“People feel like we’re walking around with knives in our backs,” one news staffer said. “We rely on our editors to stick up for us. There’s really a feeling we’ve been left to twist in the wind.”

The initial wound came June 30, when The Journal’s editorial page praised reporter Glenn Simpson’s handling of the news of the Bush administration’s secret program of tracking international bank transfers. The editorial described Mr. Simpson, unlike the perfidious reporters of The New York Times, as having received the story from the Treasury Department, which was willing to “offer him the same declassified information”—because, the editorial conjectured, the administration “felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times.”

Journal sources said that editorial-page editor Paul Gigot produced that characterization of the paper’s news operation without speaking to Mr. Simpson, Washington bureau chief Gerald Seib or managing editor Paul Steiger. Instead, Mr. Gigot consulted with a Treasury spokesperson. Mr. Steiger was not even aware the editorial was running, according to a Journal source, till he saw a front-page blurb promoting the piece late in the day on June 29.

A Journal spokesperson said the information in the editorial was sourced to the Treasury Department, not the newsroom. “[T]he editorial based its assertion that the Department of the Treasury contacted Glenn on information attributed to a Treasury spokesman,” the spokesperson said.

The wall between news and opinion has traditionally been a tall and sturdy one at The Journal—with missiles lobbed over it. The editorial side has never been afraid to pick its own facts to support its arguments, even if those facts conflict with the ones reported in the paper’s news columns. Nor has it been reluctant to attack Journal reporters for writing stories that disagreed with its editorial premises, as when it downplayed the Enron scandal while Journal reporters were documenting the corrupt energy giant’s downfall.

“They’re wrong all the time. They lack credibility to the point that the emperor has no clothes,” said one staffer whose reporting has been at odds with an editorial crusade.

But the current disputed facts concern The Journal’s own news-reporting practices. And the news staff has viewed the editorial as an outrageous presumption—made worse by Mr. Steiger’s lack of a public response.

“To have Paul Gigot as our captain is bullshit,” one staffer said. “It’s not for real.”

“I’ve been here 16 years, and in my 16 years, this is something different,” political reporter Jackie Calmes said.

At a July 5 meeting in the Washington bureau, Ms. Calmes urged her fellow staffers to take action in response to the editorial. Currently, the staff is drafting a letter of protest to Mr. Steiger. “It could be one sentence: ‘We object,’” Ms. Calmes said. “It doesn’t have to go into chapter and verse. But I was just throwing it out there. I’m not instigating it. I’m not going to take the lead.”

Neither is Mr. Steiger. A Dow Jones spokesperson said that the paper doesn’t comment on its reporting and editing decisions. In an e-mail, Mr. Steiger noted that the editorial had explicitly not speculated about whether or not the news operation would have held a story if the administration had asked it to. “That said, the edit page is free to comment on anything it wants to comment on,” Mr. Steiger wrote. “The news department is free to write about anything it considers newsworthy, which on rare occasion has included the activities of The Journal’s edit page. The edit pages expresses opinions. The news pages do not.”

Mr. Gigot, meanwhile, has continued pushing his message. On July 9, on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, Mr. Gigot repeated the characterization: “[T]he news side was fed it …. The news side of The Journal was given the story because … [the administration] wanted to affect the way that this story was portrayed.”

According to Journal staffers with knowledge of the situation, Mr. Simpson, who is based in Brussels, had been working for months on a story about government monitoring of the international banking system operated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. On June 22, Mr. Simpson was in Washington when a Treasury source tipped him that The Times would be publishing a piece on the subject, according to Journal sources. Mr. Simpson delayed a flight back to Belgium and raced to put out a piece on deadline, posting one online minutes after the Times story went out. The Journal, The Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post all had SWIFT stories in the next day’s papers.

Mr. Gigot forwarded requests for comment to a spokesperson, who said that The Journal doesn’t comment on editorials.

Mr. Simpson declined to comment on the editorial. “All I’ll say is, people should make up their minds if I’m anyone’s lackey, or whether the piece should have run or not, based on what I’ve written during my last 11 years at The Wall Street Journal,” he said.

“Glenn Simpson brought great insight and context to our account of the Swift program,” Mr. Steiger wrote. “Mr. Simpson has done this a number of times in recent years. He has broken a number of stories on international terrorism finance and tax legerdemain that have won praise from readers and at times elicited objections from governments, companies and libel plaintiffs in Washington and around the world.”

But the news staff isn’t looking for Mr. Steiger’s endorsement—it’s looking for him to reject the editorial page’s endorsement.

“What I said is, ‘How could any reader take away anything but the fact that [the editorial page] had talked to people on the news side?’” Ms. Calmes said. “I’m unhappy. I know a lot of other people are unhappy. The question is: What do we do about it?”

How far has the world turned when the anarchists are with The New York Times? They were from the New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists, a small handful of them, standing on the north side of West 43rd Street on July 10—their backs to the wall of the New York Times Building, blowing whistles and jeering at the larger anti-Times demonstration across the street.

The main demonstration, packed in behind metal police barricades, was more numerous—about 70 heads at its peak—and substantially louder. A treble-heavy public-address system sent the speakers’ remarks clattering across the hard, charmless space between the Hilton Theater (where Hot Feet is playing) and the sullen pile of The Times. Occasionally, a bus bound for the Port Authority would pass in front of the sound rig, gently muffling the blast.

But there was plenty left to blast The Times about between buses. The speakers, using the bed of a black Ram 1500 pickup as their podium, had convened the demonstration to denounce The Times for publishing news of the government’s secret bank-monitoring program. “What The New York Times is doing borders on treason,” announced Rabbi Aryeh Spero, of Caucus for America.

It was an oddly delicate choice of wording—but what Mr. Spero was seeking was a prosecution under the Espionage Act. Most of the signs and slogans didn’t bother with “borders on.” Either way, the banking story was only the jumping-off point for a sort of jazz improvisation of grievance. The building across the way, various orators said, was “a temple of Babylonian decadence,” a bastion of the “smug” and the “arrogant,” people with “transnational” loyalties, people who “think Americans are rednecks.” The word “latte” came up frequently.

“You go around in your fancy limousines—liberal limousines,” Mr. Spero declared. The protesters, by implication, took the subway: “We have to worry about terrorism and you’re aiding the terrorists.”

The Times folks were in limousines—that is, if they were in Manhattan at all. “I’m sorry, it’s July,” Mr. Spero said. “They’re out in the Hamptons!”

Other speakers included Debra Burlingame, whose pilot brother died on American Airlines Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, and Roy Innis, of the Congress of Racial Equality. But the real work of carrying the rally fell to Mr. Spero and Beth Gilinsky of the Jewish Action Alliance, who returned to the microphone again and again, modulating and amplifying and extemporizing with the relish of old-fashioned politicians on the stump.

Ms. Gilinsky, blond with black sunglasses, sounded in her fury like an improbable cross between early Patti Smith and South Park’s Sheila Broflovski. “I grew up with you!” she told the Timespeople hidden inside their building. Inadvertently, she quoted Suicidal Tendencies: “I went to your schools …. I know everything you are.”

“I know you from the Upper East Side,” Ms. Gilinsky said, “and the Upper West Side and Long Island and the beaches of East Hampton and Southampton. I know you.”

There is something in attacking The Times for everyone. Apart from the main body of protesters, a man drifted back and forth across the street with a hand-scrawled sign: “NYT Used Eminent Domain to Get Their New Building.” Another man, with straggling gray hair, quietly taped handbills to the front of the building accusing the paper of “covering up for a still-unknown number of crooked casinos.”

At one point, the protesters would serenade the building with a chant of “Boring! Boring!”

Ms. Gilinsky even found an accidental point of agreement with Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. “Pinch, Pinch, pinch me, wake up, Pinch!” she taunted. “What kind of stupid name is that for a Jewish boy?” She had the publisher’s religious affiliation wrong, but his own loathing for the nickname is on the public record.

“You’re just an old gray lady and you might as well drop dead and die,” Ms. Gilinsky told The Times.

The speakers kept going. The anarchists heckled. A fire truck passed down the block, drowning everything out. The demonstrators paused, then applauded it.

Two different protesters were dressed as Osama bin Laden. Osama No. 1 wore black Converse sneakers and carried a messenger bag. “It was my idea,” he said, of dressing up. “I couldn’t find a mask.” He wore a fluffy light-gray beard on a string and a long off-white robe.

Osama No. 2 looked more like the real Osama, only short, with a big, bulbous nose. He wore a camouflage-patterned laundry bag torn open to make a fatigue vest, worn over a long white garment he bought at “a Judaica store.” His beard, very professional and full, came from a costume shop.

An hour into the protest, Mr. Spero—after invoking Tokyo Rose and Benedict Arnold—went ahead and called The Times a “traitor.”

Ms. Gilinsky attacked the paper for writing that the latest fashions were “more boyish.” “Don’t you realize that there’s a war on?” she asked.

Mr. Spero took another turn, then Ms. Gilinsky came up again. “Please don’t cover this event,” she said, addressing The Times. “You’ll make us into people that we never were, but that you wish that we would be.”

Craig Whitney, the Times standards editor, came out of the building unrecognized by the demonstrations. Mr. Whitney turned and walked east, in the direction of the beaches of Southampton, or the Times Square subway station.

—Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha

On July 10, at breakfast time, the newest Condé Nast cafeteria opened for business. The eatery is on the second floor of 750 Third Avenue, the home of the former Fairchild Publications.

Fairchild was absorbed into Condé in September 2005. The cafeteria is a ceremonial embodiment of the changeover: It was designed by Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, under the eye of W creative director Dennis Freedman—just as Frank Gehry did the cafeteria at 4 Times Square, working with Condé Nast’s then editorial director, James Truman.

(Disclosure: This reporter will be absorbed by Condé Nast later this month.)

Staffers enter the cafeteria down a hallway with translucent lighted walls. The internal lamps pulse with a revolving palette of muted hues, part lava lamp and part Rorschach blot. Only a handful of people were present at 9:30 on the opening morning, chatting over breakfast in the near-empty space. The ceiling is finished in sleek aluminum, studded by rows of recessed lights.

“Someone said it was like a Mariah Carey video. It’s sort of like a spaceship,” one diner said.

Oh, the food: Inside the cafeteria, staffers can choose from a fruit salad bar, selections of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, croissants from Balthazar bakery and berry smoothies. On the north side of the serving area, chefs in toques prepare omelets to order, along with egg-white frittatas and egg-and-cheese sandwiches. Beverage coolers are stocked with sodas, juices, Vitaminwater and Total Greek Yogurt.

Beyond the checkout kiosks, the 150-seat eating space is finished in ivory walls and slate floors. Rows of circular tables have interlocking cutouts, like Venn diagrams. The chairs are sculpted and modern. Three-quarter walls, with more pulsing lights, break up the space.

The north wall of windows, looking over East 47th Street, is shielded by metallic-colored blinds, billowing calmly in the breeze from air-conditioning vents. Private dining alcoves line the west and south walls.

To promote the cafeteria’s grand opening, Condé Nast is running a week of promotions. Monday was Trans-Fat-Free Muffin Day, where staffers could select from complimentary blueberry, corn or bran muffins. The rest of the week’s freebies: bottles of Aquafina water on Tuesday, berry parfaits on Wednesday, Balthazar croissants on Thursday and organic Stonyfield Farm Yogurt on Friday.

One 750 Third Avenue staffer likened the new space, unenthusiastically, to a mid-90’s nightclub. But another reacted positively to the opening: “The old West 34th Street space was like a prison cafeteria. This is a major, major upgrade.”

But, this being Condé Nast, some things need to be worked out.

“They need to get the two-percent yogurt,” the staffer said.

—G.S.

The new Hearst Tower is close to being completely tenanted. On July 17, the editorial staffs of Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping and the business staff of Town & Country are due to move in, finishing the transfer of Hearst’s New York–based consumer magazines to the building.

But the angular, Norman Foster–designed glass-and-steel shaft, thrusting out of William Randolph Hearst’s old Art Deco headquarters on Eighth Avenue, is not quite completed. Employees entering the pleasure dome’s giant lobby/atrium have noticed that the three-story waterfall in the lobby—Alph, the sacred river—is periodically dry.

According to Hearst real-estate director Brian Schwagerl, the waterfall, which flows below the escalators, is still in the testing phase.

“The building itself is not opening until September,” Mr. Schwagerl said. “All of these people were told they’d see work unfold before their eyes.”

So the attractions have been coming online in stages, since the occupants began arriving in April. The cafeteria, Café 57, opened in mid-May and is currently serving more than 900 meals a day. The 14th-floor gym opened last month as well. On July 11, the 168-seat theater held its first event, a speech from Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black to the summer interns.

Mr. Schwagerl said workers are still calibrating the computer software that operates the waterfall. The aim is to regulate the flow of water down the slope so that it produces the right burbling sound—neither a gush nor a trickle—and proper ambient humidity level as it passes around hand-sculpted glass outcroppings. The whole thing is fed by a 14,000-gallon holding tank in the basement of the building, filled with collected rainwater.

Mr. Schwagerl said that even though 200 construction workers are still working on the premises, everything is on track for the September official opening.

“It’s been on more and sooner than we expected,” he said.

—G.S.

Ms. Min, 36, is approaching her third anniversary as editor of Us Weekly. She ascended to the job in July 2003, the same month that George W. Bush, savoring a quick and tidy army-on-army victory, dared Iraqi insurgents to “Bring ’em on.”

Ms. Min has had a better three years than Mr. Bush. Circulation has doubled, to 1.75 million. Since January, Us—“the Newsweek of celebrity,” in Ms. Min’s words—has pulled in some $107 million in revenue. Rolling Stone, Wenner Media’s flagship, which makes room for war and politics, has made $70 million.

“It’s not a pick-me-up to read about American soldiers getting beheaded,” Ms. Min said.

Ms. Min, a onetime reporter for the Reporter-Dispatch in Westchester County, was cheery and matter-of-fact. She spoke briskly between pauses, working her way through a bento lunch at Nobu 57 on June 23. She had just returned from six weeks’ maternity leave, her second. On June 5, the magazine had put out its best-selling issue ever, with Janet Jackson on the cover: “How I Got Thin: 60 Pounds in 4 Months!”

Magazines are magazines; either people read them or they don’t. And people want—at this moment in history, when American Idol outdraws the evening news 7 to 1—to read Us, with its flurries of exclamation points, its snappy captions, its photos of the famous on the hoof with the franchise slogan: “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”

And who cares to read a soft piece about one of us? Us deals in escapism, but an escape into drama and conflict—human-shaped conflict, if not exactly human-sized. The plot lines are coupling and uncoupling, childbirth and divorce, recounted with cynical affability and enthusiasm for minute detail. “Entertainers are themselves the entertainment,” Ms. Min said.

In recent focus groups (“We almost never do focus groups,” Ms. Min annotated), readers lit up discussing the Us Weekly stars. “This is their recreation, to think and talk about celebrities,” Ms. Min said. “They bond with their girlfriends. They like it because they can relate to their mistakes, they can make fun of their mistakes, they can look up to their fashion … something they can have strong opinions on in a safe way. They can be pro-Angelina or pro–Jen Aniston. They can be pro-Nick and pro-Jessica.

“I guess in an era when probably politicians and many people [are] wishing people would be involved in the Iraq debate, you know, people are more interested in debating did Jen Aniston get the shaft?”

Richard Stolley, the founding editor of People magazine, recalled a similar climate when his title launched in 1974: “The magazine came out and started telling the news of the world in terms of individuals. The country was coming out of war and racial nightmare; the time was right for a magazine to celebrate human beings.”

The early 70’s were also the golden age of Mr. Wenner’s Rolling Stone, which represented rather a different response to a troubled era.

Rolling Stone, Mr. Wenner said by phone, “set out its initial charter to cover politics and culture as well as entertainment and rock ’n’ roll. There was a generational thing at play. Its mission was always journalistic. So it has a right to address serious topics.”

“I think it would be terribly out of place in Us,” Mr. Wenner said.

“That’s a characteristic of anxious times, that people flock to escapism in a way of coping with danger,” said the historian Alan Brinkley, who is writing a biography of Time founder Henry Luce. “World War II was a high point of celebrity …. In the Depression, the most popular movies were big splashy musicals and comedies.”

“I think there has always been a cult of celebrity,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates said. “The instinct to worship is so deeply embedded in the human soul, we naturally look to individuals elevated above the masses, however minimally they might be elevated, and temporarily.”

Yet that worship, as practiced by Us Weekly, is not traditionally reverential. “The Us reader is pretty sophisticated about celebrities,” Ms. Min said. “They love them, they’re fascinated by them, but they don’t have a fanatical belief in them.”

What sets celebrities apart is that people care about them. This is not tautological anymore; it’s a business model. “This is the whole definition of being a celebrity, is having the public interested in you,” Ms. Min said. “And the ways a celebrity derives their income these days—through endorsements, through different deals.”

The June issue of the American Sociological Review reported that the average American’s number of close friends has declined from 2.94 to 2.08 in the past 20 years; a quarter of the people surveyed had no close friends at all.

They’re just like us—only not alone!

“People like to see where there’s this finest line that separates [celebrities] from quote-unquote normal people that makes them so interesting,” Ms. Min said. Hence the fascination with the famous-for-being-famous. “Nicole Richie was in rehab,” Ms. Min said. “She was overweight. And she achieved fame through the oddest of means, by becoming excruciatingly thin.”

Plain, tranquil, undamaged fame? Who needs it? “Look at the people who don’t sell the magazine,” Ms. Min said. “Who don’t resonate. They are people who have remained almost superhuman in the public eye. Look at people who don’t give anything. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston all became much bigger stars because of this scenario that happened to them …. They got involved in this crazy, you know, what was most likely an adulterous love triangle. That suddenly put them on the same level as you, as your neighbor, as your friends. That made them relatable.

“To see Jennifer Aniston, who was basically the icon of young women all through the Friends era, to see this perfect—they called them the Hollywood storybook marriage—to see that fall apart: that suddenly made her a much bigger celebrity, where she could become Vanity Fair’s highest-selling cover ever and move millions and millions of magazines. For Us, for all the weeklies, that was a radical shift.”

And in the otherwise depressed world of magazine midtown, that shift has led to a rare success story. “No one is addicted to any magazines,” Ms. Min said. “Except I hear a lot about Us Weekly addicts. People are addicted to celebrity weeklies. You don’t hear people talk with the same passion as they used to about different fashion monthlies, about a different men’s magazine. I think about all the men I know—not one reads a magazine anymore. They get all their information online. And the women I know.

“And I know I’m a good example. The monthlies come in and sit in their polybags and die a slow death before getting carted out to the recycling, sometimes without the polybag getting taken off.”

The power of gossip, Mr. Wenner said, “goes back to the Bible, to who begat whom, and on and on. It has a powerful force for social mores, for values. Britney and Angelina set styles beyond their hair for what’s acceptable in terms of morality and relationships, about having children out of wedlock or not out of wedlock.”

Tom Wolfe noticed a similar impact. “The motif of babies and the bump is just rampant,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Brad and Angelina and Britney and Kevin, it’s all about babies. The one thing that Us Weekly has done that’s a great boost to the nation is, they’ve probably increased the birthrate.”

Ms. Min was not raised on the culture of exposure. As the third of three children growing up in Littleton, Colo., she said, “there’s probably barely a baby photo of me.” She said she didn’t go to journalism school with dreams of covering fetus-bumps and marital spats. “I never thought I would work in celebrity,” she said. “I thought I would have loved to have been a White House correspondent. For a lot of people in journalism, you realize you take a job and see where it goes.”

You take a job. Carve that over the doors at Columbia. And Ms. Min—the legendarily nice heir to the legendarily not-nice Bonnie Fuller at Us—has taken to the job diligently. “I always hated those questions, where you want to be in five years,” Ms. Min said. “You don’t know. No one has leisure to pick and choose. There are no right places; you make the best of what’s available to you.”

Likewise the stars, the troubled stars of today, have learned to leverage their own situations. “They’re pretty much complicit in their own publicity,” Ms. Min said. “Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, despite their pleas for privacy, have played the game really well. They’ve done things to encourage their own publicity. There’s no reason they needed to hold a press conference in Namibia after she had a baby …. It’s all about pulling back and giving a little, and pulling back and giving a little. It keeps the public wanting more.”

Who are the other masters? “Jessica Simpson—she’s very smart, she knows where her bread is buttered,” Ms. Min said. “This is not someone who ever goes on the attack against the press. This is not someone who ever frowns for a photographer, for the paparazzi. This is someone who knows her income is based on the intimacy she has with the public who buys Us Weekly …. Jessica Simpson [is] not going to get her beauty contract if she’s not seen as one of the most popular celebrities out there. What’s part of that popularity is being on the cover of Us Weekly five times out of six weeks.”

Same goes for her ex. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Ms. Min said, “Nick Lachey—the first single on his album is about love gone bad, and the video is a re-enactment of a marriage. They’re finding ways to intersect their personal lives and professional lives in ways that benefits them the most. Remember, Nick Lachey[’s first] solo album sold 175,000 copies total. Two years later, his album sold that in a week. He got no more talented in those two years, but he could capitalize on celebrity culture and the media.”

Life crisis, Ms. Min said, is a growth sector. “You [see] declining box office, declining TV ratings, declining music sales—[and] heightened interest in these people as personalities, and most of them are embracing it to some degree.

“You look at some of the things that celebrities have done in the past—there’s no reason for Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe to announce they’re separating but not getting divorced, that they’re working on their marriage. These are things that wouldn’t have happened before.”

Some people are better able to protect their investment in fame than others. “Jennifer Lopez, happily married to Marc Anthony, is just not nearly as enticing,” Ms. Min said. “And all of a sudden, it’s like someone took an eraser and she just disappeared out of Us Weekly eventually. We started to put her back in a little more. I feel like there’s growing interest in her again. She retreated from that spectacle, which shows you can retreat if you choose to. Someone like Kristin Cavallari, you know, who merited an Us Weekly cover—which became one of our best-selling Us covers—because she dated Nick Lachey for like 32 seconds. She would have to do something equally crazy to get back on the cover. There are people who are one-week covers, certain people who are five-week covers.”

Then there are the people whose five weeks—or five months—are over, raising what Ms. Min calls the “who-we’re-sick-of factor.” Even Britney and Angelina are starting to bore.

“That’s why I was so happy to see Janet Jackson take off,” Ms. Min said. “Let’s try a new person, who pretty much defies the conventions of what magazine editors think will sell a magazine. To have a 40-year-old black woman, and a musician, on the cover shows me not all the rules apply all the time.”

And there are those cold fish who are no covers at all—who, Ms. Min said, don’t play to win the public interest: “They might admire them as actors, but they don’t embrace them as sort of personalities they’re obsessed with. People like Nicole Kidman, who has managed, I’m sure quite happily, to stay out of the Tom Cruise fray. Gwyneth Paltrow—who I’m sure she’s spoken openly about disliking the press—she’s quite happy to stay out of the fray. They are women who are challenged when it comes to opening a movie.

“Gwyneth is less famous now than she was five years ago. I think she wouldn’t trade that for anything. If the very definition of celebrity is to be embraced and loved by the public, then these are people who are not winning that game and might be happy to. No one is in this game to be recognized as the finest actors in Hollywood.”

Nor do they have to be. Over lunch, Ms. Min said that Us was weighing whether to put Ms. Kidman’s wedding on the cover. “Chances are low,” she said. “She’s older than our average reader …. She hasn’t done much. She hasn’t opened a movie big.”

Instead, Us shipped to the printer with Tori Spelling on the cover, telling “how her mother’s betrayal kept the heartbroken star from her father’s deathbed.”

“It is Tori’s first cover,” Ms. Min said by phone. “I think I’d always felt there was a fascination with Tori. We had been talking about her doing a cover when her father passed away …. Tori was pretty much laying low until her romantic life took a twist. She had a million-dollar wedding and a marriage that ended less than a year later, and then hooking up with another guy and having a quickie wedding put her back into the pop-culture discussion.

“That made her endearing to the audience,” Ms. Min said. “She wasn’t ashamed of any of it and embraced it.”

Other Times reporters may have had splashier stories in that day’s paper—Mr. Chan’s longest piece, the stray-animal one, was only 758 words, and informed readers that the shelters had been found “adequate” but could be better. But no Times reporter had written more.

With those two bylines and two taglines, Mr. Chan raised his number of reporting credits in the past 12 months to 422. On average, if you pick up a copy of The New York Times, Mr. Chan’s name will appear in it 1.15 times.

Since he debuted in The Times in November 2004—with a contributor’s credit on a story about the lowering of terror-threat levels—Mr. Chan, now 28 years old, has recorded more than 600 credits. He has covered Hurricane Katrina, the transit strike, the Lake George boating disaster and the fine print of the municipal budget.

“He’s a terrific reporter,” said former metro editor Susan Edgerley, who hired Mr. Chan away from The Washington Post. “He’s hugely energetic. He’s curious, smart. He loves coming to work every day. He’s a joy to have in the newsroom.”

At a paper populated by reporters with sharp elbows and brazen ambition, Mr. Chan’s singular, nearly inhuman work ethic stands out. Through the decades, some New York Times reporters have made names for themselves on West 43rd Street with felicitous prose—to say nothing of deft politicking, sartorial flair or heedless use of expense accounts. But Mr. Chan has made himself a legendary Times reporter by reporting for The Times. And reporting, and reporting some more.

Mr. Chan collects reporting credits the way Pete Rose collected base hits: obsessively, with doggedness and hustle, scratching them out where others might bide their time and swing for the fences. They come one after another, and sometimes in flurries of three or four. As of June 20, Mr. Chan had been in the paper one or more times for 10 consecutive weekdays. That followed a streak of 19 weekdays in May.

The No. 2 metro reporter in output, Kareem Fahim, has 323 credits in the past 12 months, 99 fewer than Mr. Chan. The majority of his colleagues have fewer than 200.

Earlier this month, in a memo announcing the hiring of Serge Kovaleski from The Post, metro editor Joe Sexton quoted Mr. Chan praising his former colleague—and noted that Mr. Chan “took time out from filing 11 stories over the weekend” to contribute those thoughts.

“I guess I’m really old-fashioned, but I’d rather be the one writing about the news,” Mr. Chan said, declining to comment any further.

Mr. Chan’s drive has won him both admirers and detractors. The displeased ones see his ambitiousness as being a little too naked—there was grumbling about careerism (unheard of at The Times!) after he showed up at executive editor A. M. Rosenthal’s funeral. He has been known to shower famous journalists with detailed praise, including specific citations of their work.

But most of the complaints—and the praises—have an element of recognition. Mr. Chan at work is like any reporter on deadline, except he’s always on deadline.

At City Hall, Mr. Chan is one of the few reporters who carry a laptop into press briefings. “I see him working here constantly,” New York Post City Hall bureau chief David Seifman said. “From the moment he gets in to the moment he leaves, he doesn’t take many breaks.”

In group settings, according to witnesses, Mr. Chan doesn’t hesitate to hammer on minutiae. He will offer a question, prefaced by “Mr. Mayor, sir.” Then: “If I could please ask a follow-up …. ” Then: “One more follow-up, if I may …. ”

And he is constantly offering pieces to editors. Wendell Jamieson, who edited Mr. Chan’s M.T.A. coverage last year, said Mr. Chan used to intercept him as he walked through the newsroom and follow him, suggesting ideas.

“There’s a lot of great, ambitious, smart reporters in the newsroom,” Mr. Jamieson said, “but he’s the only reporter I know who actually pitched me a story while I’ve been standing at the urinal in the men’s room.”

Mr. Chan wrote more than 80 metro-front transit stories in 14 months on the beat.

“The story I like to tell about Sewell is you hand him the M.T.A. budget, and two days later he’s digging through it and he’s finding B1 story leads on page 250,” Mr. Jamieson said. “I think he’s home in bed reading it. He flips through it and finds things like they’re going to take conductors off train lines this year. It’s just classic good reporting.”

In bygone days, there were two distinct breeds of Timesmen: the establishment-cozy gentry à la Scotty Reston, and the pavement-pounding sons of immigrants, like Rosenthal. Mr. Chan’s background embraces both. He grew up in Flushing, the son of parents who emigrated from Hong Kong in the early 1970’s. His father drove a taxicab, which he does to this day.

Mr. Chan attended Hunter High School, where he was class co-president his junior and senior years, and where he was a classmate of his current Times colleague, Jennifer 8. Lee. Together, as juniors, Mr. Chan and Ms. Lee took over the school’s No. 2 paper, The Observer, transforming it from an 8 1¼2-by-11 newsletter to a full broadsheet in competition with the official paper, What’s What.

After Hunter, Mr. Chan went on to Harvard, where he majored in social studies and joined The Harvard Crimson. He raced through the paper’s tryout period.

“Usually, you call people at 2 in the afternoon and beg them to come in,” said Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mathews, who supervised Mr. Chan’s college tryout as The Crimson’s managing editor. “With Sewell, you didn’t have to beg.”

Mr. Mathews said Mr. Chan stayed long after the other aspirants, till only the regular staffers were left, fetching sandwiches and coffee as needed. In a notable class—which also included Ms. Lee and Times reporter Michael Luo—Mr. Chan stood out, Mr. Mathews said. “I would say in both ability and diligence, Sewell was the hardest-working and most talented in that class,” he continued. “And probably the hardest-working and talented person I met at The Crimson during my time there.”

Mr. Chan rose to be executive editor of The Crimson and interned at The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. Upon graduation in 1998, he studied politics at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship.

In 1999, he joined The Post’s metro desk, where he covered cops, education and social services. “He would stay up late at night reading clips,” said former Post reporter Justin Blum, who now works for Bloomberg News. “He could recite who was on the City Council decades ago.”

“He was just incredibly energetic,” said Allan Lengel, a metro editor at The Post. “As an intern, the word was he would work all day and all night and go home and collapse on his bed in his clothes.”

“At one point, he asked then-A.M.E. for metro JoAnn Armao to bring a cot in so he could sleep,” Post metro reporter Lyndsey Layton said. “He was having such long days, he thought it would be more efficient to sleep there. I don’t think she took it as a serious request.”

Ms. Layton sat in the cubicle next to Mr. Chan in the newsroom. “He keeps trying to go deeper,” Ms. Layton said. “He has this very strange affection for middle initials. He was always double-checking with sources, ‘Is that William H.W. Smith III?’ He would get everyone’s middle initial.

“He was obsessed with it,” Ms. Layton said. “Even though it’s not Post style to include it.”

Mr. Chan was also fascinated by bylines, Mr. Blum said. At one point, he expressed admiration for former Times sportswriter Buster Olney’s byline and said he wished he had a snappy handle of his own. Shortly after, Post reporter David Nakamura dubbed Mr. Chan “Skippy.”

Not everyone who crossed paths with Mr. Chan was so enamored. In February 2004, he was assigned to cover Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a tour of Central Asia. According to multiple Post staffers with knowledge of the trip, Mr. Chan’s enthusiasm chafed the veteran Pentagon reporters on the trip. After a stop in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Mr. Chan was late for a flight to Kabul, and the group left him behind, stranding him in Tashkent for an extra day. Afterward, an e-mail circulated in which reporters claimed to have pooled their money and bribed a clerk to delay Mr. Chan’s wake-up call. “I don’t think that’s true,” said former Los Angeles Times reporter John Hendren, who was on the trip, of the wake-up-call story. Mr. Hendren said that reporters had written “Sewell” on a sheet of paper and buckled it into his empty seat.

Mr. Chan then was assigned to Iraq, where he had other troubles. During his three months in Baghdad, he clashed with Post bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Post staffers said there was an incident in which Mr. Chan antagonized the bureau by asking the paper’s Iraqi driver to install a new toilet seat in his room at the Sheraton.

But by summer, he was back in D.C. and on the municipal beat—landing 23 credits in an August with 22 weekdays.

Soon after, he moved to The Times. There, he became as constant a presence in the newsroom as on the news pages. Mr. Jamieson said he had to order Mr. Chan to stop showing up on days off—or at least to stop showing up so much.

“I told him to take a day off on the weekend,” Mr. Jamieson said. “I think he did sometimes, and didn’t on others.”

The balance of Foers is shifting northward! This month, Joshua Foer, the youngest of the celebrated team of brothers, left his hometown of Washington, D.C., to take up residence in New York.

The move leaves New Republic editor Franklin Foer the last Foer brother in the District. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer is currently ensconced in a $6.75 million Park Slope townhouse with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss.

Joshua Foer is at work on a book about memory—he competes in memorization contests and has won a national championship—and has been freelancing for National Geographic, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other publications. In an e-mail, he declined to discuss the specifics of his relocation.

“I literally just moved in,” Mr. Foer wrote. “I haven’t even figured out where to plug in my electric toothbrush or which day is trash collection. Given that most of my friends don’t know that I’m here yet, I’d hate to have them read about it in the newspaper. Plus, I sort of think I should do something a little more noteworthy than just move to town before I end up the subject of one of your columns. I’ll keep you posted.”

—G.S.

Mr. Kim’s embryonic magazine—named for the Harvard Square ZIP code—has nonetheless mastered one of the traditional roles: putting the touch on alumni. His principal backer is Atlantic Media boss David Bradley (Harvard Business School, 1977), who put up $4 million last year in support of what the 27-year-old Mr. Kim habitually describes as the “Vanity Fair for Harvard.”

Not to be confused with the regular Vanity Fair, the Vanity Fair for the University of Ottawa!

“For the first time, at least as to any substantial sum, I am investing in someone else’s company and concept,” Mr. Bradley wrote in an e-mail. “Among my concerns is how little I bring to the 02138 editorial sensibility. The magazine’s market position is everything I am not: light, engaging, easy, original, sophisticated.”

So far, after two years of gestation, the Boston-based magazine consists of a barebones Web site, which appeared June 8. (“It’s a soft launch,” Mr. Kim said.) But with an actual issue still three months away, 02138 is already well into hobnobbing with the fabulous—at least, the Vanity Fair–for-Harvard fabulous.

On the model of Mr. Bradley’s public “listening tour” last year to round up a new Atlantic editor, Mr. Kim has been tapping into the Harvard-connected media class for advice and support.

“I’m as self-obsessed as any Harvard alumni,” said Kurt Andersen (class of ’76). Mr. Andersen met with Mr. Kim over coffee at Dean & Deluca earlier this year.

“I suppose I would be happy to look at and read a magazine about Harvard not put out by the alumni association,” Mr. Andersen said. “And the fact that Bradley is doing it made it seem that much more appealing.”

02138 would be the third magazine for Harvard College alumni. The university recently combined three newsletters into a glossy house organ, The Yard, which joins the existing Harvard Magazine, which gets half its budget from the university but is editorially independent.

Would a completely independent Harvard title be appealing enough that Mr. Andersen might consider contributing? “I have plenty on my plate without writing for them,” he said.

Mr. Kim also met with former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson (class of ’74) and Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows (class of ’70) the morning of the White House correspondents’ dinner, at a breakfast hosted by Mr. Bradley at Washington’s Hay-Adams hotel.

“These are people who are not only members of our community, but prominent members of the field,” Mr. Kim said. “They’ve been very supportive.”

Mr. Kim, a native of Korea, graduated with a degree in government. While at Harvard, he and classmate Daniel Loss started Current Magazine, a news title for college students that is now published by Newsweek. The two worked together as reporter-researchers at The New Republic in 1998; Mr. Kim had spent the previous summer at Brill’s Content and Mr. Loss was at George. Mr. Loss, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2004, is a co-founder of 02138 and currently works for it part time.

Outside the Crimson community, Mr. Kim counts Steven Brill (Yale ’72) as an unofficial advisor.

And Mr. Kim and Mr. Bradley have brought in former New York magazine editor Caroline Miller (Stanford ’70) as 02138’s editorial director. Ms. Miller has been spending two or three days a week in Boston, staying in an apartment rented by 02138.

“I have been working as a consultant,” Ms. Miller said. “The minute I heard the concept of the magazine, I thought it was a good idea to develop. My role has been a catalyst in developing the content and putting together the staff.”

The staff now numbers more than 10 editorial employees. Last month, the executive editor’s job went to Seth Bauer, the editor in chief of Body+Soul magazine, a lifestyle title acquired by Martha Stewart in August 2004. There has been turnover as well. Earlier this year, one of Mr. Kim’s editors departed for Body+Soul. And 02138’s managing editor resigned after a week.

Atlantic associate publisher Meredith Kopit moved from Mr. Bradley’s 150-year-old publication to his not-yet-born one, becoming 02138’s publisher.

Ms. Kopit said 02138 has drawn a “very positive” response from advertisers.

“I’m not in a position to share who we’re signing on,” Ms. Kopit said. “I will share categories. We brought on a single-malt scotch, a private wealth-management company. A European import-car company. High-end fashion advertising. Private banking.”

“It is a different mix than The Atlantic,” Ms. Kopit said. “We’re enjoying the occasion to draft off nice relations of advertisers we have with The Atlantic, but it’s a differentiated audience.”

The magazine’s other relations with The Atlantic have not been so cordial. Mr. Kim moved into an office in The Atlantic’s headquarters at 77 North Washington Street in December, just as The Atlantic itself was in the midst of being uprooted by Mr. Bradley and relocated to the Watergate, joining the rest of the Bradley media holdings in the capital.

At the time, Mr. Bradley told Alex Beam of The Boston Globe that he regarded Mr. Kim as “extreme talent,” saying he “might invest with him if he were starting a trade magazine on the cauliflower industry.”

Meanwhile, more than 30 staffers were leaving The Atlantic, a result Mr. Bradley had anticipated when he announced the move south. Atlantic deputy managing editor Toby Lester approached Mr. Kim and advised him that feelings were raw among some of the departing Atlantic people.

But 02138 failed to soothe things. “They were injected hypodermically into the office,” one Atlantic staffer said. “They were ramping up while there was a tourniquet applied to the Boston office.”

Another staffer referred to the newcomers as “the Bom Squad.”

When Mr. Kim and his growing staff moved into the offices being vacated by The Atlantic’s production department in January, a turf battle broke out, according to Atlantic sources. “There was confusion about things like supplies and printer paper,” one Atlantic staffer said. Mr. Kim further antagonized the Atlantic contingent by printing up stationary for 02138 bearing The Atlantic’s Boston fax number—a line that was supposed to be transferred, along with the accompanying machine, to D.C.

Later that month, Mr. Kim moved a gray couch that had been outside the office of The Atlantic’s then art director, Mary Parsons, into the office of his incoming managing editor.

“It was her personal couch,” a staffer said. “It wasn’t an Atlantic couch.”

The next morning, the couch was returned. (“It’s just confusion,” Mr. Kim said. “We wanted to be very sensitive.”) Following the incident, Atlantic office manager Robert Moeller affixed labels to Atlantic staffers’ items and boxes reading “You Touch, You Die.”

The Atlantic’s Boston outpost is now down to four employees. When the lease on the current office ends next year, both operations will move on to a space somewhere outside the North End. In the new offices, The Atlantic and 02138 will likely have separate entrances.

Meanwhile, according to one Atlantic source, 02138 has seized control of the in-house supply of coffee beans.

“The coffee inventory was put under lock and key,” the Atlantic staffer said. “We used to get periodic deliveries of bags of coffee. They were stored in the kitchen. They keep the coffee locked up in a cabinet in an office.”

That said, the Atlantic staffer added that 02138’s coffee custodian “makes sure there’s a steady supply of freshly brewed coffee.”

But are they brewing up some content? Mr. Kim said he was “not ready to unveil our media strategy,” but said in a follow-up interview that “the story lineup is not fixed. We have stories in motion.”

“We’re focused on the people, and their lives after Harvard,” Mr. Kim said. The Web site showcases thumbnail photos of Bill Gates, Tommy Lee Jones and Natalie Portman, among others, promoting a package of the 100 Most Influential Harvard Alumni for the debut issue.

The site also features a set of blogs, with titles such as “Expat,” “Cultured” and “Sex, Overthought.” That last one presents a dating essay titled “Nowhere to Go But Down,” which has nothing to do with sex, despite what one might over-think of the headline.

Mr. Loss said one of the front-of-the-book sections would be called “Vanitas.”

“It will deal primarily with stories about the Harvard tribe,” he said, “focusing on the people and on recent things they’ve been involved with.

“It’s Latin for ‘Vanities,’” Mr. Loss said.

Meanwhile, at the Vanity Fair of Princeton …. “I don’t think anything with our name on it should be a second-tier outlet,” New Yorker managing editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy said.

That’s why the Chrysler New Yorker was top of the line! But Ms. McCarthy was talking about the 81-year-old magazine’s online presence, which she has been in charge of developing. On June 19, Blake Eskin will become the magazine’s first-ever Web editor—that’s editor as in “content generator.”

So Mr. Eskin, whose hiring was first reported by Women’s Wear Daily, has to turn a site that’s been dedicated to partial reprints, archival material and mild author Q&A’s into a full arm of the old quality-first outlet.

Mr. Eskin, a graduate of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department and most recently of the online Jewish publication Nextbook, declined to discuss his plans, saying it was too soon. Ms. McCarthy described the venture as “a vague notion” at present.

“We want to give readers a reason to come to the site every day,” she said. “We haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

Mr. Eskin’s arrival is part of a Condé Nast–wide effort to get up to speed on the Web. The company is filling vacant Web-editor posts at half of its 29 titles, including the hiring of Andrew Hearst, also reported by WWD, as Vanity Fair’s Web editor.

“For Condé Nast, 2006 was like 1999 for other people,” one New Yorker staffer said.

And at The New Yorker, the brisk pace and inclusive tone of the Web is more or less the dead opposite of what created the magazine’s mystique.

“There doesn’t seem to be enthusiasm for blogging,” one staff writer said. “What would you blog when you have The New Yorker? Why descend to that level? You spend your whole professional career getting here. You start as a police reporter, then you build up to writing features at a newspaper and then a magazine, and then The New Yorker. Here you get to spend a couple of months on a piece. Why would you go backward to the beginning?”

Another writer expressed trust in Mr. Eskin. “I guess I’m just optimistic until they completely lean on me,” the writer said.

Staff writer Jeffrey Toobin was more enthusiastic about the project. “Look, I love writing for the magazine,” Mr. Toobin said. “I think if you can do something that’s consistent with the quality and value of The New Yorker, the technology matters less.”

“I’m intrigued and excited about us stepping on the Web in a more formal way,” pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones said. “If there’s a role for me to play, even if it means staying up all night, I’ll do it.”

One option the magazine has discussed is bringing Mr. Frere-Jones’ personal blog under its banner.

Stephin Merritt, beware! And Mr. Frere-Jones’ fellow staffers, get with the spirit!

“There’s no thought of an A-team or B-team,” Ms. McCarthy said. “Who wants to have a B-team?”

—G.S.

On June 5, New York Times metro editor Joe Sexton put out a memo announcing the hiring of Serge Kovaleski (“a muckraker of the first order”) from The Washington Post and Cara Buckley (“thrilled to have her”) from The Miami Herald.

The effusive personnel news made no reference to an earlier Times memo: the Sept. 20, 2005, message in which executive editor Bill Keller announced staff cuts and declared that the paper was “closing the door immediately on new hiring. This freeze will last at least until the end of the year.”

So is Times hiring unfrozen?

Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty wrote in an e-mail that the freeze was long since over, and that it had only applied to the period during which The Times was offering voluntary buyouts. “[T]here really hasn’t been any freeze other than for that 45-day period,” Ms. McNulty wrote.

That could explain why the paper has hired Mark Leibovich, Manny Fernandez, Michael Barbaro and Farhana Hossain from The Post; Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times; and former Detroit-bureau contract writer Jeremy Peters. And why it has approached Franklin Foer and Ryan Lizza of The New Republic, and held talks with Post White House reporter Peter Baker, Style reporter Libby Copeland and China correspondent Peter Goodman. In all, the paper has hired three dozen newsroom staffers since September 2005, according to a spokesperson.

Except! According to Mr. Keller, the hiring freeze is still on.

“Technically, we’re still in that period,” Mr. Keller said by phone.

“I think we’re in a position of having to hire carefully,” Mr. Keller said. “We put a lot of thought and a lot of vetting into hires. We certainly do it a lot more now. Any potential hires get approved at a higher level, being the masthead. Mostly being me and [managing editor Jill Abramson]. There are some desks that have openings they wish they could fill, and they just can’t.”

“I don’t think anyone from those desks are dying of starvation,” Mr. Keller added.

—G.S.

Mr. Kim’s embryonic magazine—named for the Harvard Square ZIP code—has nonetheless mastered one of the traditional roles: putting the touch on alumni. His principal backer is Atlantic Media boss David Bradley (Harvard Business School, 1977), who put up $4 million last year in support of what the 27-year-old Mr. Kim habitually describes as the “ Vanity Fair for Harvard.”

Not to be confused with the regular Vanity Fair, the Vanity Fair for the University of Ottawa!

“For the first time, at least as to any substantial sum, I am investing in someone else’s company and concept,” Mr. Bradley wrote in an e-mail. “Among my concerns is how little I bring to the 02138 editorial sensibility. The magazine’s market position is everything I am not: light, engaging, easy, original, sophisticated.”

So far, after two years of gestation, the Boston-based magazine consists of a barebones Web site, which appeared June 8. (“It’s a soft launch,” Mr. Kim said.) But with an actual issue still three months away, 02138 is already well into hobnobbing with the fabulous—at least, the Vanity Fair–for-Harvard fabulous.

On the model of Mr. Bradley’s public “listening tour” last year to round up a new Atlantic editor, Mr. Kim has been tapping into the Harvard-connected media class for advice and support.

“I’m as self-obsessed as any Harvard alumni,” said Kurt Andersen (class of ’76). Mr. Andersen met with Mr. Kim over coffee at Dean & Deluca earlier this year.

“I suppose I would be happy to look at and read a magazine about Harvard not put out by the alumni association,” Mr. Andersen said. “And the fact that Bradley is doing it made it seem that much more appealing.”

02138 would be the third magazine for Harvard College alumni. The university recently combined three newsletters into a glossy house organ, The Yard, which joins the existing Harvard Magazine, which gets half its budget from the university but is editorially independent.

Would a completely independent Harvard title be appealing enough that Mr. Andersen might consider contributing? “I have plenty on my plate without writing for them,” he said.

Mr. Kim also met with former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson (class of ’74) and Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows (class of ’70) the morning of the White House correspondents’ dinner, at a breakfast hosted by Mr. Bradley at Washington’s Hay-Adams hotel.

“These are people who are not only members of our community, but prominent members of the field,” Mr. Kim said. “They’ve been very supportive.”

Mr. Kim, a native of Korea, graduated with a degree in government. While at Harvard, he and classmate Daniel Loss started Current Magazine, a news title for college students that is now published by Newsweek. The two worked together as reporter-researchers at The New Republic in 1998; Mr. Kim had spent the previous summer at Brill’s Content and Mr. Loss was at George. Mr. Loss, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2004, is a co-founder of 02138 and currently works for it part time.

Outside the Crimson community, Mr. Kim counts Steven Brill (Yale ’72) as an unofficial advisor.

And Mr. Kim and Mr. Bradley have brought in former New York magazine editor Caroline Miller (Stanford ’70) as 02138’s editorial director. Ms. Miller has been spending two or three days a week in Boston, staying in an apartment rented by 02138.

“I have been working as a consultant,” Ms. Miller said. “The minute I heard the concept of the magazine, I thought it was a good idea to develop. My role has been a catalyst in developing the content and putting together the staff.”

The staff now numbers more than 10 editorial employees. Last month, the executive editor’s job went to Seth Bauer, the editor in chief of Body+Soul magazine, a lifestyle title acquired by Martha Stewart in August 2004. There has been turnover as well. Earlier this year, one of Mr. Kim’s editors departed for Body+Soul. And 02138’s managing editor resigned after a week.

Atlantic associate publisher Meredith Kopit moved from Mr. Bradley’s 150-year-old publication to his not-yet-born one, becoming 02138’s publisher.

Ms. Kopit said 02138 has drawn a “very positive” response from advertisers.

“I’m not in a position to share who we’re signing on,” Ms. Kopit said. “I will share categories. We brought on a single-malt scotch, a private wealth-management company. A European import-car company. High-end fashion advertising. Private banking.”

“It is a different mix than The Atlantic,” Ms. Kopit said. “We’re enjoying the occasion to draft off nice relations of advertisers we have with The Atlantic, but it’s a differentiated audience.”

The magazine’s other relations with The Atlantic have not been so cordial. Mr. Kim moved into an office in The Atlantic’s headquarters at 77 North Washington Street in December, just as The Atlantic itself was in the midst of being uprooted by Mr. Bradley and relocated to the Watergate, joining the rest of the Bradley media holdings in the capital.

At the time, Mr. Bradley told Alex Beam of The Boston Globe that he regarded Mr. Kim as “extreme talent,” saying he “might invest with him if he were starting a trade magazine on the cauliflower industry.”

Meanwhile, more than 30 staffers were leaving The Atlantic, a result Mr. Bradley had anticipated when he announced the move south. Atlantic deputy managing editor Toby Lester approached Mr. Kim and advised him that feelings were raw among some of the departing Atlantic people.

But 02138 failed to soothe things. “They were injected hypodermically into the office,” one Atlantic staffer said. “They were ramping up while there was a tourniquet applied to the Boston office.”

Another staffer referred to the newcomers as “the Bom Squad.”

When Mr. Kim and his growing staff moved into the offices being vacated by The Atlantic’s production department in January, a turf battle broke out, according to Atlantic sources. “There was confusion about things like supplies and printer paper,” one Atlantic staffer said. Mr. Kim further antagonized the Atlantic contingent by printing up stationary for 02138 bearing The Atlantic’s Boston fax number—a line that was supposed to be transferred, along with the accompanying machine, to D.C.

Later that month, Mr. Kim moved a gray couch that had been outside the office of The Atlantic’s then art director, Mary Parsons, into the office of his incoming managing editor.

“It was her personal couch,” a staffer said. “It wasn’t an Atlantic couch.”

The next morning, the couch was returned. (“It’s just confusion,” Mr. Kim said. “We wanted to be very sensitive.”) Following the incident, Atlantic office manager Robert Moeller affixed labels to Atlantic staffers’ items and boxes reading “You Touch, You Die.”

The Atlantic’s Boston outpost is now down to four employees. When the lease on the current office ends next year, both operations will move on to a space somewhere outside the North End. In the new offices, The Atlantic and 02138 will likely have separate entrances.

Meanwhile, according to one Atlantic source, 02138 has seized control of the in-house supply of coffee beans.

“The coffee inventory was put under lock and key,” the Atlantic staffer said. “We used to get periodic deliveries of bags of coffee. They were stored in the kitchen. They keep the coffee locked up in a cabinet in an office.”

That said, the Atlantic staffer added that 02138’s coffee custodian “makes sure there’s a steady supply of freshly brewed coffee.”

But are they brewing up some content? Mr. Kim said he was “not ready to unveil our media strategy,” but said in a follow-up interview that “the story lineup is not fixed. We have stories in motion.”

“We’re focused on the people, and their lives after Harvard,” Mr. Kim said. The Web site showcases thumbnail photos of Bill Gates, Tommy Lee Jones and Natalie Portman, among others, promoting a package of the 100 Most Influential Harvard Alumni for the debut issue.

The site also features a set of blogs, with titles such as “Expat,” “Cultured” and “Sex, Overthought.” That last one presents a dating essay titled “Nowhere to Go But Down,” which has nothing to do with sex, despite what one might over-think of the headline.

Mr. Loss said one of the front-of-the-book sections would be called “Vanitas.”

“It will deal primarily with stories about the Harvard tribe,” he said, “focusing on the people and on recent things they’ve been involved with.

“It’s Latin for ‘Vanities,’” Mr. Loss said.

Meanwhile, at the Vanity Fair of Princeton …. “I don’t think anything with our name on it should be a second-tier outlet,” New Yorker managing editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy said.

That’s why the Chrysler New Yorker was top of the line! But Ms. McCarthy was talking about the 81-year-old magazine’s online presence, which she has been in charge of developing. On June 19, Blake Eskin will become the magazine’s first-ever Web editor—that’s editor as in “content generator.”

So Mr. Eskin, whose hiring was first reported by Women’s Wear Daily, has to turn a site that’s been dedicated to partial reprints, archival material and mild author Q&A’s into a full arm of the old quality-first outlet.

Mr. Eskin, a graduate of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department and most recently of the online Jewish publication Nextbook, declined to discuss his plans, saying it was too soon. Ms. McCarthy described the venture as “a vague notion” at present.

“We want to give readers a reason to come to the site every day,” she said. “We haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

Mr. Eskin’s arrival is part of a Condé Nast–wide effort to get up to speed on the Web. The company is filling vacant Web-editor posts at half of its 29 titles, including the hiring of Andrew Hearst, also reported by WWD, as Vanity Fair’s Web editor.

“For Condé Nast, 2006 was like 1999 for other people,” one New Yorker staffer said.

And at The New Yorker, the brisk pace and inclusive tone of the Web is more or less the dead opposite of what created the magazine’s mystique.

“There doesn’t seem to be enthusiasm for blogging,” one staff writer said. “What would you blog when you have The New Yorker? Why descend to that level? You spend your whole professional career getting here. You start as a police reporter, then you build up to writing features at a newspaper and then a magazine, and then The New Yorker. Here you get to spend a couple of months on a piece. Why would you go backward to the beginning?”

Another writer expressed trust in Mr. Eskin. “I guess I’m just optimistic until they completely lean on me,” the writer said.

Staff writer Jeffrey Toobin was more enthusiastic about the project. “Look, I love writing for the magazine,” Mr. Toobin said. “I think if you can do something that’s consistent with the quality and value of The New Yorker, the technology matters less.”

“I’m intrigued and excited about us stepping on the Web in a more formal way,” pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones said. “If there’s a role for me to play, even if it means staying up all night, I’ll do it.”

One option the magazine has discussed is bringing Mr. Frere-Jones’ personal blog under its banner.

Stephin Merritt, beware! And Mr. Frere-Jones’ fellow staffers, get with the spirit!

“There’s no thought of an A-team or B-team,” Ms. McCarthy said. “Who wants to have a B-team?”

—G.S.

On June 5, New York Times metro editor Joe Sexton put out a memo announcing the hiring of Serge Kovaleski (“a muckraker of the first order”) from The Washington Post and Cara Buckley (“thrilled to have her”) from The Miami Herald.

The effusive personnel news made no reference to an earlier Times memo: the Sept. 20, 2005, message in which executive editor Bill Keller announced staff cuts and declared that the paper was “closing the door immediately on new hiring. This freeze will last at least until the end of the year.”

So is Times hiring unfrozen?

Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty wrote in an e-mail that the freeze was long since over, and that it had only applied to the period during which The Times was offering voluntary buyouts. “[T]here really hasn’t been any freeze other than for that 45-day period,” Ms. McNulty wrote.

That could explain why the paper has hired Mark Leibovich, Manny Fernandez, Michael Barbaro and Farhana Hossain from The Post; Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times; and former Detroit-bureau contract writer Jeremy Peters. And why it has approached Franklin Foer and Ryan Lizza of The New Republic, and held talks with Post White House reporter Peter Baker, Style reporter Libby Copeland and China correspondent Peter Goodman. In all, the paper has hired three dozen newsroom staffers since September 2005, according to a spokesperson.

Except! According to Mr. Keller, the hiring freeze is still on.

“Technically, we’re still in that period,” Mr. Keller said by phone.

“I think we’re in a position of having to hire carefully,” Mr. Keller said. “We put a lot of thought and a lot of vetting into hires. We certainly do it a lot more now. Any potential hires get approved at a higher level, being the masthead. Mostly being me and [managing editor Jill Abramson]. There are some desks that have openings they wish they could fill, and they just can’t.”

“I don’t think anyone from those desks are dying of starvation,” Mr. Keller added.

—G.S.

“She freaked out and she hung up,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “and turned on the TV and saw what happened to the CBS News crew.”

The bombing that hit the CBS team—killing cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and leaving correspondent Kimberly Dozier in critical condition—made Iraq the deadliest modern war for journalists, by the tally of the Committee to Protect Journalists. When The Times posted job openings in Baghdad in March, only five applicants came forward.

Still, Mr. von Zielbauer, 39, is on his way, to be joined in July by Damien Cave, 32, and later this fall by Marc Santora, 31. The three are on six-to-eight week trial tours, to prepare them to be possible replacements for bureau staff.

“It’s a complete volunteer army,” Times foreign editor Susan Chira said of the Baghdad recruiting effort. “What we make clear is that this story is the most dangerous and challenging and stressful assignment in the world.”

For reporters in their 20’s and 30’s, it’s also the biggest assignment there is.

“For me, it’s the most important story of our generation,” Mr. Santora said. “It’s something I feel passionate about trying to do.”

Mr. Cave, currently in the Newark bureau, has covered military-recruiting efforts on the home front. He closely echoed Mr. Santora’s generational sentiments. “Having done enough military reporting to feel what some of these families are going through, I felt going to Iraq is something I should experience too,” Mr. Cave said.

In the face of a historic reporting opportunity, even Mr. von Zielbauer’s mother relented. “To her credit,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “she called me the next day and said she was supportive of me and asked to stay in touch.”

“As one of my colleagues said, it’s the story of our time,” Mr. von Zielbauer said.

The Times is seeking to replenish the paper’s pool of Baghdad correspondents, as the veterans begin extracting themselves from the war zone. “People will be in this summer entering their fourth year covering this war,” Baghdad bureau chief John Burns said by phone from Iraq. “A natural foreign assignment doesn’t run over four to five years. Clearly, when you get to that length of time, then people start thinking about life after Iraq …. This is a pretty limited environment to live.”

Those limitations make the job less attractive to reporters with families and domestic responsibilities. All three of the new Times representatives are childless, and only Mr. Cave among them is married.

The turnover in Iraq extends beyond The Times. On June 8, The Washington Post is sending 28-year-old metro reporter Josh Partlow to Baghdad, where he will join Nelson Hernandez, 28, who has been there since December. The Post is looking to replace current full-time correspondent Jonathan Finer and bureau chief Ellen Knickmeyer by the end of the year.

“The biggest reason I wanted to come to Iraq is because my younger brother, Thomas, is a Marine corporal who is coming here on his first tour in September,” Mr. Hernandez wrote via e-mail from Iraq. “I want to be able to relate to him when he gets back. I have also had a fascination with the military since I was young. My dad was an Army paratrooper and for a long time I thought I might follow in his footsteps. One of the first serious books I read as a kid was The United States in World War I.

“I wanted to see the face of battle. My life would not have been complete unless I had come here.”

Meanwhile, among Times Iraq veterans, Dexter Filkins will be beginning a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in September. According to Times sources, correspondent Ed Wong is in discussions with the foreign desk to leave Iraq. And Mr. Burns has been offered the paper’s London bureau, but hasn’t yet decided whether to end his Iraq stay.

“We’ve got various movements going on here,” Mr. Burns said, though he declined to discuss specific staffing changes.

“There’s a certain amount of natural turnover here,” Mr. Burns said. “And so we need to start bringing new people in so the old people can go.”

At any given time, The Times has five or six correspondents in Baghdad, in addition to more than 70 local Iraqi staffers. Many of the current Times correspondents have been in the country since the invasion in March 2003.

“We’re rotating some people in with no commitment either way,” Ms. Chira said. “They’re trying it out to see if it works for them and works for us. I have to expect we will have people who will rotate out in six to nine months. We want to maintain expertise on the ground, and we’re feeling it will be optimal for people to go into Baghdad while we have the most experienced people there. We need to prepare.”

For Mr. Cave, that preparation will include a survival course taught by Centurion Risk Assessment Services, an outfit staffed by former British Royal Marine commandos.

The five-day program, in the Shenandoah Valley, includes lessons about I.E.D.’s and other booby traps, as well as instruction covering survival skills, first aid, the limits of body armor and the use of guides and fixers, according to Centurion’s founder and managing director, Paul Rees. Mr. Rees said that hands-on activity is “63 percent” of the training.

“We put them all through a hostage-taking scenario,” Mr. Rees said. “It’s not meant to scare them witless. It’s to teach them how the hostage-taking process goes and what to expect. We want them to know what is a typical stage and what will come next …. We do kidnap them and debrief them thoroughly. We video it. We discuss different options.”

“I don’t know how much training you can do for this kind of thing,” Mr. Cave said. “But every little training helps.”

Mr. Cave said he has been reading about the conflict, citing books by George Packer, Anthony Shadid and Michael Gordon.

Mr. von Zielbauer went through the course last June, in preparation for an Iraq assignment that didn’t come to pass. Before joining The Times seven years ago, he gained foreign experience covering the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s government in Serbia in 1998, as a stringer for Newsday.

“It can feel almost routine to read stories about Iraq in the paper,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “but it occurs to me that there is no more important story in the world right now. We all have questions what Baghdad feels, smells and sounds like. I want to know that.”

Mr. Santora—formerly Maureen Dowd’s assistant and now a metro reporter—will be on his second tour. At the start of the invasion, he covered the war for four months from southern Iraq.

“The last time I was there, I was not embedded,” Mr. Santora said. “I was able to travel to Karbala, to Najaf, just to visit. Basically, I was able to travel clear across the country. It had its own dangers and problems, but now, I’m pretty sure, it’s much more difficult. I think it will be a world of difference.”

T he New York Times Magazine of Gerald Marzorati is many magazines—more magazines all the time. The next one, the real-estate magazine planned for this autumn, will be called Key.

Carol Day of the Times marketing department revealed Key’s name June 4, as she introduced Mr. Marzorati to an audience at the CUNY Graduate Center. It was part of a litany of Mr. Marzorati’s accomplishments since taking over the Sunday magazine, along with the T style monthlies—fashion, dining, entertaining—and the sports quarterly, Play.

And the event itself: the first annual “Sunday with The Magazine,” in which Mr. Marzorati’s editors and writers and their big-meat subjects gathered to present live symposiums on Times Magazine topics. If a certain other weekly magazine can have an entire weeklong festival, why can’t The Times’ budding empire have one day? After Ms. Day finished listing his accomplishments in real estate, fashion and sports, Mr. Marzorati—wearing a summery olive-green suit, black dress shoes and no socks—took the stage to lead a panel discussion about the press and the Iraq war.

There were some 200 people on hand, watching reporters Dexter Filkins, Peter Maass and David Rieff discuss the war with essayist Michael Massing. Mr. Massing accused The Times of burying stories about civilian casualties and the Bush administration’s flawed case for war; Mr. Filkins called the charges “absurd” and cited multiple counterexamples. The two cut each other off. Eyes were rolled.

After some 90 minutes, Mr. Marzorati opened the floor to the audience. A few questions in, a young woman stepped to the microphone and asked, “So, um, why did we go to war, again?”

The panelists and the crowd shared an uncomfortable laugh—no one onstage answered, and Mr. Marzorati went to the next person in line.

Riding in the elevator afterward, Mr. Marzorati sounded disappointed. The questions had dealt with the war directly rather the designated subject, the war’s coverage. The guests weren’t quite interested in what Mr. Marzorati had wanted to talk about.

After a quick photo op with Howard Dean, Karl Lagerfeld and Gail Sheehy, Mr. Marzorati made his way to the dimly lit basement green room. Mr. Dean and Mr. Lagerfeld had had very little to say to one another when they met. Mr. Marzorati, the man who put them in that situation, thought it was very funny. “They’ve had very different lives!” he chuckled, recounting the scene to his magazine’s Q&A scribe, Deborah Solomon, and editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg.

Was there a certain lack of coherence to the day’s events? “No one in Europe would have a problem, you know, seeing what’s interesting and beautiful about Rochas slacks or a Dior suit and then also be able to really care about, you know, the civil war in the Congo,” Mr. Marzorati said. He was sitting in a bare room off the lobby, discussing the event and the magazine. His suit pants were short, showing his sockless ankles. “We have this bifurcation in our culture, in our, you know, chattering class. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be that way.”

If Mr. Marzorati was challenging his readers to embrace diverse topics, many of them failed. Only a handful of attendees came for more than one of the 75-minute talks. Partly it was because each one cost a separate $25, but it also reflected the limits of general interest: Clinton administration junkie James Traub spoke to Madeleine Albright; Mark Bryant, editor of Play, spoke to Mets-man Omar Minaya. Howard Dean was interviewed by political writer Matt Bai, Karl Lagerfeld by style editor Stefano Tonchi and fashion critic Cathy Horyn. Somewhere in there were lectures by Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen, crossword guru Will Shortz, a panel of TV celebrity chefs and an interview with musician James Blunt.

“I think I’m making a bet that there is a person who, in an encounter with a great piece of writing or some great photographs or a great headline, can be made curious about almost anything,” Mr. Marzorati said. “I still make a bet that that person exists.”

This past October, Mr. Marzorati told public editor Byron Calame that he imagined his reader to be “a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman.”

“She’s busy with work, and also with family matters,” Mr. Marzorati was quoted as saying in that piece, “but Sunday morning is a time she’ll allow herself to read something that is not work related, or kids’ homework related. She’s got 45 minutes, an hour …. My hunch is she wants to read not something escapist but something substantive—something that holds a mirror up to her own life or opens a window onto a pretty troubled world.”

On June 4, Mr. Marzorati said that he had just been trying to give Mr. Calame a creative answer—that he does not actually “sit down and have some very specific imagined reader.”

Instead, he has an ideal.

“We want to bring people proximate to big ideas. People want to be proximate to ideas,” he said. “They hunger for ideas.”

And Sunday breakfast is the time to feed them. “People just have more time to read and reflect, and we reach them all at the same time,” Mr. Marzorati said. “It’s the moment to catch people with stories about the way we live now.”

“The Way We Live Now” is the modern Times Magazine’s all-purpose slogan: the title of its front-of-the-book section and the theme of “Sunday with The Magazine.” Everywhere was we, we, we; each of the 12 sessions was labeled something cute: “What We Eat” for the food panel, “How We Think and Act” for Mr. Cohen, “How We Govern” for Dr. Dean. After about a half-hour, Mr. Marzorati excused himself and headed off to the Dean presentation.

But who’s “We”? New Yorker readers go to the New Yorker Festival because it’s a New Yorker kind of thing to do. What made the readers of The New York Times Magazine get up from around Mr. Marzorati’s imaginary national kitchen table and come out on a Sunday?

Rita and David Kaufman said they had come because they are fans of Randy Cohen. Mr. Kaufman said he likes The Ethicist’s humility and practicality; his daughter even got a question in print once (the question was about plagiarism; Mr. Kaufman said he couldn’t recall the nuances of Mr. Cohen’s verdict).

One woman, sitting in the auditorium awaiting the Albright interview, said she was there because she’d been reading Ms. Albright’s autobiography. “How long are these supposed to be?” she asked.

Still others came for reasons that fell somewhere in between. High-school student Alex Taureaux, for instance, came because he’s obsessed with Karl Lagerfeld and because he thinks The Times Magazine is “just really excellent.”

“It’s so good,” he said, dressed in a dapper tan jacket and clutching five complementary issues of T. “It is really excellently written.” And who reads it? “Intellectual beings,” said Mr. Taureaux’s friend, Haley Desette. “This is world-renowned. It’s well known, you know?”

Connie Lee, a late-30’s-something businesswoman, let out a little laugh when she heard about Mr. Marzorati’s portrait of a reader from last year’s Public Editor’s column.

Why does she read The Times Magazine? “It’s just physically there,” she said. “The minute you step out of the house, it’s right there in front of you.”

—Leon Neyfakh

“She freaked out and she hung up,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “and turned on the TV and saw what happened to the CBS News crew.”

The bombing that hit the CBS team—killing cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and leaving correspondent Kimberly Dozier in critical condition—made Iraq the deadliest modern war for journalists, by the tally of the Committee to Protect Journalists. When The Times posted job openings in Baghdad in March, only five applicants came forward.

Still, Mr. von Zielbauer, 39, is on his way, to be joined in July by Damien Cave, 32, and later this fall by Marc Santora, 31. The three are on six-to-eight week trial tours, to prepare them to be possible replacements for bureau staff.

“It’s a complete volunteer army,” Times foreign editor Susan Chira said of the Baghdad recruiting effort. “What we make clear is that this story is the most dangerous and challenging and stressful assignment in the world.”

For reporters in their 20’s and 30’s, it’s also the biggest assignment there is.

“For me, it’s the most important story of our generation,” Mr. Santora said. “It’s something I feel passionate about trying to do.”

Mr. Cave, currently in the Newark bureau, has covered military-recruiting efforts on the home front. He closely echoed Mr. Santora’s generational sentiments. “Having done enough military reporting to feel what some of these families are going through, I felt going to Iraq is something I should experience too,” Mr. Cave said.

In the face of a historic reporting opportunity, even Mr. von Zielbauer’s mother relented. “To her credit,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “she called me the next day and said she was supportive of me and asked to stay in touch.”

“As one of my colleagues said, it’s the story of our time,” Mr. von Zielbauer said.

The Times is seeking to replenish the paper’s pool of Baghdad correspondents, as the veterans begin extracting themselves from the war zone. “People will be in this summer entering their fourth year covering this war,” Baghdad bureau chief John Burns said by phone from Iraq. “A natural foreign assignment doesn’t run over four to five years. Clearly, when you get to that length of time, then people start thinking about life after Iraq …. This is a pretty limited environment to live.”

Those limitations make the job less attractive to reporters with families and domestic responsibilities. All three of the new Times representatives are childless, and only Mr. Cave among them is married.

The turnover in Iraq extends beyond The Times. On June 8, The Washington Post is sending 28-year-old metro reporter Josh Partlow to Baghdad, where he will join Nelson Hernandez, 28, who has been there since December. The Post is looking to replace current full-time correspondent Jonathan Finer and bureau chief Ellen Knickmeyer by the end of the year.

“The biggest reason I wanted to come to Iraq is because my younger brother, Thomas, is a Marine corporal who is coming here on his first tour in September,” Mr. Hernandez wrote via e-mail from Iraq. “I want to be able to relate to him when he gets back. I have also had a fascination with the military since I was young. My dad was an Army paratrooper and for a long time I thought I might follow in his footsteps. One of the first serious books I read as a kid was The United States in World War I.

“I wanted to see the face of battle. My life would not have been complete unless I had come here.”

Meanwhile, among Times Iraq veterans, Dexter Filkins will be beginning a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in September. According to Times sources, correspondent Ed Wong is in discussions with the foreign desk to leave Iraq. And Mr. Burns has been offered the paper’s London bureau, but hasn’t yet decided whether to end his Iraq stay.

“We’ve got various movements going on here,” Mr. Burns said, though he declined to discuss specific staffing changes.

“There’s a certain amount of natural turnover here,” Mr. Burns said. “And so we need to start bringing new people in so the old people can go.”

At any given time, The Times has five or six correspondents in Baghdad, in addition to more than 70 local Iraqi staffers. Many of the current Times correspondents have been in the country since the invasion in March 2003.

“We’re rotating some people in with no commitment either way,” Ms. Chira said. “They’re trying it out to see if it works for them and works for us. I have to expect we will have people who will rotate out in six to nine months. We want to maintain expertise on the ground, and we’re feeling it will be optimal for people to go into Baghdad while we have the most experienced people there. We need to prepare.”

For Mr. Cave, that preparation will include a survival course taught by Centurion Risk Assessment Services, an outfit staffed by former British Royal Marine commandos.

The five-day program, in the Shenandoah Valley, includes lessons about I.E.D.’s and other booby traps, as well as instruction covering survival skills, first aid, the limits of body armor and the use of guides and fixers, according to Centurion’s founder and managing director, Paul Rees. Mr. Rees said that hands-on activity is “63 percent” of the training.

“We put them all through a hostage-taking scenario,” Mr. Rees said. “It’s not meant to scare them witless. It’s to teach them how the hostage-taking process goes and what to expect. We want them to know what is a typical stage and what will come next …. We do kidnap them and debrief them thoroughly. We video it. We discuss different options.”

“I don’t know how much training you can do for this kind of thing,” Mr. Cave said. “But every little training helps.”

Mr. Cave said he has been reading about the conflict, citing books by George Packer, Anthony Shadid and Michael Gordon.

Mr. von Zielbauer went through the course last June, in preparation for an Iraq assignment that didn’t come to pass. Before joining The Times seven years ago, he gained foreign experience covering the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s government in Serbia in 1998, as a stringer for Newsday.

“It can feel almost routine to read stories about Iraq in the paper,” Mr. von Zielbauer said, “but it occurs to me that there is no more important story in the world right now. We all have questions what Baghdad feels, smells and sounds like. I want to know that.”

Mr. Santora—formerly Maureen Dowd’s assistant and now a metro reporter—will be on his second tour. At the start of the invasion, he covered the war for four months from southern Iraq.

“The last time I was there, I was not embedded,” Mr. Santora said. “I was able to travel to Karbala, to Najaf, just to visit. Basically, I was able to travel clear across the country. It had its own dangers and problems, but now, I’m pretty sure, it’s much more difficult. I think it will be a world of difference.”

The New York Times Magazine of Gerald Marzorati is many magazines—more magazines all the time. The next one, the real-estate magazine planned for this autumn, will be called Key.

Carol Day of the Times marketing department revealed Key’s name June 4, as she introduced Mr. Marzorati to an audience at the CUNY Graduate Center. It was part of a litany of Mr. Marzorati’s accomplishments since taking over the Sunday magazine, along with the T style monthlies—fashion, dining, entertaining—and the sports quarterly, Play.

And the event itself: the first annual “Sunday with The Magazine,” in which Mr. Marzorati’s editors and writers and their big-meat subjects gathered to present live symposiums on Times Magazine topics. If a certain other weekly magazine can have an entire weeklong festival, why can’t The Times’ budding empire have one day? After Ms. Day finished listing his accomplishments in real estate, fashion and sports, Mr. Marzorati—wearing a summery olive-green suit, black dress shoes and no socks—took the stage to lead a panel discussion about the press and the Iraq war.

There were some 200 people on hand, watching reporters Dexter Filkins, Peter Maass and David Rieff discuss the war with essayist Michael Massing. Mr. Massing accused The Times of burying stories about civilian casualties and the Bush administration’s flawed case for war; Mr. Filkins called the charges “absurd” and cited multiple counterexamples. The two cut each other off. Eyes were rolled.

After some 90 minutes, Mr. Marzorati opened the floor to the audience. A few questions in, a young woman stepped to the microphone and asked, “So, um, why did we go to war, again?”

The panelists and the crowd shared an uncomfortable laugh—no one onstage answered, and Mr. Marzorati went to the next person in line.

Riding in the elevator afterward, Mr. Marzorati sounded disappointed. The questions had dealt with the war directly rather the designated subject, the war’s coverage. The guests weren’t quite interested in what Mr. Marzorati had wanted to talk about.

After a quick photo op with Howard Dean, Karl Lagerfeld and Gail Sheehy, Mr. Marzorati made his way to the dimly lit basement green room. Mr. Dean and Mr. Lagerfeld had had very little to say to one another when they met. Mr. Marzorati, the man who put them in that situation, thought it was very funny. “They’ve had very different lives!” he chuckled, recounting the scene to his magazine’s Q&A scribe, Deborah Solomon, and editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg.

Was there a certain lack of coherence to the day’s events? “No one in Europe would have a problem, you know, seeing what’s interesting and beautiful about Rochas slacks or a Dior suit and then also be able to really care about, you know, the civil war in the Congo,” Mr. Marzorati said. He was sitting in a bare room off the lobby, discussing the event and the magazine. His suit pants were short, showing his sockless ankles. “We have this bifurcation in our culture, in our, you know, chattering class. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be that way.”

If Mr. Marzorati was challenging his readers to embrace diverse topics, many of them failed. Only a handful of attendees came for more than one of the 75-minute talks. Partly it was because each one cost a separate $25, but it also reflected the limits of general interest: Clinton administration junkie James Traub spoke to Madeleine Albright; Mark Bryant, editor of Play, spoke to Mets-man Omar Minaya. Howard Dean was interviewed by political writer Matt Bai, Karl Lagerfeld by style editor Stefano Tonchi and fashion critic Cathy Horyn. Somewhere in there were lectures by Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen, crossword guru Will Shortz, a panel of TV celebrity chefs and an interview with musician James Blunt.

“I think I’m making a bet that there is a person who, in an encounter with a great piece of writing or some great photographs or a great headline, can be made curious about almost anything,” Mr. Marzorati said. “I still make a bet that that person exists.”

This past October, Mr. Marzorati told public editor Byron Calame that he imagined his reader to be “a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman.”

“She’s busy with work, and also with family matters,” Mr. Marzorati was quoted as saying in that piece, “but Sunday morning is a time she’ll allow herself to read something that is not work related, or kids’ homework related. She’s got 45 minutes, an hour …. My hunch is she wants to read not something escapist but something substantive—something that holds a mirror up to her own life or opens a window onto a pretty troubled world.”

On June 4, Mr. Marzorati said that he had just been trying to give Mr. Calame a creative answer—that he does not actually “sit down and have some very specific imagined reader.”

Instead, he has an ideal.

“We want to bring people proximate to big ideas. People want to be proximate to ideas,” he said. “They hunger for ideas.”

And Sunday breakfast is the time to feed them. “People just have more time to read and reflect, and we reach them all at the same time,” Mr. Marzorati said. “It’s the moment to catch people with stories about the way we live now.”

“The Way We Live Now” is the modern Times Magazine’s all-purpose slogan: the title of its front-of-the-book section and the theme of “Sunday with The Magazine.” Everywhere was we, we, we; each of the 12 sessions was labeled something cute: “What We Eat” for the food panel, “How We Think and Act” for Mr. Cohen, “How We Govern” for Dr. Dean. After about a half-hour, Mr. Marzorati excused himself and headed off to the Dean presentation.

But who’s “We”? New Yorker readers go to the New Yorker Festival because it’s a New Yorker kind of thing to do. What made the readers of The New York Times Magazine get up from around Mr. Marzorati’s imaginary national kitchen table and come out on a Sunday?

Rita and David Kaufman said they had come because they are fans of Randy Cohen. Mr. Kaufman said he likes The Ethicist’s humility and practicality; his daughter even got a question in print once (the question was about plagiarism; Mr. Kaufman said he couldn’t recall the nuances of Mr. Cohen’s verdict).

One woman, sitting in the auditorium awaiting the Albright interview, said she was there because she’d been reading Ms. Albright’s autobiography. “How long are these supposed to be?” she asked.

Still others came for reasons that fell somewhere in between. High-school student Alex Taureaux, for instance, came because he’s obsessed with Karl Lagerfeld and because he thinks The Times Magazine is “just really excellent.”

“It’s so good,” he said, dressed in a dapper tan jacket and clutching five complementary issues of T. “It is really excellently written.” And who reads it? “Intellectual beings,” said Mr. Taureaux’s friend, Haley Desette. “This is world-renowned. It’s well known, you know?”

Connie Lee, a late-30’s-something businesswoman, let out a little laugh when she heard about Mr. Marzorati’s portrait of a reader from last year’s Public Editor’s column.

Why does she read The Times Magazine? “It’s just physically there,” she said. “The minute you step out of the house, it’s right there in front of you.”

—Leon Neyfakh

Economics and demographics aside, the news business has been sorely troubled by the rise of the media-bashing complex, a full-blown industry of press critics armed with cable news shows, blogs and talk-radio programs. Their mission is simple: discredit and defang the so-called mainstream media (MSM).

Historically, the wolf pack of media bashers has come from the right. Conservatives found they could whip up support from their base by exposing the MSM’s “liberal media bias” with a jab at The New York Times or the CBS News. (Roger Ailes launched Fox News to wild success based entirely on that single premise.) Since the attacks of Sept. 11, however, the piñata-like MSM has had to contend with a new band of angry critics lashing out from the left. Outfitted with their own noisy blogs like the Huffington Post, liberal press critics have attacked the leading news organizations with a fervor equal to their conservative rivals. The media’s liberal critics contend that the MSM in general, and the Washington press corps in particular, has been nothing less than a friendly stenographer for the Bush administration.

Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs is the latest title to chronicle the left’s beef with the MSM during the Bush years. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Mr. Boehlert takes the reader on a journey through Lexis-Nexis to show how the media obscured facts, spun news to favor Republicans and, in some cases, reported falsehoods (and then made no attempt to correct the record). This colossal misstep has been expertly documented before in Michael Massing’s Now They Tell Us (2004), based on his award-winning series in The New York Review of Books. Though Mr. Boehlert’s critique extends beyond W.M.D. to the press’ coverage of myriad issues, he doesn’t do the original reporting that would freshen his argument.

Here’s the thesis, baldly stated: “[T]he mainstream news media completely lost their bearings during the Bush years and abdicated their Fourth Estate responsibility to report without fear or favor and to ask uncomfortable questions to people in power.” The press, in Mr. Boehlert’s view, “came to fear the facts and the consequences of reporting them.”

Through a series of case studies, Mr. Boehlert portrays the media as elitist insiders currying favor with Beltway Republicans, while exhibiting open contempt for hapless Democrats. Witness the media’s coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Mr. Boehlert contends that the media gave the group’s specious arguments credence without calling them out on inconsistencies or misstatements.

Another instance: During last year’s Terry Schiavo debate, ABC’s The Note, an influential Web digest of political news, reported that “the Republican leadership seems to have succeeded in framing the discourse around a moral question.” Conversely, The Note said the Democrats’ “lack of clarity and weakness are the orders of the day.”

And again: When Time anointed President Bush its 2004 Man of the Year, Mr. Boehlert points out, the magazine published twice as many articles as it did when Bill Clinton earned the same honor a decade earlier.

Lapdogs also replays the media scandals of the Bush years. From the male escort Jeff Gannon to the paid pundit Armstrong Williams, Mr. Boehlert compiles a damaging list of revelations of wrongdoing inside the White House, but remains exasperated that the MSM let Mr. Bush off so easily. For example, Mr. Boehlert notes that the MSM, fueled by conservative bloggers, gave Dan Rather’s botched 60 Minutes II report on Mr. Bush’s National Guard service wall-to-wall coverage, while at the same time ignoring the substantive evidence, reported in the Boston Globe, that Mr. Bush shirked his responsibility to serve in the early 1970’s.

We’re also invited to revisit the coverage of Iraqi W.M.D. in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, with former Times reporter Judith Miller front and center, funneling the administration’s spin onto the front page. (I should mention here that Mr. Boehlert cites one of my Observer pieces in building his case that The Times hyped pro-war coverage.)

Mr. Boehlert deftly points to troubling trends in the MSM’s war coverage. Last year, it took weeks for the MSM to cover the so-called Downing Street Memo, a document leaked to The Times of London in 2005, which purported to show that President Bush was determined to go to war with Iraq as far back as July 2002, at a time when he was publicly calling for a diplomatic solution to the standoff. Additionally, Mr. Boehlert notes that the media has scaled back war coverage even as the carnage has grown worse. In 2003, ABC, NBC and CBS aired an average of 388 minutes of coverage on Iraq each month, Mr. Boehlert writes, but in 2005, that number had slipped to 166 minutes per month.

In tone and substance, much of Lapdogs reads like an extended blog post—and sometimes it’s just as careless. In explaining why The Times didn’t report on the mysterious bulge that appeared under Mr. Bush’s suit jacket in the 2004 Presidential debate, Mr. Boehlert claims that The Times chose “what to report on the basis of how it would affect Bush’s reelection chances.” Really? How does Mr. Boehlert know this? Did he interview Times reporters and ask them if they wanted Mr. Bush to win? The reader is left guessing.

When they attack the MSM, liberal critics like Mr. Boehlert—though they seek to distance themselves from their conservative counterparts—contribute to the erosion of the public’s faith in our establishment media. Writing in The New Republic last December, Franklin Foer examined how liberal press critics have become aides-de-camp for conservatives in their anti-media campaign: “By repeating conservative criticisms about the allegedly elitist, sycophantic, biased MSM, liberal bloggers have played straight into conservative hands. These bloggers have begun unwittingly doing conservatives’ dirty work,” Mr. Foer wrote.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Boehlert paints a dim picture of the future for the MSM. He complains that even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which supposedly awakened a somnolent press corps, the MSM continued to go easy on Mr. Bush.

Mr. Boehlert doesn’t offer any prescriptions for change; he merely urges reporters to ask tougher questions. And he hardly bothers to explain why the press went into a collective slumber, though he does make passing reference to the effects of corporate media consolidation, the patriotic upswing following 9/11 and the strong-arm tactics of the Bush administration’s press office.

The press can’t win. When The Times publishes a piece like its domestic spying exposé, the paper is criticized by the left for sitting on the piece for over a year, and excoriated by the right for being unpatriotic in a time of war. The polarization of American politics has grown so severe that partisan critics now blame the media for failing to bring down their political enemies. Unless bloggers on both sides of the aisle understand that it’s not the job of the press to do their political bidding, the media better get used to being a punching bag.

Gabriel Sherman is a reporter at The Observer.

Economics and demographics aside, the news business has been sorely troubled by the rise of the media-bashing complex, a full-blown industry of press critics armed with cable news shows, blogs and talk-radio programs. Their mission is simple: discredit and defang the so-called mainstream media (MSM).

Historically, the wolf pack of media bashers has come from the right. Conservatives found they could whip up support from their base by exposing the MSM’s “liberal media bias” with a jab at The New York Times or the CBS News. (Roger Ailes launched Fox News to wild success based entirely on that single premise.) Since the attacks of Sept. 11, however, the piñata-like MSM has had to contend with a new band of angry critics lashing out from the left. Outfitted with their own noisy blogs like the Huffington Post, liberal press critics have attacked the leading news organizations with a fervor equal to their conservative rivals. The media’s liberal critics contend that the MSM in general, and the Washington press corps in particular, has been nothing less than a friendly stenographer for the Bush administration.

Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs is the latest title to chronicle the left’s beef with the MSM during the Bush years. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Mr. Boehlert takes the reader on a journey through Lexis-Nexis to show how the media obscured facts, spun news to favor Republicans and, in some cases, reported falsehoods (and then made no attempt to correct the record). This colossal misstep has been expertly documented before in Michael Massing’s Now They Tell Us (2004), based on his award-winning series in The New York Review of Books. Though Mr. Boehlert’s critique extends beyond W.M.D. to the press’ coverage of myriad issues, he doesn’t do the original reporting that would freshen his argument.

Here’s the thesis, baldly stated: “[T]he mainstream news media completely lost their bearings during the Bush years and abdicated their Fourth Estate responsibility to report without fear or favor and to ask uncomfortable questions to people in power.” The press, in Mr. Boehlert’s view, “came to fear the facts and the consequences of reporting them.”

Through a series of case studies, Mr. Boehlert portrays the media as elitist insiders currying favor with Beltway Republicans, while exhibiting open contempt for hapless Democrats. Witness the media’s coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Mr. Boehlert contends that the media gave the group’s specious arguments credence without calling them out on inconsistencies or misstatements.

Another instance: During last year’s Terry Schiavo debate, ABC’s The Note, an influential Web digest of political news, reported that “the Republican leadership seems to have succeeded in framing the discourse around a moral question.” Conversely, The Note said the Democrats’ “lack of clarity and weakness are the orders of the day.”

And again: When Time anointed President Bush its 2004 Man of the Year, Mr. Boehlert points out, the magazine published twice as many articles as it did when Bill Clinton earned the same honor a decade earlier.

Lapdogs also replays the media scandals of the Bush years. From the male escort Jeff Gannon to the paid pundit Armstrong Williams, Mr. Boehlert compiles a damaging list of revelations of wrongdoing inside the White House, but remains exasperated that the MSM let Mr. Bush off so easily. For example, Mr. Boehlert notes that the MSM, fueled by conservative bloggers, gave Dan Rather’s botched 60 Minutes II report on Mr. Bush’s National Guard service wall-to-wall coverage, while at the same time ignoring the substantive evidence, reported in the Boston Globe, that Mr. Bush shirked his responsibility to serve in the early 1970’s.

We’re also invited to revisit the coverage of Iraqi W.M.D. in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, with former Times reporter Judith Miller front and center, funneling the administration’s spin onto the front page. (I should mention here that Mr. Boehlert cites one of my Observer pieces in building his case that The Times hyped pro-war coverage.)

Mr. Boehlert deftly points to troubling trends in the MSM’s war coverage. Last year, it took weeks for the MSM to cover the so-called Downing Street Memo, a document leaked to The Times of London in 2005, which purported to show that President Bush was determined to go to war with Iraq as far back as July 2002, at a time when he was publicly calling for a diplomatic solution to the standoff. Additionally, Mr. Boehlert notes that the media has scaled back war coverage even as the carnage has grown worse. In 2003, ABC, NBC and CBS aired an average of 388 minutes of coverage on Iraq each month, Mr. Boehlert writes, but in 2005, that number had slipped to 166 minutes per month.

In tone and substance, much of Lapdogs reads like an extended blog post—and sometimes it’s just as careless. In explaining why The Times didn’t report on the mysterious bulge that appeared under Mr. Bush’s suit jacket in the 2004 Presidential debate, Mr. Boehlert claims that The Times chose “what to report on the basis of how it would affect Bush’s reelection chances.” Really? How does Mr. Boehlert know this? Did he interview Times reporters and ask them if they wanted Mr. Bush to win? The reader is left guessing.

When they attack the MSM, liberal critics like Mr. Boehlert—though they seek to distance themselves from their conservative counterparts—contribute to the erosion of the public’s faith in our establishment media. Writing in The New Republic last December, Franklin Foer examined how liberal press critics have become aides-de-camp for conservatives in their anti-media campaign: “By repeating conservative criticisms about the allegedly elitist, sycophantic, biased MSM, liberal bloggers have played straight into conservative hands. These bloggers have begun unwittingly doing conservatives’ dirty work,” Mr. Foer wrote.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Boehlert paints a dim picture of the future for the MSM. He complains that even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which supposedly awakened a somnolent press corps, the MSM continued to go easy on Mr. Bush.

Mr. Boehlert doesn’t offer any prescriptions for change; he merely urges reporters to ask tougher questions. And he hardly bothers to explain why the press went into a collective slumber, though he does make passing reference to the effects of corporate media consolidation, the patriotic upswing following 9/11 and the strong-arm tactics of the Bush administration’s press office.

The press can’t win. When The Times publishes a piece like its domestic spying exposé, the paper is criticized by the left for sitting on the piece for over a year, and excoriated by the right for being unpatriotic in a time of war. The polarization of American politics has grown so severe that partisan critics now blame the media for failing to bring down their political enemies. Unless bloggers on both sides of the aisle understand that it’s not the job of the press to do their political bidding, the media better get used to being a punching bag.

Gabriel Sherman is a reporter at The Observer.

Two days before, she had hosted the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the annual live, glittery enactment of Ms. Wintour’s personally curated Friendster page. And WWD had buried it inside, in some 700 words, on pages four and five.

Ms. Wintour telephoned Patrick McCarthy, the editorial director of the Fairchild Fashion Group, which publishes WWD. She let him know her feelings.

“She called to express her frustration with the placement of the coverage,” Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell said by phone on May 30. “It had nothing to do with the tone of the coverage.

“They’re welcome to write what they do. But given the magnitude of the evening, with the enormous amount of celebrities, fashion designers, models and society figures there, their coverage to us felt very incidental.

“They covered it like a normal cocktail party.”

“We gave it substantial coverage,” said Andrea Kaplan, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCarthy. “The left-hand page was the whole ‘Eye’ column on Wednesday, with eight photos.”

Ms. Kaplan added that WWD had run two preview pieces before the Met gala.

The affair has overtones of a sibling spat. Both Ms. Wintour and Mr. McCarthy are editorial directors at Condé Nast—reporting directly to S.I. Newhouse, independent of overall Condé editorial director Tom Wallace.

But Ms. Wintour’s portfolio is growing—encompassing Teen Vogue, the newly launched Men’s Vogue and potentially Vogue Living, if that prospective lifestyle title gets the go-ahead. And with the absorption of the former Fairchild Publishing into Condé Nast, Mr. McCarthy’s holdings are shrinking.

Cookie, Jane and Details, which used to be under Mr. McCarthy before the formal merger, now answer to Mr. Wallace.

This coming summer, Cookie—the consumer-parenting magazine started by former Fairchild president and C.E.O. Mary Berner—is due to move out of the old Fairchild headquarters at 750 Third Avenue and into the eighth floor of 4 Times Square. It will be the first of the Fairchild titles to move under the same roof as the Condé flagship magazines—and as Mr. Newhouse.

“It’s a launch, and they want to monitor it very closely,” a Condé Nast staffer said of the Cookie move.

That leaves Mr. McCarthy with WWD, W, Scoop and retail trade titles including Supermarket News and Footwear News. With Fairchild scaled back, Mr. McCarthy has taken a more active role than before in the running of WWD and W, sources familiar with the publications said.

“He has been a more visible presence,” one Fairchild staffer said. “He’s been more involved.” Mr. McCarthy has begun, for example, to ask to see a daily lineup of WWD’s Memo Pad media column, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Ed Nardoza, WWD’s editor in chief, declined to comment.

The shuffling of fashion titles at Condé Nast is continuing. W, which is still overseen by Mr. McCarthy, is now classified as a Condé Nast title, while its sister publication, WWD, is in the Fairchild Fashion Group. Sources in 4 Times Square said that Mr. Newhouse is in ongoing discussions about separating W entirely from WWD, making it into a traditional consumer-fashion title.

That would put W, with its trade roots and society pedigree, in closer competition than ever with Vogue. Mr. O’Connell downplayed any rivalry. “They’ve been very great colleagues for years,” he said. “There’s always going to be issues coming along. Each publication has its unique point of view. No one wants to get on each other’s territory. We completely respect what they do.”

When it debuted more than 30 years ago, W was put out entirely by WWD’s staff. Since the 1990’s, W has developed its own staff of editors and writers, so that now only a handful of WWD staffers still contribute to the glossy.

Condé Nast spokeswoman Maurie Perl declined to comment on internal discussions, but said there is no plan to separate W from WWD. “They’re not splitting the way those synergistically work together,” Ms. Perl said.

Multiple Fairchild sources also say that staffers have been told to watch expenses, without an explanation for the budget tightening. One theory circulating inside the company is that Fairchild titles are now responsible for a share of Condé Nast’s corporate overhead, an expense that wasn’t factored in before the merger. And WWD has recently launched Scoop and other spin-off titles, which have yet to recoup their investment.

Ms. Perl said that there have been no changes in Fairchild’s budgets.

In one respect, at least, the publications are closer together. For the first time, at Ms. Wintour’s Costume Institute Gala, Fairchild didn’t have its own table. Instead, Fairchild employees were seated at the Condé Nast tables, alongside other Condé staff.

Mr. McCarthy was invited to sit at a table with Condé Nast president and C.E.O. Charles Townsend, Ms. Kaplan said. But he did not attend.

Three weeks before the Richard Stengel era was due to begin at Time magazine, the incoming managing editor was already making the rounds of his senior editorial employees.

Mr. Stengel made the trip from Philadelphia—Amtrak, coach class—to attend the May 24 session of the Time editors’ weekly “big ideas” meeting. Earlier that day, he lunched with Time.com chief Stephen Koepp at Cite to discuss plans for the magazine’s Web site.

“I think there’s an incredible talent pool there,” Mr. Stengel said by phone May 30, discussing Time’s current staff.

The theme was continuity. Mr. Stengel, a past and future Time man, dismissed speculation inside the magazine that a shakeup is coming when he officially takes over for Jim Kelly on June 15. “I’m not looking to go in there and break a lot of china right away,” Mr. Stengel said. “I’ve never had this job before. There are people I’ve worked with through a lot of my professional life.

“I think people can be re-inspired and reinvigorated. There’s just great talent. If I’m the coach, I look at the players and say, ‘Wow, this is a great team, a winning team.’”

Part of that reinvigoration, Mr. Stengel said, will involve the magazine’s tone. By way of illustration, he turned the conversation to a figure from television.

“My father watched Bill O’Reilly all the time and disagreed with nearly everything,” Mr. Stengel said. “ … That’s an example of how the health of the Republic is maintained by entertaining different points of view.”

Shut up!

Well, for Time, Mr. Stengel said, the ideal for vigorous punditry would be more along the lines of Joe Klein. “Joe is the model of what we’re talking about, in terms of voices in the magazine,” Mr. Stengel said. “Not the model of his politics—as he says himself, he’s a flaming moderate. It’s the model of reported analysis. I didn’t invent this—Henry Luce invented it. It’s not just about narrative, color and scene; it’s about analyzing why things are the way they are.”

The latest issue of Time, under Mr. Kelly’s command, seems to feature a shift in tone of its own. After winning two National Magazine Awards in May, one for general excellence and one for coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Time is fronting its serious side. The cover, with the magazine’s banner in black, features the silhouetted image of an African child in a medical clinic, accompanied by the cover line “Congo: The Hidden Toll of the World’s Deadliest War.”

Other cover lines promote “Enron Justice” and “Haditha Massacre.”

Neither “Haditha” nor “Massacre” appeared on the cover of the March 27 Time, which broke the news of the slayings of civilians. That scoop, which led the way for investigations by The New York Times and other major outlets, was flagged with a milder “Was Iraq Worth It?” on the front. The bigger question on the cover was “Are Kids Too Wired for Their Own Good?”, accompanying a soft-news photo illustration of a boy with three cell phones, a Treo and an iPod orbiting his head.

“At the time, I knew if the allegations turned out to be true, then it was clear this would be a story of significance,” Mr. Kelly said. “We put [Haditha] in the context of Iraq three years later, and we knew what we could talk about at the time was not a 10-page story …. If you’re going to do it as a cover, you need that kind of weight. We gave it the space it deserved at the time.”

Time correspondent Tim McGirk, who broke the Haditha story, said that in the weeks before publication, he had lobbied editors to use the word “massacre” in the March 27 story.

“That was a battle I lost,” Mr. McGirk said by phone May 30 from Jerusalem, where he is currently based. “I think the editors felt ‘massacre’ was too heavy of a word. They didn’t want to use it; they felt there was some justification for what had happened.”

“I think it was definitely a massacre,” Mr. McGirk said.

Has the Haditha story helped push Time back toward hard news, after swinging toward soft stories and trend pieces?

“I never took that charge seriously,” Mr. Kelly said. “Ever since 9/11, I put out a magazine that tried to make people understand better the world that was created by 9/11.”

“It was nonsense, that lifestyle tag,” Mr. Kelly said. “If this is a lifestyle magazine, I don’t know whose lifestyle it is.”

—G.S.

The New York Times’ in-house criticisms have gone paperless: With this month’s retirement of standards editor Allan M. Siegal, The Times has ended its tradition of passing out the regular feedback memos known as the “greenies.”

“With Al and [senior editor] Bill [Borders] departing, today’s installment of the postmortems will be the last in this form,” deputy news editor Philip B. Corbett—the inheritor of Mr. Siegal’s language-policing duties—wrote in a memo May 19.

Future feedback reports will appear on the newspaper’s intranet, Mr. Corbett said, and will appear weekly. Mr. Siegal’s greenies, named for the green ink that he used to annotate stories, came out as many as four times a week.

“[W]e’re envisioning a less frequent alternative—perhaps once a week, or twice a month—to foster a more thematic and analytical approach,” Mr. Corbett wrote. “We may focus on just one or two topics each time, examining patterns or clusters of problems, or showcasing a range of outstanding work.”

“Given the fact the greenies are so closely and commonly identified with [Mr. Siegal and Mr. Borders], we thought, ‘Let’s take another look at them and see if there’s things we can do to give them a different cast,’” said Craig Whitney, the paper’s new standards editor.

Mr. Siegal’s notes—on matters of language and journalistic practice—were originally handwritten, and more recently typed in a sans serif font. Copy editors, who most closely handle style and usage issues, received them most often; on Wednesdays, stacks of the “Best of the Greenies” were distributed to the newsroom at large. Reporters who earned praise had their bylines left in place. Bylines of reporters who committed errors were removed, but staffers could easily pinpoint the offender.

Newsroom reaction to the greenies’ fate was mixed.

“I loved them,” one Times reporter said. “I looked forward to them every week. You wanted to see if your piece was being praised or criticized. And you not infrequently learned a lesson.”

But another Times staffer had less fond memories.

“I’m not mourning the greenies,” a staffer said. “They are just aggravating.”

—G.S.

Correction: Among the works of now-retired New York Times standards editor Allan M. Siegal was the promulgation of proper correction form. A correction, by Times policy, should explain the nature and context of the error, then give the corrected fact, followed by the incorrect version. Last week’s column describing Mr. Siegal’s work and legacy gave an inaccurate account of his role in the production of the paper’s “Ethical Journalism” handbook. Mr. Siegal was a contributor to the handbook; he did not lead the group that created it.