Stringer hits de Blasio for hiring less minorities at City Hall

Mayor de Blasio's administration, which came to ­office as a champion of minorities and the working class, has hired fewer minority contractors than the previous administration ­under Mike Bloom­berg, ­according to new data.

Comptroller Scott String­er on Wednesday slapped the city with a "D" grade for its record of awarding contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses.

In an especially embarrassing note for the mayor, Stringer pointed out that contracts to minority vendors dipped from 5 percent of all contracts under Bloom­berg in fiscal 2012 to 3.9 percent in fiscal 2014.

De Blasio took office on Jan. 1, so he was in office for only six months in fiscal 2014, which ended on June 30.

"I agree that the performance was unacceptable," the mayor said.

"But I think if you're talking about January 1st to the present, you see a new approach. We have 641 MWBE [Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprise] firms that have been certified in the first nine months — that's a lot faster pace than before."

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Relativity adds investors to pre-IPO family

Ryan Kavanaugh's Relativity, the movie studio behind "Immortals," is bringing in new investors ahead of a planned initial public offering.

Steve Mnuchin, Kavanaugh and other unnamed investors via Dune Capital Partners are buying much of the remaining stake held by hedge fund Elliott Management. Mnuchin, the co-founder of Dune Capital, is joining Relativity's board as co-chairman.

Elliott sold down much of its original 50 percent stake in Relativity to supermarket magnate Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. in 2012.

Relativity didn't give a breakdown of its new ownership, but Elliott's stake is now estimated to be in the single-digit percentage range.

Now seems like a strange time to sell out of a studio given the interest among big and small players in acquiring film and other content — in particular for a new crop of online streaming services.

But Burkle argues that Relativity will be in a stronger position for the addition of Mnuchin and other shareholders.

"We will all benefit from the combined experience, knowledge and relationships possessed by Ryan and Steven," Burkle said in a statement obtained by The Post.

Mnuchin, who sold his financial institution, OneWest Bank, to CIT for $3.4 billion last summer, has been a Relativity banker for years and is familiar with the firm's finances. The former Goldman Sachs executive has invested in films such as "Gravity," "The LEGO Movie," "Avatar" and "Life of Pi."

"Steven has been a trusted adviser for years and I personally recruited him to join our board," Kavanaugh said.

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Fariña unveils plan to stop using letter grades to evaluate schools

One day before a rally expected to draw 12,000 parents and teachers demanding upgrades for the city's failing schools, Chancellor Carmen Fariña on Wednesday unveiled a plan to eliminate letter grades in evaluating the institutions.

"This is a new era in education in New York City," Fariña said at PS 506 in Brooklyn. "We are no longer forcing change on people — we're creating change with people."

Organizers gave her an F for proposing a way to measure schools that downplays objective test scores for criteria such as quality reviews.

"Eliminating report cards is another rejection of accountability for failing schools," warned Families for Excellent Schools CEO Jeremiah Kittredge. "There are already enough opinions about the schools — parents want facts."

Fariña trashed the letter- grade system as lacking credibility, saying she visited many A schools with complacent teachers and lower-graded schools that were judged unfairly.

"Schools have unique qualities that cannot be captured in a letter grade. They are not restaurants," she said.

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Woman sues Louboutin store for blocking her lovely view

French footwear designer Christian Louboutin is cramping an Upper East Side woman's style — by blocking the Madison Avenue views from her terrace with the construction of a new storefront facade, a lawsuit charges.

Ethel Marran, who uses a wheelchair, realized a dream of moving to the city from the suburbs in 2007 after the death of her husband. She found the perfect second-floor apartment at 35 E. 75th St., where she could survey city life.

So when the 85-year-old widow recently learned that Louboutin would be building a metal mesh facade extending above the first floor that "would obstruct nearly 100 percent" of her view ,she was "devastated."

Manhattan Judge Carol Edmead denied Marran's request to stop the construction, but the parties return to court on Oct. 15.

A Louboutin rep declined to comment.

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Gigi murder trial prosecutor hammers doctor on stand

It wasn't clear who was on trial Wednesday in Manhattan Supreme Court: the pharmaceutical millionaire accused of fatally poisoning her young son, or the pricey expert witness hired by her defense team.

Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos hammered forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, 88, for claiming he didn't realize that the Gigi Jordan case was "high-profile" even though news photographers had snapped his picture in the courthouse hallway.

The shocking case has been covered by national news outlets ever since a lethargic Jordan, 54, was discovered on the floor of her swanky Fifth Avenue hotel room beside the corpse of little Jude Mirra in February 2010. She's charged with murder for allegedly forcing a lethal dose of crushed pills down the 8-year-old's throat.

Spitz, who has worked on numerous well-publicized cases, including those of Casey Anthony and JonBenet Ramsey, said he noticed a camera flash but didn't know who had taken the photo.

Bogdanos accused Spitz of having posed for the shot, which the doctor denied.

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NYC’s most expensive judge

Finally.

This week, Judge Johnny Lee Baynes dismissed a nurses lawsuit that had led NYU's Langone Medical Center to back out of plans to partner with a developer to buy the bankrupt Long Island College Hospital.

Any understanding of the tortuous path to this deal must begin with a clear fact: A full-service hospital in Cobble Hill makes no economic sense — and has been costing taxpayers millions to keep it open.

Some neighborhood residents fought this reality. They were joined by a nurses union that wanted the courts to order the new owners to hire its members, no matter how unrealistic the costs.

Not to mention a candidate for mayor, Bill de Blasio, who jumped on the bandwagon to advance himself in the Democratic primary.

Still, they would have gotten nowhere without Judge Baynes. Indeed, a done deal began to unravel only after the judge ordered the nurses union to expand a lawsuit against the hospital's current owner to the the buyers — NYU and Fortis Property.

NYU then pulled out, leaving Fortis, which plans to build housing on the site, without a partner to run the new emergency room and preventative-care clinics.

On Monday, Judge Baynes dismissed the nurses' suit altogether, so the deal is back on.

With this action, he's undone much of the damage he had inflicted — though not before politicizing what should have been a straightforward deal and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

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Freelancers Union ends low-cost insurance due to ObamaCare

The Freelancers Union is ending its popular program that provides health insurance to thousands of its members — because the increase in rates resulting from ObamaCare is too expensive, according to a report.

The union for independent workers, which provides low-cost insurance to more than 25,000 members in New York state, decided to eliminate its insurance plan because new federal regulations would force it to increase premiums by 14 percent, according to The New York Times.

The union had been given a state one-year exemption from ObamaCare provisions, but announced Tuesday that the increase would conflict with its goal of providing low-cost insurance for its members, according to the report.

Freelancers Union members went ballistic on social media after learning they would have to switch. Those who do nothing will wind up in Empire BlueCross BlueShield, and they will likely no longer have access to out-of-network doctors.

"I'm infuriated," Andrea Bertola Shaw wrote on Facebook. "I'll be paying more and getting less coverage? What a joke."

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that tax subsidies vital to the implementation of ObamaCare are unlawful.

US District Judge Ronald White found the IRS rule that the Obama administration issued to set up tax-credit subsidies to help people pay insurance premiums was "an ­invalid implementation" of the law.

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Ex-NYPD commish Kelly rips de Blasio’s stop-and-frisk decision

Former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a champion of NYPD stop-and-frisk tactics that were found unconstitutional, on Tuesday blasted Mayor de Blasio's decision to drop the city's appeal of that ruling.

"Every indication is [that] if the appeal were allowed to go forward, it would have been reversed, and it's a shame Mayor de Blasio did that, because I think people will suffer," Kelly said on WNYC-FM's "Brian Lehrer Show" Tuesday.

Stop-and-frisks have since decreased, and Kelly, the top cop under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, suggested the city may now be seeing a negative effect on crime.

"We see shootings up now," Kelly said.

He cited a classic Post headline when David Dinkins was mayor as signaling a shift in public sentiment on crime in the early '90s.

"There was a headline in the New York Post, a famous headline: 'Dave, do something,' " Kelly recalled.

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Wenner, Bauer notably absent from Magazine Media 360

The CEOs of more than 30 consumer magazine publishers are on board for the MPA's Magazine Media 360 — the new measurement tool that for the first time tracks both the print and digital readers.

Two publishing companies are notable for their absence: Wenner Media and Bauer Publishing.

Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone and head of the eponymously named publisher that also includes Us Weekly and Men's Journal, dropped out of MPA in the early days of the Great Recession.

Despite his headquarters on Publishers Row in Rockefeller Center and his status as a self-made multi-millionaire, Wenner has always fancied himself as a rebel with little need to spend the money to join the club. He also has a reputation for keeping a pretty close clutch on the company purse strings in good times — and bad.

Only dues-paying members of MPA, the Association for Magazine Media, can be counted.

Bauer Publishing is also left out but for different reasons. Unlike most US publishers, which rely on advertising for the bulk of their revenue stream, Bauer titles — like Woman's World, In Touch and Life & Style — have always followed a European model favored by their German-based parent that relies heavily on single copy sales.

Since its titles sell mainly on newsstands, it had little reason to support an organization that in the past was most heavily involved in lobbying the Postal Service for low mail rates.
Still, Bauer President Ian Scott said he may revisit the idea of joining now that Magazine Media 360 is out.

"We'll consider it," he said. "They are coming in to talk to us. We are going to look at it again."

A spokeswoman for Wenner declined to comment.

Mary Berner, CEO of MPA, which owns Magazine Media 360, said the new total audience tabulation will not replace the Publishers Information Bureau, which tracks ad pages on a quarterly basis, or the Alliance for Audit Media, which tracks circulation of print and digital replica editions on a twice yearly basis.

The new monthly format for presenting the total audience number from desktop, laptop, mobile, video newsstand and subscriptions, is a better rubric to showcase all that publishers do in today's marketplace, she said.

"Every magazine company is now a magazine media company, not just a print publisher," Berner said.

Only about 65 percent of a magazine's audience today is derived from print and that figure is dropping, largely because the mobile audience grew 97.9 percent by this August compared to a year earlier.

The desktop/laptop audience in the same period actually shrank by 4 percent as the world goes increasingly mobile.

Still she admitted it took some arm twisting to get all the MPA publishers on board with the idea of publicly revealing the results on a monthly basis.

Berner said she admonished them to S.I. U.—"suck it up—take the hits with the good."

"It's a heavy lift to get 30 CEOs on the same page," said Berner.

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Women’s magazine head John Mack Carter dead at 86

John Mack Carter, one of the reigning gentlemen of the magazine world, died Sept. 26 at his home in Bronxville, NY, from complications related to Parkinson's disease, Hearst Corp. announced.

He was 86 years old.

A funeral service will be held on Oct. 1 at 11 a.m. at the McGrath Funeral Home in his home town.

Carter's most dramatic stand came in 1972 when he was editing Ladies' Home Journal and angry feminists stormed his office and held the mild mannered Southern gentleman as a symbolic hostage for 11 hours — demanding changes be made in the way women were covered by the major women's service magazines.

At the time, most of the top editors on women's service magazines were men.

"There was more discrimination that I thought," Carter would later said. "I didn't push our women readers far enough in their self-awareness."

Carter became a champion of the evolving role of women. In 1985, the National Women's Political Caucus named him one of the "Good Guys" for his commitment to the goals of full equality for women.

Carter was born in Kentucky and was involved in the publishing business for six decades, He is the only person to have been the editor-in-chief of the three leading women's service mags of the era — McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping for 20 years.

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