Mr. Golin is already part of the Time Inc. family, sort of. After getting sacked by Details in 2000, the man who got to spend part of his life putting half-naked nymphets on covers landed as the creative-services director of ... Moviefone.com, a decidedly unglam property of America Online. AOL, of course, is Time Inc.'s daddy, and a few months ago, Mr. Golin had dinner with Time Inc. editorial director John Huey and met with Norm Pearlstine, the company's editor in chief.

"I said, 'I wouldn't mind having a hand in publishing again,'" Mr. Golin recalled. "They said, 'We wouldn't mind having you around, as long as you don't mess up the walls.'"

Mr. Golin was pretty vague on what he'd be doing to earn his paycheck. "They just want me to think about possible magazine opportunities." He added that this would include considering new magazine launches, buying existing publications, and figuring out what to do with the magazines that Time Inc. bought last year when it acquired U.K. publisher IPC Media as well as Times Mirror Magazines, which is now known as Time4Media. Mr. Golin said he won't be dealing with the core Time Inc. titles such as Time , People , InStyle and Sports Illustrated .

A Time Inc. spokesperson said Mr. Golin didn't have a title yet, and even though his role was pretty well-defined by Messrs. Pearlstine and Huey, the company didn't want to discuss details. "He'll be working with Norm and John. They want him around because he's smart, talented and interesting," said the spokesperson.

Mr. Golin will only be at Time Inc. part-time; the rest of his time he'll spend at AOL, where he's involved in a new AOL Time Warner effort to get more Time Inc. content onto the AOL Internet services.

Recently, Mr. Golin's name had been proffered as a candidate for the top job at Rolling Stone , and he did meet with publisher Jann Wenner, but he told the New York Post on May 15 that he was no longer in the running for that position.

Now, news of his imminent arrival at Time Inc. has led some in the Time-Life Building to try to figure out what exactly Mr. Golin, who is mostly known for executing a babes-and-beer editorial formula, could offer the magazine publisher. One scenario insiders sketched was that he would be a good fit with some of the IPC titles, such as the laddie mag Loaded and the music titles NME and Muzik . In the U.K., those three magazines are overseen by Mike Soutar, who took over Maxim after Mr. Golin left for Details in 1999.

What's more, when the IPC acquisition was announced last July, there was media speculation that Time Inc. might consider launching a U.S. edition of Loaded and other IPC titles. The talk was squelched, but Mr. Golin would be an obvious candidate to lead such a launch, and his presence at Time Inc. has re-ignited thoughts of an American Loaded . The Time Inc. spokesperson said of that speculation: "I think people are getting way ahead of themselves."

Another scenario sketched by Time Inc. insiders is that Mr. Golin could be in line for the managing editor's spot at Entertainment Weekly if-or when-Jim Seymore vacates the post. Mr. Golin himself poured cold water on that one. "That is something I've heard absolutely nothing about," he said.

Mr. Golin will have at least one advantage working in the Time-Life Building. Though the building has a no-smoking policy, Mr. Golin can smoke in his 26th-floor office-as long as he keeps the door closed.

-Gabriel Snyder

Call it The Perils of Corporate Synergy, Episode CCLXVII : On May 16, the day that Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones opened, the New York Post plugged the movie on its front page and inside published a three-page special section-two of them in color!-including a guide to all the Star Wars characters and a tale o' the tape comparing Padmé Amidala, a.k.a. Natalie Portman (shy and demure), to Spider-Man 's Kirsten Dunst (likes to show off her nipples). What's more, the paper reprinted Post critic "Love It" Lou Lumenick's rapturous three-and-a-half-star review of SWEII , by far the most positive review the film has received, but one that had already run in the Post the prior Sunday. " Clones is a delightfully rousing, eye-popping, crowd-pleasing homage to Saturday-morning serials of the '30s and '40s," he wrote. "For my money, the rip-roaring light-saber battle that climaxes this blockbuster alone justifies the price of admission."

Of course, Star Wars is, like the Post , a product of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But Mr. Lumenick said the 20th Century Fox logo at the beginning of the movie didn't matter to him. "I have never felt the slightest pressure or inclination to cut our News Corp. cousins any slack," Mr. Lumenick said, "and, to the best of my knowledge, nor have any of my reviewing colleagues at the Post ." As evidence of his impartiality, Mr. Lumenick said he had stopped short "of a flat-out, four-star rave, noting some problems with the dialogue and the love scenes in my review."

Mr. Lumenick also noted that a Variety story claimed Fox didn't "own" a part of the film and was simply the distributor for the producer, Lucasfilm. "I don't even think it truly qualifies as being 'the boss movie,' as you put it," Mr. Lumenick said.

Faye Penn, the Post 's features editor, said she had no regrets about the paper's enthusiastic Star Wars coverage. "Do I get nervous about covering Fox movies? The answer is not at all," Ms. Penn said.

But one longtime Post staffer was more skeptical. Calling the Star Wars package "News Corp. synergy," the source said that the coverage was unsurprising given the paper's affiliations. "Nobody comes down and says 'You have to do this,' but clearly it was somehow communicated to features that they had to do Star Wars big," the staffer said. "I'm kind of shocked by it." But Ms. Penn said she wasn't given any instructions from superiors to plug Star Wars.

-G.S.

And the Spaceman landeth! After months of negotiating, the Daily News and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs have come to an agreement for Mr. Dobbs to write a weekly Sunday business column. News editor in chief Ed Kosner expects to get the first copy from the outer-space and Arthur Andersen enthusiast this week, but isn't sure when it'll run.

"I just think he's an interesting guy," Mr. Kosner said. "It was a chance for us to get another voice into the Sunday paper."

When asked if Mr. Dobbs would be writing about the cosmos, Mr. Kosner said: "No. It's a public-markets,

personal-finance column. Someday he might, but it's a personal-finance and markets column."

Mr. Dobbs, who also pens a monthly column for Money -owned by CNN's corporate cousin Time Inc.-was traveling and unavailable at deadline. However, a CNN representative said, "He is delighted to be associated with the Daily News and is looking forward to writing the column-he's hoping to have a lot of fun with it."

-Sridhar Pappu

''I'm going to L.A., bro," said Charlie LeDuff, slice-of-life reporter for The New York Times , denizen of bars and box cars, and-if you ask others inside the journalism mill on West 43rd Street-a favorite of executive editor Howell Raines.

An announcement of his move had appeared several days earlier in the Daily News , but there was little news of what awaited in California. Like the Joads before him, Mr. LeDuff seemed unsure himself. What will you write? "News stories." Why are you going? "'Cause they told me to."

Mr. LeDuff said he was writing on deadline and asked if he could have 15 minutes. Twenty minutes later, he picked up the phone again, put it on hold, and when he came back, had brought metro reporter Jayson Blair onto the line. "He's my representative to the press," Mr. LeDuff said.

"It's a new opportunity. After Sept. 11, we all knew there were going to be a lot of changes," Mr. Blair said of Mr. LeDuff's move. "He's going to be roving around the region, very similar to what he's been writing." Mr. Blair wanted to make an important point about his cohort. "He won't be chasing wire stories."

And what of the Bending Elbows column Mr. LeDuff has written for The Times ' City section? Who would be taking that over? "No one," Mr. Blair said. "No one, we hope."

(Elsewhere, City section editor Connie Rosenblum said, "No decision has been made.")

Mr. LeDuff got on the phone and said of his Bending Elbows column, "It was a good run, and I'm anticipating closing the doors on the saloon."

-G.S.

A bigshot New York Times writer stops paying his credit-card bill, his plastic is declined at dinner, and a Times support staffer loses her job. That's the allegation in the latest memo from the union that represents editorial, business and clerical staff at The Times .

In the memo, dated May 21, the Newspaper Guild of New York alleged that "a travel coordinator was suspended indefinitely last Friday because she was unable to get American Express to extend the credit of a 'valued' (management's word) Times Employee whose byline carries weight."

The problem started in early May, when the writer's AmEx had been suspended because The Times writer hadn't been paying his bills, according to the Guild. The travel coordinator was able to work out something with AmEx, said the Guild. "American Express said it would temporarily extend the employee's credit through Monday, May 6, and grant an unlimited credit status to the employee thereafter."

But that night, when the Times writer went to dinner, the credit card was rejected, and on May 17, the travel coordinator-who has been with The Times for 22 years-"was suspended because she failed to contact American Express on Monday to check on the status of the account," according to the union memo.

The memo adds that while AmEx initially agreed to give the Times writer "a special unlimited credit status," in the end AmEx rejected that idea. The union claims this development absolved the travel coordinator. "Although the information from American Express absolving the travel coordinator of any wrongdoing was given to management, the travel coordinator was suspended anyway," reads the memo.

Lena Williams, chair of the Times Guild Unit, told Off the Record that the travel coordinator remains on suspension, and the union hopes to return her to her job soon.

A spokesperson for The Times did not immediately have any comment on the situation.

"You want to find a contradiction between my post-retreat self and the magazines that I oversee," Mr. Truman wrote in an e-mail, "but none really exists."

Mr. Truman is not the first New Yorker to seek balance and deeper meaning after living in a city that rarely encourages either. But some of his colleagues think that Mr. Truman has chosen a strange environment to embark upon such a quest. Balance and deeper meaning? This was the guy who helped launch Lucky .

Mr. Truman disagreed. Substance was in the eye of the beholder, even at a place like Condé Nast.

"I find equal substance in an Irving Penn photograph in Vogue as a John Updike essay in The New Yorker ," Mr. Truman wrote, noting two of Condé Nast's signature publications. As for Lucky , "If I want to buy a table lamp, I will find more substance in Lucky than I would in a Noam Chomsky essay about shopping."

Inside and outside of Condé Nast, however, there is concern that 44-year-old Mr. Truman's newfound awareness may eventually clash with the magazines he oversees. "My experience at Condé Nast was that the more earthy types didn't last," said a former Condé Nast editor who has stayed in touch with Mr. Truman. When it came to superficial subjects like glamour and style, the editor said, "You have to be willing to believe it-or you didn't last very long."

Another Condé Nast insider raised the possibility that Mr. Truman may simply be going through a mid-life crisis. "Can't he get a red car like everyone else?" the insider carped.

But others at Condé Nast believe Mr. Truman has made a positive change, one that will help the company's magazines. "I found him well-composed," said Dominique Browning, the editor of House & Garden . "He seemed very at peace; he seemed serene. This seems to be a very constructive trip for him."

Allure editor Linda Wells, who Mr. Truman has worked with closely during his eight years as editorial director, noticed something different about her boss immediately after his return from Woodstock.

"I saw him the day before he left, and I saw him the morning he came back," Ms. Wells said. "What's really different is the perspective the [Buddhist] experience gave him in relation to the work I do with him …. He came back and had a very clear perspective about what I should do with Allure ."

Mr. Truman's post-Woodstock advice, Ms. Wells said, was to ease back on the pacing of Allure and create "contemplative moments" amid the "relentlessness of information" in the pages of the magazine.

Ms. Wells said she agreed wholeheartedly. "When magazines that deal with glamour and style fail is when they believe that it's the most important thing of all and try to impose a judgment on the reader-really condescend to the reader," she said. "That's the negative part of what we do-being so wrapped up in style and fashion."

In his e-mail, Mr. Truman acknowledged that he had spoken to Ms. Wells "about varying the pacing in the well of Allure , to provide some calmer moments." But Mr. Truman noted that this advice was specific to Allure .

"My work is about helping each magazine express its identity, not imposing one identity on all of them," he wrote. He added that he had told Cindi Leive, editor of Glamour , to make part of her magazine denser.

Some close to Mr. Truman said his time off in Woodstock was unsurprising.Jane Pratt, editor of Jane , who has been friends with Mr. Truman for more than a decade, said that both she and Mr.Truman"have been going through a mid-life crisis since we were 20." She added: "He always wants to try new things. He's my professional idol in that way."

Mr. Truman, who is paid around $1 million a year, has one of the best jobs in magazines. Anointed by Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, as the editorial director in 1994 when he was just 36, Mr. Truman does not have any fixed responsibilities for the magazine publisher. On some magazines, Mr. Truman has more input than others, such as Lucky , Allure , House & Garden -which he helped relaunch in 1995-and Glamour . But the star editors at Condé Nast are said to have a wider berth, including Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter, Vogue 's Anna Wintour and GQ 's Art Cooper.

And Mr. Truman has been known, on occasion, to make energetic use of his non-work time, taking salsa-dancing lessons, scuba diving and, last fall, learning how to drive a race car. Kim France, editor of Lucky , said that Buddhism "has been something that has been in his life for several years."

Mr. Truman came to this charmed life after editing Details in its downtown-hipster incarnation for several years after it was purchased by Condé Nast. In March 2000, Details was the first of three Condé Nast magazines to be folded under Mr. Truman's watch. (The others were Women's Sports and Fitness and Mademoiselle .) And there have been other tumults during his stint as editorial director. Early on, Mr. Truman clashed with editors who weren't interested in the advice of the young upstart, such as Paige Rense, the editor of Architectural Digest , who told The Wall Street Journal in 1994 that she would "spank him and send him to bed without his supper" if he tried to change her magazine.

Mr. Truman's relationship with Steve Florio, the chief executive of Condé Nast, has also been marked with tension.

"They're both very different personalities," said a Condé Nast editor. "James is flighty-doesn't get into the office very early, is out late at night. Steve is solid, Jupiter-like-and they're both competing for Si's favors."

Though Mr. Newhouse is said to be content with Mr. Truman, some at Condé Nast wonder if the owner is really willing to see his glossies injected with some down-to-earth values.

"For a trade that's based on status and glamour, I would imagine it could be rather alarming. I don't think Si wants that to be the culture of the company," said one former Condé Nast editor of Mr. Truman's recent views. "For one thing, there's not a lot of advertising in it."

Through a corporate spokesperson, Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Florio declined comment.

If people around him are privately worrying, Mr. Truman seemsunalarmed. Still, he had previously taken one stab at clarifying his Buddhist retreat, saying in the April 29 New York that the media-fashion world offered a "seductive invitation to get lost in the distractions of glamour and status and nonstopwork"from which he wanted to temporarily extract himself.

"I imagine a dean of philosophy might speak similarly about feeling caught up in the life of the mind," Mr. Truman wrote to The Observer . "A restauranteur would say the same about the invitation to overindulge in eating and drinking."

Now, Mr. Truman wrote, he was back, re-energized and ready to … write.

"While away I decided I wanted to do some magazine writing again, so I'll be getting to that," Mr. Truman wrote. He added he'd be writing for Condé Nast, but wouldn't say what kind of pieces or for which titles.

Meanwhile, Condé Nast prepares for a new era of enlightened stewardship. House & Garden's Ms. Browning thought Mr. Truman might be on to something.

"His job is not to follow the Condé Nast culture-his job is to lead the Condé Nast culture," she said. "Maybe he's ahead of the curve on where we all should be.

"There's a lot of fighting going on with Tina," said an agent with knowledge of the situation. "Either she stays and sits and takes the money-or they pay [to settle with] her."

Ms. Brown would not comment on the status of her Talk contract. But she did acknowledge that she had retained Bertram Fields, the powerful Hollywood lawyer with a history of helping high-profile clients settle contract disputes with entertainment companies-including Disney, Miramax's parent, and Miramax itself.

"There are talks going on," said Mr. Fields, who declined to comment further, stating that the parties are prohibited from discussing the negotiations.

Money, for sure, is involved in the negotiations, but also at stake is Ms. Brown's future plans. Until she settles the contract, she can't take on any projects outside Talk Miramax. Ms. Brown is said to be considering offers to host a talk show from two different cable networks as well as offers from several publications to write a column resembling the "Tina Brown's Diary" column in Talk. But any such plans must wait until after the Talk contract is settled.

Ms. Brown's current relationship to Talk and Miramax is complicated. Her contract to edit Talk magazine was with Talk Media, which was a joint venture between Hearst Magazines and Miramax Films. The New York Post reported the deal to be for $1 million per year.

But now Ms. Brown is the chairman of Talk Miramax Books, which is a distinct entity wholly owned by Miramax. Her contract with the magazine does not bind her to work at the book imprint, sources said.

Miramax executives contended that the discussions about Ms. Brown's contract have been cordial. "There's a difference between fighting and discussions and negotiations," said one executive, noting that it was perfectly normal that Ms. Brown would want to end a deal to edit a magazine that is no longer being published.

The Miramax source, however, said that Ms. Brown's departure was not a sure thing. That source sketched a scenario in which Ms. Brown could remain with the book division while adding duties in production and development for the film company.

Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Miramax, said: "We have a very strong, positive relationship with Tina, and we look forward to working with her as long as she wants."

But Mr. Fields' involvement signals that Ms. Brown may be looking to exit sooner rather than later. Mr. Fields has worked for Ms. Brown before, but it was literary agent and lawyer Mort Janklow who originally wrote Ms. Brown's contract with Talk. Mr. Janklow is involved in the current talks, sources said, but it appears that Mr. Fields is taking the lead for Ms. Brown on this matter. Mr. Janklow declined comment when reached by Off the Record.

Mr. Fields has some impressive wins in settling employment contracts. In his most notable case, he won $250 million in severance for Jeffrey Katzenberg after Mr. Katzenberg was fired as studio chief of the Walt Disney Company. In 1997, Mr. Fields represented former Miramax executive vice president Neil Sacker after he left the company with two years to go on his contract. Mr. Fields also represented Scott Greenstein, another former Miramax executive vice president, in a dispute about Mr. Greenstein's contract. Both disputes have since been settled.

Should Ms. Brown settle her deal and leave Talk Miramax Books, agents and editors at competing publishing companies said they didn't expect her departure to negatively affect the fledgling house. Several publishing sources assigned credit for the division's success to editor in chief Jonathan Burnham. Though Ms. Brown has brought in some big-name authors, like Madeleine Albright and historian Simon Schama, others, such as Rudy Giuliani, Michael Chabon and Eoin Colfer, have come in through other channels, sources noted.

"Whatever Tina decides to do, I don't think it will have much impact on Talk Miramax Books," said a top New York literary agent.

Meanwhile, there are continued signs that Mr. Weinstein is taking a heightened interest in the affairs of his publishing shop. Mr. Weinstein, whose aggressiveness in movie dealmaking is legendary, has been similarly fierce in chasing books and authors he admires. Earlier this year, when Talk Miramax lost out in the auction for James Swanson's book on the manhunt for Abraham Lincoln's assassin, Mr. Weinstein called the author's agent to ask what went wrong, a publishing source said.

Mr. Burnham pronounced confidence in the future of Talk Miramax Books, with or without Ms. Brown. Of her possible departure, he said, "It'll be sad. Tina founded this whole organization; she hired me. Personally, it's going to be a loss-but in terms of the operations of the company, we will continue to be healthy."

Ms. Brown said of her role at Talk Miramax Books: "Just know that while I'm here, I'm 100 percent in it.

"Right now," Ms. Brown added, "I'm living in the now."

-Gabriel Snyder

When classes wrap up at the Columbia University School of Journalism in a few weeks, it's likely the school will not have named a replacement for outgoing dean Tom Goldstein, who announced his departure in January.

According to faculty sources, the selection committee is still in the process of interviewing candidates for the post, and in some cases still reaching out to candidates it wants to apply for the job.

There are two notable developments, however. Sources said that Tom Rosensteil, who had been seen as Mr. Goldstein's preferred successor, is not in the running, while Alex Jones, the director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center, is attracting positive attention from some on the journalism faculty.

Mr. Jones has been the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University since April 2000. As a New York Times media reporter from 1983 to 1992, Mr. Jones won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his coverage of the downfall of the Bingham family and their southern newspaper empire. With his wife, Susan E. Tifft, Mr. Jones wrote The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.

As for Mr. Rosensteil, faculty sources said that the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism-a Washington-based group that is affiliated with the Columbia journalism school-has not applied for the job.

But a Columbia J-school faculty member said opinion on the selection was tilted against Mr. Rosensteil. "The sense was that he wasn't going to fare well, so he didn't apply," the source said. "We were surprised-and pleased."

The fact that Mr. Rosensteil wasn't in the running was read by faculty sources as a setback for Mr. Goldstein. "It just says he wasn't able to hand-pick his successor," said the source.

Mr. Rosensteil and Mr. Goldstein did not return calls for comment. A spokesperson for Columbia said the university did not comment on faculty searches while they are in progress.

-G.S.

The appearance of a New York Times supplement in the French daily Le Monde has created some consternation and confusion among its readers and employees. Le Monde's ombudsman wrote on April 13 that most reader reaction protested the weekly 12-page English-language section. "It's self-enslavement, participation in the Americanization of France," cried the head of a group that defends the French language. One reader noted sarcastically, "I guess Le Monde is published at the same time in The New York Times."

Of course, The Times is just innocently trying to extend its brand globally-that's what the marketing people like to say. The paper is looking for partner papers in Spain, Italy and Germany to publish its supplements, on the theory that they could lead to a bounty of Europe-wide advertising.

Meanwhile, staffers at the Paris-based International Herald-Tribune-the English-language daily that is a joint venture between The New York Times and The Washington Post-are asking: Hey, aren't we supposed to be the New York Times global brand extension? The Le Monde deal has the IHT worried that one of their corporate parents is now the competition. The IHT, which carries Times and Post stories and is known as a temporary yet comfy assignment for editors from those two papers, is said to lose money.

"If The Times is deciding that they can do their own brand of journalism under their own flag," said a newsroom source, "the implication is they don't need the Trib anymore."

Peter Goldmark, the chairman and chief executive of the International Herald-Tribune, was traveling and could not be reached for comment. But Bo Jones, the publisher of The Washington Post, said: "I certainly hope it does not result in a change of The New York Times' commitment to the International Herald-Tribune."

Times Company vice chairman Michael Golden visited the International Herald-Tribune's offices on the morning of Friday, April 5, to reassure the staff there that the Times deal with Le Monde wasn't a threat to the Herald-Tribune-for now. According to a source who attended the meeting, Mr. Golden said, "I can't say the Le Monde deal won't lead to problems" for the Herald-Tribune, but also said: "The New York Times wishes no harm to the IHT."

During the meeting, the source said, Mr. Golden said that in addition to the Le Monde supplement, The Times was also in discussions to do branded content, though in translation, for other European papers, including Spain's El Pais, Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung and Italy's La Repubblica.

The International Herald-Tribune staff, however, was not convinced that its further existence was assured, the source said. Mr. Golden said that the fate of the Herald-Tribune did not depend on it turning a profit right away, the source said. But according to the source, he did say, "There is no such thing as a strong unprofitable newspaper."

A spokesperson for The Times said that Mr. Golden visited the Herald-Tribune's offices as a "courtesy" during another business trip to Paris. "The supplements are part of our ongoing effort to identify new ways of extending Times branded content into new markets," the spokesperson said. "Beyond that, we have nothing further to add."

-G.S.

Microsoft's Web magazine of politics and punditry, recently sent out an invitation for a cocktail party on April 30 at the Harvard Club featuring "Michael Kinsley's successor as editor of Slate."

There's one hitch: They haven't decided on who that successor will be. Slate's still in the midst of its bake-off between deputy editor Jack Shafer and political editor Jacob Weisberg, which will determine the new editor.

"We haven't made a decision," explained Scott Moore, general manager of MSN News and Information. "But we know we will by that time."

Perhaps Mr. Kinsley will do a Bert Parks and bring a tiara to the H-club bash and have Mr. Weisberg and Mr. Shafer stand side by side, fingers crossed. When the winner is crowned, Mr. Kinsley will grab the mike and sing:

There he is, Mr. Slate Editor!

There he is, your ideal!

The dream of a million wonks ….

Mr. Moore predicted it won't be as suspenseful as that.

"My guess," Mr. Moore said, "is that people will know before the event. But [they] won't have known it for long."

-Sridhar Pappu

Every year, the folks at Gourmet magazine choose a spiffy theme to enliven their annual advertising-sales meeting. Last year saw "Campaign Gourmet," a sales meeting with the added "bonus" of guest speakers like James Carville and Mark Green. This year's theme was "Gourmet Rocks," and the sale reps-along with all the Condé Nast staffers having lunch in the fourth-floor cafeteria-got an earful of Adharma, a band described by its drummer in an interview as a "no-holds-barred, pedal-to-the-metal, ass-kicking post-core ride of adrenaline with some early Guns 'n' Roses gutterpunk attitude to boot." All band members were tattooed.

Gina Sanders, Gourmet's publisher, said the "assertive heavy-metal sound" of the band "communicated the message 'Gourmet Rocks.'" Adharma, whose name means "chaos" in Hindi, was selected thanks to an enterprising Gourmet staffer who knew the lead singer. They set up to play on April 15 during lunch hour, as sales reps streamed out of their meeting and into the Gourmet dining room, down the corridor from the famed Gehry cafeteria.

"It was hysterical," said band manager Diane Gentile, who usually finds gigs in such places as the punk hangout CBGB for Adharma. "The ceiling started to come down from the vibration-paint started to fall from the ceiling. It was really loud." A representative for Gourmet denied that paint fell from the ceiling.

The corporate gig, she added, was not the kind of thing musicians usually enjoy doing, what with getting up before 2 p.m. and all. "But for them it's all about playing music, so they don't care when they play or where they play," she said. Then she added, "They were treated with gourmet food and champagne, so they really enjoyed it."

-Elisabeth Franck

For nearly two years before The New York Sun launched on April 16, its managing editor, Ira Stoll, wrote a critique of The New York Times for his Web site, Smartertimes.com. Each day, he took The Times to task for hidden liberal bias and overall sloppiness. These daily critiques can now be found in The Sun.

A recent internal memo at The Times on corrections issued by the Metro section noted that its April 11 story on The Sun had three errors that required correction.

In the memo, Times Metro editor Jonathan Landman wrote: "While all mistakes are highly undesirable, there's something downright humiliating about making three when you write about another newspaper that happens to be run by a guy who made his name attacking us for sloppiness. It seems to me that we've screwed something up nearly every time we've written about these guys. Let's stop!"

-G.S.

"How many could they possibly give us?" a Times source wondered the week before the Pulitzers were awarded on

April 8. "Would

they go as high as five or six for one paper? They deliberately don't

want to do that."

But they did. History said the Pulitzer committee didn't ever give more than three prizes to a

single newspaper-they liked to spread them around to papers large and small, the

theory went-but this was an extraordinary news year, redefined by the Sept.

11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. And this year,

papers with the massive resources simply dominated.

Just six newspapers won 2002 Pulitzers, almost all of them big

boppers: In addition to The Times ' Ben-Hur -like

seven, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times each won two, and The Wall

Street Journal, Newsday and The Christian Science Monitor each won one. The Monitor is the only winner not in

the top 10 circulation papers in the country.

So it wasn't surprising that, amid the ample praise from the competition

for The Times and its impressive year,

there were some questions as to whether the Pulitzer committee should have done

more to share the wealth. 

Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times , former New

York Times national editor and a Pulitzer juror this year, agreed that the New York Times entries warranted

awards, but said he saw a danger in concentrating so many awards in just a few

papers.

"This was the year of the big papers. The only papers that could

compete on Sept. 11 were the biggest papers," Mr. Baquet said, fully aware that the

top-10 L.A. Times isn't

exactly the Nantucket Beacon. "The

troublesome thing is the dominance of a handful of big papers. I think it's

probably an aberration, but we should be worried."

Rex Smith, the managing editor of the Albany Times Union as well as Pulitzer juror, said that when The Times kicks into high gear, his

100,000-circulation paper has little hope of going up against the resources

over on West 43rd Street. Mr. Smith said that while his entire editorial staff

is 140 people, The Times '

metro editor, Jonathon Landman, "has that many reporters at his disposal" just

for himself.

But even within The Times

itself, there was a ripple of concern that the paper's remarkable performance

could discourage smaller papers from embarking on ambitious projects. "You

want the Bulletin in Bend, Ore., to

think that if they spend a lot of money on a series, that someone will notice," the

source said.

And, of course, there are other papers in New York. The Post 's Andrea Peyser pilloried the Pulitzer committee

on April 9 for passing on the Hackensack, N.J., Record 's Iwo Jima–esque Ground Zero flag-raising photo in favor of a Times portfolio from Sept. 11. And the Daily News , which was widely praised

for its street-level work in the wake of Sept. 11, came up Pulit-empty after

being nominated for breaking news (won by The

Wall Street Journal ) and commentary

(won by Thomas Friedman at The Times. )

"We wouldn't be human if we weren't disappointed," said News editor Ed Kosner. "But

everyone knows what superb and heroic work our staff did on Sept. 11 and

thereafter, and that's a reward in itself."

The Wall Street Journal won

in the breaking-news category for its Sept. 12 edition, but there, too, there

were raised eyebrows that in a year of extensive coverage from Pakistan and

Afghanistan, as well as groundbreaking coverage of the Enron bankruptcy, the

paper had received only that one nomination.

But Paul Steiger, the managing editor of The Journal, said he was

thrilled with his one Pulitzer. "It's only recently that we've

even begun to win one or two on a fairly frequent basis. Each one carries a

thrill,"

Mr. Steiger said. " The New York Times won

seven. We don't begrudge them that."

The Times was certainly

aware of how unique the paper's Pulitzer performance was. To celebrate

the record haul on Monday afternoon, Times

publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Howell Raines enlisted

a small army of the paper's past heroes. Mr. Sulzberger's father, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., was in

attendance, as were the paper's last three executive editors: A.M.

Rosenthal, Max Frankel and Joe Lelyveld. There was also Arthur Gelb, who was

second-in-command to Mr. Rosenthal, and Bill Keller, the Times managing editor under Mr. Lelyveld and now an Op-Ed

columnist.

Mr. Raines, who took over as executive editor just prior to Sept.

11, acknowledged his forebears in the room, paying special note to his direct

predecessor, Mr. Lelyveld. "We all stand on their shoulders," Mr.

Raines said.

Four of The Times '

seven Pulitzers were given simply to "the staff of The New York Times ." Mr. Raines emphasized the communality of

the awards. " The Times '

awards reflect not just our efforts, but the strength we draw from The Times '

traditions, our mentors and our enduring standards," he said. "So every

Times person here today is a

stakeholder in these awards and a trustee of the tradition represented by the Times people of all ages."

The Times, like every

other organization has its feuds, grievances and tensions. But, for the moment,

these were largely swept aside by institutional pride. Mr. Rosenthal, a

divisive figure at The Time s, made

his first trip to the newsroom since he stopped writing his column for the

Op-Ed page. Mr. Frankel, whose differences with Mr. Rosenthal are the stuff of

another kind of Times legend, said, "The

reason we were there, the reason we applauded each other, was because of the

pride we feel in The Time s." He

added, "There

is a continuity there of a staff built over many generations."

The party continued on into the evening, with dancing later at

the nearby, velvety Laura Belle banquet hall, but a day later, it was the

emotion in the newsroom that the staffers past and present recalled the

most. 

"I started as a copy boy in 1944, and I've sensed emotion in

that room numerous times," Mr. Gelb said. "But never as palpable as yesterday."

A

merican Son ,

Richard Blow's dishy book about working with John F. Kennedy Jr. at George magazine, won't be

published until May 3, but Kennedy loyalists and cranky George staffers are all ready to pounce. There's

just one problem for them: Henry Holt, the publisher of Mr. Blow's

book, has made everyone who's seen it sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Of course, Mr. Blow has a little history with confidentiality

pacts. Mr. Blow cited George 's

confidentiality pact, which prevented magazine staffers from dishing on

Kennedy, when he  sacked two

contributors who spoke to media outlets shortly after Kennedy's

death in a plane crash off the coast of Cape Cod in July 1999. Then Mr. Blow

got bit himself, when he lost an earlier $750,000 book deal with Little, Brown

because of the same pact.

The confidentiality agreement for American Son , which was read to us by a magazine book editor,

prevents anyone who receives a galley from Holt from disclosing its contents to

anyone else before May 15. "I couldn't make copies and then hand them out to

former George staffers," said

the editor. 

The book editor also speculated that the agreement will prevent

anyone from slamming the book until after Mr. Blow completes a round of

publicity, which, along with an excerpt of the book in the May issue of Vanity Fair , will include an appearance

on NBC's

Today show and a sit-down interview

with Barbara Walters for ABC's 20/20 .

A spokesperson for Holt said that wasn't the intent of the non-disclosure agreement at

all, insisting that the publisher was only protecting the exclusivity of Vanity Fair 's rights to the book in

its May issue. "We didn't embargo this book, but because of the serial-rights deal with Vanity Fair , we had to treat it as

such,"

the spokesperson said.

A Vanity Fair

spokesperson acknowledged that the magazine did have a problem with Holt's

initial plan to send out a lot of unfettered review copies of American Son when the Condé Nast

publication had paid for an excerpt. 

A spokesperson for Mr. Blow did not return a call for comment. In

any case, Mr. Blow shouldn't expect an early review from The New York Times Book Review . Editor

Charles McGrath said he hadn't seen the book because "I

will not sign non-disclosure agreements, period."

-G.S.

With the April 9 edition of The Wall Street Journal -complete with color, new typefaces and

layout, and something called "The Personal Journal"-the

stuffy stalwart of American business journalism dipped its toe into the pastel

waters of modern newspaper marketing.

Invariably, some will consider the new-look Journal the newspaper equivalent of  Jennifer Grey, post–nose job: Sure, now it looks more like

everyone else, but dang, there was something sexy about the original.

"There are some veteran readers who want The Journal to be mysterious," WSJ

managing editor Paul Steiger conceded. For those readers, he said, The Journal "was like organic

chemistry is for a doctor-you want everyone else to go through what you went through,

whether they need it or not." 

Tweaking The Journal

was no easy task, of course. By Dow Jones chief executive Peter Kann's own

estimates, the company spent four years and $225 million to do it. Moreover,

introducing a two-column breaking-news story posed its own problems on a page

that's

been defined for so long by its "leder" stories in columns 1 and 6, and it's "A-hed"

feature in the center of the page.  

"We didn't know what to call it," said Mike Miller, the paper's

page 1 editor, of the new addition. "For a while we were calling it 'Bob,' just

because we couldn't think of anything else. Finally [Money & Investing editor]

Larry Ingrassia started calling it the 'extra story.' That seems to have stuck."

For the past three to four weeks, editors of The Journal had been treating their 11 a.m. meetings as dry runs.

Each day they asked: If this was the new Journal,

what would be our breaking-news story that day? What would be the illustration?

How would we play it?

On Monday, April 8, Mr. Steiger and Mr. Miller had a number of

options. There was I.B.M. falling short of estimates, and indications that news

might break on either Enron or Arthur Andersen. Both said they leaned towards

leading with an exclusive interview Gerald Seib had with President George W.

Bush, but its timing-5 p.m.-posed deadline problems.

"One thing about this administration," Mr. Steiger said, "is

that they do things on time. The interview was supposed to run from 5 to 5:30

p.m., and they kept to that."

As a result, Mr. Seib filed his piece by 6:15 p.m., in time for

the paper's

first edition.

When asked about the added wrinkle of the new format, Mr. Miller

said: "I

like it, but it's definitely more difficult. I guess sleep is a thing of the

past."

-Sridhar

Pappu

magazine editors from their dreamy haze of celebrity puffery and smiley service

writing, when the industry convenes at the Waldorf-Astoria on May 1 to present

the National Magazine Awards, the winners will be drawn from a list of

finalists in which reporting on terrorism or war is conspicuously absent.

Excluding nominees for fiction and "leisure interests," out of 81

finalists in 16 different N.M.A. categories, by our count, just 16 have any

relation to the Sept. 11 attacks or the war in Af-ghanistan. In some categories

where one would most expect to see such material-like public interest and

profile writing-there are no Sept. 11–related entries at all.

That paltry showing has some editors worried that the National

Magazine Awards will show an American magazine industry-and a sponsor

organization, the American Society of Magazine Editors-dangerously out of step

with the rest of the world.

"If the right things win, it'll be O.K.," said one top magazine

editor, who did not want to be named. But if not enough Sept. 11 material takes

home the N.M.A.'s Ellies, the editor said, "we will look like we're out of

touch; the awards will look like they missed the boat."

The absence of Sept. 11 coverage from the N.M.A. finalists is

striking. By contrast, this year's Pulitzer Prizes-set to be awarded at

Columbia University on April 8-are apparently thick with nominated coverage of

terrorism and war dominating this year's highest honors in newspaper

journalism. According to Off the Record's unconfirmed list of Pulitzer

finalists, more than half are entries related to the war in Afghanistan or

Sept. 11.

But the N.M.A.'s finalists are another story. And to some, it

confirms the worst suspicions about the direction of the glossy industry: that

magazines had become so enraptured with celebrity hagiography, society-buffing

and catalog-style writing that they were vastly unprepared to react and

chronicle one of the most devastating stories of their time.

N.M.A.'s judging process has two stages. First, the nominated

entries are screened by a collection of people-mostly editors-who then pick

five finalists in each category. Then a second, separate set of judges in each

category picks winners from the finalists.

Sources involved in the initial rounds of N.M.A. screening told

Off the Record that the submitted Sept. 11 coverage was weak.

"Some of the coverage-which was doing the best they could with

whatever they had, on short notice and tight deadlines-was not that compelling

or particularly insightful or advancing the stories significantly," said one

screener. The screener added: "The pieces had this wildly disappointing feeling

to them."

Another screener said that in one N.M.A. category, a

guilty-feeling screening group actually went back and resuscitated eliminated

material in order to make a nod toward Sept. 11. The screener said that at the

start of judging, several submissions from newsweeklies detailing Sept. 11 were

eliminated from consideration, but at the end of the session-after one person

in the room asked if the group was comfortable with no Sept. 11–

related finalist-a move was made to add coverage from at least one newsweekly.

"It was a total afterthought," the screener said. "If our group had dispersed

two minutes earlier, [the Sept. 11 coverage] would have never made it in."

Cyndi Stivers, the editor in chief of Time Out New York and the current ASME president, agreed that Sept.

11 did not provoke, at least initially, much award-winning magazine work. The

terrorist attacks, Ms. Stivers said, "prompted magazines to do some of their

best work, but some of it doesn't age that well." She added: "Everybody did it

the same way everyone does a Thanksgiving-turkey story if you're a food

magazine."

As an example, Ms. Stivers pointed to her own magazine, Time Out , which was forced to skip one

issue after the attacks, mainly because her staff couldn't get into its

downtown office. Time Out did a

special issue on eating and drinking. Ms. Stivers said her magazine had to

acknowledge the events in that issue, but said, "It wasn't going to be

award-winning material."

When the N.M.A. finalists

were announced, not everyone in magazines was surprised by the absence

of Sept. 11 material. Some pointed to

coverage in daily newspapers and round-the-clock cable television and said

that, at least initially,  there was

little room for magazines to further the story.

John Rasmus, the editor of National

Geographic Adventure , which received three nominations this year, said that

so far, Sept. 11 hasn't proven to be a story where magazines have more to offer

than other media. "It has been hard for magazines to get any more depth on the

run than television or newspapers, quite frankly."

Other editors said deadlines made it difficult to do

award-winning work immediately after Sept. 11. When the attacks came, most

monthly magazines were just closing their November issues. Many-whether they

were Esquire or Money or Martha Stewart

Living -tried to adjust, reworking their covers and changing as many pages

inside as they could, but it was a rush job.

"If you look at what I did in November," said Esquire 's David Granger, referring to

his November 2001 issue, in which he

spiked a celebrity cover story to make room for Ground Zero reporting, "we didn't get the opportunity to do

good work. I didn't have four months to put in and then submit to the National

Magazine Awards."

At the same time, some of the better magazine work related to the

war and Sept. 11 could not be submitted to the N.M.A. because of regulations.

Even though nearly every monthly's January 2002 issue reached newsstands in

early December, only magazines with 2001 cover dates are eligible for this

year's awards.

When it came to Sept. 11 coverage, weekly magazines like The New Yorker , Time and Newsweek did

well. Compared to last year, when Time

and Newsweek both received one

finalist nomination apiece- Time won

the award for public interest for a series on campaign-finance reform- Time has five finalists this year, all

for coverage of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan, and Newsweek has four.

"With some magazines like the newsweeklies, it was their moment

to shine," said Mr. Granger.

Still, others said the N.M.A.'s judging has always seemed to be

tipped against news reporting, even before Sept. 11. "As a newsmagazine editor,

what's always been exhilarating, but at the same time frustrating, about the

National Magazine Awards is they fully reflect the range of magazines out

there," said Time managing editor Jim

Kelly. Mr. Kelly said that in years past, newsweeklies sometimes felt like "the

least-favorite child in the family."

Other editors said it was not fair to criticize magazines whose

editorial missions simply weren't designed to cover events like Sept. 11. David

Remnick, editor of The New Yorker

(which has nine finalists, including Sy Hersh's investigative work in the

reporting category and its Sept. 11 issue for the single-topic issue) said: "A

lot of magazines that don't do this, how can you fault them for that? I can't

imagine InStyle or a design magazine

would be going through strange gyrations to do stories on Islam or White House

politics."

-Gabriel Snyder

Bill Clinton's mega-hyped handshake with prodigal aide

George Stephanopoulos at Michael's on Wednesday, March 27, seemed like a

classic New York City chance encounter: two former heavyweights turned mortal

enemies, now leading separate lives in Manhattan, meeting by accident in the

lunching hive of the city's power elite.  

But it looks like the fix was in.Turnsout

this"chance"encounter-at leastonMr. slos'

side-was about as choreographed as a Bob Fosse routine. Not only

didMr.Steph-anopoulosknow Mr. Clinton was going to be there, but some media

insiders got a heads-up that The BigHandshake was abouttohappen-and promptly

booked tables so they could be there to witness it.

Thestory beginswith Michael Wolff, NewYork col-umnistand Michael's regular, who said he received a

call from the restaurant that morning at around 10, tipping him off that Mr.

Clinton would be there. The restaurant said they knew he was set to have lunch

with Mr. Stephanopoulos, and wanted him to know that the former President would

be lunching as well (Mr. Clinton was joining pals including Diane Sawyer, Liz

Smith, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal).

"We love George," Michael's general manager Steve Millington told

Off the Record. "He's been a great guest. We wanted to save him any potential

embarrassment." Mr. Millington said the restaurant did not alert Mr. Clinton

because "we did not have the means to do that. We were too busy preparing for

the mêlée surrounding the lunch."

Mr. Wolff admitted that he considered not letting Mr.

Stephanopoulos in on the big surprise awaiting him.

"My first instinct was to not

tell him," Mr. Wolff said. "Because I thought if I told him, he may not come."

But Mr. Wolff did decide to tell Mr. Stephanopoulos, whom he

recalled saying: "You're kidding, right? Oh my God, I've got to think about

this."

"The whole tenor of the thing was out of junior high," Mr. Wolff

said. "You know, 'Is he going to be there? Is he not? What do I say if he

comes?'"

While waiting for Mr.

Stephan-opoulos to call back, Mr. Wolff said he called several people,

all of whom, he noted, proceeded to make reservations at Michael's as if it

were Fight Night at Madison Square Garden.

Not much later, Mr. Stephanopoulos called back to say what the

heck-he'd go to Michael's. But even when the former adviser got to the West

55th Street restaurant, he was uncertain how he'd handle the approach to his

old boss.

"Once we got there," Mr. Wolff said, "George asked, 'Well, do I

speak to him first?' And I said, 'Yes.' It was completely eighth-grade."

Mr. Stephanopoulos settled for a handshake. One press report

stated that Mr. Stephanopoulos popped by Mr. Clinton's table on his way to the

bathroom. Another version had it that Mr. Stephanpoulos went directly to the

table without a visit to the loo.

"He was going to the bathroom," Mr. Wolff confirmed. "It was one

of those things where he was up and said, 'On my way, I'm going to say my

piece."

Reports were the exchange was amicable, though Mr. Clinton mildly

snubbed his former employee by only rising slightly out of his chair during the

brief chat.

Mr. Stephanopoulos did not comment for this story, but a

spokesperson for Mr. Stephanopoulos at ABC News verified Mr. Wolff's account.

"As it turned out," Mr. Millington said, "it wasn't embarrassing,

but history-making. It was really cool. It was a great day for Michael's."

-Sridhar Pappu

TheNationalMagazine Awards ceremony has, in recent

years, dragged on to Oscars-length proportions. There's a boozy 11:30 a.m.

reception that transforms into a three-hour luncheon, padded out with plenty of

introductory remarks, a keynote speech, a Hall of Fame award-think "lifetime

achievement"-plus windy descriptions of nominees read by professional

announcers.

This year, ASME president Cyndi Stivers has decided to cut these

descriptions from the ceremony. Instead, just a quick sentence will be read

aloud (the full citations will still appear in the program). "That's my way of

getting you out of there a half-hour earlier," she said, adding that it was her

goal to achieve "the all-time shortest show."

That was what the Oscar 2002 folks said, but as Condé Nast

staffer said when told the news: "Thank God! It's the most boring lunch."

-G.S.

Nearly a year has passed since Brendan Lemon, editor in

chief of Out , disclosed his

relationship with an unnamed Major League Baseball player. Lemon's May 2001

piece was a big deal in media circles and "The Show," too-it was reportedly

tacked up in pro clubhouses, where players gleefully fingered each other as Mr.

Lemon's lover.

Since then, the gay ballplayer's name has remained a mystery. But

Mr. Lemon and Player X are still a couple, and in honor of the new season, Off

the Record asked Mr. Lemon if he'd like to finally reveal his boyfriend's

identity.

"No, I don't," Mr. Lemon said. "It's his decision. He has to

decide when he wants to himself."

Mr. Lemon, also the American

theater critic for The Financial Times , maintained that his

revelatory editor's note was done with the blessing of his boyfriend. The

details he did provide-that his boyfriend's team was "a major-league East Coast

franchise" and the boyfriend himself "not his team's biggest star but a very recognizable

media figure"- provoked plenty of speculation both inside and outside media and

baseball.

"It was meant to be provocative," Mr. Lemon said of the piece.

"Provocation is a good thing. It got some discussion going."

Mr. Lemon said that he received hundreds of e-mails in the wake

of the piece from people confessing their own furtive relationships. Baseball

players sent encouraging messages. He also received calls from "dozens of

hysterical women" worried that their diamond idol was gay.

"Whenthey stoppedcrying," Mr.

Lemon said, "I told them I couldn't give them that reassurance. And why was it

so important? If it was so-and-so, why couldn't they keep up that poster up on

the wall? What makes him so different now?

"What struck me about all the guesses," Mr. Lemon continued, "is

all the assumptions people made. People thought he'd be single, probably white.

I never said what his race or marital status is."

Since the controversy's heyday, Mr. Lemon has finished a novel, Last Night , now published by the books

division of Out parent company LPI,

Inc. He said he began his book-the story of an American man's affair with a

Cuban boxer-after leaving his post as cultural editor of The New Yorker in 1997, but continued it after dating Player X.

"I read big parts of the book to him," Mr. Lemon said. "He's not

terribly literary, but he's able to understand the story well. He was able to

help with baseball details and the psychology of an athlete in the story."

Now, as Mr. Lemon tries to get people to buy Last Night , Player X begins another season with his secret intact.

However, he's in therapy, Mr. Lemon said, and his coming out will happen …

eventually.

"There's a lot of work to do," Mr. Lemon said. "There's a lot of

preparation that has to be done within the ball club itself before he can do

it. It's not easy. He has to deal with thousands of fans each night. That's the

difference between him, say, and a Hollywood actor working on a closed set.

"This is all an issue of

trust," Mr. Lemon said. "My boyfriend has enough trust in me to let me discuss

this."

-S.P.

"We were suspicious," Mr. Moss said, "but we believed there might be an explanation of what had happened." Then, he said, "the story just got darker and darker as we went along."

On Wednesday, Feb. 13, Mr. Finkel called his editor at the magazine, Ilena Silverman, to tell her that he'd spoken with a representative from Save the Children Canada, a relief organization mentioned in his story, who said the group had found Youssouf Male and he was not the boy pictured in the magazine, in a photograph credited to Mr. Finkel himself.

At that point, Mr. Finkel made an excuse, Mr. Moss said, and told The Times that he had accidentally sent in the wrong photograph and a correction was needed. But Mr. Finkel's call set off alarm bells at the magazine, and that day Mr. Moss asked his deputy editor, Katherine Bouton, to begin investigating the reporter's piece in its entirety.

Mr. Moss asked Mr. Finkel for corroboration of Youssouf Male's existence, but instead, the next day, the writer hopped on a plane from Bozeman, Mont., where he lives, to New York to meet with The Times ' editors on Friday, Feb. 15.

Mr. Finkel met with Ms. Bouton first, and in their lengthy meeting admitted that he had written about a composite character-but, he insisted, based on facts gleaned from his reporting in West Africa. After that meeting, Ms. Bouton told Mr. Finkel to walk around Times Square for a bit while she briefed Mr. Moss, who then sat down with his writer.

Mr. Moss was furious.

"It was some mix of anger-fury, I would even say," the editor said. "Here is a guy with a tremendous amount of talent, and it was just such a stupid thing to do. And at some level, even though you were furious with him, you couldn't help but feel sorry for him."

Mr. Moss said he asked Mr. Finkel "to explain in his own words what he had done and then asked him why." After the writer complied, The Times responded by terminating his contract, and by publishing a contrite Editor's Note on Feb. 21.

Mr. Finkel declined to speak with Off the Record, but he did send an e-mail explaining his silence. "As you can imagine it has been a difficult week," he wrote. "I have been doing a great deal of thinking, and I've decided to take some time before commenting further about the situation. Eventually, I plan to write about the experience myself."

Mr. Finkel also sent along a statement that read, in part: "In order to tell this story in a way that is compelling to read, I made the wrong decision to put together several accounts that were told to me by these young workers and combined them into one representative voice …. The situation that I portray-that of young boys living in an impoverished part of the world who sell themselves to traffickers in order to have the opportunity to work for pennies a day on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast-is absolutely true."

But Mr. Finkel didn't offer any insight as to why he chose to do what he did.

One of Mr. Finkel's closest friends and working colleagues, however, summed up what Mr. Finkel had told him. Photographer Chris Anderson, who traveled with Mr. Finkel on numerous assignments over the last four years, including the trip to West Africa, said that Mr. Finkel probably erred due to stress. Under the pressure of writing for the biggest venue of his career-before landing a Times Magazine contract, Mr. Finkel's primary outlets were National Geographic Adventure and Skiing magazine-Mr. Finkel buckled, he said.

What really put the pressure on, Mr. Anderson said, was the fact that the West Africa story hadn't panned out as Mr. Finkel thought it might. "From the get-go, it was like a busted play," Mr. Anderson said.

Originally, he said, Mr. Finkel was setting out to document the use of child slavery on cocoa farms. But when the two arrived, they both began to have their doubts that the young men they met had ever been slaves. The conditions were harsh, to be sure, but Mr. Anderson said they were resistant to the slavery label that several aid organizations in the region were using. "We started finding that the story was that there wasn't a story," Mr. Anderson said.

After a couple of weeks of reporting in June and July of last year, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Finkel had a lot of trouble writing. Mr. Anderson said Mr. Finkel went through a lot of drafts. To compensate for the lack of a hard child-slavery angle, Mr. Anderson said, The Times editors wanted Mr. Finkel to "try to make it more personal, more human, so Mike tried to do that and wrote a couple more drafts, and they were all rejected for one reason or another."

Mr. Finkel was getting frustrated, and also had a looming self-imposed deadline: At the end of the summer, he had planned to climb a mountain in Nepal.

"When he finally cracked," Mr. Anderson said, "I don't know how long he had been awake, but this had been weeks of rewriting and I don't how many drafts he had written, but finally he had been awake for literally three days straight; he had not slept."

Mr. Moss said that Mr. Finkel told him the story that ran was actually a draft he'd written as an exercise, to put down on paper what he wanted to write-but, Mr. Moss added, after a positive reaction from his editor, Mr. Finkel never told anyone at the magazine that it wasn't true.

Mr. Finkel did go to Nepal, and Mr. Anderson said that during his friend's time there, Mr. Finkel was completely out of contact with The Times . He claimed Mr. Finkel was so remote that he didn't hear about the attack on the World Trade Center until days afterward. When he returned from Nepal, Mr. Anderson said they expected the piece, like lots of others after Sept. 11, would be spiked. And soon after Mr. Finkel returned, the two left for eight weeks in Afghanistan.

While he was gone, however, the Youssouf Male piece was put back on the magazine's schedule. It closed during the first week of November, and Mr. Moss said that his magazine's fact-checkers had trouble verifying the piece. There are only three full names in Mr. Finkel's piece, and Youssouf Male, the main character, was unreachable.

One of the other named individuals was a psychologist, Ibrahim Haidara, who had worked at Save the Children's center for child laborers in Sikasso, Mali. In the piece, Mr. Haidara counsels Mr. Finkel's composite character, Youssouf Male; in reality, Mr. Haidara couldn't recollect interacting with Mr. Male when he visited the center. It was the simple fact-checking call that could have raised questions before the piece was published, but as Mr. Moss explained, a language barrier-Mr. Haidara speaks French and not much English-and an e-mail snafu kept them out of touch.

A fact-checker did try to reach Mr. Haidara, who was fired by Save the Children at the end of August, but, Mr. Moss said, she only received a rather garbled response in broken English. As The Times Magazine read it, he was upset about his dismissal and wasn't going to answer any questions about Youssouf Male. Mr. Moss, who said he has French speakers on his staff, said the magazine left it at that.

"We felt satisfied that the communication in English was going through on both sides and we were not going to be able to get a lot of information from him," Mr. Moss said. "In retrospect, we should have pursued this more aggressively."

Off the Record called Mr. Haidara in Paris, where he currently lives. In an interview conducted in French, Mr. Haidara said he saw problems with the story of Youssouf Male when he read Mr. Finkel's piece in English.

"I think he added another child. I don't really believe it," Mr. Haidara said, pointing to details in the story that were inconsistent with his work in Sikasso. For instance, Mr. Finkel wrote that Mr. Haidara taught Youssouf Male to sing the Malian national anthem. "You don't teach things like that to children. Even I don't know it by heart," he said.

Mr. Haidara, in fact, said he sent another e-mail to the Times fact-checker about inaccuracies the day after the story was published. But Mr. Moss said because the fact-checker who received the e-mail was a freelance fact-checker and hadn't been in the office since, no one was monitoring her e-mail account, and Mr. Haidara's e-mail went unnoticed until Mr. Moss ordered the new investigation.

Mr. Moss said that the editors went on trust with their writer: "And, you know, that trust turned out to be misplaced."

In the days after The Times acknowledged Mr. Finkel's mistake, Mr. Anderson said he'd been consoling his friend. He has fielded several teary, late-night calls from Mr. Finkel, he said. "Obviously he's shattered in many ways, extremely remorseful. He's hurting."

So far, The New York Times ' leadership has been content to let the Michael Finkel episode pass as an event confined to its magazine section. Mr. Moss said he alerted executive editor Howell Raines as soon as he got out of his meeting with Mr. Finkel on Feb. 15.

The controversy over Mr. Finkel's piece comes at a time when rumors about section editors like Mr. Moss being shuffled had already been swirling.

Times sources tell Off the Record that prior to the Finkel episode, Mr. Raines had spoken to Mr. Moss about taking a job where he would oversee The Times ' feature sections like Dining In–Dining Out and House and Home, but Mr. Moss resisted the move. The Finkel episode, Times sources said, may force the issue.

Mr. Moss said: "My conversations with Howell are between he and I."

A request for comment from Mr. Raines was referred to Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who rebuffed the suggestion that Mr. Moss' stock may have been damaged by the Finkel incident.

"To the contrary, I think this reflects very highly on Adam Moss," Mr. Boyd said. "He did what we expect of any section editor: He spotted the problem, he investigated it, and he put us down the road of fixing it."

Asked to comment about the possibility of Mr. Moss leaving the magazine for a features-editing post, Mr. Boyd said, "Nope."

-Gabriel Snyder, with reporting by Elisabeth Franck

who watch closely, few were surprised by the deflation and slow settling to

ground of the grand balloon known as Talk .

For like some turn-of-the-century hot-air balloon-the kind with

gilded gondolas and loud gas jets filling their air chambers-there was

something unwieldy and antiquated about Talk:

It didn't travel as fast as other, more modern forms of communication, or as

fast as it should have to match its editor's aviatrix-like instincts. And as

others of their style began losing air and drunkenly spiraling down- George , Brill's Content , Mademoiselle - Talk 's short flight looked imperiled as

well, despite the truly glittering smile of its captain, who continued to wave

and express confidence all the while in its incessant descent until it

dropped-klump!

Then she emerged with the desultory smile of an around-the-world

balloonist brought down in Peoria. There were adjunct reverberations in Park

City, Utah-where part-owner Harvey Weinstein was shopping for new independent

movies at the Sundance Film festival-and Los Angeles, where Talk 's premonitory wake had been held,

unknowingly, a party preceding the Golden Globe Awards.

Talk magazine may have

started as, among other things, Tina Brown's entrepreneurial urge for

independence after some tense New Yorker

jousting with Steve Florio at Condé Nast, and Harvey Weinstein's fascinated

need to have and hold a media property. And though it's true she entered at the

top of page 1 of The New York Times ,

and exited two years later at the bottom, Ms. Brown and Mr. Weinstein pretty

much went out as they went in-dispensing glittery, amusing $50 million quotes

as their lieutenants fended for themselves.

On the chilly afternoon of Friday, Jan. 18, outside Talk 's Chelsea offices, the very

reporting hordes Talk depended on-and

now was complaining had brought it down-waited to give Ms. Brown either the

Marilyn Monroe or the Norma Desmond treatment by getting a big quote. The media

pack, looking at the fall of Talk

like a steamed dumpling stuffed with Schadenfreude ,

waited for an epitaph to a magazine to which few had any particular emotional

allegiance-as many had with Life or

the Saturday Evening Post or Lingua Franca - but which they remembered

mostly for a party on Liberty Island on a strange, humid evening in 1999. That

was the party, of course, to which they'd been invited with Madonna, Henry

Kissinger and about a million gallons of sponsored liquor, the party that-remember?-the

magazine's then-avowed enemy, Rudy Giuliani, had kept out of the Brooklyn Navy

Yards. For political reasons.

Ms. Brown's explanations for Talk 's

demise: a somewhat opportunistic assigning of blame to Sept. 11; a rotten

economy prior; the crushing weight of expectations no start-up magazine had

ever faced. (Although she might have honored her own signal triumph by

remembering that Vanity Fair had far

grander expectations and was a bigger flop, before she showed up to save it in

the 1980's.)

Behind the scenes, there was scattered, equally predictable

noise: Hearst was cheap, Miramax was profligate, Ms. Brown wasn't the glamour

surgeon she'd been in the Reagan years.

Now Ms. Brown suggested that the media should be less gleeful at Talk 's demise. "When you think about it,

with Talk gone, where do you place a

sophisticated story now?" she said to Off the Record. "You could do it for The New Yorker , but that's highly

competitive with a whole bunch of staff writers who mostly write it. The Time and Newsweek s of the world are really mainstream, and you couldn't

write a really risqué piece for those publications. The New York Times is also very conservative. And Vanity Fair has its sort of established

roster.

"There's not many places to submit a piece at this point," she

said. "There's really a death of places to write. So I think when people say,

'Was there a reason for Talk ?' Yes,

there's a reason for Talk . We did

provide outlets for a whole bunch of other writers, and they were writing for

our pages and loving doing it."

Mr. Weinstein sounded a more bottom-line note, with a complaint

at the shark-stocked nature of the media pool. "I was surprised that members of

the media didn't see Talk as a chance

to create more jobs in the industry," he responded to a written question from

Off the Record. "While there's obviously competitiveness in the movie industry,

there is an appreciation for competitors providing opportunities for those in

the industry to work."

Left unanswered: what Talk 's

farewell meant for prospects in the genre Ms. Brown had so successfully

reinvigorated, first at Tatler , then

at Vanity Fair and at The New Yorker : Tina Brown was

supposedly the woman who had saved the general-interest magazine, and it had

been there that Talk had a terrible

weight upon itself. If Talk had

promise, it was because it could be-once you got past Gwyneth, Heather and

then, as things descended, Estella and Gwyneth once more-a magazine. Ms. Brown,

who had been marketed, hoisted and made a

60 Minutes subject, the first really well-known editor since Jann Wenner,

was supposed to make things levitate.

But Talk never quite became a magazine-in the sense that Playboy or Sports Illustrated or Ladies

Home Journal is a magazine you know and can come to terms with. After its

initial kind of cool physical appearance as a stapled, sleek, oversized

magazine in the tradition of English Sunday supplements and Hello! That suggested a raffish feature

newsmagazine with a short lead-time, it returned to the usual lumbering

American perfect-bound format, and then to indistinguishability.

In the end, Ms. Brown said what editors say when it happens: She

wished she had more time. She wished she had more time to perfect her magazine

before it was reviewed, more time from her two backers, Hearst Magazines and

Miramax Films, more time to find new investors. Like scores of editors before

her who were told by their financiers that the money was being turned off, Ms.

Brown maintained right up until the announcement that Talk would close-without even printing its next issue with Courtney

Love on the cover-that she just needed a few more issues to prove that Talk could be a success.

"For us, being a single title in the conglomerate world, as it

were, was so incredibly difficult," said Ms. Brown. "You know, you spend all

your time in that war, and so little time in the end is spent on the creative

stuff, which is the lifeblood of what you do. And so much time is spent in a

crouched position in the dugout."

At least six months ago, it became clear to Talk that they would need another investor to keep the magazine

going. Hearst was starting to signal that it did not want to continue

underwriting half the losses of starting up a general-interest magazine,

sources close to the situation told Off the Record. So Ms. Brown and Ron

Galotti, the prodigious, aggressive publisher who was Talk' s president, began seeking out a new investor. Miramax Films,

which had put up the other half of Talk ,

would continue to back them, they thought.

This past summer, Ms. Brown was confident that she would be able

to find someone to replace Hearst. Prior to Sept. 11, she said, "we would have

definitely found another partner. There were two people in particular we talked

to who really wanted to be in the magazine." Ms. Brown wouldn't say who the two

potential investors were, but a source close to Talk identified the two likely investors as Conrad Black, the chief

executive of newspaper publisher Hollinger International, and David Pecker,

chief executive of supermarket-tabloid publisher American Media Inc. (Hollinger

International did not respond to requests for comment, although the company

confirmed in other reports that it had once considered investing in Talk but decided to pass. A spokesman

for American Media would neither confirm nor deny that Mr. Pecker had looked at

the magazine.)

"The problem was," Ms. Brown said, "they could live with our

pre–Sept. 11 business plan, but what no one can take was having to double the

number for the next year of losses."

By Monday, Jan. 14, after a meeting with Hearst and Miramax, it

became clear that Hearst's patience was gone and it was pulling out, said one

source who spoke to Ms. Brown after that meeting. 

The final decision, however, sat with Miramax. Would it continue

to back Talk , a magazine that had

been a long-term fascination of Mr. Weinstein's and which, with his political

participation in the Gore campaign and his undisputed triumphs in Hollywood,

would have-if it had succeeded-made him a triple-threat power. Ms. Brown, the

source said, thought the magazine's end was near, but was convinced she would

get a few more issues-issues which she believed were the strongest since the

magazine started. March was to have Ms. Love on the cover, April, Tom

Cruise-which she could use to round up a new investor.

"Really, the magazine since last summer has been really good,"

Ms. Brown said. "I think the magazine gelled, and it happened at Vanity Fair , although people love to

forget it, but it took two years to get that team right."

On Wednesday, Jan. 16,with the March issue still closing, Ms.

Brown and Mr. Galotti headed to Los Angeles where Talk was throwing a party for the Golden Globe awards, crucial to

any studio's Oscar campaigns, and Mr. Weinstein was to head there from the

Sundance Film Festival in Utah. When Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti got to the

Mondrian Hotel, where they were to host their party, Ms. Brown got a call from

Mr. Weinstein telling her he had decided he couldn't shoulder all of Talk on his own, and that the magazine

would close down immediately.

That meant the March issue would never be published.

Ms. Brown, sources said, began lobbying Hearst and Miramax

officials to print the March issue. Partly, they said, because she was proud of

it, and partly because she wanted to buy time to seek a new investor.

Attendees of the party, held in the Mondrian's restaurant Asia de

Cuba, said it was hardly lively. Missing were the Miramax stars, like Judi

Dench, and the studio's staff. Most conspicuously absent was Mr. Weinstein, who

was hosting a party in Park City, Utah, for Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman,

both of whom are featured in upcoming Miramax films. Many partygoers in Los

Angeles took the down-beat note of the party as sign. "To me the alarm bells

went off when Harvey went to Utah with Russell and Nicole," one source said.

Many noticed that Ms. Brown spent a long while talking alone out

by the restaurant's pool with Michael Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt

Disney Company. The conversation wasn't heated, sources said, but serious and

determined, and the two seemed to make it clear that other people were not

welcome to join it. In Ms. Brown's effort to publish one last issue of Talk , since Miramax is a subsidiary of

Disney, winning Mr. Eisner's support could have been crucial.

Early on the morning of Friday, January 18, Ms. Brown and Mr.

Galotti flew back to New York to meet with their staff.

At Talk , which was

still closing the March issue, when the meeting was announced around noon on

Friday, speculation began to swirl. Some believed that Talk was going to be closed down. Editorial director Maer Roshan

believed that Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti were bringing back good news. On

Wednesday, Mr. Roshan, who thought speculation about Talk 's future was distracting his staff during the close, asked Mr.

Galotti to update them on the search for investors, sources said. Mr. Galotti

had agreed, and Mr. Roshan thought that the meeting was the one he had asked

for.

But, in fact, it was not. Ms. Brown, Mr. Galotti, Hearst

Magazines chief executive Cathie Black and Miramax executive vice president

Charles Layton announced that Talk was over.

Then the recriminations began. In the three-way pull to avoid

blame for a failed magazine launch that reportedly burned through $50 million,

Hearst is being accused by some at Talk

and Miramax of undermining the magazine. In December, when speculation that

Hearst was on the verge of pulling out of the magazine began to intensify, Ms.

Black stood behind a statement that "we support" Talk 's efforts to find new investors and "expect that we will have

a continuing relationship with the magazine."

At Talk , it was seen as

damning with faint praise, and since the staff felt increasingly under siege

from the press and now Hearst, very damaging to the very efforts Hearst said it

supported.

"For the past year, it seems they have done everything in their

power to shorten the life of the magazine," said one close source. "They didn't

just want to remove themselves from the magazine, they didn't want any

magazine."

Ms. Black was out of the country on Jan. 22 and unavailable for

comment. A spokesperson for Hearst said, "We can't imagine why someone would

say this while Hearst was investing dollar for dollar alongside Miramax. It was

in everyone's best interest that the magazine succeed."

Meanwhile, the very press

that had mythologized Ms. Brown, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Galotti as print

powerhouses suddenly were seen as the dirty rotten scoundrels who were dragging

it down. The press counted the ad pages, complaining that Talk was nothing but Vanity

Fair Jr. , watching the non-stop revolving door of hires, retreats,

announcements, raids and inside scuffles.

And the one thing that just worked-the book business-run by

Jonathan Burnham and launching best-sellers and prestige publications from

Simon Schama, Martin Amis and the astonishing, fortuitous signing of Mayor

Giuliani-did nothing but make the magazine look bad in contrast.

Asked if she would do anything differently now, Ms. Brown said,

after three years of hyping a magazine built largely on her own celebrity, she

wished she had kept a lower profile.

She brought up a conversation she had with the founder of women's

cable network, Oxygen. "When I ran into Geraldine Laybourne recently," Ms.

Brown said, "they were very unhappy about the fact that they didn't have a New

York outlet. And I said, 'You're so lucky that you don't have a New York

outlet. There's been huge amount of turbulence over there, in terms of people

coming and going and so forth, but their programs weren't being reviewed."

In December, the three-year old Oxygen won a slot on New York

City cable. "I don't know what their shows are going to be like," said Ms.

Brown, "but you'd think after two years they've probably got it in much better

shape than if they had just opened on Broadway. One thing that would have been

great is that I wish we would have had an out-of-town try-out."

And Ms. Brown volunteered that she had a lot of difficulty

editing a monthly after seven years of editing the weekly New Yorker . Asked if she would edit another magazine, Ms. Brown

said, "And if I were to do it again, I would never do a monthly again. I think

monthlies are a killer. It's too long." She added, "I think the culture is

moving very fast and the whole kind of laborious pre-historic kind of minuet to

the close, locked in aspects two or three weeks before you publish, it just

felt like agony"

For now, Ms. Brown said she plans to stay as chairman of Talk

Miramax Books, the wholly owned subsidiary of Miramax, which is set to publish

two books by former Mayor Giuliani, as well as a memoir by former Secretary of

State Madeleine Albright.

As for herself, she ruled out publishing her own diaries, kept

since age 12, except as a last resort. "I think my diary will be something at

some point when I'm 75,  when the

bailiffs are taking my furniture out, I'll cash in then," said Tina Brown.

Bill Colson's sudden departure as the managing editor of

Sports Illustrated didn't just signal

a shakeup for the venerable-yet-creaky jock weekly; it also marked the arrival

of John Huey as a cage-rattling force within Time Inc.

Five months into his tenure

as Time Inc.'s editorial director, Mr. Huey, the 53-year-old former managing editor of the Fortune

Group , has already shown a

willingness to personally intercede in publications he perceives to be on the

down slope. Sports Illustrated may

have simply been the first; People and

Entertainment Weekly could be next on

Mr. Huey's hit list, a Time Inc. source said. Another source said that the new

editorial director was dissatisfied with all the magazines he oversees "except

for Fortune and Money ."

Mr. Huey declined to be interviewed for this story. But sources

at Time Inc. said that he has established himself as a far more aggressive

manager than his predecessors, Walter Isaacson and Henry Muller. As one Time

Inc. executive put it: "No [other editorial director] has flexed his muscles as

much as Huey already has. Even Walter didn't flex his muscles as much as Huey."

There were early signs that Mr. Huey would be a shakeup artist,

however. When Mr. Huey took over for Mr. Isaacson after the latter went to run

CNN, Time Inc. editor in chief Norm Pearlstine changed the editorial director's

role. Instead of focusing on the broad synergies of AOL Time Warner properties,

Mr. Huey would have a more direct, day-to-day control over the company's

flagship titles. (Mr. Pearlstine, too, declined to be interviewed for this

story).

Mr. Huey's rise surprised few people inside or outside the

company. Ever since Mr. Pearlstine joined Time Inc. from The Wall Street Journal , Mr. Huey has served as his fixer: an

affable man who will deliver results, but one who can be ruthless in his

execution. Just a month into Mr. Pearlstine's tenure, he replaced Fortune 's managing editor, Walter

Kiechel, with Mr. Huey, who proceeded to quickly remake the staff. Then, when

Mr. Huey was given oversight of Money

in 1997, longtime editor Frank Lalli was forced out the door in favor of Fortune senior editor and Wunderkind Bob Safian.

"I think that's an indication of how things are going to go," one

Time Inc. source said, referring to Mr. Huey's scorched-earth past. "He got rid

of a lot of people at Fortune very

fast, and he told the remaining people, 'Get on the program or leave.' And then

he treated Money the same way. That

was just bloody over there."

As editorial director, Mr. Huey's been tinkering with small parts

of Time Inc. for a number of months. According to sources, Mr. Huey has been

visiting Time to talk to staffers and

chat with managing editor Jim Kelly. Last fall, according to sources, with Mr.

Kelly on vacation, he attended a 10 a.m. meeting in which editors debated

whether they should put President George W. Bush on the cover. When one editor

raised an objection, according to a source, Mr. Huey shot back, "Who cares what

you think?" (Mr. Kelly did not return phone calls for this story.)

But Sports Illustrated

was the first publication to be on the receiving end of a  thunderbolt from Mr. Huey. Long considered

the finest sports magazine in the country, the perception was that SI had fallen into something of a rut,

especially when compared the sassy, graphics-heavy ESPN the Magazine , SI 's

first serious competitor in years.

According to company sources, Mr. Pearlstine had been

dissatisfied with Mr. Colson's performance since he won the job in 1995. But it

was Mr. Huey who finally initiated the move to do something about it.

Following a series of focus groups viewed via satellite simulcast

at AOL Time Warner's building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza beginning in early November,

Mr. Huey became convinced that the magazine "was for 50-year-old white guys who

play golf five times a week," one SI

source said. Then on Nov. 27, in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, Mr.

Huey met with four of the magazine's West Coast writers and expressed concern

about the magazine. One of the writers who was there, Michael Silver, said the

meeting wasn't a bitch-fest. "It wasn't as if we sat around complaining," said

Mr. Silver. "I thought the meeting was constructive and on a positive note."

But sources in New York said the meeting represented a harbinger of things to

come. "Right after it happened," said one SI

source, "everyone here knew about it. That's when we knew major changes were

coming." Given the command to implement major if not really necessary changes,

sources said, Mr. Colson decided to call it quits. (Mr. Colson declined to

comment for this story.)

But even before Mr. Colson's decision to leave, Mr. Huey stepped

in and made changes with SI

content-even terminating pieces he didn't like. One such piece was a column by

Steve Rushin about a golf outing with Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura for the

Oct. 1 issue. According to one SI

source, the column "just didn't work" for Mr. Huey. When Mr. Colson tried to

intercede on Mr. Rushin's behalf, saying the columnist might quit if the

magazine didn't run it, the source said Mr. Huey responded: "Let him quit."

Mr. Rushin didn't return a call seeking comment. But Mr. Huey's

meddling in content was seen by some SI

staffers as an ominous sign.

"You don't get your column killed," said one SI source. "Its sacrilege. A column is a column. You do what you

do."

Mr. Huey also stepped in to

torpedo a mid-November piece written by a freelance writer about the heavy

financial losses of Major League Baseball. Commissioned by Mr. Colson, it was

written by Andew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor and author of

the book Baseball and Billions.

Mr. Zimbalist said that the 1,500-word piece had gone through

various editors who all expressed happiness with it, only to be struck down in

the early-morning hours on Monday, as the magazine closed. When he asked why,

Mr. Zimbalist was told the piece had been killed by an outside editor. Said one

SI source: "Huey reached in and

killed it."

"I thought it was wrong for an outside editor to kill an

initiated and approved piece," Mr. Zimbalist said. "Furthermore, it's

indicative of the difficult position Sports

Illustrated 's in as part of AOL Time Warner, which, as owner of the Atlanta

Braves, has a relationship with Major League Baseball. How can they claim to be

objective if an outside editor has such control?"

While it's extremely unlikely Mr. Huey was acting on orders from

baseball commissioner Bud Selig in putting the kibosh on the economics piece,

it does appear that Time Inc.'s new editorial director has a Steinbrennerian

flair. Mr. Huey is meeting with SI

editors and writers about rejiggering the magazine one again, and as for

successors for Mr. Colson, the two most talked-about candidates are US Weekly 's Terry McDonnell and Roy

Johnson of Savoy .

And that figures to be the first of many shifts at Time Inc.'s

publications during the John Huey era. According to one company executive, Mr.

Huey is the clear favorite to succeed Mr. Pearlstine, whose contract reportedly

expires at the end of 2003.

"Norm's in the back seat for the most part," said another Time

Inc. source. "He's more than happy to do the other stuff he's doing. But Huey's

pretty much got free rein."

-Sridhar Pappu

York Sun, New York City's conservative-leaning, next daily newspaper,

officially announced itself to the world as a defender of, among other things,

"lower taxes and school choice."

But while many pieces of Sun

gossip were publicly confirmed by the announcement-boldface investors like

Conrad Black; Ira Stoll and Seth Lipsky as the paper's editor and managing

editor, respectively-it failed to mention when the paper might be coming out.

Sources told Off the Record that The Sun was hoping for a mid-March arrival,

but Mr. Stoll was more vague. "We're saying spring," he said. "It's kind of

like the special forces moving into Afghanistan. You don't want to exactly say

when you're coming in."

The paper has hired some reporters, however: Rachel P. Kovner, a

2001 Harvard Crimson editor who has written for Mr. Stoll's New York Times -critiquing Web site

Smartertimes.com and is the daughter of Sun

investor Bruce Kovner, as well as Ben Smith, a former stringer for The Wall

Street Journal Europe , who also has contributed to the Web site.

"We've hired four people," Mr. Lipsky said. He said the other two

were his longtime personal assistant, and someone to help set up the computers.

"But we've been inundated with résumés, hundreds of them. We're in the process

of working through them."

Sources said, Mr. Lipsky and Mr. Stoll have also reached out to

Seth Mnookin-the former Inside.com

media writer who worked for the pair at their previous incarnation, Forward . Neither Mr. Mnookin nor Mr.

Stoll, however, would comment on the situation.

Sources also said the paper might turn to some outside columnists

to help fill their pages. One name mentioned was Caroline Baum-a columnist

covering bonds for Bloomberg News. A longtime Federal Reserve watcher, she was

once described by Alan Greenspan as "the only person who can make the

flattening of the yield curve sound pornographic."

When asked for comment, Ms. Baum said, "I really have no idea.

You'd have to ask Seth Lipsky or Ira Stoll about it." Mr. Lipsky confirmed his

appreciation of Ms. Baum's work, but declined to say if her byline would appear

in the paper.

"I'm a huge fan of Caroline Baum," Mr. Lipsky said, "Huge. But we

haven't hired her and we haven't subscribed to her column."

In the meantime, there are plenty of other issues left to solve.

The skeleton staff has barely moved into the paper's offices at 105 Chambers

Street. Mr. Lipsky said they were still unsure where the paper would be

printed, how many pages an average issue will be and how much it would cost.

The Sun's team of investors are reportedly putting up $15 million to launch the

paper, a figure some skeptics have found paltry for a daily start-up.

"All I can say is that it's

risky and it's worth the risk," Mr. Lipsky said of the financial naysayers.

"I'm here and I'm doing it."

-Sridhar Pappu

Throughout the dot-com boom, Jason McCabe Calacanis

played the part of P.T. Barnum, hyping New York Internet companies to the high

heavens in the pages of his magazine, Silicon

Alley Reporter , and his handful of e-mail newsletters.

When it came to self-promotion, Mr. Calacanis was no slouch,

either. But there is the possibility of doing something too well. For example,

take an Oct. 8 story in The New York

Times . The news was that Mr. Calacanis had decided to stop publishing Silicon Alley Reporter and instead

launch Venture Reporter , a magazine

that would chronicle venture-capital deals and trends. It's a canny move; after

all, with nearly every dot-com strapped for cash, learning who's got the money

has become that much more important.

"The story's over," the quotable Mr. Calacanis told The Times of his decision to shut down Silicon Alley Reporter. "You can't have

a magazine about unemployed people. You can't have a magazine about people who

are taking time off."

But when the story appeared, with the headline "Requiem for a

Cheerleader: Silicon Alley Magazine Is Dead," the piece backfired on Mr.

Calacanis: Many people in the industry (including this reporter) assumed that

Mr. Calacanis and his trade publishing company were going out of business. They

weren't going out of business; they were simply folding one magazine and

launching another.

Soon after the story was published, Mr. Calacanis complained to

Tim Race, the Monday business editor at The

Times , and asked for a correction.

"I'm furious about this," Mr. Calacanis told Off the Record. "I

lost advertising over this. I can't tell you how many sales calls I've been on

where people say, 'I thought you shut down,' and then we spend the first 10

minutes explaining how The New York Times got it wrong."

Still, it was a muddy situation, because the story about Mr.

Calacanis' plans, written by Amy Harmon, was factually accurate.

"The Silicon Alley Reporter

… has published its last issue," Ms. Harmon wrote. But later, she noted that

"Mr. Calacanis, 30, plans to begin publishing a magazine about venture capital

investment called Venture Reporter

beginning in December."

If anything, the confusion might have been caused by

headlines-along with the "Requiem" headline, there was a teaser on the digest

of the Business Day section which used the headline, "The Silicon Alley

Reporter Closes."

So now, as Mr. Calacanis touts his new title, he's been sure to

take a few digs at The Times .

Recently, he sent out an e-mail announcing the first issue of Venture Reporter had come back from the

printers. "What, you thought we were out of business just because the New York Times said so?!?!?! Please," he

wrote.

That was enough for Mr. Race to write back, "Whatever it takes to

be off your list of gratuitous swipes at the Times , please do."

Mr. Calacanis replied, "You're not on a list Tim … was a personal

email from me."

Mr. Race thinks The Times

did nothing wrong. "As I've tried to tell him any number of times, anyone who

read our Oct. 8 article and came away with the idea that he and his company had

gone out of business doesn't read well enough for their opinions to count for

much in public discourse," he told Off the Record.

Mr. Race said he feels The

Times didn't err because Mr. Calacanis had in fact been planning a mock

funeral for Silicon Alley Reporter .

"He had been planning to hold a mock funeral for the publication, until the

events of Sept. 11 made Jason conclude that such an event might be in bad

taste," he said. "For having that much good sense, I give him full credit."

-Gabriel Snyder

The New York Times Book Review has

decided to start placing original poetry alongside its reviews, best-seller

lists and page-long ruminations about how it's really O.K. to hate your books. Book Review editor Charles McGrath said

the decision was a natural one, given the fact that the review had published

excerpted poems in the past. "It won't be every week," Mr. McGrath said. "I

don't want to be in a position where we have to fill a slot that we can't

deliver on."

-S.P.

The events of last

fall led lots of suddenly heartfelt, earnest magazine editors to put less

"relevant" projects aside. Esquire

editor David Granger canceled the magazine's annual "Dubious Achievement

Awards." GQ eliminated its "Man of

the Year" award show. And, as it turns out, Vanity

Fair 's Graydon Carter put a completed, special issue of the magazine into

publishing purgatory, where it remains to this day.

The doorstop in question is a

prototype of a Vanity Fair devoted

entirely to design, according to Spencer Beck, the man who put it together. Mr.

Beck, formerly the editor in chief of Los

Angele s, said he spoke to Mr. Carter about the project for a couple of

months before he moved back to New York in January 2001 to work on it. Over a

period of several months Mr. Beck toiled on the project with the art department

and a few senior editors.

Mr. Beck declined to comment on the contents of the issue, saying

only that it was "devoted to design A-Z, but with a Vanity Fair point of view." After Sept. 11 Mr. Beck said he and Mr.

Carter spoke about the project, but that "Graydon's attention is now on stories

about terrorism."

A Vanity Fair

spokesperson said Mr. Carter was unavailable for comment. When asked if the

prototype would ever emerge in actual, distributed form, the spokesperson said:

"We don't know. Right now we're not sure what we're going to do with it."

-S.P.

There was something reassuring about the party Harper's Bazaar threw for itself on Jan.

14. The magazine had decked out the large space of Eyebeam Atelier, a sprawling

event space on West 21st Street, in red carpeting, red couches and red light in

honor of Glenda Bailey's first "official" issue at the helm.

In reality, Ms. Bailey, who had come from Marie Claire , had been hired last summer, and her hand could be

seen at work in the magazine's pages since the November issue. But Bazaar Nation was in full

self-congratulatorymood, rolling out staple party props like a giant blow-up of

the new cover withGisele Bündchen, a logo-filled backdrop in the posing pen for

the paparazzi,and pieces of chocolate with Bazaar

printed on them. In a time when magazines have seen advertising revenues

plummet and party budgets have been severely cut, it all felt so very, pleasantly

… 1999.

Standing up front, Bazaar 's

creative director Stephen Gan was doing receiving-line duty while telling Off

the Record just how much time he's been spending redesigning the fashion

magazine.

"Life is busy again," he said, " I started work and then 10 days

after I started work, the November issue had to go to print. So we had-" he cut

off to say goodbye to a fashion executive who was leaving.

"What day's your show?" he said, referring to the upcoming

fashion week in Paris.

"The 25th," the woman said. "Are you going to be there?

"I will! O.K., call me."

After a four-month hiatus, the fashion crowd was back to being

busy, touting new projects, shimmying and jiving through the after-hours.

Later, Christy Turlington said, "I don't go to that many fashion events, so

part of it's reunion with a lot of people I don't get to see."

Ms. Turlington was busy these days, too. There was the yoga book

she had to turn in to Hyperion in March, and of course her cosmetics company,

Sundari, and then her role as editor at Yoga

Journal . "I have very little free time," she said.

Elsewhere, Moby-gosh, it seemed like a million years since we'd

gotten to write about a magazine party with an obligatory Moby appearance-was

complaining about a deadline for the music he was writing for the closing

ceremony of the Winter Olympics next month.

Ms. Bailey played the frenzied host, darting from guest to guest

to the point where it was nearly impossible to catch a word with her. Off the

Record first tried to talk with her as she was coming off the dance floor set

up in the middle of the room. We started with a question and she asked, "Do you

want a drink?" We went up to the bar and as soon as she had put our order in,

the Clash's "Rock the Casbah" came up. Ms. Bailey didn't bother to order a

drink for herself. "I've got to dance to this," she said, "I'll be back," and

then went back to the dance floor.

We caught up with Ms. Bailey a few songs later on the other side

of the room, standing with Susan Magrino, the publicist for the party. She at

first apologized (saying she had "passion for dance") and then launched into,

"We love fashion, and we're very, very fortunate. We live such a privileged

life because we're able to go to fashion shows, we're fortunate enough to see

the best designers in the world …. "

Before long, Ms. Magrino was introducing Ms. Bailey to Frank

DeCaro, a movie critic for The Daily Show

with Jon Stewart and writer for TV

Guide .

"Congratulations," Mr. DeCaro said.

"Thank-you," Ms. Bailey said.

"And thank-you for your note,"

Mr. DeCaro said. And Ms. Bailey was off again, heading back through the dance

floor.

That left us with Mr. DeCaro, who noted he had just finished a

new book proposal: Love Handles to Die

For: A Heartwarming Tale of Sexual Depravity . "It's sort of about how a boy

named Phyllis became a man named Frank," he said.

Dancing, Ms. Bailey was all elbows and hands, while shaking her

waist around. Bill Buford, literary editor of The New Yorker , who himself was staining the underarms of his blue

shirt while boogie-ing with Bazaar

senior features editor Jessica Green, called Ms. Bailey's moves "arrhythmic and

exuberant."

-G.S.

The Jan. 21 issue of Forbes

features as its cover boy Tom Siebel, the head of software giant Siebel

Systems. Along with Mr. Siebel's handsome mug comes this cover line: "Betting

on the Comeback: Tom Siebel's software saw the downturn coming. Now he says

tech is ready to roll."

Fair enough. But open the issue and this is what you'll see: A

full-page ad for Siebel Systems, placed adjacent to another portrait of Mr.

Siebel on the contents page, as if it were a two-page advertising spread.

A spokesperson for Forbes said this wasn't a case of the

magazine's editorial and business sides getting all warm and cozy.

"The contents page was the last to close and this was a

production error," the spokesperson said, "which is always captured. But this

one is a big, red-faced 'Oops!' "

-S.P

behind his desk at the News Corporation headquarters on Sixth Avenue. In the

photo, he's 8 years old and dressed as a paper boy in a street-urchin cap. He's

pretending to hawk a copy of the New York

Post.

Today, Lachlan Murdoch has a very real and critical role in the

future of the Post . At 30 years of

age, the eldest son of News Corp. chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch

has evolved into the driving force behind the tabloid newspaper, which turns

200 years old on Nov. 16.

In recent months, the younger Mr. Murdoch has overseen dramatic

changes in the paper's newsroom, is presiding over its conversion to color, and

has vigorously sought to turn his 70-year-old father's longtime labor of love

and American mouthpiece into a profitable business.

All the while, the usually media-shy Mr. Murdoch, who is News

Corp.'s deputy chief operating officer and the Post 's chairman, has shown signs of increasing comfort with the

spotlight-as well as his growing role in his father's still-widening media

empire. It was Lachlan Murdoch's call, for example, to oust the Post 's previous editor, Xana Antunes,

last spring and replace her with Col Allan. And last month, the spiky-haired

Mr. Murdoch stood up and met the cameras and microphones along with Mr. Allan

and publisher Ken Chandler when word broke that one of the Post 's employees had

contracted anthrax.

"When I'm in New York, which is most of my time, [the Post ] is a third to half of my time,"

Mr. Murdoch said in an interview at his spacious News Corp. office. He said of

the paper: "It's the most fun part of my day. Even though there's a lot of

demands on my time, it's rewarding.

"It's the Post ," Mr.

Murdoch added with emphasis.

But clearly, Mr. Murdoch doesn't view the Post as some kind of entertaining diversion. Since Rupert Murdoch

bought the paper in 1976 and then repurchased it in 1993, analysts have

estimated that it loses between $10 million to $20 million a year. The paper's

primary value, it was long held, was to serve as a brash, block-lettered sounding

board for Rupert Murdoch's political and business causes.

That's supposed to change under Lachlan Murdoch, however. If the Post 's guiding principle was once to

keep his father happy, Lachlan Murdoch's chosen mission is to turn the paper

into a money-making business.

In terms of sheer numbers, he's off to a prodigious start. Citing

its filing with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Post recently announced that for the six-month period ending on

Sept. 30, the Post 's daily

circulation rose an unprecedented 22 percent. Though some of this rise is due

to the paper's slashed 25-cents-per-copy price-as well as to increased

readership after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks-Mr. Murdoch and his colleagues

also attribute the gain to a repositioning and revitalization of the paper,

both editorially and entrepreneurially.

"People thought the Post

was a great brand and that there was this aura around it and that it could

never change," Mr. Murdoch said. His obvious message? Nothing's sacred, and

he's going to keep on making changes.

He has already made substantial changes, of course. The first

indication of Lachlan Murdoch's burgeoning control of the Post came back in April, when Ms. Antunes-who had produced a lively

paper largely dependent upon gossip, business and media coverage-was replaced

by Col Allan, who had been a News Corp. editor in Sydney, Australia. While

Rupert Murdoch was in Detroit trying to negotiate a deal for the acquisition of

the DirecTV satellite-television operation from General Motors, Lachlan introduced

Mr. Allan to an apprehensive Post

newsroom.

Since then, Mr. Allan-with Lachlan Murdoch's consent-has

aggressively remodeled the paper's newsroom and the product itself. In June,

Mr. Allan fired a number of longtime staffers, including two top editors and

columnist Jack Newfield. Not long afterward, the Post 's look changed, too, as Mr. Allan reworked the famous front

page into a blockish arrangement that often touted multiple stories at once and

increased photography in the paper.

At the same time, a handful

of media outlets -including this column-sharply criticized Mr. Allan for

remodeling what some considered to be a prized, fun-to-read tabloid.

Unfazed, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Chandler, the publisher, stayed the

course and stood behind Mr. Allan. "What Col brings to it is incredible

journalistic instincts, and he is evolving the paper very quickly," Mr. Murdoch

said.

In Lachlan Murdoch's mind, the Post had long been in need of an overhaul, and had lagged behind

News Corp.'s other properties overseas. Indeed, Mr. Allan was only one of a

number of Australians and Brits that Mr. Murdoch had brought in from other

parts of the News Corp. empire to work on production and the transition to

color at the Post . For example, Geoff

Booth, who was the general manager of the Herald

Sun in Melbourne, came to New York as the Post 's general manager.

"We really dropped the ball

for a while, because we weren't leveraging our skill sets in the U.K. and

Australia," Mr. Murdoch said.

And now, with the new circulation report and the 22 percent jump,

the Post 's newsroom is feeling a

pretty big blast of vindication. The recent terrorism-and-war-driven spike in

readership has also helped. Mr. Chandler, who also attributes the gains to the

paper's improved reproduction at its new $250 million plant in the South Bronx,

said the tabloid is currently selling about 600,000 papers a day.

The circulation gains have come at a cost. Mr. Chandler said of

the 25-cent price cut, "It's like any other promotion. It's expensive. We could

have taken the money we've invested in the 25 cents and we could have spent

several hundred million dollars on TV campaigns, and kept the price at 50

cents."

But the Post 's biggest

challenge-the true goal-is to find more advertisers for the paper. In the

advertising market, the Post has long

been caught between The New York Times on the high end and the Daily News for the mass market. Most of

the Post 's readers, the theory goes,

also read one of the other dailies. So while the Post has some high-end readers, advertisers figure they can reach

them by buying an ad in The Times .

Likewise, the Daily News already

offers more reach to a middle-class and minority audience.

The trick for Lachlan Murdoch and the Post , then, is to raise circulation high enough so that advertisers

can't ignore the tabloid anymore. Daily

News officials, naturally, are skeptical that the Post can make inroads on advertising until the tabloid has a

sizable readership of its own. "The reason we're so important is that over half

our audience reads no other newspaper," said News president Les Goodstein. "They don't bring a lot to the party

in terms of mass or exclusive readership."

But this is where Lachlan

Murdoch believes color will be his ally. Mr. Murdoch is banking that the end of

the black, white and red era will boost readership-the Post published its first color cover on Nov. 13, the day after the

crash of Flight 587-and is trying to lure advertisers with color ads. When all

the kinks of printing color have been worked out on all four presses in the

plant-a process which Mr. Chandler estimated would take until at least early

2002-the Post will be able to print

color on 64 pages per issue.

At the same time, Mr. Murdoch clearly has his sights set on the Daily News . There's a piece of

conventional wisdom that says New York can't support two profitable tabloids

along with The New York Times . And

this axiom has always-no matter how much the two tabloids diverge

editorially-set the Daily News , which

makes money in a good year, against the Post .

Lachlan Murdoch, relatively new to the clash but very much in

charge now, didn't back down a bit.

"The Post and the Daily News are in a battle," he said.

"It's the last of the great newspaper struggles in America."

-Gabriel Snyder

Wall Street Journal staffers might not

know when they'll be returning to their offices at the World Financial Center,

which they evacuated on Sept. 11, but they might start getting their stuff back

… soon.

In a tongue-in-cheek memo sent last week, WSJ assistant managing editor Cathy Panagoulias wrote that workers

had begun the process of taking everything on and in people's desks, cleaning

the items and bagging them. More urgent items, she wrote, could come back to

their owners first.

But those yearning for their Filofaxes, business cards and new

pairs of New Balance running shoes are out of luck.

"These things," Ms. Panagoulias wrote, "can wait."

Among the items that could make the cut? Eyeglasses "purchased at

the extremely expensive eye doctor in the lobby," divorce papers and "notes for

a leder that has been in the works for a year and that you are actually going

to write."

In addition, she wrote, "Because each piece of paper has to be

vacuumed (yes, really!), we want to know if there are file cabinets of old

stuff that you can just abandon. Those of you who have many file cabinets,

please consider this request seriously."

Vacuumed?

"We're doing asbestos abatement," Dow Jones vice president Steven

Goldstein explained. "This is part of it."

-Sridhar Pappu

Two weeks after Time

magazine boasted that it got an exclusive "first look" at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (produced by AOL Time Warner

corporate subsidiary Warner Bros.), the Nov. 19 issue revealed what the

magazine's movie critic, Richard Corliss, thought of the film.

And woo- wee! Let's just

say that you're unlikely to see a quote from Mr. Corliss in the trailer. The

veteran critic dubbed H.P. a "movie

by the numbers" and "often stodgy, humorless." The worst slight of all was

calling H.P. a "magic act performed

by a Muggle." For the uninitiated, "Muggle" is Potter-speak for a non-wizard.

Mr. Corliss' review was a dour detour from Time 's previous H.P. gushfest, in which writer Jess

Cagle piled on the superlatives like "eye-popping grandeur," "dazzling special

effects" and "sumptuous production values."

So how did Mr. Corliss feel about raining on the Potter parade? Not too bad. He didn't

think he gave the movie a total pan, calling his review

"mixed-mixed-mixed-mixed-negative." And Mr. Corliss said it was a lot easier to

review H.P. than it was reviewing Batman in 1989-the first big Warner

Bros. movie after the Time Inc.–Warner merger. That time, Mr. Corliss was

assigned to write both Time 's cover

story on the movie as well as the review. That was hard.

"I didn't think it fair to have

a quote from Tim Burton saying, 'This is the most wonderful movie I've ever

worked on,' followed by a quote from me which said, 'No, it's not.'"

-G.S.

and Jonathan Franzen was headed for trouble.

Ms. Winfrey, of course, is the heartland priestess of the

soccer-mom set, the you-go-girl mogul whose dewy chat show is one of the most

successful daytime television programs in history. Mr. Franzen, a Mid westerner

by birth, is nonetheless an adopted New York novel is ton the rise-a prodigious

De-Lillo heir apparent in chunky-framed specs and cheek scruff.

To borrow from Donny & Marie, she's a little bit country,

he's a little bit rock 'n' roll.

When Mr. Franzen, after his novel The Corrections was selected for Ms. Winfrey's book club, got

himself into trouble by whining about

Oprah -fication and even grousing about the yawning "O" logo on his

book-Eek! A logo !-and wound up

getting himself booted off an upcoming episode of Ms. Winfrey's show, people

saw it coming. And that was before Mr.

Franzen babbled in the Oct. 12 Oregonian

that he saw himself as "solidly in the high-art literary tradition."

What was telling about the Franzen-Winfrey contretemps was the

five-alarm outrage of Manhattan's literary publishing community. Faced with a

choice-reprimanding arguably their brightest star in years or alienating a

woman who spends many of her shows in the company of a bald-pated schmaltzateer

named Dr. Phil-judgment was swift.

New York publishing chose Oprah.

This love affair had been all but official, of course. With her

powerful show and her loyal viewership, Ms. Winfrey has done more than any

individual in recent memory-perhaps more than anyone, ever-to generate new

readers and revenues for literary fiction. A book picked by Oprah is a

best-seller, period. If the Franzen flap clarified anything, it was that Ms.

Winfrey was now fully ingrained in New York publishing culture, as

untouchable-or even more untouchable-than The

New Yorker and The New York Times

Book Review.

"When I ever even come close to voicing any sympathy [for Mr.

Franzen], I am actually shouted down-even with people who I am intimate with,

who would tell me the truth," said one New York editor. "There seems to be a

genuine siding in the literary community with Oprah. I don't think it's false;

I don't think people are lying. Whether it's good or not, I'm not sure."

But that raises a delicate question: How genuine is the

publishing community's public show of support for Ms. Winfrey? Notwithstanding

the recent displays of fealty, there has always been an undercurrent of

resentment against the talk-show host. It's not the kind of resentment that

rears its head in plain view.

Clearly, there are people in New York's publishing world who may

be more simpatico with the now-beaten-and-bedraggled Mr. Franzen than they've

been letting on in the last couple of weeks. As one New York book editor said,

when asked if anyone in the city actually respected Ms. Winfrey not as a sales

rainmaker, but as a literary fixture: "Not really. I think that's a fact-an

uncomfortable fact, but a fact."

Is some of this snobbery? Surely. There are those in the New York

publishing world who see themselves as the keepers of the American literary

flame and can't stand the fact that, in the past several years, their influence

has come to be dwarfed by a woman with a squishy talk  show. And even though Ms. Winfrey has picked books by Toni

Morrison and Bernhard Schlink, there are those writers who, as New Republic senior editor James Wood

notes, believe "that if you were selected by Oprah, it probably meant that you

hadn't written a challenging and serious novel, at the deepest level."

But you're not likely to hear many people this publicly. Those

inclined to criticize Ms. Winfrey fear being branded an elitist and making an

enemy of such a powerhouse.

"Let me ask you a question," said a well-connected book editor,

but only after being assured that his name would not be used in print. "How

many editors or publishers have you found that are willing to, in any way, see

any fault in Oprah?"

On the record? Zero, of course.

The fact that Mr. Franzen touched off a dispute along cultural

lines is somewhat ironic, considering that one of the most central tensions in The Corrections ' Lambert family is the

tension between the Middle American parents and their children, who have all

moved to the East Coast to pursue a sort of sophisticated lifestyle that

boggles their parents. Henry Finder, the literary editor of The New Yorker , said of the book: "There

are cultural divides, there are geographic divides, and some of them are played

out in this controversy, and yet those very divides are very well dramatized in

the book."

Still, trouble arose when Mr. Franzen, who had written two

previous novels, went out on the road with his third, giving readings and

signing books at primarily independent bookstores. He also gave interviews, and

here he started raising eyebrows after Ms. Winfrey's book-club selection was

announced. Mr. Franzen told various outlets, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , The

Oregonian , the Web site of Powell's bookstore in Portland, Ore., and NPR's Fresh Air , that he was worried that Ms.

Winfrey' send or sement would scare off his core fans -especially with the

Oprah Book Club seal on the extra 500,000 copies of his novel printed to meet

expected demand.

Jonathan Galassi, Mr. Franzen's editor at Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, said that on the road, the author was constantly confronted by fans who

were dismayed that his book could be somehow associated with Ms. Winfrey.

"He told me many times people

in the lines at his readings saying things like that to him, which I think is

one of the reasons this kept coming up with him," Mr. Galassi said. "He kept

getting it thrown at him-it wasn't so much something he was generating. It was

being forced upon [him]; he was being made aware of it constantly."

Mr. Franzen told The

Observer that he had given the interviews within just a few days of each

other beginning on Oct. 4, a day in which he gave six interviews. As soon as he

returned to New York a week later, he found out that Ms. Winfrey had read some

of his comments and wasn't happy.

"When I got back from the tour-Oct. 12, I guess-was when it all

went down," Mr. Franzen said. The word was that Ms. Winfrey had already

scrubbed his appearance on her show.

Mr. Franzen sat down to write a letter saying he was sorry for

hurting her feelings. "I immediately wrote to Oprah Winfrey herself and

apologized very quickly, and everything I've been saying subsequently to

interviewers I'd already tried to privately convey to her. But I knew she was

in a hard position, and I was not trying to talk my way back onto the show by

that point," Mr. Franzen said.

Mr. Franzen's letter apparently made no impact. On Oct. 22, Ms.

Winfrey confirmed in a statement to Publisher's

Weekly that Mr. Franzen's appearance had been canceled and the book club

would be moving on to the next title.

A spokesman at Farrar, Straus & Giroux said that the

publisher was still working to get Mr. Franzen's book discussed on the show,

even without Mr. Franzen appearing. A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey said that on

Oct. 12, "Oprah's decision was made and was final at that point."

Since the blow-up, Mr. Franzen has been nothing but apologetic.

"I inconsiderately and

unwisely gave voice to some ambivalence or mixed feelings as a writer who was

relatively on the margin, certainly on the margins of the mainstream. I

expressed some discomfort with being pushed in the middle of things," he said.

"And again, it was dumb and inconsiderate to express those misgivings in a

public way."

In effect, Mr. Franzen was qualifying his apology-not expressing

regret at what he said about Ms. Winfrey's show and book club, but regret at

saying it out loud.

"The fact is one, you can be married to someone and be out with

your buddies and talk about the person you love in ways you really wouldn't

want to be heard by the person you love," he said. "So, it was really -saying

things in the wrong place is what it amounted to."

And indeed, though it's hard to say that sitting through the hour-long

show would not be worth the roughly $1.5 million extra in royalty payments that

selling through the 500,000-copy Oprah-driven print run would bring, one can

understand why Mr. Franzen could be ambivalent about appearing on Oprah. For

her segments, Ms. Winfrey can turn up the Vaseline-and-gauze quotient,

encouraging authors, in line with the rest of her show's format, to dwell on

their personal relationships, traumas and tragedies and explain how these led

them to come to the novel they produced-frequently one of the least favorite

ways that novelists like to speak about their books.

"If I were talking about somebody's work and got into the true,

genuine literary details-ideas, images, themes-I don't know that it would go

for very long on Oprah , on any

television show," said a book editor. "The actual literary meat-and-potatoes of

that book are never going to be discussed on any television show."

Much has been made of Mr. Franzen's interview with Terry Gross on

Fresh Air , where Mr. Franzen

expressed concern that the Oprah selection may turn off male readers and called

the B-roll footage of Mr. Franzen walking through his old neighborhood in St.

Louis "bogus."

But perhaps the most telling moment in the interview came after

he had finished discussing his concerns about being an Oprah author. Ms. Gross

began a line of questioning about how much of the novel was based upon Mr.

Franzen's personal experiences..

Mr. Franzen responded, "Well, part of it grew out of my own

experience, and I'm guessing you'll have a question or two along those lines.

It was-"

"He said resentfully," Ms.

Gross interjected.

"No, no, no, no, no, no," Mr. Franzen said. "No. I don't watch Oprah , but I do listen to your show, so

let me leap-frog over that to … some of the thematic reasons why I was

attracted to that."

The author was artfully dodging the whole question while sneaking

in a careful dig at Ms. Winfrey. NPR had asked an Oprah question, and he didn't

want to answer it.

To be sure, the Franzen-Winfrey dispute has taken on a life of

its own also because of the amount of literary rubbernecking and petty envy.

Mr. Franzen, with his well-reviewed book, souped-up handsome-man jacket photo

and the kind of glossy-magazine advance hype Angelina Jolie can't get, was

simply on too high of a run, some said, which made him a big, easy target.

"Look, let me put it to you bluntly," said an editor. "The

literary world runs on envy. The envy level in respect to Jonathan Franzen was

already running at flood tide before The

Corrections was selected by Oprah. It was simply too much to bear that in

addition to being knighted as the literary man of the hour for his book, that

he should become rich from it as well. Jon Franzen simply had too much good

fortune for one book at one time, and so he needed to be made to feel bad about

it."

But then again, Mr. Franzen also took on the one person he wasn't

supposed to challenge-in New York or anyplace else.

"This is so fucking weird! This whole thing," said the same

editor. "This wonderful woman devotes a portion of her daytime program to

praise-songs to particular novels that not only bring news of literature to an

area of broadcasting that was totally devoid of it, but that manages to

motivate hundreds of thousands-even millions-of readers to go out and buy that

book, and the literary world has a problem with this? I mean, in its darkest

terms, that's insane."

A little bit later, the editor ended the interview by saying,

"Can I stop talking about this now? It just upsets me."