Off the Record

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 »

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 »

“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.”

“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 >

“A lot of us have known about it for a long time,” one veteran Albany reporter told The Observer on March 18, the day after it was revealed in Juan Gonzales’ Daily News column that the brand-new governor, David Paterson, had had affairs earlier in his marriage.

“It was sort of like accepted,” the reporter said.  read more » Next Page >

The cover of the April Lucky brags that the magazine contains “785 hot new fashion and beauty ideas.” Domino’s March edition suggests “150 easy ways to go green at home.”

“NUMBERSSSS! Why all the GIGANTIC MEANINGLESS NUMBERS?” rhetorically asked the blog Jezebel, which chronicles women’s magazines, on March 7.

Really, why?

Dave Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health, and Cindi Leive, editor of Glamour, discussed their cover-number calculus at the bar at Michael’s on Monday, March 17, during New York Post media columnist’s Keith Kelly’s annual St. Patrick’s Day fund-raiser.

“The smaller the number and the more specific, the better,” Mr. Zinczenko said.

“To me, that promise of volume seems a little bit tired,” Ms. Leive said. Still, Glamour has two numbers on its cover this month: “10 things no woman should feel guilty about” and “15 super honest answers to your most private health questions.”

“We’ve trained our readers to look for the numbers,” said Peggy Northrop, the former editor of More and newly anointed editor of Reader’s Digest, who was standing a few feet away. “It’s become one of those things that magazine editors fall back on. I just put one on my May cover. … We all go to the newsstands and look at what’s happening, and you see who’s up and who’s down and then you change it accordingly.”

“It’s both a promise to the reader and a great graphic device,” said Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, on the phone later. But “we don’t do those super-big numbers.”

Do they come up with the number beforehand, or actually count noteworthy items one by one?

“It depends,” said Mr. Zinczenko. “With the bigger ones we’ll take an average where we say, ‘O.K., we have 8 tips per page and 140 editorial pages and hence we have 1,100 tips in the magazine.’”

“We decided in August or so that we wanted to do 365 beauty ideas in the beauty section for our January issue,” Ms. Leive said. “The beauty department commissioned 365, and there was some last-minute talk if there should be 366 beauty ideas for the leap year, but we decided against it.”

“I have to like the number,” Ms. White said. “Sometimes i’ll have 75 items and I’ll like the number 67 better.”

And what poor sap has to total everything up?

“Our research department literally just counted the number of products we had in the issue and that’s the total we had,” said James Baker, the editorial director of Real Simple, of the “218 Best Buys” that graced its January cover, also on the phone.

“We’ll assign a research assistant or a hapless intern to try to count up most of the tips in the magazine and find some way to quantify for the cover of the magazine,” Mr. Zinczenko said.

Ms. Leive said the vast majority of the time Glamour’s numbers are commissioned beforehand, but that she’s less inclined to use the really big ones now, and alluded to a mysterious magazine malady, “numbers fatigue.”

“We’re using them a little more sparingly—there’s an eye-roll factor,” she said. “A few years ago there was a numbers arms race and these numbers were ballooning into the thousands! That’s changed.” Next Page >

“Being pop critic at The Times is a dream job—certainly it was mine,” the former occupant of that position, Kelefa Sanneh, wrote in an e-mail to Off the Record this week.

But a little more than two weeks ago, Mr. Sanneh left his dream job for the other dream job: a reporting gig at The New Yorker. Since March 3, when a Times memo went out announcing Mr. Sanneh’s departure from the newspaper, the word has been spreading in music circles that a new music-critic star was about to be made: When was the last time there was a music critic opening as big as this one?

“I’ve gotten e-mails from college friends saying, ‘Dude, it’s open!’” said one music critic.

And now The Times has begun its search for a replacement.

“These are early days yet,” said Sam Sifton, the culture editor of The Times, to Off the Record. “We’re looking at a lot of candidates.”

Traditionally, The Times has gone one of two routes for these positions: They can pluck the well-groomed outsider, such as a Manohla Dargis, the star film critic who came from The Los Angeles Times; or they can go out of context and pick someone closer to home who is in need of a bit of a stretch. (Remember when Frank Bruni became the paper’s restaurant critic?)

This is, of course, presuming The Times gets the O.K. to go out and hire a replacement. Last month the paper announced there would be about 100 newsroom job cuts, and there is currently a hiring freeze, though many editors at the paper have told OTR that there are easy ways to work around that whenever there is an opening.

Over the past two weeks, editor Sia Michel, who has been the point person on finding a replacement, has started reaching out. According to several sources with knowledge of the situation, the paper has already been in contact with at least two people: Jon Caramanica, a Brooklyn native and Harvard graduate who is the music editor at Vibe (a position that he’s leaving later this week, a source said); and Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, who wrote the cover story on country singer Taylor Swift for the current issue of Blender.

They both have a knack for hip-hop, and Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Rosen also write about country music, which suggests they are looking for some of the same background they had found in Mr. Sanneh.

The job requires lots of writing, lots of late hours. In 2007, Mr. Sanneh had 170 bylines; in 2006, he had 264. According to Condé Nast sources, Mr. Sanneh was getting exhausted with the workload.

Though he told Off the Record otherwise: “It’s also a job that’s impossible to complain about, partly because it’s the opposite of boring, and partly because no sympathy will ever be offered to someone who goes to concerts for a living.”

Mr. Sifton wrote in a Times March 3 memo that Mr. Sanneh was “one of the most inventive, interesting and brilliant pop music critics in the history of the form.”

And now someone has to follow up! Someone who won’t mind traveling to Glassland in Williamsburg at three in the morning to catch Vampire Weekend, file overnight, and then show up at Terminal 5 the next day to review another show. Next Page >

At 2 p.m. on March 10, The New York Times published a story on its Web site reporting that Governor Eliot Spitzer had been named in connection with a federal investigation into a prostitution ring.

And the story belonged, unequivocally, to the Cinderella section of the Times newsroom, the Metro desk. Joe Sexton, editor of the section since 2006, was finally getting to try on the glass slipper: The Spitzer story was arguably the biggest scoop in a year at The Times, and was certainly the biggest story of Joe Sexton’s reign at Metro.

Managing editor Jill Abramson was not shy about handing out the laurels in an interview the next day.

“Metro was the absolute center of gravity on this story,” she said. “I see it at the nexus of news and investigative reporting, something which Joe and the Metro desk have excelled at.”

But part of the reason there is so much excitement on Eighth Avenue right now is that the Metro desk has had a hard time finding its direction. Mr. Sexton is in love with the blood-and-guts reporting of a city paper, the kind of paper the stentorian and increasingly nationally focused Times has, for decades now, had some trouble impersonating; at the same time, according to several sources, Mr. Sexton has been under pressure to commission more lifestyle features and to soften its hard-news focus, with bigger, wider photos on the front page. Two reporters from non-newspaper backgrounds have been hired into the section within the last year and a half: Susan Dominus and Eric Konigsberg.

But for the last few days, at least, Metro’s mission has been crystal clear.

According to two people involved in the story, it started on Friday, March 7, when William Rashbaum, a reporter of the old school whose outgoing message refers telephone callers to a pager number, got a tip. The nine-year veteran of the paper’s courts and investigations desks was holding a complaint detailing the arrest of four people associated with a prostitution ring; information in the documents told the story of a john in Room 871 at a hotel somewhere in Washington.

They knew from the tip that Client 9, as the court documents called him, was a “New York official,” one source familiar with the investigation said.

But which one? And what Washington hotel has a Room 871?

Reporters were given specialized missions to help narrow down the identity of the subject they were after.

“It was a real nibble” of information most reporters outside of the core group got in the first hours of reporting, the source said.

But as Friday wore on, the investigative team became convinced this was a real story, and that Client 9 could be Eliot Spitzer.

The Times, in its own account printed Tuesday, said the reporting had started on Friday and that inquiries to the governor began “over the weekend and on Monday,” and that the governor had canceled his public schedule on Monday.

In the building, there was a sense that something was going on. “You knew something was up,” said one staffer present over the weekend who wasn’t let in on the secret.

Ms. Abramson was there late Friday night and much of the weekend, and Mr. Sexton and Metro political editor Carolyn Ryan barely seemed to leave.

“We were very much here,” said Ms. Abramson. “Very late. I talked to Joe all the time—all weekend.” On Sunday, Mr. Sexton, who only rarely makes appearances in the office over the weekend, was quietly shuffling small groups into the “crying rooms,” little conference rooms where reporters and editors go for privacy, along with Ms. Ryan and Metro investigations editors Kevin Flynn and Matthew Purdy and Albany bureau chief Danny Hakim, who made an even rarer weekend appearance in the Eighth Avenue newsroom.

After the saga surrounding the months-delayed publication of the John McCain-lobbyist story, a story that was written about before The Times even published it and that ended with a whimper amid a cloud of public opprobrium (and that, in the end, was a tie with The Washington Post), one person involved with the story said the biggest fear, by far, was that they’d lose it.

No Spitzer story appeared on the Sunday “sked”—the lineup of stories sent out to the Metro staff to let them know what was in the hopper for Monday papers.

“There was an extreme effort” to keep it quiet, said one person involved with the story. Next Page >

On the evening of March 10, Christopher Bollen, the new editor in chief of Interview magazine, met with Off the Record over a cup of Earl Grey at Grounded, a coffee shop on Jane Street. Mr. Bollen, 32, was speaking about a long-lost era when some magazines were so good that it absolutely terrified you to miss a single issue.

“I think people used to feel that way about Interview,” he said. “And people used to feel that way about Details when it first started. There have been these magazines throughout time that people took seriously and felt left out if they didn’t read it. I don’t know where all that has gone.”

He flicked away a gnat that was flying near his head. “But it would be fun to get it back. I feel like I would fail if I just make Interview what it was, or just keep it on one track and then no one even notices a change. If you’re going to relaunch it, you have to go all out.”

Mr. Bollen was offered the editorship on March 4 by editorial director Glenn O’Brien (Ingrid Sischy—whom Mr. Bollen called “brilliant”—quit on Jan. 23, after a 19-year tenure) and said he might change virtually everything about the magazine that Andy Warhol launched in 1969: fonts, designs, contributors, trim size. “I think with anything that’s around for this long you have to keep fucking with the formula or people will kinda maybe get bored of it,” he said. “I think maybe it’s time to breathe new life into it.”

Mr. Bollen is as good-looking as a typical Interview subject: tall and slender, with short, coiffed hair, a few days of scruff on his face and a blue-inked tattoo of the electron atomic structure of carbon on the inside of his right forearm (a “college mistake,” he said). In crisp white oxford-cloth shirt by Adam Kimmel (“He’s my favorite designer”), gray Karl Lagerfeld sweater vest, Dior navy cords and Margiela brown shoes, he was an advertiser’s wet dream.

Yet to Mr. Bollen, for the past four years editor of V, a bimonthly magazine offshoot of Visionaire that catalogs the downtown fashion and art scene, magazines have been too long “pit stops for publicists.” He wants longer stories for Interview, where many pieces used to run at 200 to 300 words, and more radically, to shake up the magazine’s trademark format: celebrities interviewing other celebrities. “Too careful,” he said. Instead, he’s imagining out-of-context writers and celebrities interviewing one another, with a separate writer serving as a liaison to help “coax” revelations from subjects. Other possibilities: more from-the-ground coverage of downtown; a politics page; maybe even a sports page.

Essentially, Mr. Bollen, who has lived in Manhattan since he was an undergrad at Columbia in the late 1990’s majoring in English and American literature, wants to see the city back in the magazine. “The best and brightest people still move to New York,” he said, and they should have a platform. “That’s what I tried to do at V, which was very small. It was really kind of grass roots, where you’re talking to someone at a club and they’re telling you about this weird project they’re doing. And it’s like ‘O.K.? We’re sending a photographer over and we’re doing a story.’”

He rents in the West Village now, a quiet little yellow stucco cottage off West 12th Street, where he wakes up to birds humming in his backyard garden, which has a grill for summer roasts.

“A lot of magazines think they have to appeal to the least common denominator,” Mr. Bollen said. “You know, like, ‘Who’s gonna read this and is 40 and lives in Ohio?’ (I can say that because I’m from there). People want to read what’s going on, and people want to read about exciting stuff. Everyone doesn’t want to read the same interview because the same movie is happening.” Next Page >

On a recent Monday morning David Carey, group president of Condé Nast since early January, welcomed Off the Record to his spacious and spare 18th-floor corner office at 4 Times Square with his hand extended. “Want a smoothie?” he asked, gesturing to a table full of fruit and yogurt parfaits.

The auburn-haired Mr. Carey, 46, is of formidable height—6-foot-1—but has a dad’s slouched, somewhat recessive posture. Grabbing a plate of cantaloupe, he spoke about life in Scarsdale, which he shares with four kids—two pairs of fraternal, mixed-sex twins—and his wife, Lauri, who used to work in special events at the Metropolitan Opera but is now a homemaker. “It’s been fascinating to see all these high-rise towers going up in White Plains and they just opened a Ritz-Carlton, too,” he said, between chomps. “Not just a hotel. But beautiful residences. They have all these condos, and they sold out very quickly.”  read more » Next Page >

It was a little over a month ago that The New York Times’ editorial board urged voters to cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

On one level, the editorial was blunt.

“As Democrats look ahead to the primaries in the biggest states on Feb. 5, The Times’ editorial board strongly recommends that they select Hillary Clinton as their nominee for the 2008 presidential election,” the item, appearing a little less than two weeks before Super Tuesday, declared.  read more » Next Page >

It’s been a jittery two weeks in Melville.

Over the next week, Newsday reporters and editors are expecting an announcement about job cuts. Even veterans of the Vlad the Impaler year of 1995, in which Times Mirror ordered the elimination of 800 jobs from a payroll of 3,200, contemplate the coming week with dread.

“To be honest with you, it’s really grim here,” said James Bernstein, a business reporter and 30-year-veteran.

“It’s very bleak, and everyone is totally absorbed in it,” said another reporter.

“It really wears you down,” said William Murphy, a reporter on the Long Island desk.

On Feb. 13 Sam Zell—who bought Newsday’s parent company for $8.2 billion in December—wrote in an e-mail that there would be job cuts at every Tribune paper. The L.A. Times made its announcement the next day—100 to 150 jobs would be lost—and the Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant put their estimates at about 45 jobs. Newsday has yet to make its decisions on job cuts.

“First you’ll hear the rumor that it’s seven positions, then 40, then 10, then you hear the newsroom will be spared, then it won’t, and there’s just all these e-mails back and forth and no one knows what’s happening,” said Mr. Murphy.

“It’s difficult to work ’cause one second you’re on the phone and then somebody comes in and screams, ‘I heard the latest!’ And then you tell the guy on the phone, ‘Wait, I’ll be right back with you,’” said Mr. Bernstein.

And the latest is still little more than: The decision is coming.

“We’ve gotten the sense that it will be this week,” said Zachary Dowdy, a reporter and editorial vice president of the Local 406 that represents Newsday employees.

It’s an exacting time at papers nationally—The New York Times announced earlier this month that it was cutting about 100 newsroom jobs this year.

But at Newsday, there is no jobectomy left that won’t take out some bone.

Since the 1995 purge that eliminated the paper’s New York edition, the paper has steadily cut positions, generally in increments of 50.

Thirteen positions in the newsroom have been vacated in the last year, and have not been refilled; it’s not clear whether those will even count toward whatever cuts Newsday will have to make. (L.A. Times publisher David Hiller announced in his job-cuts e-mail that all open positions would be eliminated.)

In one demoralizing memo back in December, editor John Mancini announced that four star reporters were leaving: Matthew McAllester to Details; Katie Thomas to The Times; Tom McGinty to The Wall Street Journal; and James Rupert to Bloomberg News.

Mr. Murphy, the Long Island reporter, felt that Newsday got beat badly on a story in its own backyard—the story of the three children found dead in their Garden City apartment on Feb. 24—because the paper hasn’t replaced its social services reporter after Lauren Terrazzano died last year.

But what gets really depressing are the small-ticket items that are being slashed: Can the scale of Newsday’s current expenses really make the cancellation of staff subscriptions to the New York Post, the Daily News and USA Today seem worth the candle? Who’s going to bust ass on a story after they’ve initialed the pass-around chit on the single copy of The Times and two copies of The Wall Street Journal that wend their way among the desks of 26 reporters and editors?

“You get accustomed to opening newspapers at Newsday, it’s been like that for 30 years,” said Mr. Bernstein. “Now it’s like working blind!”

The environment like this one leads to all sorts of speculation: One reporter grumbled about the cafeteria shortening its hours after the paper replaced contractors late last year; another said that reporters are being discouraged to taking sources out to lunch.

The paper’s summer internship program, one of the most popular nationally with college seniors and J-school grad students since it offered up to 25 internships, a cushy $523 weekly salary and a job offer for two interns, will be cut this year. Two reporters said that word around the newsroom is that it will save the paper a little more than $100,000.

The paper’s spokeswoman, Deidra Parrish Williams, described the cut this way: “What I can tell you is that the summer internship is on a hiatus, but we will still have academic interns. With regards to your question about whether those interns will be offered jobs, that is still taking shape.” Next Page >

In the spring of 2005, when asked about Arianna Huffington’s plan to launch a news-aggregating blog to compete with the Drudge Report, Matthew Drudge did not seem too impressed.

“I don’t think that need is there,” he told The Observer. “I think I fill that need.”

And while he allowed that Ms. Huffington had “tons of charm and humor,” he questioned whether she and her coterie of boldface names had the stamina to compete.  read more » Next Page >

The New York Times front-of-the-book is about to get a makeover.

Starting in a month, when you open up the front section of the Times, you’ll find an expanded table-of-contents section spilled across two pages, a section box detailing features at nytimes.com, a relocated corrections section and a new banner heading dubbed “International Report” for foreign stories.

In essence, there will be lots of easily digestible summaries, which will require an extra page flip or two (or three!) before you hit your first news story.

“This will be a bit of a magazine model,” said Tom Bodkin, the assistant managing editor of the Times.

Executive editor Bill Keller and Mr. Bodkin announced the changes at the “Throw Stuff at Bill” meeting on Valentine’s Day, which were, unsurprisingly, overshadowed by Mr. Keller’s announcement that about 100 reporters and editors wouldn’t be working at the paper by year’s end. Mr. Bodkin told the newsroom that the new look would debut on March 25, though he later cautioned in an interview that it would be better to say “late March.”

Editors at the paper have complained that there’s a jumbled feel to the first few pages of the paper—a foreign story here, some ads there, then some more foreign stories—so Mr. Bodkin explained, “It’s really an attempt to make the organization more coherent.”

So, the details! The pithy story summaries that walk you through what’s inside the paper, a section that now appears on A2, will double in size and expand to A3. Likewise, the “Inside” box that appears on A1, which teases stories inside and rotates around the front page at the whim of page designers on any given day, will now anchor the front page with the same strip-slot at the bottom.

“If you skim through page one and then go through two and three, you’ll sort of touch every major news story of the day and every significant story in the paper,” said Mr. Bodkin.

The corrections box will move from A2 to A4 and will be joined alongside a box that will be dedicated to nytimes.com. Mr. Bodkin couldn’t quite say what would be there.

Foreign stories, which appear in the front pages of the paper in drips and drabs that rotate around strip ads, will start appearing only under a section heading dubbed “International Report,” similar to the way “National Report” sections off. The international section will start either on A5 or A6 (or even farther back during the “busy season”), depending on wherever the full-page ads stop, Mr. Bodkin said.

“You know how the magazine has a lot of advertising in front before you get to its main well? We may put more full-page ads in front.”

Ah, full-page ads! So were these moves generated by money—essentially, were advertisers willing to pay more for news summaries rather than, say, a police raid in Paris?

“Advertising is absolutely not a factor,” said Mr. Bodkin. Instead: “All of the changes are going to address some perceived issues with the paper that we anecdotally hear from readers—that they don’t have enough time to get through the paper. This is a reader’s service.” Next Page >

Jim Impoco, the former deputy editor of Portfolio, is heading back to his old home at The Times, where he’ll be a consulting editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati told Off the Record Mr. Impoco will be conducting an “experiment” for the magazine: overseeing a group of reporters from the newspaper side to produce enterprise pieces and investigative pieces for the magazine.

“The thought is if we can generate two, three, or four big Times-enterprise and investigative-reporting pieces that would be a great thing.”

It’s been a long time since there was significant traffic between the newspaper and magazine sections of the newspaper, but Mr. Marzorati said: “Times reporters are really good at this digging, this sort of investgative stuff. For our contributing people, that’s not really their strength.”

Mr. Impoco was fired from Portfolio in August after a widely reported dispute with editor Joanne Lipman; before that, he’d been editor of the Times Sunday business section.

“I didn’t even know him until I met him six week or eight weeks ago,” Mr. Marzorati said. “I sort of had this appetite for these stories for some time and Bill Keller came to me and he said ‘what about Impoco?’ Next Page >

Sam Zell, the Rabelaisian real estate billionaire who bought The Los Angeles Times’ parent company for $8.2 billion in December, went out to Los Angeles last week to shake things up at the left-coast newsroom notorious for its turmoil—overturns, layoffs, bad management. He did.

At first it seemed just an amusing counterpoint to all the Romenesko-style journalistic hand-wringing and self-examination that has plagued the paper these past few years when, speaking in the newspaper’s Chandler Auditorium and at the paper’s plant in Orange County, he encouraged browsing Internet porn in the workplace, said it was “un-American not to like pussy” and accused former executive editor James O’Shea, who left the L.A. Times last month and publicly criticized management for not raising the newsroom budget, of “piss[ing] all over the paper” on his way out.

For days afterward the previously harried and pit-stained editors were dropping “F-bombs.”

“Let’s get to this fucking meeting,” read an e-mail invitation to a weekly staff meeting for Calendar, the paper’s entertainment section.

“There’s a certain lasciviousness descending on the newsroom—I just look forward to using rude words in everyday conversation,” Dan Neil, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist told The Observer in the days following the meeting.

Then, on Feb. 11, as if responding to some unquantified undertone of dissent, Mr. Zell wrote in an e-mail to staffers: “My goal was to shock you, to shake you out of complacency, and to help you understand that the game has changed, and we have to change with it.”

And, a few hours later, three newsroom officials, including John Arthur, the paper’s managing editor, co-signed an e-mail to the editorial staff.

“Last week you may have encountered some colorful uses of the lexicon from Sam Zell that we are not used to hearing at the Times,” the letter began, before clarifying that viewing porn on work computers is indeed verboten, as is “profane or hostile language.”

“In short, nothing changes; the fundamental rules of decorum and decency apply. As Russ Newton, the Senior VP of Operations, observed in a note to his managers, Sam is a force of a nature; the rest of us are bound by the normal conventions of society,” the e-mail concluded triumphantly.

It was not just a bit of beadledom from the top of the masthead; it was a permission to unleash the counterrevolutionary spirit against the sudden burst of enthusiasm for Mr. Zell’s program.

“Listen, I’ve been here for the better part of 19 years, and there have been a lot of ups and downs, but [Zell] brings a whole new ballgame into town and people are excited to try this out,” said Jim Newton, the editorial page editor.

“At first, the newsroom embraced his coming here and saving us from the wimps from the Tribune, but I think Sam shot himself in the foot in his presentation last week,” said William Rempel, a special projects editor who oversees investigations.

IN REALITY, MR. Zell’s Molotov cocktails and his guarantee of change only further underscored the newsroom’s deepest division: the debate over who should replace Mr. O’Shea as the paper’s lead editor.

On this issue, the paper is literally torn in two. There’s the innovation editor, the 49-year-old Russ Stanton, the man credited for transforming latimes.com from a barely functional, moribund Web site into something of a machine; on the other side is the 60-year-old Mr. Arthur, a 22-year veteran of the paper who has worked his way methodically up the editorial chain.

“Is there a divide?” said Mr. Newton. “Absolutely.”

“It’s a battle over the heart and soul of the newspaper,” said Jeffrey Rabin, a transportation reporter and 20-year veteran at the paper. “What is the L.A. Times? The place is in a panic, it has been for some time and that’s why the choice of who’s going to be editor is so interesting. John represents one school, Russ represents the other school.” Next Page >

When Village Voice Media named Tony Ortega editor of its flagship paper, The Village Voice, The Observer asked him about his relationship with Michael Lacey, the man who runs VVM and who has been accused of micromanaging his stable of newspapers from his Phoenix offices.

“I never really had that problem with him,” said Mr. Ortega, who had worked for Mr. Lacey since 1995, most recently as editor in chief of New Times Broward-Palm Beach. “I’ve always had complete freedom to do what I wanted.”

But over the last week, the staff has had reason to wonder how much control Mr. Ortega has at the paper.

On Jan. 24, LD Beghtol, associate art director of The Village Voice, came into work at the newspaper’s Bowery headquarters and was immediately called to a meeting.

He was told to bring his union steward—the staff of The Voice is organized by United Auto Workers Local 2110—and so he brought along a colleague in the art department, Jesus Diaz.

When he arrived at the meeting, Voice editor in chief Tony Ortega was there with VVM design director Michael Shavalier and a human relations representative from the newspaper.

Mr. Beghtol said he was told he was being fired, and was handed a letter that said he was “wasting company time on the Internet” and that he had a “lax attitude toward” his job.

Mr. Beghtol said that while he was at the paper, he was actively searching for a new job, and was sending out e-mails from his desk, using a Gmail account and, he said, possibly his Village Voice e-mail account in aid of his job hunt. But, he said, he was not aware that he had ever been criticized for wasting time or being lax.

“I just started laughing at one point,” said Mr. Beghtol. “It was just all so ridiculous. I never got any complaint prior to this meeting.”

On Jan. 28, at a regularly scheduled editorial meeting, attendance was peculiarly high, and a rare appearance by veteran staff writer Wayne Barrett added to its significance.

According to two sources who were present at the meeting, Mr. Ortega addressed the staff about Mr. Beghtol’s dismissal; they said that according to Mr. Ortega, the decision to fire Mr. Beghtol had come from Village Voice Media; that the cause was insubordination; and that the charge was based on a Village Voice Media staffer’s monitoring of Mr. Beghtol’s computer use.

“He said he wasn’t on board with this and they told him they were going to do it anyway,” said one staffer.

The sources said Mr. Ortega told editorial staff at the meeting that it was likely they were monitoring the e-mail on Mr. Beghtol’s screen, including possibly his use of a Gmail account.

Mr. Barrett spoke out at the meeting, as did Tom Robbins and staff writer Lynn Yaeger, according to one staffer present.

Several attempts to reach Mr. Ortega for his account of the meeting were unsuccessful; likewise, Mr. Lacey did not return repeated phone messages and e-mails seeking comment for this article.

But Mr. Shavalier, who works with the parent company, explained the thinking behind Mr. Beghtol’s firing in an email to The Observer.

“Despite having the right to do so because of a union-approved policy,” he wrote, “The Village Voice does not routinely monitor its employees’ computer usage. Mr. Beghtol’s work product and performance had been of increasing concern to his supervisors for many months for, among other things, ignoring project deadlines, refusing to adjust his work habits, having a poor attitude, and calling in freelancers to do his work for him.”

Mr. Shavalier said that a new supervisor in Mr. Beghtol’s office noticed him “in plain sight” wasting time on the Internet.

“In an effort to determine the facts, I used my remote production software--set up to train designers on new systems, to exchange art files with them, and review their layouts pre-publication – to find out what was on Mr. Beghtol’s Village Voice computer that day. Unfortunately for Mr. Beghtol, instead of finding his layout work in progress, I found his long, rambling gmail chat window in which he conversed with friends, looked for new employment, and discussed how to leave the Village Voice ‘in the lurch.’”

“I don’t have any recollection” of using that phrase in a g-chat, Mr. Beghtol told The Observer when we asked him about Mr. Shavalier’s claims. “It’s unlikely I would have said that, but I certainly was looking for a job because of the really unpleasant atmosphere over there.”

“I had free time because I’m fast,” he added. “If I was ever doing anything else that’s because I was done with my work. T