A Freebie That Proved Quite Costly. ‘The Junket,’ Mike Albo’s Take on the Freelancer’s Life
Frank RizzoMarch 24, 2014: The life of a freelance journalist is not a pretty one: As described by Mike Albo in his often amusing but slight solo show, "The Junket", it’s filled with anxiety, insecurity and professional perils. Mr. Albo, a freelancer who formerly wrote the “Critical Shopper” column for The New York Times, among other jobs, recounts in this “really insecure TED talk” how he once accepted an all-expenses-paid junket to Jamaica — and the consequences, once bloggers and a media website got on his case. (Mr. Alba tinkers with all the names in the story. The media website is named Jabber, and the newspaper in question is The Tomes.) The conflict-of-interest brouhaha eventually led to the loss of his high-profile gig at The Times. His short show, presented at the Lynn Redgrave Theater by the Culture Project, is not so much bitter payback to those who reproached him — well, O.K., there’s some of that, and, in a way, who can blame him for feeling victimized by an ever-morphing, increasingly murky media landscape?
READ THE REVIEW