Woman Named Editor of the New York Post

Jane Amsterdam, a magazine and book editor, will be the next editor of the New York Post, the newspaper’s new owner, Peter S. Kalikow, announced.

Amsterdam will be the sixth woman at the editorial helm of an American newspaper of greater than 100,000 circulation, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

It marks the second time a woman has been named a top editor at a newspaper with more than 250,000 circulation.

Out of the 38 largest U.S. dailies, Janet Chusmir, executive editor of the Miami Herald, is the only woman who currently serves in a top editorial post, the ASNE said.

Amsterdam said she felt “probably the way that filly felt on Saturday,” a reference to Winning Colors, the third female horse ever to win the Kentucky Derby. “I think it’s great.”

Amsterdam will join the newspaper officially on June 13 and be listed as executive editor until the departure of the current editor, Frank Devine, who is returning by year-end to Australia for personal reasons, Kalikow said.

Amsterdam was reticent about the changes--editorial or personnel--that she had in mind for the Post.

Kalikow, the Manhattan developer who paid Australian publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch $37.6 million for the paper in March, has overseen the return of founder Alexander Hamilton’s profile to the newspaper’s logo and has promised a makeover.

Amsterdam was founding editor of Manhattan Inc., a business-oriented city magazine, in 1984, but left three years later in a disagreement with owner D. Herbert Lipson.

She joined the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf as a senior editor in January.

Previous positions include deputy editor of investigations at the Washington Post and assignment editor in the paper’s style section. Before that she was executive editor at the American Lawyer, New York magazine, New Times magazine and the New Jersey Monthly.