

Among the original pieces that have appeared in its pages are a one-question Q & A with a rapper known as Bun B. by Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic of The New Yorker, and an essay on pseudonyms by an author and New Yorker editor, Ben Greenman. The newsletter, which is free, boasts of having more than 500 subscribers, not to mention untold numbers of editors, copy editors, writers and fact-checkers who have read a copy abandoned on the tray of an office printer.

Its cheeky tagline is "The Weekly Newsletter You Print Out at Work!" (Funny, this sounds like the daily newspaper that the Toronto Star tried, and failed to make fly, a pdf that commuters were intended to print out at work and read on the GO train.) The Ghost can be subscribed to free, as an e-mailed pdf, by writing to: newyorkghostATgmailDOTcom. It says operators are standing by, unless they are outside smoking clove cigarettes and watching the rain...