Off the Record

At lunchtime on July 29, the New York Times masthead invited a group of reporters and editors up to a conference room in the paper’s executive hall on the 16th floor to eat roast beef and turkey sandwiches and talk about the paper’s massive investment in the Olympic Games.

How, they wanted to know, could The Times best use the 32 credentialed reporters and editors that would cover the Olympics in China?

George Vecsey, the paper’s longtime sports columnist, answered by not talking about sports at all.

He told the group the real story in Beijing over the coming three weeks was not about athletes, but about China, its geopolitical aspirations and how they were staked on the games.  read more »

At first glance, the Web sites elasticwaist.com, productfiend.com and dailybedpost.com look like garden-variety blogs created by average civilians. There’s little clutter, no ads, links to other sites with similar post-feminist themes (dieting, skin care and sex, respectively) and sporadically updated content.

But upon closer inspection, there’s something suspiciously … slick about the layout of all three, isn’t there? Aha! Down the left-hand side of each loom the logos of Glamour, Allure and Self, rendered in varying shades of pink. And then in size 7.5 Veranda font, tucked away at the bottom of the page, is the telltale line: “Copyright © 2007 Condé Nast Publications.  read more »

Two and a half weeks ago Chris Hine, who this fall will enter his senior year at The University of Notre Dame, was saying his goodbyes to staffers he'd met at the beginning of his summer internship at the sports desk of The Los Angeles Times.

They'd been around at the beginning to help him out with stories, give him pointers, and occasionally have him make a call for a fresh take on a bit of news. And then, with one of the recent rounds of layoffs at the newspaper, they were gone, leaving the intern behind.

The firing of these mostly younger reporters - people practically straight out of college - hit home for Mr.  read more »

In 2005 things took a turn for Mr. Essex. He was hired to be editor in chief of a magazine called Absolute—one of those shiny luxury publications that straddle the line between advertisements and editorial and leave the reader (flipping through it idly in a shiny luxury condo lobby, perhaps) feeling glazed and hollow, not sure exactly why.  read more »

Katharine Weymouth, the most powerful person at The Washington Post, was making her way from the elevator bank across the dingy lobby to the exit of the building, a big brutal concrete thing on 15th Street NW. Fred Hiatt, the paper’s editorial page editor, was at the door right before her and almost let it close on her before he realized who she was. There was a big lurch, and with all his arms and legs, he kept the door from slamming on the new publisher.

"Thanks," Ms. Weymouth said. "Getting a coffee and some sunlight!"

"Yeah," Mr. Hiatt said.  read more »

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

Last week, The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Robert Thomson, announced sweeping masthead changes—new people have been added, some familiar names dumped.

Laurie Hays, former deputy managing editor, is off to Bloomberg; Bill Grueskin, another deputy managing editor, is packing away for Morningside Heights and semi-retirement at the journalism school at Columbia University.

Other people left, too. Earlier this month, The Journal’s formidable Federal Reserve reporter, Gregory Ip, said that he was leaving for The Economist; a special writer from the San Francisco bureau, Rebecca Beckman, said she was leaving for Forbes.  read more »

“I’ve been getting e-mail for years from people who think that I’m a moron,” the Los Angeles Times’ entertainment columnist Patrick Goldstein said in an interview with The Observer this week. “I don’t think that’s gonna change.”

Mr. Goldstein, who’s been with the Tribune paper since 1979 and has written an entertainment column called The Big Picture since 1998, was talking about his newly launched blog, also called The Big Picture. “I have a thick skin,” he says, when asked how he plans to deal with any negative feedback he’s sure to get from commenters and other more established industry bloggers.  read more »

Understandably, when a newspaper has to make deep cuts in its payroll, columns like this crunch the numbers. How many pink slips, and in what areas?

But that is arguably less important than how the remaining staffers are reorganized to fill the gaps—or not.

The big victim in the last round of cost-cutting at The New York Times: Starting this month, the Metro section’s regional desks are, essentially, dead. Local reporters who have been spared have been redirected and reassigned. Jersey general assignment reporter and poetry writer Tina Kelley will be “spending more and more of her reporting life online, busting rhymes here and there along the way,” wrote Joe Sexton, the editor, in a memo sent last week to staffers.  read more »

Campbell Robertson, the dogged Times journalist who has worked his way up from office clerk to gossip reporter to Broadway-beat man, is headed to Iraq.

“We were out last night and he was picking my brain on Iraq,” said Times Baghdad bureau chief Jim Glanz in a telephone interview on June 17. “He said that people have been asking him when he’s going to Iraq. And he said he’ll go once the Tonys are over!”

In some ways, it’s unbelievable that a man who wrote a story for Monday’s Times recapping the Tonys—for instance, he wrote that the awards tried to “goose ratings” by including more numbers from Rent this year—is going to be filing with Basra and Mosul datelines before old story subjects are back from the Hamptons.  read more »

Mary Kaye Schilling’s final days as an entertainment editor at the Los Angeles Times were bleak.

“It was incredibly stressful there,” she said on the phone June 17 from California. “I really believed the L.A. Times could make a comeback, but the situation really became untenable.”

Two months ago, Ms. Schilling parted ways with the West Coast paper of record—she says it was mutual, sources there say otherwise—and in mid-July she’s returning east, where she worked in magazines for many years, to become the culture editor at New York. Women’s Wear Daily reported the news first on June 17.  read more »

“Three or four people leaving is not a big deal,” insisted Maer Roshan, founder and editor in chief of Radar.

Actually, it’s five: Senior editor Tyler Gray, en route to Blender, just had his last day at the magazine, as did managing editor Leigh Ann Boutwell, who is joining her boyfriend on the West Coast. On the business side, the magazine’s president, Fred Poust, fled Radar’s East 45th Street offices on May 30, along with finance director Dwight Holovach and Web site general manager Michael Small, who came in with great fanfare from Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.  read more »

On the afternoon of June 2, Wolf Blitzer was talking to Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum about his 9,647-word piece about Bill Clinton.

“Some people who work for him now say that he seems to be angry all the time, angry when he gets up in the morning and angry when he goes to bed at night,” Mr. Purdum was saying.

At about the same time, Mr. Clinton was giving a live demonstration of his mood when he met up with Huffington Post reporter Mayhill Flower after a campaign event in Milbank, S.D.

Gripping her arm and “refusing to let go,” according to her account, he unleashed a tirade on the topic of Todd Purdum.

“[He’s] sleazy,” he said of Mr. Purdum. “He’s a really dishonest reporter. And one of our guys talked to him. … And I haven’t read [the article]. But he told me there’s five or six just blatant lies in there. But he’s a real slimy guy.”

Mr. Clinton also called Mr. Purdum “a scumbag.”

This was not in fact a sudden burst of temper, but a flare-up in a slow-burning fury that had been unleashed publicly with the release of a 2,457-word response from the Clinton camp about Mr. Purdum’s story.

The e-mail, which was released to Politico’s Ben Smith and picked up on the Drudge Report, really amounted to one very long rant full of borderline hilarious retorts. (“President Clinton has helped save the lives of more than 1,300,000 people in his post-presidency, and Vanity Fair couldn’t find time to talk to even one of them for comment.”)

Jay Carson, the spokesman responsible for the memo, sent out the response to “people who inquired about the piece,” he said to Off the Record.

The piece made Mr. Clinton look pretty bad, and the sourcing was transparently thin--that is, thin, but transparently so; in other words, honest. It cites, for instance, “a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.”

Even so, the Clinton memo is a risibly ridiculous document at times; and after Bill Clinton’s dramatic South Dakota rant, it looked like a Valentine.

The memo digs into the clips and revisits a four-year-old story about Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “[S]everal news outlets including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported in 2004 on Editor in Chief Graydon Carter’s capitalization on his position at Vanity Fair to explore consulting and investment deals,” the memo read in part, going on to recall Mr. Carter’s role in the inception of the box-office hit, A Beautiful Mind, for which he received a $100,000 consulting fee.

To prove the point, the memo quotes an L.A. Times story where Ed Kosner—former editor at Newsweek, Esquire, New York, The Daily News—criticized Mr. Carter and a May 2004 editorial in these pages that called Mr. Carter “unconscionable.”

“The responses from the former president and his camp are very saddening in their own ways,” said Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, in an e-mail to Off the Record. “Characteristic, but nevertheless shocking.”

In all this, Mr. Carter comes off as somewhat more successful at overcoming the Clintons’ slings and arrows than some of his Condé Nast brethren. Ben Smith of Politico reported in September 2007 that the Clintons exerted pressure on GQ to kill a piece on Hillary Clinton. The piece, by Joshua Green, did not appear; but Mr. Clinton did appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, over the headline “Bill Clinton Leads Our Men of the Year.”

What’s more, the Clinton camp’s e-mail about Mr. Purdum’s piece doesn’t actually dispute any of Mr. Purdum’s facts. His story grabbed headlines mostly because it was about Bill Clinton’s behavior on the campaign trail, which anyone can agree has been very watchable!

But the e-mail does charge that Vanity Fair sustains a “loose relationship with facts.”

Meanwhile, across town, Esquire editor David Granger got an e-mail directing his urgent attention to another of Mr. Clinton’s claims to the Huffington Post’s Ms. Flower, out in South Dakota.

“The editor of Esquire—he sent us an e-mail yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he’d seen in decades,” Mr. Clinton told Ms. Flower. “He said it made him want to go take a shower, and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it.”

But it wasn’t Mr. Granger who sent the e-mail. He quickly got to the bottom of it: Another editor at Esquire—whom he refused to identify—is apparently friends with a longtime Clinton aide, Doug Band, who shows up as a character in Mr. Purdum’s story. That Esquire staffer sent the e-mail personally to Mr. Band; after Mr. Clinton’s tirade, Mr. Band wrote the Esquire editor to apologize that the quote had been taken out of context and misattributed.

“It’s just odd that something is attributed to me that I didn’t say. I haven’t even had time to read Todd’s piece,” said Mr. Granger.

That’s O.K., neither has Bill!

Later that evening, Mr. Granger picked up the phone and dialed Graydon Carter’s office to explain what had happened. He left a message with his assistant.

jkoblin@observer.com

This past winter, Paul Tough, a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, brought Emily Gould, a recently retired editor of Gawker.com, to the sixth floor of the paper’s skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. Sometimes, writers meet with the magazine’s editor in chief, Gerry Marzorati, and this was one of those times.

Mr. Marzorati had never before heard of Ms. Gould, he told Off the Record. They talked for around an hour about her “wanting to write some memoirish piece about having lived a fair amount of her life on the Internet in her first years in New York; I was interested.”

The assignment was made. The piece arrived in Mr. Marzorati’s in-box around six weeks ago. “It was a lot better written and more ‘thinky’ than I could have imagined,” he said. “I think she’s really a good writer, it turns out.” The task of illustrating fell to Elinor Carucci, a freelance photographer who said she does mostly fine arts work and spent several hours over two days in a one-on-one photo shoot at Ms. Gould’s apartment in Brooklyn.

“I got some direction: ‘We want it to be personal,’” Ms. Carucci said. “‘What’s her day like? Does she type on the bed? At the desk?’ They wanted her clothes, or maybe something that will be more intimate.”

Mr. Marzorati said his instructions were “to try to convey this sort of intimacy and dreaminess and sort of intimate detachment—if that’s a meaningful oxymoron—that is in the piece. They worked that out together.”

And this is how an image of Ms. Gould, poured upside-down onto a rumpled bed wearing a camisole, no bra and a come-hither look, landed on New Yorkers’ laptops and brunch tables over Memorial Day weekend. The writer was involved in winnowing the photos to a dozen, Ms. Carucci said. Still, “when I saw the cover, I was shocked,” Ms. Gould said on the phone from Bryant Park on May 27. Did she feel a tad exploited? Ms. Gould paused. “Yeah, I really don’t want to talk about it.”

She referred Off the Record to an online Q&A she gave for the Times Web site, in which she describes the photos as “vaguely cheesecakey.” “I am starting to wish the Magazine had chosen to illustrate the piece some other way, though,” she wrote.

“I don’t think it was terribly complicated,” Mr. Marzorati said of his cover calculus. “You’re always trying to entice people with a cover, whether it’s a story like this or it’s a story about Afghanistan. I mean, this just happened to be an intimate story written by a young person who happened to be attractive.”

“The photos speak for themselves,” said Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s photo editor, before ending a conversation with Off the Record.

Sex sells, of course—but this was not Maxim. And women writers in Manhattan could be forgiven for a slightly sickly feeling as they regarded the images. This again?

Photographing the young, attractive female writer of first-person narratives has become something of a tradition in New York media. There was Katie Roiphe writing about her divorce in New York magazine a few years ago, posing in a tight trench coat, with her baby and her designer purse hanging off each arm (there were no such images for Philip Weiss’ discussion of adultery on May 26). Ms. Roiphe’s visage also graced her Times Magazine cover story about date rape back in 1993. Then there was the one-two punch of Lucinda Rosenfeld and Nell Freudenberger, young fiction writers discovered by The New Yorker (Ms. Freudenberger was then fiction editor Bill Buford’s assistant), and photographed, both in -- wouldn’t ya know it?-- camisoles.

Where are they all now?

Ms. Freudenberger has published a book of short stories and a novel, and married an architect in 2006, according to The Times’s Styles section. Her agent, Amanda Urban, said she recently had a baby and was unable to comment.

Ms. Rosenfeld also recently had a baby, her second, and is married to New Yorker writer John Cassidy. “I remember some creepy guy at Connecticut Muffin in Park Slope asking me if I was the ‘girl on the stoop,’” she e-mailed, when asked about the photo shoot. She added that long term, she didn’t think it had affected her career one way or another. “Magazines come and go—every seven days. In the end, it’s the quality of the book that counts.” She said she’d had no time to read Ms. Gould’s cover story.

Joyce Maynard, who appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine back in 1972, at age 18, wearing dungarees and a crew neck sweater, was more voluble.

“I felt a motherly concern for that young woman, who is clearly a talented writer who now can’t quietly develop and will not have the opportunity to develop,” she told Off the Record by phone from California. “I would say now there are many better and few worse ways to launch one’s career and to develop as a writer than to plunge onto the cover of The New York Times Magazine.

“She’s the age of one of my sons,” she continued, considering Ms. Gould. “And I think a young artist is going to make all sorts of embarrassing mistakes. It’s best to make them a little less publicly.”

Did she think the younger woman was exploited? “Twenty-six is a little old to be exploited,” Ms. Maynard clucked. “I think she may have exploited herself.

“A serious writer should take her growth and development seriously,” she said. “Wait, that’s a bad sentence. A serious writer should put in the time to locate her own voice before she goes singing to the balcony. And that’s all very good advice given to me by J. D. Salinger in 1972 in somewhat different language in how I stated it, but that was pretty much the gist of the letter he sent to me.” (Mr. Salinger famously wrote to Ms. Maynard after seeing her story, and they had a relationship that she wrote about in a 1998 memoir, At Home in the World. In 1999, she auctioned off his letters for $156,000 at Sotheby’s.)

Ms. Maynard recalled that she got the story in the magazine after writing a letter to the paper’s Sunday editor, Max Frankel. (Mr. Frankel, now retired, said he hadn’t read the Gould piece. When asked about the cover, he said, “I’ll never judge a story by its cover!”) A few years later, Ms. Maynard got a reporting job at The Times.

“That was the beginning of my serious development as a writer, to begin to look outside myself and look at the world,” said Ms. Maynard. “So I got a job, and that’s a very good thing to do.”

The media campaign for the Sex and the City movie, which arrives in theaters May 30, was executed with near-militaristic precision. You might call it “flooding the zone.”

Vogue, which itself has a recurring role in the franchise, easily secured the big kahuna: 43-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover and an elaborate photo shoot featuring her posing with Chris Noth, 53 (Mr. Big): on top of a skyscraper, on a red carpet, in the bedroom making sex tapes! (Earlier in May, New York magazine devoted eight pages to Emily Nussbaum’s interview with Ms. Parker, in which the latter woman discussed how she had changed the city and how it makes her a little uncomfortable.)

Curiously, it was homosexual icon Kim Cattrall, 51, rather than actual lesbian Cynthia Nixon, 42, who made the cover of gay-interest publication The Advocate. Ms. Nixon, for her part, scored the cover of middle-aged women’s publication More, as well as an interview with Deborah Solomon in The New York Times Magazine (she does play a Harvard-educated lawyer, after all); the demure Kristin Davis, 43, graced the cover of Health and dispensed cooking tips in a Bon Appetit feature.

Marie Claire had four covers … of each girl. And Next, the glossy club guide that you find when stumbling out of gay bars, also got “exclusives” with all four, trading their customary cover fare of scruffy models in swim trunks for a shot of SJP lying face first with red heels dangling in the background. “You think since we’re not screwing around a lot the gays aren’t going to be interested?” she asks her interlocutor. Then she answers: Nah, they’ll be fine!

What about the men? Jason Lewis, who plays Ms. Cattrall’s underwear-model boyfriend, got a Men’s Fitness cover. The Times’ Arts and Leisure section did a Serious Interview with writer-director Michael Patrick King. And Array magazine landed the big exclusive with Sex and the City production designer Jeremy Conway!

Meanwhile, Time Out New York got creative, doctoring a stock photo of the gals to make it look as if they’ve been muzzled by masking tape and relegating its features about the movie to the Web. “ENOUGH ALREADY,” the headline blares.

“Everyone is looking for some sort of an angle!” brightly said Robert Pini, a spokesman at New Line Cinema, who arranged much of the saturation coverage. “It’s like everyone is trying to dissect it and slice it and dice it to come up with a fresh angle.”

At some point in 1999, Barack Obama, then a young and virtually unknown Illinois state senator, was considering running for a seat in the House of Representatives representing Illinois’ First Congressional District—which includes parts of the South Side of Chicago and some southern suburbs—against longtime incumbent Bobby Rush.

So on a visit to Washington, D.C., he stopped in at the office of Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.

It’s what everyone does when they’re in a tough race: introduce themselves to Ms. Sweet, who since 1993 has been the voice of Washington politics for the Chicago tabloid.

“When he walked in, the first thing he did was hand me this book,” said Ms. Sweet, as she settled down into a seat at Morty’s, a Washington delicatessen, for a toasted onion bagel and a Dr. Brown’s diet black cherry soda. “He walked into my office in the Press Club with his aide Dan Shomon and he hands me his book and says, ‘This is my story.’ And I said, ‘Oooh. Okay?’”

Mr. Obama gave her a copy of Dreams from My Father, his 1995 memoir, which Ms. Sweet had no idea he had written. Ms. Sweet, who turned 57 years last week, made a crooked face.

“Probably if you saw me, you would have seen me raise—it was a silent huh? It was a silent huh. If you could hear me say, silently, huh, it raised a huh for me.” She looked like she had swallowed a few lemon slices.

“The huh is, he’s 40-something and he’s written his memoir already? I wasn’t aware of the whole story line, though; I just thought he had a memoir. I did not know that much about his life. We just met a few hours ago. If the first thing you did was say, ‘Lynn, here’s my memoir,’ I would say ‘Ooookay?’”

He was unlikely to unseat Mr. Rush (he didn’t, in fact), so she shelved the book and forgot about it. “In hindsight, I wish I had gotten the book a week beforehand. But who knew? Who knew at the time?”

She didn’t start leafing through it until June 2004, the same summer Mr. Obama was well on his way to his Senate seat and delivered his famous speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The book was an instant hit when it was re-released that year, when Ms. Sweet finally got around to reading it.

“Composite characters. Changed names. And reams of dialogue between Obama and other people that moves the narrative along but is an ‘approximation’ of the actual conversation,” she wrote in the Sun-Times. “Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not.”

HILDY JOHNSON MEETS BEN SMITH

Ms. Sweet is not the person to think of if you think of the reporters that people like to say have given in to Barack Obama’s charms. Nor does she have an axe to grind. She is not a pledged foe of Mr. Obama the way some reporters for hometown papers become when the people they have covered emerge from their backyard to become national figures.

But even other reporters who follow her around say she’s the first to call “bullshit.”

“I don’t write a story saying how Obama came out of the rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics,” she said, quietly and forcefully in her Chicago accent—she’s lived there nearly 40 years. “Because in my experience, he was able to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics. Au contraire! He didn’t come up through the system.”

She was now speaking from the same office where Mr. Obama had met her nine or so years before, and I suspect it hasn’t much changed since then. It’s full of memorabilia from her days from Chicago: Sun-Times baseball caps; a framed gag license plate that reads ‘SCOOP,’ accompanied by a laudatory note from then Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, who later became governor and after a recent conviction for corruption is serving a six-year prison sentence. On the wall is a road sign indicating the Lincoln Park West neighborhood where she used to live. A broken computer sat in front of her with a sheet of paper taped to its side reading, “Shut the fuck up and type.”

“Obama came in and had a very lucky break to come in in 90-something, make some of the right connections, and have an opening,” she said. “He returned to Chicago and worked with a law firm that gave him a lot of political network advantages, and started looking around for some office to run for, found this opening in the State Senate where he put himself in it. Now that’s not coming through the rough-and-tough of Chicago politics. And then once he knocked his opponent off the ballot, he represented a safe Democratic district, and that if he chose to, he could have represented until he stopped working. O.K.?” Next Page >

On the afternoon of May 10, when word got out that Rupert Murdoch was dropping his bid to buy Newsday, the writing was on the wall: For a likely $650 million, the odd-couple father-and-son team of Chuck and Jim Dolan would be the paper’s new owners.

So on May 11, Newsday’s business desk dispatched reporter Ellen Yan to the Dolans’ compound in Oyster Bay Cove to try to buttonhole the new owners for a story.

She looked for their house, having bought a flower in case it, in turn, might buy a little goodwill—it was Mother’s Day, after all!  read more » Next Page >

For the past two weeks, Robert Thomson, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has been busy not being the paper’s editor.

It hasn’t been easy. Since April 22, when Marcus Brauchli resigned as the newspaper’s managing editor, Mr. Thomson, who was forced to describe himself in an interview with The New York Times as the interim “head of content” for the paper, has had nine meetings (in person and on conference calls) to soothe the fraying nerves of his orphaned editorial staff.

“There was a real panic here for a few days when Marcus left,” said one reporter.  read more » Next Page >

“Any premise that the magazine is in trouble is an incorrect premise,” said Aaron Hicklin, the editor in chief of Out magazine.

And yet one could be forgiven for making it. Back in April, the gay-targeted monthly and its older-sister biweekly, The Advocate, were sold in a veritable fire sale by PlanetOut to Regent Releasing (who also run the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender-geared here! TV network) for $6 million—less than a fifth of the $31.1 million PlanetOut paid LPI Media two and a half years earlier.

But Mr. Hicklin, former editor of Blackbook, insisted that any problems are the financially beleaguered PlanetOut’s, not his magazine’s. “Our circulation is up 30 percent since I’ve been editor and we just launched our second-best issue in terms of advertising and page count!” he said. “It would be an inaccurate premise to say we’re facing any more significant challenges than any other magazine. I feel our magazine is in a very good position now.”

Some staffers, however, are feeling queasy. “The mood prior to this announcement was really grim,” said one. Back in March, when the sale was mere rumor, employees were updating résumés and wondering which day would be the magazine’s last.

And after the transaction went through?

“So people were like, ‘O.K., when is the other shoe gonna drop?’ And it hasn’t!” the staffer said. “The Regent people have been meeting with us one on one and they seem really chill. If they wanted to disrupt stuff, they probably would have done something. The mood is up, which it hasn’t been for a long time.”

Members of the masthead might be toasting their close shave, but there’s still that age-old gay question about identity! Where does Out stand in a field where a general-interest magazine like The New York Times Magazine dedicates a 7,000-word cover story to young gay men who marry (as it did on April 27), to say nothing of what GQ and Details regularly cover?

“We bring a much better perspective,” Mr. Hicklin argued. “I think [those publications] are very aware they have a gay audience and they tread very carefully in terms of creating and articulating their sensibility, and they don’t alienate their gay readers. But that leaves us free to be unequivocally a gay magazine in a way we can be and they can’t be.

“I absolutely don’t think they’re stealing our gay turf,” he said.

In fact, he might be stealing their audience! “I’ve been getting the magazine and enjoying it—if I’m the test case, you’ve produced the first crossover gay magazine,” wrote Slate editor Jacob Weisberg in a note to Mr. Hicklin that the latter shared with Off the Record.

How ‘bout that? But will Out be around in 20 years, when gay people are completely assimilated into mainstream culture?

“I think we’ll exist, yes,” Mr. Hicklin said—though of course, like most editors these days, he conceded: “Whether this is a magazine that’s delivered as a print publication or primarily a Web operation, that’s something I wouldn’t put my money on. But everything that exists within those two covers will exist.” Next Page >

“It’s not the best time in the world to be a White House correspondent,” said Bill Plante on the sultry afternoon of Saturday, April 26. This was at Tammy Haddad’s annual pre-White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner lawn party. The blooming wisteria was strangling the woods that surround her house.

These nearly-over final four years of George W. Bush are Mr. Plante’s third second-term presidency in his years as CBS White House correspondent. “I guess he could still drop a bomb somewhere—there are people who think he means to do it,” Mr. Plante said. “He’s still important, but he ceases to be the center of attention.”

Mr. Bush gets that. His performance at the dinner that night, which is a worrisome gathering of journalists and sources, would be largely a retrospective clip show of his star turns at dinners past. Not included: his infamous and ill-considered “looking for weapons of mass destruction” skit from 2004.

(He never found them, for one obvious reason, and yet we are still at war over it.)

“As you get into the final year, the wheels start to come off,” Mr. Plante said. “The root of it is always the same. The president loses his mojo.”

“The story of the Bush administration has really taken a dip,” said David Gregory, host of MSNBC’s Race for the White House, and formerly a White House correspondent himself. “Everyone is looking forward to a new administration because it will be a great story again.”

So the Bush story is now dead to the press, even while the war, his grandest contribution to this tale, has entered elementary-school age. But the real D.C. narrative—that of a Southern city through which billions of dollars quickly flow—is not generally thrown off by something as small as a war, and everyone was there to party, from the new acting head of Freud Communications, Lisa Dallos, to CNN’s Jessica Yellin to some raucous fellas from Qorvis, which represents Halliburton, the “Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform” and the fine government of Saudi Arabia.

“This is the center of the universe,” said Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund. But too many want in on the grift. Nearby, MSNBC analyst (and West Wing writer) Lawrence O’Donnell made a sour face. “Look at this,” he said, gesturing at the crowd at Tammy Haddad’s. “It’s such a gigantic, horrible subway car.”

“Well, Pennsylvania was great!” said Hillary Clinton for President chair Terry McAuliffe. “And now Indiana … ”

“I don’t know who’s here,” said Mr. O’Donnell. “There used to be a time when you walked across the lawn and said, ‘Hi, Jack!’ But really. Who are these people?”

And where did they come from?

“People at Newsweek are so frightfully bored of each other that they don’t want to have to talk to one another at the table, so now they’ll invite anyone,” he said.

“There’s a see-and-be-seen aspect to this where your existence is somewhat validated by being seen with people that are perceived as being important,” said Washington Post/CNN half-timer Howard Kurtz.

“Very boring times,” a guy said to Alan Greenspan, sarcastically.

“That fat fuck threw me out of a piece,” said The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash, pointing to a publicist.

“That guy’s a pimp right over there,” said Mr. O’Donnell, pointing to Dennis Hof. “I’m serious, he’s a pimp. We used to have a no-pimp policy.”

The large Mr. Hof runs the Bunny Ranch, a legit bordello made famous by HBO. “I saw lots of clients at this party,” Mr. Hof said. “Lots of ’em.”

Andrea Mitchell of NBC and her husband, Mr. Greenspan, came down Ms. Haddad’s driveway together. How was Mr. Greenspan enjoying the day? “On deep background?” he said.

These things used to be fun, said Richard Schiff, who was Toby Ziegler on The West Wing. Back in the Clinton days, he said, D.C. was a riot. The cast would attend the dinner. “It was a bit of an honor, at first, in the Clinton years,” said Mr. Schiff.

“The White House was like a swinging summer screen door to us back then,” he said. “It would swing open anytime we walked by. That was a fun time. They were winding down. They were loose. It was a good time to come to Washington.”

Florida governor and wannabe vice presidential candidate Charlie Crist’s insane tan preceded him through Ms. Haddad’s tent. Vice president? “That’s never going to happen,” said a publicist. “It’s bad for the gays and bad for the G.O.P.”

“I see him all the time in Florida,” said someone.

“Where?” asked another.

“Palm Beach.”

“Mmm. With whom?” Next Page >

Marcus Brauchli’s last supper with The Wall Street Journal had been a good one.

Seated at a table in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on 22nd Street NW in Washington, D.C., on the evening of April 21, he’d been offered a roasted red apple stuffed with bleu-cheese mousse; a Vidalia onion-crusted petite filet mignon with baby turnips; a chocolate mousse bombe with a dark chocolate crème brûlée center; and two wines, a 2006 California Chardonnay and a 2006 Pinot Noir.

Hosting was the Atlantic Council, the public-policy think tank run by Mr. Brauchli’s former Journal colleague, Fred Kempe. Tony Blair was there! But so were a lot of his colleagues from years of working at The Journal. Next to him was John Bussey, who at one time was his assigning editor on the foreign desk; more recently, thanks to Mr. Brauchli’s elevation 11 months before to the top editorial position at The Journal, it was Mr. Brauchli who assigned Mr. Bussey to the increasingly important role of Washington bureau chief.

Journal editors and reporters, past and present, had packed the joint. Editors Jerry Seib, David Wessel and Alan Murray were there, as was Mr. Brauchli’s popular predecessor, Paul Steiger; former Journal star Larry Ingrassia, now the business editor for The Journal’s new great rival, The New York Times, was there; reporter Sarah Ellison was recording the awards dinner for posterity for her book about Mr. Brauchli’s new boss, Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born international media megalith, the owner of News Corporation, and, as of December 2007, the owner of The Journal, was one of the night’s honorees, getting an award for his business smarts. He was sitting two tables away.

It was a long evening, and Mr. Brauchli must have been pretty tired from his week spent traveling the globe. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, there was the glossy insert magazine, WSJ., to sell to advertisers—and an increasingly impatient and nervous group of reporters covering Hollywood, Entertainment and Silicon Valley for the paper to soothe and appease. Not long before he’d journeyed to China.

But the long dinner was scarcely over, a little after 8:52 p.m., when the room started buzzing like crazy. The Journal-ists were all jumping up from their seats and waving their BlackBerrys at each other. Time magazine’s Web site—Time!—was reporting that Mr. Brauchli was officially out of a job.

Mr. Brauchli, who quickly figured out what was going on, kept his seat for about an hour as the proceedings continued, and just as the ceremony was drawing to a close around 10 p.m. suddenly popped out of his seat.

But The Times’ Mr. Ingrassia leapt from his place and ran after him to ask him about the news.

“I can’t talk,” Mr. Brauchli told his former colleague.

It had been a nearly impossible 11 months for Mr. Brauchli, and Mr. Ingrassia’s scrappy stringing effort only goes to show how personal the takeover of The Wall Street Journal—and the declarations of newspaper war by Mr. Murdoch—has become.

But if it had seemed for weeks like the war that would never start—don’t they all?—suddenly reports of gunfire were ringing in everyone’s ears. Now, Mr. Murdoch’s war had begun.

Within the last week, on visits to two West Coast bureaus, reporters there painted a picture of a dispirited editor who looked and sounded trapped by conflicting visions for the newspaper. On a trip to the San Francisco bureau on April 16, the low-key but normally charismatic Mr. Brauchli looked dour, his face drawn. The questions thrown at him were tense: What’s going to happen to the “A-hed,” those offbeat Page One stories about things like aging pets and farming neighbors? Was the paper to be front-loaded with general stories about San Francisco politics, or did they still want to hear every mouse click coming out of Cupertino? Does Rupert Murdoch care about Pulitzers?

Finally, as a way to ease the tension, Robert Guth, the paper’s Microsoft reporter, tried to change tack.

“Are you having fun?” Mr. Guth asked, according to people present.

Mr. Brauchli appeared distracted—he was looking around the room, scrolling through his BlackBerry, and the question seemed to stop him cold.

“What did you say?” Mr. Brauchli replied.

Mr. Guth repeated the question.

“Well, I’m still here,” Mr. Brauchli said, and the laughter that followed was strained. Next Page >

When The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on April 9 that “barring a change” Katie Couric and CBS News were “likely” to part ways and that it “could” happen after the election (those are just the qualifiers from its headline and subhead), Matthew Drudge picked it up quick as lightning on the Drudge Report.

After a few hours, the story, sourced to “people close to Couric” and executives, was taken out from behind a paid firewall, and WSJ.com watched the traffic—“definitely” one of its biggest hits of the month—roll in. At business desks everywhere, reporters were receiving e-mails telling them their editor “thought they would be interested in this story from The Wall Street Journal.” Reporters everywhere were presumably scolded and assigned. The next day it was front-page material for the New York Post and the Daily News; The Washington Post had to pull together a quick follow-up on its own.

The next day, a spokeswoman for CBS told the Post the story was “speculative”; on April 15, CBS started calling it “gossip” to the Post.

“Well, I had expected there would be big, breaking news because of how it was played and it was inside The Wall Street Journal,” said Gail Shister, a writer with The Philadelphia Inquirer and a columnist for TV Newser who competes with The Journal on the television beat. “But I read it, and in that particular story, I didn’t see anything new.”

Ms. Shister herself had written a similar story a year before. Had she lost the bead? It was hard to tell. In her Couric story, she wrote in her lede that the damage was looking so irreparable between Ms. Couric and CBS that she might leave her evening news slot after the election (though she would stay with the network).

Cindy Adams scolded The Journal, pointing out that she, too, had had the news in September: “Top execs” told her that “way way waaaaayyy down the line” Ms. Couric could be a replacement for Larry King. The Journal’s take in its headline on April 10: “A Successor to Larry King?” The story then included an anecdote about Ms. Couric lunching with ex-CBS newsman and current CNN president Jon Klein.

By nature, breaking news stories need a break: an on-the-record quote; a clean anecdote. Those are the types of stories that get prominent placement on front pages of newspapers. And if you’re missing that? Any reporter will tell you it requires a trip back to your sources to get something more.

But is that changing? Several reporters and editors say they’re noticing an increasingly changed dynamic where more stories with little fresh news are getting packaged with strong placement. We’ll call it fake news: stories that are driven by speculation, or a rehashing of collected detritus that was already circulating among blogs and the gossip mill on a reporter’s beat. As editors feel an increasing crunch by speedier deadlines and “citizen journalists” like 61-year-old Mayhill Fowler, who printed comments from an Obama fund-raiser, is the belt loosening for getting a story in the paper?

“Everyone’s trying to break through the increasingly competitive digital din,” said Mike Allen, the chief correspondent for Politico. “The temptation to hype stale or shaky theses is greater than ever, but it damages your brand and hurts both the reporters and their organizations in the long run.”

He continued: “It’s a modern incarnation of the boy who cried wolf.”

“The Web creates more urgency in editors than ever before,” said David Carr, the media columnist for The New York Times. “It used to be you came in the next day and your editor would say, ‘Well, we won today,’ or she’d say, ‘Looks like we got beat like a drum,’ and that would be the end of it. Now it’s this ongoing game of catching up and staying ahead.”

Weighing false leads versus real ones are what reporters do all day—but there’s so much of it now, and so much of it is fake!

“There’s a lot more stuff out there that’s undercooked,” said Adam Nagourney, chief political reporter for The New York Times. “I don’t find myself tracking down too many false leads … but I’ve been doing this a while.”

“Everyone is doing now what the Associated Press always did,” he continued. “You try to get a story up as soon as possible and you want to make sure it’s 100 percent right, and sometimes it takes a few tries to get it there. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The story gets better as it goes on.”

“I used to work all day on a story, and I’d get a lot more nuance into it and maybe more facts,” said Bill Carter, the longtime Times TV reporter. “But now you have to get it on the Web. So is there less consideration? Is there less of an editing function? I think probably yes. I’m not complaining about it—that’s the way it is.”

“I think the driver of it, as with all things, is the Net,” said Ms. Shister. “If a blogger picks up something on the Net, it gains currency within 120 seconds and it’s all over the civilized world. I think print feels pressure to get on the train.” Next Page >

An odd thing happened after Jacob Lewis was hired as Portfolio’s managing editor back in September: that wacky 17th floor at 4 Times Square, full of firings and bloody exits, began to calm down.

“When he came in, we had been in a period of start-up tumult, and he’s helped move us into the next phase,” said Kyle Pope, Portfolio’s articles editor.

“He’s made the trains run on time in some basic, fundamental way that as a start-up we were having problems with,” said Jesse Eisinger, a senior staff writer.  read more » Next Page >

At a little after 3 p.m. on Monday, April 7, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller grabbed a microphone and took to a landing on one of the floating red-walled staircases that climb up into his brand-new newsroom’s skylit clerestory. It was Pulitzer day, and the first time this kind of stand-up-in-the-newsroom ceremony was being observed in the new Renzo Piano-designed tower the newspaper moved into last May.

Hundreds of reporters and editors were gathered in the massive space, some leaning over the rails of the newsroom’s suspended fourth floor, the rest sandwiched between cubicles and looking up from the newsroom’s third.

Mr. Keller’s opening remarks were reserved for 2002 Pulitzer-winner Barry Bearak, the Times reporter facing a court date in Zimbabwe later this week; prolonged applause followed to pay tribute.

“The custom on this day has been, for many years, to gather around Al Siegal’s computer terminal, awaiting the A.P. report on the Pulitzer winners…” he said. “Al is retired, we have this lovely new space, and some of us have long wondered about the disproportionate fuss we make over this particular award.”

If there was a day for new traditions, this was it. The Washington Post had had its biggest payday ever—six Pulitzers, one shy of the Times record in 2002. The Times picked up two.

“We’re disappointed,” a senior newsroom source later told The Observer. “We thought we deserved at least a couple more finalists and maybe a prize or two more.”

And so Mr. Keller’s speech, “with all due respect to Columbia University,” had to recourse to the art of consolation. He would detail other accomplishments at the paper—Polk Awards and ASME awards and almost every other kind of award—which perhaps only served to show that a consoling tone was required.

“Prizes are not why we do what we do, and prizes are not how we measure what we do,” he said. “Prize juries are human. They can be arbitrary. They can be political. They can be sentimental. They can miss the point. There are countless examples of truly great reporters who will not have a Pulitzer in the lede of their obituaries — and of profoundly important work that never gets a trophy.”

He continued: “How the Baghdad Bureau of The New York Times has not won every award on the planet—up to and including the Nobel—is a continuing mystery and frustration to me, and that alone makes me take journalistic awards with a grain of salt.”

Among staff, particular grimaces were exchanged over the fact that former Off the Record columnist Warren St. John wasn’t a finalist for a Pulitzer for feature writing for his piece on refugee soccer players in Atlanta, which is being made into a book and has been optioned in Hollywood.

“I think this year was more surprising than in past years,” said a source.

At the same time in Washington, D.C., employees at The Washington Post practiced straightforward excitement about the Pulitzers.

“It was the coolest thing ever!” said one reporter.

On Pulitzer day at The Post, work dependably stops for a few minutes while people trade high-fives. On Monday, it took two hours for everyone, and many more for some.

The staff came to the newsroom that morning prepared. A Reliable Source-worthy rumor mill had already pegged the six winners, and everyone showed up, said a reporter, “dressed to the nines,” streaming-video-ready.

Metro bureaus cleared out and did early-afternoon work from their main 1150 15th Street N.W. newsroom, all gleefully waiting for the news to come across the AP wire next to executive editor Leonard Downie’s desk at the appointed hour of 3 p.m.

When the prizes had been announced, Mr. Downie gave introductory remarks to the newsroom. The ringing phones in nearby cubicles rang on; no one cared, no one picked up. “No one was getting work done at all! Like zero!” said one reporter.

It was around 5 p.m. before people finally sat back down at their desks, but that was quickly interrupted by another party.

The newsroom gathered up on the ninth floor in the paper’s executive offices and partied in an even more crowded space, portraits of Katharine Graham and Eugene Meyer chaperoning. Two open bars served champagne, beer and wine; wontons, egg rolls, shrimp cocktail and chocolate-dipped strawberries were handed out to sop up the grog. Three more hours. And then! A special few headed out for an after-party at newly anointed publisher Katharine Weymouth’s house.

When did all the partying end?

“Can’t remember,” said one. Next Page >

In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.

“You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,” Mr. Carter said. “That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.”

“Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!” said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

Interviews with editors of magazines like Wired, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Us Weekly and several others elicited more of the same:Magazines are not, for the most part, worried about the Internet.

Most magazine editors seem to have emerged from 10 years of mostly noncommittal fiddling around with the Web confident that the magazine of the future will be largely the magazine of the present. That is, when they are willing to look past the next print deadline to contemplate the magazine of the future at all.

“Sorry, not dodging you,” wrote Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly. “I just think I have nothing to say because I don’t really know the answer!”

What if you put on your thinking hat?

“I cannot answer that without putting on my silly hat!” said Kim France, the editor of Lucky. “It’s just impossible to imagine.”

“I THINK IN the late 90’s, when those first e-books came out, there was an assumption everything would go online,” said David Granger, the editor of Esquire. “But that’s what it’s like with every new technology—anytime a new medium comes out, it’s gonna kill all previous mediums and it never does. We’re in a more realistic view of the future of magazines.”

For Hearst, that means all sorts of new ways to think about the print magazine. To Mr. Granger, that means using some more expensive paper, perhaps. A cover that folds out into a piece of topical origami? Maybe!

“Magazines have to become more magaziney rather than less magaziney,” said Mr. Granger. “There are things you can do with your cover where the paper will actually fold into different shapes—this cool experience that will let you do novel editorial things, but it’s all very expensive.”

To prove its interest, on March 11 Hearst held its first ever “print innovation expo” at its new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. The printers and manufacturers there showed editors and publishers all sorts of new magazine covers, including “lenticular covers (holographic treatment that allows two images to interchange), gatefolds, pull-out sections, metallic printing and more,” e-mailed Nathan Christopher, a spokesman for Hearst.

The point, then, is to capitalize the physical experience of reading magazines. If it’s all about textual and textural experience, then the more dear that experience becomes, the more of a luxury object it becomes.

“The correspondence between physical luxury as a subject and physical luxury as a thing,” Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York, thought out loud. “As paper magazines become rarer, it might seem like they become a physical luxury and thereby gain. The affinity between thing and subject might be greater in 10 years.”

It’s the argument magazine editors have been making for ages—even as their magazines themselves become more luxurious objects, chronicle more luxurious lives.

The question is, when did we start thinking of magazines as luxuries? And is it there that magazines will have to look to scratch out their survival—among photo shoots of country estates and fancy cars and couture clothing?

“The strength of our magazine is that it’s not disposable and clickable,” said Sally Singer, the fashion and features director at Vogue. “It’s a fundamentally different experience from reading it online.”

“We tell long, narrative stories with fantastic pictures,” said Mr. Carter. “You can’t replace that on the computer screen.” Next Page >

On Jan. 15, Sam Zell dropped by the bleak house that is the Melville, N.Y., headquarters of Newsday, Long Island’s newspaper.

It was to be a pep talk: The last decade, characterized by its nearly annual tradition of soul-wrenching job cuts, was over. “We’ve got to get off our ass,” he said to the assemblage of reporters and salesmen; it went over well, less like a scolding than a slap on the butt from Coach.

Two months later, a somber group showed up at the Newsday auditorium for cannoli, pecan pie and coffee to say goodbye to the 36 newsroom buyouts Tribune had exacted from the paper, including three national reporters, several business reporters, its features editor, its movie editor and two critics. (Some reporters were taken off other desks and transferred to the Long Island desk.)  read more » Next Page >