On Jan. 29, in the midst of the latest Presidential scandal, Time felt it had a big scoop that would not hold until the magazine came out on Feb. 2, so it put an exclusive up on its Web site. The magazine had learned that President Bill Clinton, in his sworn deposition in the Paula Jones case, had admitted to one sexual encounter with Gennifer Flowers back in 1977. However, the definition of sex was so broad, including any touching of the groin, breasts, inner thighs or buttocks "with the purpose to arouse or gratify," that the term was almost meaningless.

According to sources in Washington, CNN's Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno heard that Time was working on a big story and wanted to get at it pronto. But when Michael Duffy, Time 's Washington bureau chief, gave Mr. Sesno a rundown of the story, the CNN honcho had a sudden change of heart. The reason? The sourcing was just too "squishy" for CNN, Mr. Sesno said, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation.

The reaction at Time 's Washington bureau was incredulous. "They're calling Time 's reporting 'squishy'?" asked one Washington-based writer.

This was the same CNN, complained various Time staff members, not taking a quadruple-sourced story when it has rushed on air a number of stories that were premature or wrong? Take, for instance, Wolf Blitzer's feverish dispatch on Jan. 24, in which he excitedly told anchor Judy Woodruff that "several of his [President Clinton's] closest friends and advisers, both in and out of government, now tell CNN that … they're talking among themselves about a possibility of a resignation." According to sources at Time Inc., the magazine nearly changed its cover line on the issue going to the printer because of that newsbreak. But about two hours later, Mr. Blitzer was back on the air, adding the crucial point that several of the President's aides "have angrily denied that there is any consideration whatsoever to the possibility of resignation." There's been no talk of resignation since.

On Jan. 28, Larry King delivered another humdinger when he decided to report an upcoming scoop in The New York Times . Unfortunately, the story didn't exist. "We may have jumped the gun on the fact that The New York Times is reporting tomorrow that there is a call on Monica Lewinsky's answering machine from the President," said Mr. King. "We have no information on what The New York Times is publishing tomorrow. Anyway, it came to us. We reported it. But this happens in a running story like this. Now we unreport it."

So, who's calling whom squishy?

Apparently displeased with such unfounded outbursts, CNN executives decided to send out some memos. Mr. Sesno sent an e-mail to the Washington bureau, reminding anchors and any on-air people that when any guest "pushes speculation out front," as one memo recipient put it, he or she should "take a breath and a moment to correct it or put it in proper perspective." Mr. Sesno just wanted to remind people that the coverage of this crisis is "serious business," and they should strive for "correct and cautious tone and content."

Mr. Sesno could not be reached for comment about the Time story. But Mr. Duffy said he was unaware of any misgivings at CNN over his magazine's reporting. "The overall headline here is we're pretty cooperative," he said. "I didn't care whether they picked it up just as I didn't care if anyone else picked it up."

So Mr. Duffy is probably not too annoyed that Time didn't even run the Web newsbreak in the regular magazine the following week.

As New York Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld admitted last week in Off the Record, his paper got caught "flat-footed" at the start of the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio. So, to make up for lost scoops, The Times did what any self-respecting, heavily armed superpower does: It called in reinforcements. Problem was, it sowed dissension among the troops already stationed in Washington.

Alessandra Stanley, a correspondent based in Moscow, received a phone call from Mr. Lelyveld during the first weekend of the crisis, asking her to fly to Washington. She arrived on Jan. 26, the night before the State of the Union Message, joining Adam Nagourney, the political reporter for the Metro section, who had gotten a reprieve from the wilds of Albany; legal reporter William Glaberson, fresh from the Unabomber trial; and Ethan Bronner, who was hauled in from the education beat.

With their help, The Times recovered from its slow start, but the Gang of Four's arrival angered some of the regulars. "The idea that the bureau couldn't handle it was a cause for some concern," said one Times reporter, diplomatically.

"It was no such thing," countered Michael Oreskes, the paper's Washington bureau chief. "They were brought in to augment the coverage."

In a Jan. 26 memo to the bureau, Mr. Oreskes stressed that extra people represented no slight on the "sterling" job everyone had been doing. "You have all been working flat out, and the workload is going to increase," he wrote. "We have a lot of shoe leather work to do and, of course, we must continue to produce the smart, well-written coverage that has set us apart from the pack. This is a huge story, and it needs even more talent than the bureau can produce."

Except for Mr. Bronner, who recently joined The Times from the Boston Globe, all of the newcomers worked under Mr. Oreskes in New York when he was Metro editor. Mr. Nagourney had covered President Clinton before, and Ms. Stanley, the daughter of a career civil servant in the Defense and State Departments, had worked in Washington for Time and had covered the 1992 Presidential campaign for The Times . Mr. Oreskes had been beseeching Ms. Stanley to move back to Washington full-time when her four-year stint in Russia comes to an end in the spring, which would give the bureau a Maureen Dowd-like reporter-a stylist with a great eye, and when appropriate, a well-honed sense of irony. But Ms. Stanley has opted to go to Italy instead, along with her husband, Times reporter Michael Specter. The current Rome-based correspondent for The Times , Celestine Bohlen, will head off to Russia.

Ms. Stanley did not provide Off the Record with any pithy comments about the media morass in Washington, but she did offer a summation of the Russian reaction to President Clinton's predicament: "They see nothing wrong with it," she said. "The only thing wrong they'd see was if he wasn't hitting on someone. That's what you have interns for." As for any backlash about her return, she said, "If there was, no one's said anything to me."

Although The Times got beat by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 21, the paper has scored its share of scoops since then. On Jan. 25 and 27, Stephen Labaton and Jeff Gerth broke stories about Monica Lewinsky's late December visit to the White House after she was subpoenaed to provide information in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against the President. And on Feb. 3, Don Van Natta Jr. and John Broder reported that Ms. Lewinsky has been cleared to enter the White House about three dozen times between April 1996 and December 1997. ( The Washington Post reported the same day that such records were not available.)

The paper has also shown more restraint in running questionably sourced material than most media outlets. The Times , unlike ABC, the Dallas Morning News and other mainstream media outlets, did not report that the President and Ms. Lewinsky were caught in a "compromising situation" in the White House. The paper also hasn't touched stories that President Clinton engaged in phone sex with Ms. Lewinsky, an aural practice written about in both Time and Newsweek.

"We have to know it from our own reporting, period," said Mr. Oreskes. "Two sources sitting next to each other in an office are not two sources. They are one."

But The Times has not been perfect. On Jan. 24, 26 and 30, the paper wrote about the phantom dress Ms. Lewinsky supposedly has that is reportedly stained with the President's semen-even though no one has been able to prove it exists, and CBS News reported on Jan. 29 that F.B.I. tests of clothing taken from Ms. Lewinsky's Watergate apartment showed no such residue. The Times has yet to confirm or disprove the CBS story.

Michael Holigan, the force behind a new magazine called Michael Holigan's Your New House , is quickly learning just how big a company Time Warner Inc. is. One subsidiary sued his fledgling magazine for ripping off the look of This Old House , even as another unit was planning to distribute the magazine. And all while Life magazine used the Dallas-based builder to raise its "Dream House" for the February issue.

Time Publishing Ventures, the Time Inc. subsidiary that publishes This Old House , and WGBH, the Boston-based public television station that owns the rights to the name, went to court on Jan. 13 to stop the first issue of Your New House from appearing. It seems the logo of the new magazine bore a striking resemblance to the Time Inc. model, down to the typeface and design of the words in the title.

On Jan. 30, the two sides settled. Mr. Holigan agreed to change the logo and will redo the 150,000 copies already printed. But he could have saved the $150,000 it will cost to go back to the printing plant, he said, if only the people at Life or the distributor, Warner Publisher Services, had noticed the similarities between the two home magazines last fall. "Hell, everybody in the building knew about it," Mr. Holigan said.

It took Isolde Motley, Life 's new managing editor and a former editor of This Old House , to notice the similarities as she was thumbing through Life 's February issue and came across the blow-in card offering readers a free sample issue of Mr. Holigan's magazine. "Upside down, I thought he was Norm Abrams," the star of the This Old House TV show and magazine, said Ms. Motley. And to think Mr. Holigan originally rebuffed Life 's approaches to build its dream house. "It's really an ugly home," he said. "I didn't think I'd be able to sell it."

But Life made Mr. Holigan a tempting offer. As the magazine's ad sales staff canvassed ad agencies about interest in the February "Dream House" issue, they offered ad pages in the debut issue of Your New House and commercial time on Mr. Holigan's syndicated TV show. Life also committed to putting 1.6 million subscription bind-in cards for the new magazine in the February issue. With that kind of boost from a magazine giant, Mr. Holigan agreed to build the house. And then he got sued.

"I'm not going to build the Life 'Dream House' again," Mr. Holigan said.

The spinning ways of the fabulous Florio brothers have finally caught up to them. After months of denials that The New Yorker would become a part of Condé Nast publications, the august publication will indeed be swallowed up by its glossy brethren.

Last September, when Off the Record reported that The New Yorker would no longer operate as a separate fiefdom in S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s empire, New Yorker president Tom Florio emphatically disputed any such development. "We are not folding The New Yorker into Condé Nast," he said. "Editorial will operate independently, and so will advertising and marketing." Back in December, Mr. Florio reiterated to Off the Record that ad sales would always remain separate.

Then his brother, Condé Nast chief executive Steve Florio, got into the act. In December, he told Advertising Age , "[W]e are not merging ad sales or editorial or any of that. It is just in areas like account payables and payroll where we can help them out and get their costs down a bit."

But now, just like its accounts payable and payroll departments, The New Yorker 's ad sales and marketing departments will be folded into Condé Nast proper. And to top it all off, Tom Florio no longer runs his own ship, reporting only to Mr. Newhouse; he remains president in name, but now has to report to his brother.

Soon, the only semblance of independence that will be left for The New Yorker will be the editorial department. Editor Tina Brown refuses to deal with Condé Nast editorial director James Truman and will continue to report to Mr. Newhouse.

Driving all these changes is the magazine's inability to make money since Mr. Newhouse bought it in 1985. Although the losses have narrowed from the more than $30 million it lost one year when Steve Florio was president, it still lost about $7 million last year, according to Condé Nast sources. Ms. Brown has been hellbent on returning the magazine to profitability; she wants to prove she's the turnaround queen, rejuvenating a financially stagnant magazine, just as she eventually did at Vanity Fair . Although Ms. Brown and Tom Florio profess undying admiration for the jobs each is doing, Ms. Brown (as Off the Record reported last month) has complained that Mr. Florio could be selling more ads.

Revenge came quickly. On Jan. 21, The Washington Post became the first mainstream media outlet to follow the Drudge Report in breaking news of the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton tangle, followed quickly by the Los Angeles Times and ABC radio. The Times was nowhere to be found.

"I'm sorry to say that we were flatfooted Wednesday morning," said Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld. The Times did not pick up on the "hint," as Mr. Lelyveld put it, in either the original Drudge Report item on Jan. 17 about Newsweek holding its story, or the mention of it the next morning on ABC's This Week. "We should have, and we didn't," he said. "The people who missed these signals know who they are and aren't going to do it again," he added. Mr. Lelyveld declined to name names.

Although one Times reporter claimed the sexual details of the story made the paper "a little queasy," Mr. Lelyveld disputed that take. "We made a deliberate choice back when the Troopergate thing happened not to be aggressive on Clinton's Arkansas philandering … partly because the country had voted on it," he said. "We have a distaste for investigating consensual sex. But it was always clear that given his alleged history, reckless philandering in the White House would be a story."

Mr. Lelyveld said he thought that by Jan. 23 The Times was up to speed. Since then, he said, it has broken several stories, including the Jan. 27 article about Ms. Lewinsky's late December meeting with President Clinton.

Nonetheless, The Washington Post has owned this story more than any other newspaper in the country, and the feeding frenzy that has accompanied the scoops has resulted in some celebration. Ben Bradlee, the executive editor during Watergate who passed on his mantle to Leonard Downie seven years ago, dropped by the newsroom on Jan. 21. He headed over to Mr. Downie's office on the fifth floor, where the executive editor was meeting with managing editor Robert G. Kaiser. Outside the glass partition separating the office from the newsroom, Mr. Bradlee held up a sheet of paper, upon which he had written one word: "Sizzle!"

"He gave us a big thumbs up, and we felt good," said Mr. Kaiser.

The Times article on his paper was "no big deal," insisted Mr. Kaiser, who still couldn't resist a friendly jab. "I confess, it was great fun to read in the Sunday Times all the stories we had run in our Friday and Saturday papers."

Of all the players to appear in the first act of the latest Presidential tragicomedy, Vernon Jordan-Clinton confidant, grade-A schmoozer and media executive buddy-has received the most gentle handling by his friends in the Beltway press corps. Indeed, some have gone out of their way to practically absolve him of any alleged misdeeds.

Roger Cossack, of CNN's Burden of Proof , spent part of the Jan. 22 show offering up puffball questions that were more like encomiums. "Vernon Jordan is a man, like Caesar's wife, above and beyond reproach," Mr. Cossack said while posing a question to Martin Pollner, a former deputy associate attorney general. "And when he gets up and says, 'Look, I spoke to her and this is what she said,' it's almost like, you know, hearing the absolute truth."

The Wall Street Journal 's Al Hunt quickly rushed to his longtime friend's defense, popping up on Nightline and other TV venues, and writing in his regular Thursday column on Jan. 22 that "even some Washingtonians who felt the story could be the end of this President didn't believe the published charge against Mr. Jordan, an exceedingly careful and cautious lawyer." During his TV appearances, Mr. Hunt neglected to mention that Mr. Jordan is also a director of Dow Jones & Company, which just happens to own the paper; the connection was made in the newspaper.

Similar sentiments were echoed the same day by Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, also friends of Mr. Jordan, when NBC broke into regular programming. That afternoon, Chip Reid, a White House correspondent for NBC's weekend newscasts, showed up on MSNBC to tell viewers that he had just gotten off the phone with a Washington power broker who'd been on the phone with other Washington power brokers all day. Their verdict: Mr. Jordan could never do such a terrible thing as coaching someone to lie.

Even the second- and third-day backgrounders in many papers and on TV failed to mention easily accessible information, the sorts of tidbits the media displayed no reluctance to run when they were writing about Ms. Lewinsky or the President. For example, The New York Times made no mention, on Jan. 22, of Mr. Jordan's 11 directorships, or the conflicts they've raised when those companies benefit from decisions he helps the President make, or his affinity with Mr. Clinton for lewd and sometimes crude bantering with and about women.

There have been some half-baked attempts at balance: The Washington Post and ABC did cite one black leader, Randall Robinson of the Trans-Africa Forum lobbying organization, complaining that Mr. Jordan had forgotten his roots. But there have been no references to an anecdote recounted in a 1993 Vanity Fair article by Marjorie Williams, in which Mr. Jordan leaned over to his hostess at a dinner party in the mid-1980's and said, "You look like a woman who likes to fuck." Or to a scene in Michelle Cottle's June 1997 Washington Monthly story, in which President Clinton, seated next to an attractive blonde at a state dinner, told Mr. Jordan to keep his hands off her because "I saw her first."

Mr. Jordan's relatively easy treatment is testament to his standing in the Washington Establishment. He's enormously well liked, and offers connections to A-list parties and the White House that Beltway inhabitants-especially journalists-find irresistible. He's also been known to dispense gossip, what he calls "dead men's talk."

"Jordan has this great value in Washington, which has a very lily-white Establishment," said Ms. Williams. "People in Washington talked to me very un-self-consciously about what a relief it was to have a friend who was black who understood all the same cultural signifiers they had." Added Ms. Williams: "He's really benefited from being a mystery. People are covering up the lacunae of their own reporting in the coverage of Vernon Jordan."

"Vernon Jordan's role in Washington society is one that would only be exalted in a culture that is somewhat debased," said Michael Kelly, the recently deposed editor of The New Republic who is now a senior writer at National Journal . "He is not a traditional Washington wise man, offering sage counsel to the President on grave matters of statecraft. He is a very high-level fixer.… It is, on the face of it, neither illegal nor improper. But it is not a great, noble calling. To hear of Saint Vernon the Generous, dispensing acts of kindness to all classes, to all races who walk the streets of Washington, is pretty funny stuff."

But the decision-makers Off the Record spoke to dispute the charge of playing favorites. "I don't think anyone has been getting an easy ride," said Frank Sesno, CNN's Washington bureau chief.

"I think what happened is the charge [against Mr. Jordan] didn't seem to stick," said Tom Bettag, executive producer of Nightline . Mr. Jordan is viewed as too slick for tactics as crude as telling someone to lie, Mr. Bettag added, and with so many allegations aimed at the President, "Jordan was a sideshow."

However, Mr. Jordan's role was key to Kenneth Starr getting authorization to expand his independent counsel investigation into the Lewinsky affair. Mr. Starr had been investigating Mr. Jordan's role in funneling a $100,000 consulting contract to Webster Hubbell, an Arkansas crony of President Clinton's who was forced from the Justice Department and ended up in jail for fraud. The goal: to prove a pattern of buying the silence of potential witnesses against the President.

A more nuanced view of Mr. Jordan's role in the crisis, however, is starting to emerge. The Feb. 2 editions of Time and Newsweek provide more rounded pictures of the President's chief fixer. And given the X-rated tenor of the scandale , both magazines reported the two men's fondness for the ladies. Asked what they talked about on the golf course, Mr. Jordan is said to have replied, "We talk pussy." Newsweek ran the word sans the two s's. Time did away with all the letters, expect p.

ABC's Nightline has the reputation of superior journalism and sober news judgment. But on the night of Jan. 22, the show allowed Stephen Enghouse, a self-proclaimed "good friend" of Ms. Lewinsky during her days at Lewis and Clark College, to trash her credibility even though he could not muster one example of her alleged penchant for embellishment and fabrication. Mr. Enghouse also hadn't talked to Ms. Lewinsky in three years.

"Why do you rank her credibility so low in this instance?" asked host Ted Koppel during Nightline 's second night of "Crisis in the White House" coverage.

"Well, just because I know her and I know that she's kind of young and seeks attention and I believe would be prone to sensationalize or overdramatize or exaggerate specific areas or instances in her life that would lead her to gain more attention," said Mr. Enghouse.

That was pretty much it in the way of specifics.

Executive producer Tom Bettag concedes that the Enghouse appearance is a legitimate area for complaint. "It was a tough call," said Mr. Bettag. "We had him and we had to decide what to do with him, so we put him on. But again, we made a point of saying that he couldn't make a single point to back it up and that he hadn't seen her in three years."

In a show filled with reports that weren't too helpful for the President, Mr. Bettag felt that a segment of 2 minutes 15 seconds would at least show some of the other side. "I think journalism is better off not killing things. You give them [the viewers] enough context to decide."

For many members of the "responsible" press, the apocalypse arrived on Jan. 25 at 10:30 A.M. on NBC. Matt Drudge was a panelist on Meet the Press .

Mr. Drudge, a one-man operation spreading political, media and celebrity gossip around the World Wide Web, was not there to be grilled for his questionable journalistic practices. No, he was there, sitting next to The New York Times ' William Safire, as an esteemed member of the press pursuing the scandal surrounding President Clinton.

"It scares the hell out of me," Nightline 's Mr. Bettag told Off the Record.

Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press, accorded Mr. Drudge the same respect he gave his other media mouthpieces- Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff (who's done the most reporting by far on the story even though his scoop was upstaged by Mr. Drudge) and Stuart Taylor of National Journal and Newsweek .

"What's your take?" asked Mr. Russert. Mr. Drudge proceeded to attack the press corps for blowing the story and expressed dismay over the state of the Republic. He also got to throw in an as-yet-to-be-substantiated rumor that another White House staff member "is going to come out from behind the curtains this week. If this is the case-and you couple this with the headline that the New York Post has-there are hundreds, hundreds, according to Ms. Lewinsky, quoting Clinton-we're in for a huge shock that goes beyond the specific episode. It's a whole psychosis taking place in the White House."

Tom Shales, in the Jan. 26 Washington Post , was repulsed. "Drudge, as sleazy-looking a character as anyone involved in the case so far (and that is saying something), has no credentials whatever to serve on a panel with professional journalists or even professional pundits," he wrote. "His only credential is his computer. Drudge's sudden rise to fame, and now Russert's implied endorsement of him, may be but one small sign of the new electronic Tower of Babel that the Internet will become."

Mr. Drudge, a fedora-wearing gossipmonger who idolizes Walter Winchell, struck back. "He's calling me sleazy-looking?" Mr. Drudge told Off the Record. "All he does is sit in front of the TV stuffing his face. At least I can fit into my Levi's."

But Mr. Drudge, whose breathless reporting is often unreliable but just as often scoops the mainstream media, has an explanation for the grudging reception the journalism club has offered him. "It's a turf war," he said. "There's confusion because there's a new medium afoot and it sort of blindsided them." He views himself as the voice of a populist sentiment sweeping the land, "because of a press corps that got a little too close to their sources."

Of course, Mr. Drudge conveniently left out that he, too, has gotten too close to his (conservative) sources, and his insistence that he is not a journalist hasn't protected him from being hit with a libel suit. His dispatch last August smearing White House aide Sidney Blumenthal with accusations of spousal abuse resulted in a $30 million defamation suit against him and America Online, which carries the Drudge Report . The suit is continuing.

The crashes, which both occurred after 5 P.M., required some quick thinking. All the national edition's copy editors and most of the news desk had to head two floors up to the 11th-floor offices of the overseas copy desk, which had just finished closing The Wall Street Journal Europe and The Asian Wall Street Journal . It was quite a sight. Scores of frenzied-looking editors, clutching their style books and pencils, waited for the chronically slow elevators. They then had to transfer the copy from one computer server to another that still worked, losing any semblance of what had been already edited.

A memo that managing editor Paul Steiger dispatched after the first near catastrophe does a fine job of setting the scene. "There was an eerie calm on 11 as editors coded copy without the benefit of their usual user keys, circumvented access privilege problems and relied on their memory to edit the bottoms of stories for which the tops were invisible," he wrote. But there was no mention of when the new computer system would be completely operational.

A Dow Jones spokesman said nearly all reporters and many editors are already on the new system and that the copy editors will be completely integrated by September. He chalked up the delays to constant improvements in the design. "It's software," he said, "it's never finished."

The current system, from a now-defunct company called Composition Systems Inc., is more than 15 years old, according to sources at the paper. "Sometimes it looks like they're patching this together with Scotch tape," said one editor who made the vertical trek. "It's a big problem getting parts. It's like getting a fender for a Studebaker."

Dow Jones executives knew the problems when they sent out highly complicated requests for proposals for a new proprietary computer system. In 1993, the company hired Electronic Data Systems-which had no experience with the newspaper industry-and the system was scheduled to arrive in 1995. The company is still waiting for a full roll-out, while the current system grows creakier and creakier.

"It's indicative of Dow Jones' lack of technical understanding," said a former computer-systems consultant to the company. "It starts at [chairman] Peter Kann and works its way down to editors and writers."

The reporters who cover City Hall are as competitive with one another as any other form of the journalistic species, jealously guarding their scoops from their ravenous brethren. But the Darwinian struggle to be first and best came to a brief halt recently as the reporters of Room 9 pooled their resources to fight a common enemy: Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the heavy-handed ways of his press office.

On Jan. 13, the day before the Mayor was set to deliver his State of the City speech to an adoring crowd, he decided to play nice for a change. So the Mayor's lackeys called City Hall reporters for the three main city dailies and Newsday , and handed out presents, hoping for an extra day of coverage.

The New York Post was told about the Mayor's planned crackdown on deadbeat dads. The Daily News received a story about the Mayor's attempt to wrest control of Kennedy and La Guardia airports from the Port Authority. The New York Times got a tip on the introduction of merit-based promotions in the beleaguered children's services bureaucracy. And Newsday was shoveled a scintillating story about getting the Metropolitan Opera involved with the city's schools.

The recipients of these tidbits were not too pleased. "These were not leaks; these were drips," said one Room 9 denizen. Most of the good stuff-extending the school year and rescinding open admissions at the City University of New York, for example-Mr. Giuliani kept tucked away for the speech itself.

So the journalists circumvented the press office's ham-fisted attempts at story control by playing a round of "You tell me your leak, I'll tell you mine." Robert Polner, one of Newsday's City Hall reporters, started the sharing when he asked David Seifman, the Post's bureau chief, if he'd be game to let everyone partake of his gift. "Sure, I'm in," said Mr. Seifman, according to one witness. The Daily News came aboard after Mike Finnegan conferred with City Hall bureau chief Doug Feiden. And Times newcomer Dan Barry joined in the fun, too. "That was the great rebellion of Room 9," said one of the insurgents.

On Jan. 21, the editorial employees who toil for Life will find out just how many of their jobs will be axed under the regime of new managing editor Isolde Motley. And according to sources within Time Inc., by the time the company finishes following Newspaper Guild rules for firing employees, only 28 people will be left on the monthly's editorial masthead. That will represent nearly a 40 percent cut from the 46-person staff that former managing editor Jay Lovinger employed.

The Guild held an informational meeting on Jan. 16 for its members to outline the cutback procedures. Volunteers for the severance packages will have two weeks to come forward. Then, the layoffs begin. Life staff members will get a severance package of three weeks for every year worked plus a notice package (on most positions) that provides an extra payment based on length of service, said Larry Nesbitt, the shop steward at Life .

Already, four of the top people on the masthead not covered by Guild regulations have been ejected. David Friend, the assistant managing editor and director of photography, decided to walk after learning the photo desk will become subservient to the art director in the new regime. Tom Bentkowski, the director of design, chief of reporters June Omura Goldberg, and Barbara Baker Burrows, the picture editor for special projects, were all fired.

Unlike at most magazines where the photo editor reports to the art director, Life has historically given more power to the photo director. Under Ms. Motley, the Time Inc. development editor who was the founding editor of Martha Stewart Living and This Old House , that is about to change, Time Inc. sources said, although photography will remain a key aspect of Life . Ms. Motley, who was named to the job last November but took over earlier this month, has not yet shared her vision of the magazine with her new employees. But that hasn't kept Time Inc. apparatchiks from sharing their predictions. "She is more interested in good news," said one Life editor. "I wouldn't characterize something so simply," Ms. Motley said. "The magazine has always been about emotions and I think it will continue to be so."

Fears of a major overhaul would seem to be unfounded. According to one top editor at the company, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine "felt reinventing Life once again would be too problematic."

These changes come at an odd time: Last year was Life 's most profitable since it was reborn as a monthly in 1978, bringing in more than $6.5 million. But that's not enough at Time Inc., where double-digit profit increases are demanded each and every year. Corporate executives would like to see that profit number hit $10 million, the better to withstand any falloff in advertising.

When it comes to Anglophilia, the New York Post faces little competition in the New York newspaper world. But it was the Daily News that lost its sense of journalistic balance, not to mention its mind, swooning over the Spice Girls. Perhaps the News ' sponsorship of a Spice Girls contest, in which the winning family of four got to meet the girls in all their prefab glory, had something to do with the overkill.

Earlier this month, the News began running front-page teasers for the contest, before they were overtaken by reams of copy about the Spice Girls' new movie and album and fashions and bathroom habits. Even though the Spice Girls marketing juggernaut was coming to New York for only one day, the News decided on Jan. 13 that the Spice Girls' arrival was equivalent to the Rolling Stones' playing three sold-out dates at Madison Square Garden. So page 3 was given over to a story about the latest British invasion, complete with a chart comparing the two bands.

Later that week, the News ran a half-page of pictures of the stars (and their kids) who came to see the Spice Girls. And on Jan. 19, five days after the band came to town, the entertainment section devoted two-plus pages to interviews with the band.

But it was Jan. 15's embarrassment of Spice Girl riches that proved to be the nadir: A box on the front page proclaimed "Spice Girl Mania"; page 6 held two stories about preteens gushing over their favorite symbol of "Girl Power"; and in the most shameless plug of all, a "Spice Girls Special" inside the News ' regular "Thersday" section. Almost every column inch of the seven-page section was handed over to minutiae about the Spice Girls. There was the list of 10 essentials for every little girl's Spice Girls wardrobe. (No. 1? Six-inch high platform sneakers. No. 5? A leather tube top and anything spandex.) There was even a quiz. The toughest question: Which Spice Girl overcame a case of teenage acne? Answer: Victoria, who also goes by the name Posh Spice.

Daily News executives said the all-out coverage of the Spice Girls had nothing whatsoever to do with the promotion. Sources at the News speculated there may be a simpler reason for the obsession: The daughter of editor in chief Debby Krenek just loves the Spice Girls. And when the paper decides to get behind a cause in the Krenek era-be it The Lion King , transit fares or now Ragtime -"we throw everything behind it," said one reporter.

"I felt that if we were embarking on such an ambitious project, as I said to Jack and Adam, I wanted one editor who'd wake up each morning feeling obsessive about the millennium project and the other editor to wake up feeling obsessive about the magazine," said The New York Times ' executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld.

Mr. Moss, whose name usually turns up when there's a vacancy anywhere in the magazine business, rose to deputy editor at Esquire during the 80's and then went on to launch 7 Days, a stylish weekly published by Village Voice owner Leonard Stern, who pulled the plug in 1990. In the early 1990's, he tried to start The Industry , to cover the converging world of media. But, dead center in a media recession, he couldn't raise the necessary $8 million, and he landed at The Times , where he consulted on various sections, helped launch its Style section and brought a sprightly quality to the magazine as editorial director. Mr. Moss did not return calls.

Just one issue into his tenure as the new editor of National Review , Richard Lowry already has pushed through some noticeable changes at the conservative magazine. But it's a move not yet visible-the downgrading of senior editor Peter Brimelow's role to that of a contributor-that has the right-wing media community and Washington policy wonks buzzing about a sea change in the philosophy of William F. Buckley Jr.'s creation.

National Review , alone among the major conservative media outlets such as The Weekly Standard , the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and The American Spectator , has taken a hard line on immigration. And Mr. Brimelow, a British immigrant upset with what he views as the decline of assimilationist tendencies among the new arrivals, has led that crusade with his writings. He wants to close the door on immigrants who would upset the pure racial identity of the United States. "The American nation has always had a specific ethnic core," he wrote in his 1995 book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About American's Immigration Disaster . "And that core has been white."

With Mr. Brimelow knocked back to contributor status, and his ideological soul mate and fellow British immigrant, former editor John O'Sullivan, now just an editor at large, some conservatives sense that National Review is withdrawing from the battle over immigration. The issue is one of the conservative movement's fault lines, and many in the Republican Party fret that tough restrictions will offend Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population and a key voting bloc.

That sentiment, according to some writers at the magazine and elsewhere in the conservative community, appears to hold sway with the Washington bureau of National Review , from which the 29-year-old Mr. Lowry came. And they suspect that Mr. Buckley has tacked toward that view.

Mr. Lowry and Mr. Buckley insist the speculation is misguided. "There is no change in sentiment or analysis here on the immigration issue," said Mr. Buckley. Added Mr. Lowry: "We're always going to be hostile to the kind of bedtime stories that support the pro-immigration lobby. It's just a scandal we don't have control of our borders."

Mr. Lowry said he made the Brimelow move because he wanted his senior editors to be more involved in running the magazine, and Mr. Brimelow's senior editor duties at Forbes precluded that. Mr. Brimelow, who learned of his demotion via mail, declined to comment.

Despite the pledge of allegiance to the nativist faith, readers shouldn't expect regular laments complaining about how bad these new immigrants are for the country. "Some issues just aren't as close to [Mr. Lowry's] heart," said one source at the New York-based magazine. "Immigration is not quite the burning priority it was for John O'Sullivan."

Some National Review watchers also have been surprised with how quickly Mr. Lowry has put his mark on the magazine because they assumed the naming of a very young editor was a sign that Mr. Buckley wished to reassert day-to-day control of the magazine. However, in his first issue, dated Jan. 26, Mr. Lowry demonstrated his independence by dumping the On the Scene section, which featured dispatches from overseas that often did not have the political context Mr. Lowry desires. He has eliminated "The Week in Verse," 36 or so lines of doggerel that are sure to be missed. (A sample from the final installment: "Christmas is coming! Underneath the tree- Miss Reno finds her new assistant, Lee .") National Review' s version of a crossword puzzle, called the Trans-O-Gram, is gone. And Mr. Lowry has killed Gekko, John Dizard's financial column that ran each issue. (Mr. Dizard is negotiating with the New York Post to write a Wall Street column, according to two sources.)

Mr. Buckley said that Mr. Lowry needs to check with him on any changes only if they imply policy shifts. Asked if he'll be as hands-on with the magazine as Martin Peretz is with his toy, The New Republic , Mr. Buckley answered with a laugh: "No. Comma. God, no."

A two-month game of chicken between Sports Illustrated chief of reporters Jane Bachman Wulf and Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine and his sidekick Henry Muller has finally come to an end, with Ms. Wulf heading off to Sports Illustrated for Kids . Although the corporate editorial brass would have preferred Ms. Wulf to vacate the premises completely, they're still picking up her salary at her new job, according to Time Inc. sources.

The trouble with Bambi (Ms. Wulf's nickname) began last fall after her husband, Time senior writer Steve Wulf, landed an executive editor gig at ESPN Magazine , the forthcoming competitor to Sports Illustrated . Worried that she'd be a direct pipeline to her husband because she sits in on Sports Illustrated's twice-weekly editorial meetings, Mr. Pearlstine dispatched editorial director Mr. Muller to tell her it was time to move elsewhere in the company. The Sports Illustrated executive team did not argue too strenuously with Mr. Muller's and Mr. Pearlstine's somewhat paranoid take on the situation.

During the almost weekly meetings Mr. Muller held with Ms. Wulf through the fall, he encouraged her to take some time off while proffering no other job in the vast Time Inc. empire, Time Inc. sources told Off the Record. Ms. Wulf at first resisted the pressure, arguing that nearly 21 years of loyalty to Sports Illustrated should count for something. But when Sports Illustrated for Kids managing editor Neil Cohen offered Ms. Wulf a position as director of special projects, she decided to give up the fight.

Ms. Wulf, according to company sources, did not have to take a pay cut, but she does have to work five days a week instead of four. Ms. Wulf, however, will still be sitting in on editorial meetings at the junior version of Sports Illustrated, a prospect that apparently doesn't bother the editorial powers at Time Inc.

Ms. Wulf declined to comment on the deal. Mr. Pearlstine referred questions to Mr. Muller, who was traveling and could not be reached.

This seeming overreaction to Ms. Wulf's marital predicament indicates just how seriously Time Inc. executives are taking the ESPN Magazine project, despite their public displays of sanguineness. Mr. Pearlstine has informed several people at Time Inc. that ESPN Magazine represents the biggest threat to Time Inc. since the launch of Newsweek. (Mr. Pearlstine told Off the Record that he "also said that that's like being the best left-handed heavyweight in Jersey City.") "Even if it's a terrible magazine, the promotional power of ESPN makes it a formidable competitor," said a senior Time Inc. executive.

And ESPN is not making it too difficult to divine what audience the sports cable channel is targeting with its glossy, Rolling Stone -sized magazine. A just-mailed subscription solicitation contains not-so-subtle digs at its entrenched competitor, even if a certain 44-year-old magazine that rakes in more than $115 million in profits a year is never mentioned by name. "Shorter, snappier stories" are promised by editor in chief John Papanek in the four-page direct-mail letter. "Not 10-page yawners about some minor league hockey player growing up on a farm in Manitoba. Or some former world leader stalking bone fish off the Florida coast."

Now we come to the part of Off the Record where we inject the irony. Back when Mr. Papanek was the managing editor of Sports Illustrated in the early 1990's, he ran a lengthy feature by Franz Lidz about Don King's hair that the previous managing editor, Mark Mulvoy, had barred from the magazine's pages. The headline: "From Hair to Eternity." Some of Mr. Papanek's other longer stories, according to Michael MacCambridge's history of Sports Illustrated , included a Maryanne Vollers feature about endangered animals in Zambia and a longtime contributor's golden retriever named Luke.

Morale may be high at The New York Times , but that doesn't mean employees think management has a clue about what it's doing.

Such fascinating factoids can be found in a recent edition of Ahead of The Times , the internal newsletter of The Times' news department. The newsletter reported the results of a survey conducted for The Times last September by Sirota Consulting. The survey found that 78 percent of Times workers were proud to toil for the not-so-Gray Lady, and that 88 percent thought the paper was of high quality and was interesting to read. But only 36 percent thought top management knew what it wants. Just 30 percent gave management high marks for making them feel that they're an integral part of the company. And a mere 22 percent of employees said they trust management.

At night, in the dining room of the Hopkins Inn, they go through cocktails and dinner and bottles and bottles of wine. The mood is pleasant and raucous. But then GQ' s food writer and resident gourmand Alan Richman unveils the many cheeses he has brought up from Zabar's or Fairway, and those present are expected to say whatever is on their minds, no matter how nasty. Someone will suggest an idea for a story or a cover, and someone else will stomp all over it with glee.

It was a little different cheese time in the summer of '96. GQ' s editor in chief, the bearded and patriarchal Mr. Cooper, had a question for his crew: "What is the good life to you?" he said. "Define it in two words or less."

David Granger was among the 20 or so people at the long table. He was Mr. Cooper's protégé, the editor who developed most of GQ' s best writers. Colleagues said he was like the son Mr. Cooper never had. Mr. Granger looked a little trashed that night, and by the time it was his turn to speak, he was supporting his head with the help of a butter knife.

"I need three," Mr. Granger said as he prepared his answer. Then he gave his three-word definition of the good life: "editor in chief."

People looked over at Mr. Cooper. He was grinning inscrutably.

About 10 months later, the ambitious Mr. Granger was gone. He took the editor in chief job at Esquire -the daddy of all men's magazines, but now an irrelevant pamphlet-and then he convinced a number of GQ writers and editors to come with him. In the testosterone-laden environment of men's magazines, this meant war.

"It's not enough for Art to stay on top," said someone who has worked with both men. "I think he needs David to fail."

The close relationship the two men had was gone. When they bump into each other now-at the Four Seasons restaurant, at the men's fashion shows-they're no more than civil. Those early-morning chats about stories and writers and life are no more, and Mr. Granger and his wife are no longer party to those long dinners with the Coopers and the Richmans.

"I have the impulse to call him up and just talk to him about running a magazine," said Mr. Granger. "I'm not sure that would be appropriate."

Mr. Cooper can sound wistful, too. "I adore his wife, Melanie," he said. "She's terrific. I miss her."

Mr. Cooper likes to say he's not really concerned with what Mr. Granger is up to, and that he wishes him the best. But his co-workers and acquaintances say that Mr. Cooper is obsessed. He can't seem to get through a conversation without bringing up Mr. Granger and his handiwork. His memos to the GQ staff poke fun at Esquire or make jokes about destroying Mr. Granger. And the arrival of the newest issue of Esquire prompts days of discussion, often during the cocktail sessions Mr. Cooper holds daily in his office, and the words are rarely positive.

"This whole beautiful little family was torn asunder when the prodigal son decided to move on," said Mike Sager, a writer who went to Esquire after leaving GQ on bad terms. "And now it's head-to-head competition. It's the good old American way. It's like football Sunday. You have two teams and only one can win."

70's Guy Versus 90's Guy

At GQ , Mr. Granger played the champion of writers, going over drafts again and again, while Mr. Cooper played the Papa who liked being in charge and was not afraid to delegate. It was a nice match. Sometimes Mr. Cooper would rein in the overly literary impulses of Mr. Granger and the writers he was nurturing. The mentor was easygoing where the protégé was zealous.

"He doesn't really edit copy," said Mr. Granger of his ex-boss. "That's his style. Just because I think it's one of the things I do well, I want to keep in touch with it. And it's a relief at the end of the day, when you've dealt with nothing but administrative stuff, to sit down with a story. Whether it's just reading stories that have piled up in my in-box, or it's actually working with a piece of text on my computer, it's an incredible relief. It's almost relaxing. It used to be work. Now it's my relaxation."

Mr. Cooper, 60, has a trimmed gray beard and favors turtlenecks and, on his more formal days, pirate cufflinks. He came of age as an editor in the 1970's, when he ran Penthouse for Bob Guccione. At the recent GQ Christmas party, Mr. Cooper was sure to populate the place with models who wore revealing Santa's Little Helper outfits made of red leather and fishnet stockings.

Mr. Granger, 41, in his goatee and wired-rim glasses, is more of a 90's guy. He's a soccer dad, coaching his two daughters, and plays father confessor to his writers, who revere him like a sage. At his Christmas party, there was Al Yeganeh, the Soup Nazi of Seinfeld fame, serving tortilla wraps.

In turning around GQ , Mr. Cooper added good narrative journalism and compelling service articles to a magazine that was little more than fashion spreads and motorcycle features. Mr. Granger, with his passion for spending hours going over stories with his writers, helped the former editor of Penthouse get something he craved: respect. Mr. Granger was a key part of bringing GQ its three National Magazine Awards. Mr. Cooper cherishes those trophies, keeping them on a shelf behind his marble desk. Now Mr. Granger is trying to get some of that respect for Esquire , whose glory days have long disappeared.

One thing Mr. Cooper and Mr. Granger share: a love for Esquire as it was in the 1960's, when legendary editor Harold Hayes turned the magazine into a literary and cultural powerhouse by showcasing the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer, among others, and the vibrant cover art of George Lois. When Mr. Granger first arrived in New York in 1982, he used to go stand in front of the old Esquire offices on Park Avenue, daydreaming about his future. And in Mr. Cooper's office at GQ , there are two framed photographs of Harold Hayes, one showing Hayes with Mr. Cooper; also in the frame is a note written by Hayes in 1984, congratulating Mr. Cooper on the job he had done overhauling GQ .

Mr. Cooper had to make do in creating his version of the old Esquire in GQ . Mr. Granger now gets the chance to do it with the real thing.

Esquire Envy

But Mr. Granger has a long way to go before he can put a dent in his new rival's publication. He's intensely competitive, just like his mentor, and not just when it comes to work. Mr. Cooper even resorted to an action movie cliché in describing his former employee: "He reminded me a lot of myself at that age."

Mr. Granger's desire to prove himself the alpha male made for good sport in those GQ retreats. Everyone would be paddling around the pool, and Mr. Granger would feel the need to challenge someone to a race. But on the tennis court was where Mr. Granger really showed off his machismo. One summer, he got into a fierce volleying flurry with GQ feature writer Andrew Corsello. When they got off the court, Mr. Cooper asked who won. When they said they weren't keeping score, the boss was outraged. So he insisted that there would be a proper match the next year between the two men, and he said the winner would win the suit of his choice, courtesy of GQ .

In the estimation of his colleagues, Mr. Corsello had no chance in hell of beating Mr. Granger. So the writer tried to psyche Mr. Granger out by calling him when he was on vacation-a tactic he borrowed from Muhammad Ali's tactic of phoning Joe Frazier the night before a fight. Mr. Corsello never reached Mr. Granger himself, but, using the voice of Mr. Ali, he managed to annoy his wife.

In the set they played, Mr. Corsello won, 6 games to 1. "I kicked his fuckin' ass," said Mr. Corsello, still gleeful 18 months later. "I just mopped him off the court. He was withered. He was a broken man. It was sad. He was muttering to himself like Colonel Kurtz."

A picture was taken of the two men soon after the champion was vanquished, and Mr. Corsello got it framed and sent it to Mr. Granger for his 40th birthday. And whenever Mr. Corsello wore his chalk-striped Hugo Boss suit he won, he made sure to model it for the loser.

Mr. Corsello admires Mr. Granger's style of play on the court, and sees in it a direct correlation to his philosophy of editing. "He's got a huge first serve," said Mr. Corsello. "And there is no distinction between his first and second serve. Even if he is serving disastrously and it will cost him the game if he keeps it up, he won't back off. That's what makes him a man … It's all-out big risk. If you win, you win gloriously. If you lose, you go down gloriously. But it's always loud."

Mr. Granger tells his writers that we're living in the most boring era of magazine journalism. He wants his writers to have some real personal involvement in their articles. So at GQ he pushed Scott Raab, who's been through rehab himself, to write about doctors on drugs; and he got Charles Pierce to write about his family's history of Alzheimer's disease.

That passion inspires devotion to him, even though he can be a demanding taskmaster, often making his writers turn in four, five, sometimes even eight complete rewrites of an article before he deems it fit to run. They also don't seem to mind when Mr. Granger assumes a pimplike demeanor and refers (jokingly) to them as his "bitches, as in, "Hey, bitch, come over here and we'll talk about your story."

"He's unbelievable at having writers find their own voice, no matter where it takes them," said writer Tom Junod, soon after Mr. Granger went to his new job.

Mr. Junod followed Mr. Granger from GQ to Esquire , despite Mr. Cooper's dangling a $300,000 deal before his eyes; included in the deal was a chance to write for GQ' s corporate sibling, The New Yorker .

A GQ senior editor, Scott Omelianuk, also left Mr. Cooper's shop to join Esquire as executive editor. And Lisa Hintelmann, GQ 's link to the Hollywood celebrity machine, shocked Mr. Cooper with her departure; she wasn't seen as one of Mr. Granger's guys.

"David's a true believer," said Terry McDevitt, a former public relations director for GQ who worked closely with both Mr. Cooper and Mr. Granger. "He is like one of those impassioned guys. Both are kind of macho in their own way. Art is more like 'Damn good job. Great story.' And David is like 'This is the best frigging story I've ever frigging read.'"

Mr. Cooper inspires loyalty, too-for the freedom he gives his writers and editors, for his talent-spotting abilities, for his breathing life into a journalistically bereft magazine--but not as passionately. And when Mr. Granger departed, Mr. Cooper decided to gauge the rest of his family's loyalty. Charles Pierce, a writer whose contract had just expired, was the first to be jettisoned when he told Mr. Cooper he needed a little more time to consider his options. That was the wrong answer.

Mike Sager, a contract writer who had been with GQ for five years but was not a Granger acolyte, went next. "I was associated with this palace coup, and I was written off as disloyal," said Mr. Sager, whose contract was not renewed; Mr. Cooper said he sought someone more productive.

And then there was Scott Raab. A GQ loyalist-he's got the letters GQ tattooed in red on his right forearm-Mr. Raab had already agreed to a new contract before the excitement began, and intended to honor it. But with all the money being shelled out to new GQ contract writers Robert Draper, Jack Hitt and Elizabeth Gilbert, Mr. Raab felt he should receive more money for his five years of loyalty. He also wanted to ensure he'd be paired with a regular editor. But a misunderstanding over an outstanding article from Mr. Raab's previous contract scuppered any resolution of these issues. When weeks dragged by, with both no story and no renegotiation, Mr. Raab asked out of his contract. Then things got tempestuous.

Mr. Cooper told Mr. Raab that to be released from his contract, he either had to finish a story left over from his previous contract or reimburse the magazine the prorated fee. Mr. Raab chose the rewrite. GQ killed the story. On Oct. 10, after more than six weeks of haggling, Mr. Raab bought his freedom. The story in question-about the dried-up casino town of Laughlin, Nev.-ran in the January issue of Esquire .

Mr. Cooper said the dismissals were not related to Mr. Granger's departure. "There were things that were not working as well as I thought they might," he said, "but we were doing terrific, we were doing gangbusters with things the way they were."

Spacey to O.J.

Mr. Granger's all-out style has resulted in a few glorious double faults early into his time at Esquire . The quasi-outing of the actor Kevin Spacey in the October issue provoked a loud thud. The showy prose and first-person journalism that he encourages can sometimes get on your nerves. And the trio of paeans to Christy Turlington in the November issue ("Because Beauty has something to say," went the cover line) was a misguided attempt to attach some sort of deeper meaning to a simple imperative of men's magazines: Run lots of pictures of beautiful babes.

"It seems to me that it's really a kind of very unsubtle, in-your-face magazine," said Mr. Cooper of the new incarnation of Esquire . "I guess that is David's sensibility."

Most recently, for his February issue, Mr. Granger has won the dubious distinction of becoming the first editor to get O.J. Simpson to cooperate with a photo session and interview. The story was in the works under his predecessor, Edward Kosner, but he saw it through. To get the cooperation of the accused killer, Esquire dispatched a blond female writer, Celia Farber, to catch the prey. On Jan. 6, Mr. Granger was doing something that puts him ill at ease-publicity-in an appearance on the Today show to hype the article.

Mr. Cooper still seems preoccupied with what Esquire is up to. "It's literally his favorite topic of conversation-how well GQ is doing and how poorly Esquire is doing," said a GQ staff member. Even when Esquire' s Christmas party invitation landed at GQ 's offices, Mr. Cooper was seen parading it around and belittling it for copying GQ s design. At the end of 1997, Mr. Cooper decided to send out an e-mail, congratulating the staff on a triumphant year. In it, he remarked on how well GQ was doing on the newsstand and managed to get in a dig at Esquire 's relatively poor showing.

Mr. Cooper really has no reason to worry so. Esquire is an economic basket case. It loses millions of dollars a year, and only the revenue of the international editions and licensing deals helps recoup any of the $80 million the Hearst Corporation paid for the magazine more than a decade ago, magazine-industry sources said. GQ made more than $20 million in 1997, according to two executives at Condé Nast Publications.

Esquire 's advertising revenue, which already trailed that of GQ kept spiraling downward under the Ed Kosner regime, even during a economic comeback in the magazine industry. In 1997, GQ sold 1,234 more ad pages than Esquire . For the first quarter of 1998, Esquire 's ad pages have risen 35 percent, but it's still pretty thin.

According to preliminary internal figures obtained by Off the Record, Esquire 's already poor newsstand sales fell 23 percent in September and 10 percent in October (the Kevin Spacey cover). Esquire in those two months is expected to average 72,000 copies; GQ , by comparison, will see an estimated total sale of 298,000 copies sold on the newsstands.

A Hearst source said November and December issues for Esquire will beat last year's numbers. And Hearst insists it's committed to the magazine. It's adding about 100 editorial pages to the magazine (about 10 percent of the total) in 1998.

Mr. Granger said he is not really thinking about beating Mr. Cooper's magazine. "To be absolutely honest," he said, "I don't think about GQ that much because I have too much to think about with Esquire . So I don't see it as a competition … I don't think one has to die for the other to succeed."

Part of Mr. Cooper's intense interest in Esquire , those who've worked with him say, stems from his views on loyalty and betrayal.

"Art is one of those people who, if you upset or offend him in any way, you are cut off," said John Korpics, a former GQ art director who is now at Entertainment Weekly .

And Mr. Granger did not go to just any magazine, but to Esquire , the Esquire of Mr. Cooper's idol, Harold Hayes.

But Mr. Cooper summarily dismisses any talk of obsession. "Am I concerned about it, am I worried about it? No, I'm not worried about it at all. Am I going to look at what they're doing? Of course. But obsessed? Hardly," Mr. Cooper said. "I've been competitive ever since I got here. I wanted what Esquire had, which was regarded as the top book in the men's field. From the day I got here, that was my goal, to dominate the field. So now David's over there, he's got to try to take it back. We're not going to give it to him."

It seems that Mademoiselle , decided to jettison journalistic niceties so the section could approach the verisimilitude advertisers desire. So, the real Ms. Devin alleges, the magazine invented quotes and used a picture of a model to better sell the Discover card.

The suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, names Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., whose Condé Nast Publications unit publishes Mademoiselle , and Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover & Company, owners of the Discover card.

The advertorial saga began in June 1996 when the girlfriend of a friend of Ms. Devin's brother called to interview her for a 28-page Life-o-Rama special section ("Your guide to: Hot wheels, cool style, healthy budgets, sex and love, community works, serendipitous vacations, good looks, sensational health and other assorted stuff served up by real-life experts").

Ms. Devin talked about her making of Rendezvous in Puntarenas and her life in the independent film world and consented to the use of her name in the magazine. The writer "said it would be very low-key," said Ms. Devin. "Those are the exact words she used, and she repeated it two or three times."

The result was anything but. The whole page was taken up by words and a picture, purportedly from and of Ms. Devin. But many of the quotes were not those you'd expect from an independent filmmaker. That's because she never said them, Ms. Devin alleges.

Asked how she got motivated, the advertorial had her launch into a non sequitur plug for community colleges. "Use the Discover card for tuition deposits, supplies and rental fees," she purportedly said. "By using the Discover card, you can get money back-up to 1 percent based on your annual level of purchases. It'll come in handy when you are saving for the perfect outfit for your premiere screening or exhibit opening!"

And the picture of a smiling artist accompanying the page bore no resemblance to Ms. Devin, although the two both have brown hair. "Why, if they wanted to actually use real people, did they use a model?" asked Ms. Devin. "Maybe they were scared I was hideous." But Mademoiselle never asked for her picture, Ms. Devin added.

"All that stuff they can make up," said Ms. Devin. "So why do they need to talk to me if they're going to use someone else's picture?"

Ms. Devin's lawyer, Jeffrey Barr, told Off the Record that by using the photograph of a different person and attributing quotes to Ms. Devin she never said, the magazine and Discover made unauthorized use of her name for commercial purposes and invaded her privacy under New York State civil rights laws.

But what really peeved Ms. Devin is the magazine's use of the phrase "starving artist." "Starving artist is always negative," said Ms. Devin. "I don't want to come off as someone desperate."

Hence the second cause of action in the complaint, for injuring her reputation as an individual and a professional in her trade. The suit seeks a minimum of $1 million for both of the causes of action.

Executives at Condé Nast declined to comment about the complaint.

Hollywood's craving for raw material from magazines shows no sign of abating, and Texas Monthly has become one of its favorite feeding grounds.

The latest article to be optioned is Skip Hollandsworth's "The Bookmaker's Wife," which ran in the November issue of the Austin-based magazine. The tale has all the elements of the quintessential movie-of-the-week. A wealthy Houston businessman with a secret-he's the most successful bookie in Houston-allegedly gets his vengeance-minded, ne'er-do-well brother to murder his straying and divorce-seeking beautiful wife.

The Polone-Winer Company will end up paying about $50,000 for the story rights if a movie ever gets made; upfront, Texas Monthly received several thousand dollars.

Mr. Hollandsworth, a senior editor at the magazine, is no stranger to Hollywood interest in his work. Since late 1992, Hollywood has optioned nine of his features. In a world where few purchased stories ever make it to the screen-small or large-two of Mr. Hollandsworth's stories actually have been made into TV movies, and a third is headed for Lifetime Television. "To me, I am baffled why an article even gets optioned, but I'm never going to complain about it," he said.

The attraction, however, is simple: Texas Monthly' s features tend to run to be sweeping narratives, and Mr. Hollandsworth writes much of the true-crime stories that producers love. "I'm the staff middlebrow," said Mr. Hollandsworth. "It's not like I'm looking for a movie story," he added. "I'm looking for a narrative story. And when you work in Texas and work for Texas Monthly , you just can't help but walk into a treasure-trove of stuff."

Mr. Hollandsworth's previous optioned story-August's "Store Wars"-shows the folly of trying to predict Hollywood's ways. The article focused on the Texas battle between Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, not your typical damsel-in-distress movie of the week. There was no crime, no straight chronology, just two lumbering giants in the high-end retail business. Victor Television Productions picked up the option and then placed the project with ABC, which plans to produce the movie for Lifetime Television.

Despite all the Hollywood hype, the payday isn't as large as star-struck writers may assume, Mr. Hollandsworth added. Option payments for Texas Monthly stories range between $1,000 and $7,500, according to sources at the magazine, while the total purchase price for the rare times a movie gets made stretch from about $20,000 to upward of $50,000. Since Mr. Hollandsworth is a staff member, Texas Monthly could keep all the money for itself. But in a display of benevolence, it hands over 75 percent of the total to writers. And it lets its staff writers keep all the money from any consulting deals.

Texas Monthly doesn't get much in the way of monetary gain, either. In 1997, it will see no more than $10,000 from the four stories Hollywood has optioned; one four-color advertising page in the magazine runs $26,020. But Michael Levy, the magazine's publisher, said having the William Morris Agency shop its wares helps keep writers on board at the mainly staff-written magazine and provides some promotional benefit for the magazine.

Since Nobody Beats the Wiz, the consumer electronics chain, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Dec. 16, the local newspapers have been filled with stories showing how the retailer's woes could hurt its creditors and the sports teams that rely on its advertising largess. But not one has mentioned the not-so-minor impact that parent company Wiz Inc.'s financial travails will have on the New York Post, Daily News, The New York Times and Newsday .

Just in time for the holiday season, the chain's busiest weeks of the year, Nobody Beats the Wiz has been forced to cut back drastically on its $90 million advertising budget. And that means millions of dollars in lost income for the dailies during the holiday season and a questionable new year. Through October, Nobody Beats the Wiz had spent $29.3 million in the four papers, according to Competitive Media Reporting. In the previous two years, that number had topped out just under $37 million. Given the stronger retail atmosphere this year, analysts expected the total to be even higher.

Even when the struggling company is assigned a bankruptcy trustee and can prime the advertising pump some more, newspapers will only see a trickle. "[Advertising expenditures] will be reduced from before," confirmed Richard Sebastiao, the chain's chief restructuring officer, who otherwise declined to hand out exact figures.

The Daily News already had taken in nearly $8.3 million in advertising revenue this year, according to C.M.R., making the retailer among the newspaper's top 10 advertisers. The Post snagged $4.8 million of the chain's advertising budget, and The Times received $5.4 million. But Newsday will take the biggest hit, as it has always carried a lion's share of the Wiz's ads ($10.8 million so far this year), and the company plans to close four of its eight Long Island stores.

The track record for consumer electronic companies emerging from Chapter 11 is not too promising. The loud-mouthed antics of Crazy Eddie disappeared, while 47th Street Photo and Newmark & Lewis also never made it through the reorganization process. And the entrance of a strong national company-Circuit City-into the New York market doesn't promise relief, either. "Circuit City will take up some of the slack, but they're not the same kind of intense advertiser," said Walter Loeb, publisher of the Loeb Retail Letter .

Advertising executives at the papers do not appear panicked by the Wiz's bankruptcy. "Whenever you lose a customer, there's concern," said Les Goodstein, an executive vice president and associate publisher at the Daily News . "I have seen a lot of these in my 20 years at the News ."

Take, for instance, Mr. Cochran's ex-wife, Barbara Cochran, who used her autobiography to accuse him of philandering and physical abuse. Or how about Joe Fitzgerald, a columnist at The Boston Herald , who called Mr. Cochran a "two-bit phony with the million-dollar wardrobe [who] dove into the sewer looking for the meanest card he could play, the race card, then proceeded to fan the flames of racial tension by slapping that card onto the table in shameless pursuit of victory, caring not a whit about the divisiveness he was sowing." And who could forget Christopher Hitchens, the Vanity Fair contributor and Mother Teresa-basher, who painted Mr. Cochran as the villain in the O.J. Simpson trial? "As head of the defense team, Johnnie Cochran acted as a thug and a demagogue," Mr. Hitchens wrote in London's Evening Standard . He added: "In his frenzy to do anything to muddy the waters, and to lead attention away from the timing, the forensic evidence and the motivations established by the prosecution, Cochran has set back the cause of justice for many people who need it far more than his spoiled, sullen client."

Mr. Cochran did not sue any of them. But the eloquent defender of civil rights is suing Ms. Peyser and the New York Post for libel, and seeking at least $10 million for the damage to his reputation and his general emotional well-being. And given the apparently slim legal chances he has of winning such a case in New York, he's playing the California card. On Dec. 10, in United States District Court in Los Angeles, Mr. Cochran sued over the following words in her column entitled "Nightmare Team is taking over": "Cochran has yet to speak up. But history reveals that he will say or do just about anything to win, typically at the expense of the truth."

"The foregoing statement is false and defamatory and accuses Cochran of unethical conduct in his profession, especially when read in the context of the entire article," the complaint states, "and the foregoing statement implies that Cochran has a record of lying and unethical conduct. Said statement exposes Cochran to contempt, ridicule, and obloquy, and defendants knew, at the time they made such statements, that the statements would expose Cochran to contempt, ridicule, and obloquy."

(When Mr. Cochran mentions context, he's referring to lines like, "The man who cynically turned West Coast justice on its ear in service of the guilty is now poised to do a similar number on the city of New York.")

"I'm just astonished that in this country you can be sued for expressing an opinion, particularly one as widely held as the one expressed in the column," Ms. Peyser said.

That sentiment was echoed by a number of First Amendment lawyers contacted by Off the Record. "I'm surprised Cochran would do that," said David Korzenik, whose firm, Miller & Korzenik, has represented Vibe and Spy . "I thought he was more sophisticated.… I understand his reaction on a personal level, but libel is not about offense, it's about an actual harm to reputation. And I don't think a statement like that is understood the way he thinks." In this case, meaning that it does not accuse him of committing perjury, just having a win-at-all-costs mentality, a statement likely protected by the First Amendment.

"I think it's safe to say it will be dismissed," said Laura Handman, a partner at Lankenau, Kovner, Kurtz & Outten, which has represented media outlets such as The Observer , NBC, The Economist and Harper's Magazine . "It's hyperbolic. It's in a column."

Mr. Cochran had nothing to say about his libel suit. But Barry Langberg, Mr. Cochran's lawyer, who has won cases for Carol Burnett (against The National Enquirer ) and casino developer Steve Wynn (against Lyle Stuart's Barricade Books), disagreed with the conventional wisdom. "Harshness isn't the issue," he said. "Going from legitimate expression of opinion to expressing purposed facts that aren't true is the issue. She's saying that he has a record of lying in court. That is provably false. That goes beyond opinion. It is fact."

The Federal courts have long operated under the assumption that there is no such thing as a false idea. But in 1990, in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., the United States Supreme Court trimmed the nearly complete protection in which the courts had blanketed opinion. The decision in that case, which involved a sports columnist calling a high school coach a liar, determined that opinions that imply defamatory facts can be libelous. But the more outrageous the opinion, and the context and style of how it's delivered, the more likely it will be protected by the law. (Ms. Peyser's assertion would fall into the latter category, said some of the First Amendment lawyers contacted by Off the Record. Mr. Langberg responded simply that he's proven the experts wrong before.)

Making Mr. Cochran's legal gambit even trickier is the Post' s location. New York State constitutional law is even stronger than Federal law, granting broad immunity for all sorts of opinion. Hence Mr. Cochran's move to Los Angeles-where the Post sells an estimated 165 copies each weekday, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations-even though he's here much of the week filming Cochran & Company for Court TV and networking his way into Manhattan's power circles. California law has shown more concern toward well-known figures and the license the media can take with their reputations. "There's a notion that California juries are more sympathetic to celebrities than jaded New Yorkers," said Ms. Handman.

Mr. Langberg said the sole reason Mr. Cochran filed in Los Angeles is that he has practiced law in the city for the past 30 years and that his friends and associates are based there.

New York Post editor Ken Chandler referred a call to a spokesman, who said, "The complaint has no merit and we are defending it vigorously."

Harold Evans, soon to take office as the editorial director and vice chairman of Mortimer Zuckerman's mini-empire of media outlets, visited the Freedom Forum on Dec. 10 and delivered a searing lament on the decline of journalistic standards and vigilance in the land of the First Amendment. But as he went about decrying the tabloidization and laziness of the media, he cleverly found the time to defend the family honor.

The target of his ire: New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has written all sorts of unflattering things about Mr. Evans and his wife, New Yorker editor Tina Brown, and how they've succumbed to the culture of celebrity that Mr. Evans claims he so despises. Maybe it was Ms. Dowd's labeling Mr. Evans an "expensive hustler" that so enraged him. Or her praying in print that the former president and publisher of Random House would "take a bath" on Dick Morris' book. Or her cringing disbelief on discovering that Roseanne would be serving as a guest editor at The New Yorker . "Can this be?" Ms. Dowd wrote back in 1995. "The magazine of Dorothy Parker and Hannah Arendt joining forces with the boorish TV star who urges women to kill bad husbands and children to kill bad parents?"

Whatever the catalyst, Mr. Evans decided to make Ms. Dowd the poster girl for all the journalists who he thinks evince partisan tendencies and carry a visceral dislike of President Bill Clinton. The subject was "Gravegate," or how an unsourced allegation of political donors buying their way into Arlington National Cemetery became a full-blown media controversy.

"That very funny columnist Maureen Dowd, who so ached for the story to be true, gave us an intriguing standard of journalism-the doctrine of implied guilt. It was right to run it, she said, because it was the kind of thing she expected of Clinton. It was plausible.

"It won't do," Mr. Evans continued. "A lot of rumors are plausible, especially if you happen not to like the subject. By that standard, someone might say it was plausible that Maureen, a renowned Clinton-hater, was in the pay of the Republican propaganda machine. Nonsense, of course. The fact that an idea is despicable does not make it plausible."

Ms. Dowd declined to comment. But the column in question skewered Republicans as much as it did President Clinton, accusing the House Veterans' Affairs Committee of sloppiness. "What you need to know about Bill Clinton is that the charge was plausible," Ms. Dowd wrote on Nov. 22. "What you need to know about the Republicans is that the charge is despicable."

Besides exacting revenge on Ms. Dowd during his lecture, Mr. Evans offered his soon-to-be-subjects at the Daily News and U.S. News & World Report some clues to his journalistic temperament. He frowns on the use of unattributed sources. "There should be a quota, a kind of tariff on blind quotes per issue in any newspaper," Mr. Evans said. "Blind quotes may be defensible for whistle-blowing on a grave issue, but not for the personal vendettas one sees every day in the press."

While Mr. Evans treasures the First Amendment, he's not as fond of the second one; he bewailed the fact that there hasn't been a thorough investigation of "the murk of the National Rifle Association." He's not a fan of Whitewater stories or giving the Paula Jones case such visibility. And page 1 stories about tempests such as Frank Gifford's extramarital gropings are trivial and demeaning, no matter how much editors claim such stuff is about character. "This is no more than prurience on stilts," he said. "It is as much about character as Joe McCarthy's list of names had to do with state secrets."

Mr. Evans, of course, made sure he jokingly toadied up to his new boss. "Any references to tabloid journalism which could be in any way construed as critical do not include publications owned now or possibly owned in the future by Mort Zuckerman-slash-Fred Drasner," Mr. Evans said at the opening of his speech. "To borrow from my immediate trade past, any resemblance to persons, living or dead, in this lecture is purely coincidental."

Wired Ventures Inc. finally has found a new editor to replace Louis Rossetto on a day-to-day basis, tapping editor-at-large Katrina Heron. But the search for a volunteer to take over Mr. Rossetto's chief executive duties does not appear anywhere near culmination.

Perhaps the prospective candidates are shying away from the "organizational culture" delineated in the "specs" document that the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles is sending around to the publishing and new-media industries. It's a description full of cyberlibertarian corporatespeak-grandiose, trite, contradictory and redundant-that would not be out of place in a Dilbert strip. And the writing begs for an editor. To wit:

"These values or 'heuristics' are the company's cultural aspirations and are based on proactive ethical leadership, collaboration, independent and creative thinking, and high standards of excellence," reads one of the opening sentences describing Wired Venture's organizational culture.

Then comes a list of talking points:

"The organization is driven by the motto of 'Smart Media for smart people around the world,' and by its mission to connect people to the technological future. The company most admires strategic, intellectual, creative and editorial talent."

"Entrepreneurial drive and fanatical commitment to the business are keys to success internally."

"It is a highly intense, fast-paced, efficient and energized gestalt."

"The accepted term for the environment is 'office-home' environment, which translates as 'you can wear what you want and be yourself, but we're here to make great media and a great company, and build wealth and assets, and that's where the focus must be.'"

If Wired Ventures can find a candidate willing to immerse him or herself in this Digital Citizen ethos, the chief executive will be expected to take the company from $45 million in revenue to $250 million, make it profitable and prepare it for another try at an initial public offering. Wired Ventures struck out twice before in its public-market entreaties, and recently laid off 20 percent of its on-line unit's staff. But the job as chief executive could become a very lucrative gig. According to people approached for the job, the incoming executive team will get 10 percent of the company.

Urinating Santas and Christmas expletives won't be greeting readers of The New York Times Book Review this holiday season, thanks to the watchdogs in the newspaper's advertising department.

Little, Brown & Company had planned on advertising David Sedaris' cheerfully misanthropic collection of Christmas stories, Holidays on Ice, in the Dec. 21 issue of The New York Times Book Review opposite the table of contents. The publishing house's ad agency, Dweck & Campbell Inc., dispatched the ad materials and did not anticipate any problems. After all, the ad had already passed muster with the gatekeepers at The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine . But at The Times , the ad--a "Merry #!@*ing Christmas!" banner accompanied by the book's jacket-cover photo of Santa relieving himself at a public urinal-was deemed unacceptable.

"We just find it to be in questionable taste and not suitable for The New York Times ," said Steph Jespersen, copy chief of something called the advertising acceptability department at the newspaper.

The folks at Little Brown were stunned that The Times was turning down their $4,492. "They'll put half-naked women in lingerie all throughout the paper," said one miffed executive at Little Brown. "But Santa urinating? Santa drinks a lot of eggnog. The man has to take a leak sometime."

In a very even tone, Mr. Jespersen told Off the Record that the three-person department evaluates each ad separately, and that comparisons cannot be made between lingerie and Christmas blasphemy. "This ad had two things working against it." he said. "One was the urinal, and the other was the copy."

When asked if The Times might have accepted the ad if it had contained just one of the offending elements, Mr. Jespersen declined to deal in hypotheticals. "We take each one on its own," he said.

Back in the early days of Saturday Night Live , Chevy Chase often used to open the "Weekend Update" segment with the line, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." The brass at The New Yorker could take a tip from Mr. Chase and adopt it to a motto that might run: " The New Yorker is still not profitable."

Nineteen ninety-seven was supposed to be the year the magazine's financial messiah arrived. Indeed, New Yorker president Tom Florio told The New York Times on Oct. 14, 1996, that the magazine would move into the black in the following year. And S.I. Newhouse Jr., who shelled out $168 million of his family's money to buy the magazine back in 1985, told the New York Post on Sept. 27, 1996, that he expected 1997 to be a profitable year for the magazine.

The losses, however, are still piling up, said sources at the magazine. But the deficit is apparently down into the single-digits-in the millions, that is.

The editorial side places the blame for this financial state of affairs on the business side, and editor Tina Brown is not as enamored of Mr. Florio as she once was, said sources in the Newhouse empire. "There should be more ads in the magazine," said one editorial type. Losing one of the magazine's top ad salespeople, Will Lippincott, to The New Republic , won't help matters, either.

But Mr. Florio remains upbeat. He told Off the Record that the magazine "is having the best year it's had in 10 years," selling nearly 102 more ad pages this year than in 1996. The nine special theme issues brought in 38 percent of the magazine's total ad pages, he said. So, look for the "California" issue this coming February, and a "Private Lives" issue later in the year.

Mr. Florio, perhaps learning from his past mistakes, declined to tell Off the Record when the magazine will become profitable. But Advertising Age reported him saying that the magazine may break even or turn a profit in 1998. Old habits just won't die.

"It has become increasingly clear to us that Family PC is, above all, a computer magazine and, consequently, increasingly a Ziff-Davis-controlled business, one that is core to their strategy," Mr. Conforti wrote in the memo. "In fact, we had reached the point where we were simply funding the magazine with no real involvement-and that's just not what we do."

A miffed Ziff-Davis put out its own internal memo on Dec. 4, repeating much of Mr. Conforti's words verbatim and stressing that Ziff-Davis will continue publishing the magazine.

For Disney to pull out now, just as the magazine is starting to return money to its investors, seems odd. Both partners have already poured more than $10 million each into the magazine, according to sources at both companies, and 1998 will be Family PC' s first profitable year. Abruptly ending the relationship makes Disney's recouping any portion of its investment unlikely.

According to magazine sources, Disney's move was not based on money, but control. Disney's say in the direction of the magazine had been dwindling. And ever since its main proponent, Family Fun founder Jake Winebaum, went off to run Disney Online, Family PC no longer had a champion at Disney. (The current publisher and editor in chief of the magazine, Robin Raskin, comes from Ziff-Davis.)

Mr. Conforti is a financial guy, most recently a chief financial officer of Disney Consumer Products, which looks after all the licensed tchotchkes in addition to publishing. He moved to New York from Burbank, Calif., this past summer to temporarily run the division while looking for a new publishing chief. (John Skipper, the former vice president of publishing, had gone off to run the upcoming ESPN Magazine , and his replacement as magazine division head, Paul Hoffman, left for Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.) Magazine sources say Mr. Conforti doesn't understand the intricacies of the computer industry, a necessity if an executive wants to have an intelligent say in Family PC' s future.

With Family PC gone from Disney's publishing stable, the job of magazine division head just became even smaller. At first, when Mr. Conforti moved here, there was talk the Disney Publishing job would oversee not only Disney's books and magazines, as Mr. Skipper did, but Fairchild Publications, the home of Jane, Women's Wear Daily and W . That plan went nowhere. Then, books were stripped out of the portfolio and given to Hyperion publisher Robert Miller. Now there are only four magazines left: the solidly profitable Discover, Family Fun, the money-losing Disney Adventures and Disney Magazine , which has no pretense to editorial objectivity-it just hypes Disney merchandise. In his nearly six months in New York, Mr. Conforti has had no luck peddling the job. The three candidates he most liked all rebuffed his advances, industry sources said. Greg Coleman stayed at Reader's Digest ; former Condé Nast executive Michael Clinton went to Hearst Magazines; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia executive David Steward took the president's job at TV Guide .

Mr. Conforti declined to speak to Off the Record.

New Yorker theater critic John Lahr raved about Triumph of Love in the pages of the magazine more than a month before the October opening on Broadway. He raved about the musical on CNN last spring after seeing it in an out-of-town tryout. And The New Yorker even sent a discount-ticket offer to its subscribers that contained Mr. Lahr's words raving about the show. But what Mr. Lahr has failed to mention in all his hyping is that he is a good friend of the producer of the show, Margo Lion, so much so that he even recused himself from reviewing the play.

That didn't stop Mr. Lahr from penning these words to accompany a photo in the magazine's Showcase column of Sept. 22: "The battle between heart and head gets a smart, funny twist in Triumph of Love , a seven-character musical reworking of Marivaux's 1732 comedy." And "the musical's fresh combination of high jinks and high style-it could be called 'Nonsense and Sensibility'-earned it standing ovations during tryouts in Baltimore and New Haven." (The New Yorker letter to subscribers misquoted Mr. Lahr's words, conflating all his praise into "a smart, fresh and funny combination of high jinks and high style!" As Off the Record reported last week, the magazine also mangled the words of their other theater critic, Nancy Franklin.)

On CNN back in May, Mr. Lahr bemoaned the quality of Broadway musicals. But there was one bright spot on the horizon. "The best musical I have seen this year is Triumph of Love , and that hasn't come into town," he said. When it did arrive on Broadway, Mr. Lahr went as Ms. Lion's guest on opening night.

Ms. Lion said she has known Mr. Lahr for 17 years, and that there was nothing untoward about Mr. Lahr writing about the show. "He's a friend of mine-period," Ms. Lion said. "He's a man of incredible integrity. This is just a tempest in a teapot. He's writing about things he believes in."

Mr. Lahr, who makes his home in London, could not be reached for comment. But New Yorker deputy editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy said that Mr. Lahr was asked to write the September puff piece and that the magazine saw no conflict of interest. "Showcase, to my mind, is quite a separate thing than a review," Ms. McCarthy said. "It seemed like it would be an incredible twisting out of our natural shape to go off and find someone else to do it."

New York 1 reporters assigned to cover the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade this year didn't realize they were on a covert mission. But broadcasting the shopping monolith's holiday festivities was more like playing James Bond than Jimmy Olsen.

The tension stemmed from a sponsorship agreement that New York 1 cut with Kmart, involving promotional acknowledgments and commercials during the station's coverage of the parade. Kmart paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for the ads. "According to my sales folks, Macy's knew that Kmart was involved, and they were told, 'By all means, sell it to Kmart,'" said Steve Paulus, vice president of news at New York 1. But then, Mr. Paulus said, about 10 days before "Inflation Eve" (the traditional balloon blowing in Central Park the night before the parade), Macy's informed the news station that because of its deal with Kmart, the department store would not be able to countenance the broadcast. Mr. Paulus was surprised by the reaction from Macy's. "Tell me who is not a competitor to Macy's," he said. "They sell everything in that store. They sell delicatessen meats in the Cellar. Is Zabar's a competitor then?"

Macy's essentially put the kibosh on an hourlong special on the balloon inflation and made it hard for New York 1 to cover the parade by not giving reporters access to parade organizers. But New York 1 decided to give it a go, anyway. The result: parking-space disputes, interview requests denied and constant walkie-talkie surveillance by flacks for Macy's.

The troubles began from the moment the New York 1 van arrived at the media parking space on 81st Street and Central Park West, early on the evening of Nov. 26. According to a New York 1 reporter, a representative of Macy's tried to shoo the news team away. "Even though CBS and NBC were already there, Macy's told [the reporting team] they could not park there," the reporter said. "To which the truck driver said, 'Forget it, we're parking here.'" New York 1 then attempted to take its cameras to designated areas for live shots but was barred from access.

The intransigence continued into the next day. When the station contacted Macy's for a comment on a major parade accident-a bystander hit by a falling lamppost-they said they received no response. (Reps for Macy's denied ever being contacted at all.) And the Macy's parade staff refused to give New York 1 reporters assistance, which, according to news sources, ranged from being frozen out of interviews with Jean McFaddin, the event's organizer, to more picayune details like mysteriously unavailable press packets.

Ronnie Taffet, a Macy's spokesman, claimed that Macy's has a standing "agreement" with all parade broadcasters that bars them from using retail competitors as commercial sponsors. When New York 1 failed to respect this "agreement," she said, "Macy's decided not to accommodate New York 1."

Mr. Paulus said there may have been an informal agreement with Macy's, but never anything in writing. "Although they were probably less than cooperative, I understand their point of view," he said. "I don't necessarily agree with it. [But] they are a ubiquitous presence in New York, as we are, and we'll be working together in the future."

-Kate Kelly

Last year, George' s overall circulation for the issue closest to the filing date (September) was 440,359. This year, the number was lower, down almost 10,000 readers to 430,800. And this is from a magazine that in its media kit promises advertisers it will deliver between 450,000 to 500,000 copies by this month.

The story on the newsstand is even bleaker. The percentage of copies a magazine sells on the newsstand is an excellent indicator of its vitality. According to tabulations made by magazine-circulation guru Dan Capell, newsstand sales (or "sell-through," in magazine parlance) account for 48.3 percent of overall circulation for the nation's top 100 magazines. The industry average was in the low 40's, he added. George last year had a remarkable 56 percent sell-through over the course of the previous year. But October 1996 to September 1997 is a very different story. George sold an average of 118,333 copies, for a sell-through of 29 percent. By comparison, Vanity Fair , which George considers a competitor, had a sell-through of 51 percent.

Swing 's newsstand numbers are even worse. Just 9,040 copies of Mr. Lauren's magazine for twentysomethings were sold on the newsstand for each issue between November 1996 and October 1997, out of a total circulation of 87,720. The sell-through number is a minuscule 9.3 percent. The numbers from October, the most recent issue tabulated, are not much better. The total comes in at 14.9 percent. But advertisers still are paying for the privilege of appearing in Ralph Lauren's son's magazine. The current December-January issue, a third-anniversary special, carries the most ad pages in its history.

On the night of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, CBS News became the poster child for laggard news divisions everywhere, stumbling for hours before finally breaking into pro wrestling with a feed from Britain's Sky TV. Now it seems CBS will interrupt regularly scheduled programming for almost anything resembling big news.

During the week of Nov. 17, CBS News interrupted Americans' favorite soap operas four times for breaking news on that life-altering story about the birth of the McCaughey septuplets in Iowa. On Nov. 19, CBS breathtakingly announced that the kids-all seven of them-were about to be born, and then came back to say that, yes, indeed they had been born and were supposedly doing fine. Two days later, CBS News again broke in twice, including coverage of the parents' news conference. CBS competitors didn't seem as jazzed by the news. Both NBC and ABC interrupted their daytime programming just twice, and ABC didn't even cover the news conference.

In the aftermath of the Diana debacle and the apology from CBS News president Andrew Heyward for the "serious cracks" in the operation, television news observers expected changes. Mr. Heyward did demote vice president Lane Vernados, and he issued a bunch of edicts ordering up a "bulletin center" staffed around the clock by a producer and technician, ensuring that at least one correspondent was on duty. He also gave more news executives the green light to break into programming with the latest news updates. But the suits at CBS may want to give their trigger fingers a rest before they really upset Young and the Restless fans.

If both Marv Albert and Mike Tyson can make news for their biting prowess during the same year, why can't there be two renditions of the 1997 Dubious Achievements awards?

The team responsible for Esquire 's yearly spoof of the foolish and the inane lost its leader, deputy editor David Hirshey, when editor in chief David Granger cleaned house on his first day in office in June.

But TV Guide editor in chief Steven Reddicliffe hired Mr. Hirshey and his crew to do the same thing with a new name and a slightly different twist.

The TV Guide version, called "The Year in Jeers 1997: We Bite Back!" will be on newsstands on Dec. 8. Mimicking the Esquire method of straight news items topped by a snarky headline, "The Year in Jeers" has slightly more of a TV and pop-culture bent. "Few of TV Guide 's readers would welcome a seating chart at Balthazar," said Mr. Hirshey.

But Mr. Hirshey rounded up his usual collection of punsters-the pseudonymous Stanley Bing, Newsweek 's Jerry Adler and Mediaweek 's Lewis Grossberger-and delivered the same mixture of well-turned quips and groan-inducing jokes. To wit: A whole section on "People … Who Eat People," including "tasty tidbits from the world of human sushi." And then's there's the obligatory O.J. Simpson joke. A news item quoted Mr. Simpson saying it was much easier now to get dates. "I guess it's sort of the bad-boy thing." The TV Guide kicker: "So that's why they call him a lady killer."

Of course, playing to TV Guide 's 13 million-plus paying readers, compared to Esquire 's 650,000, forced the group to cut down on the risqué, particularly on dick jokes. But they still managed to push the envelope. "If we do our job well, we'll knock a few of their readers off their Barcaloungers," said Mr. Hirshey. Mr. Reddicliffe played hall monitor. "It was like the Dick Van Dyke Show ," said Mr. Reddicliffe, keeping the TV motif alive. "I would like to think I was Buddy. I'm sure in some cases they thought I was Mel Cooley."

Meanwhile, Esquire 's Dubious awards will be out later this month. David Eggers, formerly of the satirical magazine Might , is playing a major role in trying to refresh the formula.

Hachette Filipacchi Magazines is mighty proud of the fact that the company is wasting at least $5 million over the next five years leasing a blocklong billboard along Broadway to promote its stable of magazines. But how the company decided which 11 magazines to promote first has stirred up a mini-controversy in the 29-title empire, overseen by chief executive David Pecker.

Magazines like George, Elle and Car and Driver made the cut and have nearly 25-foot-high covers looming over a Starbucks and other stores between 51st and 52nd streets. But at least two of Hachette's mainstream consumer magazines are conspicuously absent, even though the circulation of Metropolitan Home (616,799) and Family Life (452,353) are both bigger than Elle Decor (443,809) American Photo (258,185) and George (which promises advertisers 400,000 but still hasn't released audited circulation numbers). According to sources at Hachette, editors at the snubbed titles feel slighted by their exclusion, and editorial director Jean-Louis Ginibre is annoyed he was not informed about the billboard plans.

Hachette editors contacted by Off the Record attempted to be diplomatic about not making the first cut of the 205-by-25-foot billboard. "I certainly wish we were there, but it's not the end of the world," said Donna Warner, editor in chief of Metropolitan Home . A Hachette spokesman said that the two forgotten magazines will be rotated onto the billboard in the coming months.

Mr. Pecker was nonplussed about the complaints, and even joked about it. "Since I came up with the idea and the money is not coming out of the magazines' pockets, I have the right to say, 'I did the deals, I have the right to decide what goes up,'" he said.

When a magazine's theater critic bestows a rave on a Broadway production, the play's producers rush to slap those comments on their ads, often misquoting them in the process. Rarely, however, does a magazine step in and do the marketing (and misquoting) work itself, as The New Yorker has for the people behind Triumph of Love . That help, in the form of a letter offering discount tickets just for being a subscriber to The New Yorker , has some of the magazine's patrons upset with the marketing ploy's crassness.

"Critics John Lahr and Nancy Franklin have been raving about a new Broadway musical comedy, Triumph of Love ," the letter says. "John has called it 'a smart, fresh and funny combination of high jinks and high style!' And Nancy said: 'This is the kind of show that makes people want to come to this city-be in the theater, go to the theater, talk about the theater!' So here's an offer to make it even easier to come, be, go and talk-a chance to see Triumph of Love early in the run, in the best seats, and for the best price."

The letter is signed, coyly, "Best regards, The New Yorker ."

Magazines often rummage through their databases to dispatch similar offers, but they usually sign the publisher's name to them and make sure their subscribers know they're helping out an advertiser as part of a marketing deal. The New Yorker makes no such distinction.

"You're mortgaging the brand name and credibilty of the magazine for the sake of the advertiser," said one media executive elsewhere in S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s empire. "That should not be able to be bought. And you're doing it in an obfuscating way without signing it from the business side. It's not something you would let happen in the magazine's pages, so why let it happen on letterhead?"

Ms. Franklin was not too perturbed by the mercantile use of her words but was slightly annoyed by The New Yorker 's dropping three of the infinitives she used in her review. "Let's just say I'm bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their inability to quote me accurately," she said. Ms. Franklin actually wrote: " Triumph of Love is the kind of show that makes people want to come to this city-to be in the theater, to go to the theater, to talk about the theater."

Mr. Lahr, who wrote a Showcase item in September, was in England and could not be reached for comment.

"If I had known about it, it would have never gone out," said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine's deputy editor. "It was someone's misguided notion of synergy."

In an interview with The Observer , Mr. Zuckerman said he was considering the idea of taking his four publications public. And Mr. Evans, 69, a still-perky Great Man of Journalism who is not beneath grinning for the paparazzi at the countless parties he has attended and thrown, could serve as the perfect leading man in any campaign to convince investors to part with millions. Whether or not he makes substantive changes in the four publications, Mr. Evans-with his wife, New Yorker editor Tina Brown on his arm-makes a nice public face for this little unnamed media group.

Mr. Zuckerman also enjoys the gaze of the camera. See his guest-host appearances on Charlie Rose , the Sunday morning political programs and in the freelance photographers' shots of New York media and society parties. He doesn't cut a dashing figure on the party circuit, unlike Mr. Evans, and he isn't a wily debater, unlike Mr. Evans, but there he is. And as previous editors of the Daily News have learned, he also loves to play editor. But he has promised to be good this time.

But whether the micromanager, even with loads of good intentions, can mend his ways is doubtful.

"Mort has always been the point person," said noted designer Walter Bernard, who has worked for Mr. Zuckerman on Atlantic Monthly , U.S. News and, most recently, the Daily News . "Everyone deals with Mort. And now there's another layer. And that's going to be the most interesting experiment … People thought he was genetically incapable of marrying and having a child, and he's done that."

Others are not so sanguine. "He's not going to back off," said a media executive who has dealt with Mr. Zuckerman over the years. "People like Zuckerman never do."

Mr. Zuckerman himself begged to differ. "No. 1, the work has expanded exponentially," he said from London's Heathrow Airport in a telephone interview. "No. 2, my time has imploded because of the fact I'm involved in several public companies, a wife and a child. And No. 3, any time you can get somebody as talented as Harry Evans to work for the talented editors we have, you want to make sure you just go for it."

A friend of Mr. Evans said Mr. Zuckerman even went so far as to promise his friend editorial autonomy, and he put the promise in writing. Mr. Evans would also be in charge of a newspaper Mr. Zuckerman said he plans to launch next year, and any other publications he might acquire. The owner said he was modeling his corporate structure on that of Time Inc., where Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief, watches closely over the managing editors in charge of the various publications.

Good Harry, Bad Harry

While certainly grateful to Mr. Zuckerman for giving him his first job in the United States back in 1984, Mr. Evans is no fan of meddling editors. His memoir of his 39-year career in journalism-much of which takes his former employer, Rupert Murdoch, to task-is full of lines like this one: "A proprietor of commercial and political instinct who interferes in the running of a quality newspaper will inevitably erode its standards. This need not be obviously dramatic. It can happen in ways as apparently innocuous as insisting that sport has extra columns at the expense of news, or closing a foreign bureau." Editors who have gone through the revolving door at the Daily News would probably say that those words capture their old boss pretty well.

In interviews with the British press following his move from Random House to Mr. Zuckerman's media properties, Mr. Evans was at once hucksterish and imperious, taking full advantage of the fact that overseas reporters have little idea that his new job is a little less prestigious than his old one.

"What is it Bagehot said about the role of the monarch?" Mr. Evans told The Guardian by way of explaining his new role. "To advise, to warn and to encourage. That's how I shall try to act." He also told the reporter back home, "The writing in the British press is so superior to most of the American press."

In an interview with The Observer , Mr. Evans was sure to be a little more mealy-mouthed and humble: "I'm just going to absorb, talk to the editors, see what they need, talk to the staff, get a sense in further conversations of what they need, and whatever they need I think they ought to have, I will supply it for them," he said. "I'll give them some ideas, some of them will be good, some of them will be bad. I hope most of them will be good."

What a cagey bastard! But he's also perfectly suited to the job of editorial overseer. He combines great energy and zeal with a distaste for the tiresome day-to-day labors of running a publication. As a newspaper editor and publishing house boss, Mr. Evans did display one pronounced tendency that might not sit well with his boss: He loves to go after the big story, whatever the cost. "He founded his reputation on big-ticket journalism, yearlong investigations that cost a lot of money and manpower," said a former Daily News employee familiar with Mr. Evans' career. "But Zuckerman is a notorious penny pincher as far as editorial is concerned."

If Mr. Zuckerman's early enthusiasm is any indication of what will happen, he may just go for it. After all, he knows he hired a big-spending editor who craves attention-and he may just let him do his thing. "Harry, as far as I'm concerned, is the decathlon champion of print," Mr. Zuckerman said. "I mean, he's a great editor, he's a great writer, he's got a great pair of eyes, he's great in newspapers, he's great in magazines, he's great in books. It just doesn't get better than Harry Evans."

Indeed, Mr. Evans' journalistic achievements have left him a journalistic deity in his home country. Oh, there are some spoilsports who considered him a grandstander who got too close to the people he was supposed to cover, but his innovations and accomplishments are not really up for debate. He began his reporting career at the age of 16, as a reporter for a Lancashire weekly newspaper, and was editor of The Northern Echo before becoming editor of The Sunday Times in 1967 at the age of 38. During his 14 years at the Sunday Times and one at The Times of London, he won Editor of the Year awards of different stripes on four occasions. Those who have worked with him-even those who did not have kind words for his management style-rave about his ability as a packager, his design sensibility and his eye for talent.

The Crusader

Mr. Evans' journalistic sensibility can be largely captured in one phrase: He believes in the crusade. "It's simple," said Phillip Knightley, a reporter and author who worked for Mr. Evans for 15 years. "Look for an injustice no one else has noticed, pick it up, publicize it and correct it."

At The Northern Echo , Mr. Evans drummed up an inquiry into the wrongful hanging of one Timothy Evans. When he got to The Sunday Times in 1967, he freed up an investigative team for months-long investigations. In return, they delivered stories that altered laws and expanded the power of the press in a country without a First Amendment.

Mr. Evans embarked on a crusade to help the Thalidomide children, more than 450 of whom had been born with deformities due to the drug their mothers had taken during pregnancy and had not received any compensation. Showing his marketing brilliance in the service of a social injustice,he put each part of the series under the same headline: "Our Thalidomide Children: A Cause for National Shame." He also made possible the exposure of spy Kim Philby and the truth about the 1974 crash of a DC-10. All of it impressive and all of it costly.

But to reporters at the Daily News , Mr. Evans is just a literary ringmaster who did something in journalism a long time ago somewhere far away. Daily News staff members said that if Mr. Evans is a monarch, he will be so under the current British model, as a figurehead. One columnist at the paper predicted that Mr. Evans will become "editor in chief of [Don] Imus"-meaning he will simply play the role of editor in chief on morning radio programs and such.

The surly Daily News staff members, who are traditionally an unhappy bunch, say that editor in chief Debby Krenek, who assumed the title of editor in chief in October, is "very upset about the whole thing," as one colleague put it. "Look at it from her point of view. She's run the paper for no great [salary] and now she finally gets the chance and she got shafted. Say circulation starts to pick up-who will take the credit?"

"It's not a slam at her," Mr. Zuckerman responded. "Harry will be a resource to all these editors, not to undercut them, not to be a threat to them. That's his role … [Ms. Krenek] understands as well as anybody I've ever encountered what the mix has to be for a solid but populist newspaper."

"I've had two meetings with Harry Evans," Ms. Krenek said. "We got along very well … But he's got four properties he's got to see to…. If you divide it evenly, then 25 percent of time in one place is not a lot.… I hope to continue to put my stamp on the paper."

Fred Drasner Blows

The Daily News ' rival, the sharp, gossipy New York Post , made merry with the news of Mr. Evans' appointment by gleefully reporting that Daily News co-owner Fred Drasner-the street-tough stickball-playing publisher of Daily News TV commercials a few years back-would have to report to this interloper. The Post story made Mr. Drasner so crazy that he made a rare appearance at the afternoon news meeting in an attempt to dispel the notion that he ranked beneath Mr. Evans in the new order.

"He said Debby is the man," said a witness, "and that he is not reporting to Harry Evans … He said that Harry was the broad brushstrokes guy."

Ms. Krenek backed the co-owner, explaining Mr. Evans' arrival this way: "It means that where before I reported to Fred and Mort, now I report to Fred and Harry."

This notion of an all-powerful Harry Evans was masterminded by none other than Mr. Evans himself, who faxed a special handwritten notice of his departure-headed "Dear Friends"-to certain New York media elite. The note seemed like an example of perfect etiquette even as it was a bit heavy-handed in trumpeting his editorial autonomy under Mr. Zuckerman.

However he will act in January, when Mr. Evans begins his new job, Mr. Zuckerman has lately been very hands-on, especially at U.S. News . The magazine's staff always knows when he's in their building because of the smell of cigar smoke. The building has a no-smoking policy, but Mr. Zuckerman is the owner and lights up his stogies whenever he wants.

Mr. Zuckerman, sources said, is not completely thrilled with the job James Fallows has done as editor in chief of U.S. News . Mr. Zuckerman has complained at cover meetings that U.S. News needs more, well, news. Breaking news in particular. Mr. Fallows scorns the insider politics box scores, but in his quest to be forward-thinking and community-minded, the magazine has become whimsical, complain some writers and editors. It barely covered Al Gore's fund-raising travails, instead treating readers to cover stories on "How Julia Child Invented Modern Life" and "Life After Death." Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, one of the harshest (and funniest) critics of Mr. Fallows, wrote: "The magazine that was once derided as U.S. Snooze and World Report is now deemed U.S. Muse & World Report."

Smoking Out Fallows

Readers did seem to be shying away from Mr. Fallows' version of a newsmagazine in the first half of this year. Circulation dropped, particularly on the newsstand (a good test of a magazine's vitality), where the number of U.S. News copies sold fell by nearly 10 percent from the previous year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. (Those numbers have rebounded so far in the second half, according to a magazine spokesman.)

And Mr. Zuckerman made his presence felt by putting out feelers to Brian Duffy, a former investigative reporting chief for U.S. News who left for The Washington Post last January after clashing with Mr. Fallows. Those talks led to the kinds of rumors that often plague editors in chief, baseball managers and others in high-profile jobs. "I view this as a condition of my life that I will have to deal with for as many years as I am here," Mr. Fallows said. A U.S. News spokesman said Mr. Fallows was not going anywhere. "Mort is happy with the general tone and direction of the magazine," he said. But U.S. News , always third in the battle for readers and influence behind Time and Newsweek , does not seem any more relevant today than it did before Mr. Fallows took over.

Given his new involvement at U.S. News , few expect Mr. Zuckerman to stay out of it once Mr. Evans gets started. Even Mr. Evans himself has told friends that Mr. Zuckerman will still have a keen interest in editorials and anything to do with the Middle East. And Mr. Zuckerman enjoys the privileges of media ownership: power and prestige, invitations to great parties and audiences with politicians.

Mr. Zuckerman jokingly laments the perception of those who would portray him as a meddlesome busybody. "That's only because they don't know me," he said. "You're looking at one of the laziest people in the world."

Lazy or not, Mr. Zuckerman has managed to keep himself especially busy in the Wall Street craze of recent years, public stock offerings. His activity in this area may be the surest sign of his intentions in hiring Mr. Evans. In fact, the editor has the chance to make a lot of money if Mr. Zuckerman takes his media properties public. The piece of the company Mr. Evans has talked about in the press is really just a phantom one.

"He has-like a lot of people-if I take the company public, he will have an equity stake," said Mr. Zuckerman. "His equity in the company is if we go public."

Mort the Money Man

Given Mr. Zuckerman's financial maneuverings with his other companies-and his coyly suggestive answers to questions about a media I.P.O.-that's likely to happen. Asked if he's considered taking the magazines and newspaper public, Mr. Zuckerman answered, "Sure. These are all general thoughts. The only thing that counts is the specific execution of it. It's got to be the Age of Aquarius every time you take a company public. Everything's got to be properly aligned."

Mr. Zuckerman's market plays have been incredibly profitable for him and his investors so far. Boston Properties Inc., Mr. Zuckerman's real estate investment trust that develops, owns and manages hotels, office buildings and industrial properties, went public this past June, raising nearly $903 million. It opened at $25 a share and as of Dec. 2, it was trading at $33.88. Applied Graphics Technologies Inc., a company that supplies digital pre-press and advertising services to publishers and advertisers, started in April 1996 at $12. On Dec. 2, the share price stood at $52, and Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Drasner have already gone back to the market and raked in another $258 million. And then there's Snyder Communications Inc., rarely thought of as a Mort Zuckerman operation. But Mr. Zuckerman acted as a venture capitalist for this direct-marketing company about a decade ago. It went public a year ago September at $17, and is now trading at $34.

And investors are clamoring for media companies. "As the Cowles family discovered in Minneapolis, this is a great time to be selling media properties," said David Cole, editor of News Inc. , a newsletter covering the newspaper industry. Cowles Media Company, publisher of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and a bunch of special-interest and trade magazines, was sold last month for $1.4 billion. And while Wired Ventures got toasted in the press for its failed I.P.O. attempts, a number of more traditional publishers have gone public successfully, such as Petersen Companies Inc.

One New York investment banker scoffed at the prospects of a Zuckerman media I.P.O., arguing that circulation at the Daily News and U.S. News is stagnant at best, and that beyond Mr. Zuckerman's upscale business magazine Fast Company , there's little growth left in the company. Mr. Evans' prominent role and talent for showmanship could help dispel that perception, however. Asked if Mr. Evans would be a featured player in any I.P.O., Mr. Zuckerman said, "I would hope so."

But with the exception of his tenure as founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler , Mr. Evans' big jobs in the 80's and 90's have ended badly. He finished his time as a Murdoch employee with a bang-walking out of The Times of London as cameras just happened to be following him. After 14 years of editing the very profitable Sunday Times , Mr. Evans was thrust into the editorship of the daily, money-losing Times after Mr. Murdoch bought the two papers in 1981. There the hero of British journalism received his first poor notices and suffered his first firing.

Mr. Evans' relationship with Mr. Murdoch began swimmingly. "In those first few months Murdoch did everything and more to support me editorially," Mr. Evans wrote in Good Times, Bad Times .

The Murdoch War

By the end of the first year of his tenure at The Times , more than 50 people had departed, most taking the handsome severance package. But Mr. Evans was hiring as quickly as people left, and usually at higher salaries. Mr. Murdoch was not pleased. He complained about articles he felt were not supportive enough of Margaret Thatcher and the Tory Government. He tried to block appointments at overseas bureaus.

The knock against Harry-that he is great on the big ideas but lousy on the orderly running of a place-soon surfaced. Stories would actually be lost in the newsroom, editions wouldn't make the trains, editorials were deemed erratic by Mr. Murdoch, senior managers were threatening to quit.

Mr. Evans chafed at the interference. "None of this represented a reasonable exchange of views between editor and proprietor, unexceptional in any newspaper. The tone was assertive and hostile to debate." He also charged that Mr. Murdoch's machinations undermined the guarantees of editorial autonomy.

At Random House, under the gentler media mogul S.I. Newhouse Jr., the editor was also accused of being a spendthrift from people within the company-but his tenure ended with a whimper on Nov. 25, after months of negotiating a safe haven with Mr. Zuckerman.

Will things end the same way with Mr. Zuckerman? Probably not. Now that he has been in the public eye as the handmaiden for media villains like Dick Morris and Joe Klein, both Random House authors, Mr. Evans has become sensitive to the invasiveness of the free press. In this, he and Mr. Zuckerman are in agreement. And he may have mellowed in his desire for absolute editorial autonomy given his long friendships with Mr. Zuckerman and the possibility of an obscene payoff down the line in the event of a public stock offering.

Mr. Zuckerman first hired Mr. Evans in the mid-80's, after the Murdoch debacle. Mr. Evans worked at the Atlantic Press and U.S. News and formed a good impression of Zuckerman-as-boss. "I have found him in my time at the U.S. News to be absolutely stalwart in defense of press standards," Mr. Evans said. "I remember writing an editorial attacking the National Rifle Association, in which he had a vast advertising contract that had just been negotiated with U.S. News . There was an anxiety that if the editorial ran, the advertising would be pulled. Mort Zuckerman personally instructed that the editorial be run. It was run, and he lost the advertising, and he said to me, 'Well, that's journalism.' And that's the kind of guy he is. So that's as far as I'm concerned. He's not fickle; he's firm and faithful."

Mr. Zuckerman is also in the honeymoon phase. "I didn't go through a number of editors because I liked to go through editors," said the man who made life difficult for Daily News editors Pete Hamill and Martin Dunn. "I've had the same editor at The Atlantic for 17 years. I had the same editor at U.S. News for seven, almost eight years, which is Mike Ruby, and that's because he was doing a great job. It's not a questions of wanting to change; it's a question of making sure you have the right people and you never know in some of these jobs until they're in it."

With reporting by Warren St. John.