Rush & Molloy Bid Farewell to New York Daily News Gossip Column

You don’t have to like it, but you can’t knock the hustle: Gossip reporting is a New York City institution, and rightfully so. Whether they’re maneuvering their way onto MTV hit shows or grading Courtney Love’s dinner etiquette, the best gossips are always grinding, working the phones and party circuit with the same fervor. It takes a special kind.

For 15 years, George Rush and his wife, Joanna Molloy, had a shit-talking, rumor-spreading operation of the highest order over at the New York Daily News. But the death of the newspaper is coming for everyone, albeit slowly, and in 2008, the pair cut back from five days a week to only Sundays. And this Sunday will be their last, as Rush hopped on the paper’s offer to buy out a fair amount of its writers. More from their goodbye after the jump.

A few readers, though, seem to have developed an unhealthy addiction to R&M. And they’ve expressed distress about the column ending. But, honestly, we’re into it. You’ll be in good hands with new Gatecrasher columnist Frank DiGiacomo, our old friend and colleague. Molloy will be sticking around to bestow her opinions on all manner of things. And look for Rush to write elsewhere at a length of more than one paragraph.

DiGiacomo, a New York Observer alum, once ran Page Six and contributes to Vanity Fair, and will doubtlessly provide a splash of fresh blood, though it’s doubtful he and Ms. Molloy will be working their magic together. (But come to think of it, the possibility of some sort of intra-gossip column partner swap or affair sounds juicy. Gossips have feelings, too, or so we hear.)

And speaking of the Observer, they have a money quote-filled report from Rush’s goodbye party last Thursday in which Ms. Molloy sounds off about the friends and enemies you make as a gossip reporter in this town:

After the pair ran an item about tension between Sarah Jessica Parker and her Sex and the City cast mates, Ms. Parker turned against them.

“I tried to interview her,” Ms. Molloy said, “and she said, ‘How do you do what you do? How do you wake up in the morning and face yourself and do what you do?'”

But wait, there’s more.

Click here to read the entire Rush & Molloy farewell.