Lecture: Joanna Molloy
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Living in crowded, noisy New York City, word spreads fast when news breaks. Why? Joanna Molloy and her husband, George Rush, keep their ears wide open to tell us who’s sleeping with whom and which stars are dueling off-screen.
Molloy, half of the wedded gossip duo from The Daily News, spoke to students in the atrium of New York University’s journalism department on March 9, sans her husband, George Rush, who could not make it to the event. Molloy chatted to the crowd about the inner workings of the industry and what it’s like for her to work alongside her spouse on their column.
Rush and Molloy first teamed up to provide eager ears a daily airing of dirty laundry on the Page Six column at the New York Post. Molloy, a native New Yorker who was born in the Bronx, has been in the gossip industry for 17 years. She is known for her hard-hitting interview style that has helped her and her husband when asking some of their hardest questions. The two married in 1992 and moved their chatter to The Daily News the subsequent year. Molloy admitted to students that though they try to talk about other things, their work inevitably follows the pair home.
“In order to meet sources, you have to go out a lot in New York to places where you think your type of sources would be.”
“We used to have a rule where we didn’t talk about it at home, but the line gets blurred,” Molloy said. “We try to talk about books occasionally.”
One thing that Molloy could not prevent gossiping about at the lecture was the ongoing rivalry between her present paper and her former.
“We are totally in a tabloid war with the Post,” Molloy said. “Rupert Murdock subsidizes the Post just so he can have the political power. It’s a huge war because they want to keep their political power, so our reporters really have to push to get their stories.”
A major aspect of getting the story, Molloy said to students, is finding and keeping sources. They are a journalist’s gold throughout their career, she said.
“In order to meet sources, you have to go out a lot in New York to places where you think your type of sources would be,” said Molloy, who recommends swinging by Michael’s Restaurant on 55th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on a Thursday night.
However, be wary of the person readily divulging information, said Molloy. She has had many people approach her and tell her tidbits that were found to be false or untrue.
“You risk getting stories where someone just wants to make a buck or has an axe to grind,” cautioned Molloy, who has never been sued but has received several legal letters.
As far as the issue of whether the celebrities that she hashes about have a right to some degree of personal privacy like other citizens, Molloy coyly answers, “Personal privacy? What’s that?”
Molloy, though, grants confidentiality to certain aspects of a celebrity’s life, stating that she never writes about children, illnesses - if the person in respect does not ask her to - and bouts in rehab.
For as long as people persistently talk, Rush and Molloy will forge ahead to provide readers latest news on the stars they cannot get enough of because, as Molloy said, “It brings a bright spot to people’s day.”