(Scott Dvorin)

"I think in the last year I've done, I want to say--it's tough--a few dozen? Thirty to forty would be my guess?"

Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, was on the phone from Los Angeles Monday evening, trying to recall how many paid speeches he had delivered in 2010. Mr. Lehrer, 29, is the author of two books on the brain, is writing a third about creativity and is in high demand on the lecture circuit. Thousand-person convention halls, intimate corporate gatherings--he's done them all. "I remember being at a podiatry conference in Denver for my first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist," he told The Observer.

Foot doctors in the Rockies are paying to hear about a madeleine, and they are paying well. For decades, media critics have scolded journalists who give speeches for outsize sums, deeming it unseemly at best and a conflict of interest at worst. But in an era with fewer watchdogs--and a profession that has had a measure of its righteousness sapped by pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs and bankruptcies--the practice is thriving once again. Scan the rosters of the various speakers' bureaus, and you'll find no shortage of names from The Times, TV news and the monthlies, all eager to hit the Hyatt ballroom and fling spittle over a sea of warmed-over salmon.

Not everyone pockets the money. Some speak gratis or donate their fees to charity, and straight newspaper reporters know better--or should--than to take cash from groups that they cover. But opinion journalists and ideas-y magazine writers are largely free to collect five- and even six-figure checks for a single afternoon's work.

"There are journalists at every price point within the lecture field. You can say anything between $5,000 and $100,000 and up," Bill Leigh, whose Leigh Bureau represents Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Atul Gawande and others, told The Observer last week. "I can assure you that journalists are well represented--and that that is new. That much I can tell you emphatically."

Mr. Leigh recalled, years ago, being unable to even gauge Walter Cronkite's interest in a speaking tour: The CBS anchor's reps assured him that the field's maximum pay did not meet the minimum for the man's time. Today, pretty much everyone has a price; the Washington Speakers Bureau discreetly lists a fee range next to each of its clients, from Luke Russert ($7,501 to $10,000) to John Heilemann ($10,001 to $15,000) to Christiane Amanpour ($40,001 and up).

It's the multiplication factor that really pays. For most writers, an idea is only good for a single article, or a single book--and a single paycheck. But that same idea rendered in speech form can be delivered many, many times. "You can assume that speakers as a rule end up doing between 15 and 50 dates a year," Mr. Leigh said.

Is this a ray of hope for the wily journalist, The Observer asked David Lavin, of Toronto's Lavin Agency? A new way to actually make a career at reporting and writing?

"Viable? It's the world's best-paying part-time job," Mr. Lavin said. He added: "Some people write books just to get on the speaker circuit."

Old model: tour the country to promote your book. New model: write a book to tour the country.

"It's interactive. They both support each other," Mr. Leigh said. "Initially, the speaking promotes the book, and afterwards the book promotes the talks, and then the talks go on keeping the book alive."

"The book doesn't even need to be good. You just need to have written one good book, to get known," said a longtime magazine editor who has worked at several large media companies. "The book is just the loss leader for the speech."

Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson's agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.

A PERUSAL THROUGH the media criticism archives indicates that the practice of writers speaking for money was probably invented shortly after writing itself. "The phenomenon of journalists giving speeches for staggering sums of money continues to dog the profession," Alicia Shepard, now NPR's ombudsman, wrote in the American Journalism Review in 1995, when the top fees were around $35,000. "Welcome to the era of the buckraker," Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic in 1986, coining the term; fees at the time could hit $25,000. Just 21 then, Mr. Weisberg knew a devilish way to tweak power when he saw one, and according to TNR legend, he installed a bell at his cubicle, taped to a photo of notorious yakker Robert Novak, that he would ring whenever a senior staffer snuck out to the podium.

These days, event organizers know to clam up when media reporters come calling about honoraria, as The Observer did this week. But numbers inevitably leak out. New York found Malcolm Gladwell netting $80,000 from a dental suppliers group in 2008, and the next year, Thomas Friedman was busted by the San Francisco Chronicle for taking $75,000 from a government agency, in violation of Times rules. "We have all become lax in complying with the parts of the ethics guidelines that require annual accounting of income from speaking engagements," executive editor Bill Keller wrote the staff in a May 2009 memo that Gawker published. "The rules are vague and need a fresh look," ombudsman Clark Hoyt frowned in the paper that month. (The policies have not been updated since, a Times spokesperson said.)

The lucrative lecture circuit may be the one thing that Mr. Friedman and his longtime antagonist Matt Taibbi have in common. In many thousands of bilious words over the years, Mr. Taibbi has savaged the Times columnist's metaphors, ridiculed his worldview, insulted his mustache and worse. But when the $75,000 mistake happened, and readers inundated Mr. Taibbi with links to the news, eager for a fresh beat-down, he gave his favorite punching bag a pass. He didn't say why.

But the clearest sign of just how unobjectionable the new speaking-fee era is may be this: Last week, the Lavin Agency says, it signed Mr. Taibbi as a client.

THE MONEY IS good. But the speaking circuit is not a glamorous world. "You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you've got like seven hotel keys," Mr. Lehrer said. "It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn't working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago."

The way Mr. Lehrer tells it, joining the circuit just ... happened. When his first book came out, in 2007, he didn't even have representation; corporations simply sought him out themselves. Subsequent books and regular contributions to Wired, The New Yorker and other publications have kept his bio fresh.

"To be totally crass about it, I think I got into this for the revenue side, but I've been surprised in the last year by the other perks," he told The Observer. He can see clear improvement in his writing as he tests out loud what elements of a given story work and learns how to build tension, withhold key information, deliver a punch line. His latest book is stuffed with characters he never would have met if not for his travels. The act of taking gobs of money, though, still feels strange.

"The stage fright, that's something I've acclimated to," Mr. Lehrer said. "But I've never really gotten over the sense of fraudulence that comes with being onstage and, you know, dispensing knowledge and wisdom. That's where I think the feelings of insecurity and self-loathing come in." He corrected himself. "'Self-loathing' is too strong a word. But certainly, it's a strange business. And the enjoyment that comes from all the perks of it--the getting better at storytelling, the revenue, the meeting new people--that's on the ledger against the fact that ..." He made a digression about airport logistics and eating too many Egg McMuffins, and apologized.

"For me," Mr. Lehrer continued, "the toughest part of public speaking is kind of psyching myself up onstage beforehand, to be like, 'Who am I to do this? What could I possibly offer you that will make it worth the price you're paying me to go up here?'"

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

"There's been no doubt that the Atlantic has been very nimbly handling the delicate maneuver of bringing a 150-year-old plus brand into the digital world," Mr. Snyder told The Observer. The Atlantic will announce the hire later today.

He'll head up only The Atlantic Wire, the company's aggregation site -- not theatlantic.com, home to Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, James Fallows, and up-and-comers Alexis Madrigal and Alan Taylor.

Mr. Snyder, a former writer at Variety, W and The Observer, moved to New York to work as editor-in-chief of Gawker in 2008, replacing Nick Denton after one of the site owner's editing stints. After traffic doubled, Mr. Denton abruptly fired him in February 2010. Newsweek hired Mr. Snyder to run its web site later that year, but with the magazine up for sale, he lasted only five months on the job.

At The Atlantic Wire, which has focused on aggregating the world of op-eds and talking heads since launching in July 2009, Mr. Snyder will add news aggregation to further give what was once a stodgy monthly a prominent say on the headlines of the hour. Though the magazine and theatlantic.com are based in Washington, Mr. Snyder will work from New York and expects to hire 15 young aggregators to work from here. The site will relaunch in March. Part of the idea, he told The Observer, is to bring more of a New York tone to an outfit that for the first century and a half of its life was Boston Brahmin, then veered towards the Beltway.

"For the same reason that a lot of places based in New York want a DC bureau, because they want people steeped in the culture of DC, I think this will bring [to DC] people who are more attuned to what's going on in New York," Mr. Snyder said.

Can the high-minded brand fit in here? Last week, the Atlantic hosted a State of the Union viewing party at Le Cirque. The Observer, expecting to find the wonky likes of Bob Shrum, instead plopped down next to Gayle King, Mark Ecko, Peggy Siegal, and the somewhat perplexed star of Law & Order: SVU.

The Atlantic's owner, David Bradley, is enjoying a run of good press. The magazine finally turned a $1.9 million profit in 2010, in part by embracing digital platforms that other titles regarded in horror. The company will announce tomorrow that its web properties drew more than 5 million unique visitors in January, a new high.

"It's amazing how what was perceived as a kind of dowdy old brand is growing really quickly and expanding its audiences," Justin Smith, the Atlantic's president, told The Observer.

Mr. Snyder replaces Ben Carlson, who left to join Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only news project, The Daily, which is set to launch this week.

The plan is to have Mr. Snyder's new hires work out of the Madison Avenue office where the Atlantic's sales staff lives, he said. Nine Atlantic Wire staffers now work from Washington. Fifteen more is a big number -- and another sign that while entry-level gigs in journalism are still hard to come by, where they are to be found, they're mostly in aggregation.

"Yeah, I think that coming in and doing curation and aggregation in many ways is the new 'go out to a small paper and earn your stripes covering the school board,'" Bob Cohn, the editorial director of Atlantic Digital, told The Observer. Further up the career arc, in recent months he has snagged Alan Taylor and his beloved The Big Picture Blog from the Boston Globe, as well as Garance Franke-Ruta, who ran the WhoRunsGuv site for The Washington Post.

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

When a new editor takes over a magazine, overhauling the front of the book is almost always at the top of the to-do list--and sure enough, one of Mr. Lindgren's first official moves had been to hire Greg Veis, the talented young online editor of The New Republic, to do just that.

With this in mind, The Observer bellied up to Mr. Lindgren to talk redesign. A lot of front sections seemed to lack vim these days, we said. Was there any title in particular from which Mr. Lindgren would take inspiration?

A great front of the book? Are you kidding? "If you find one," Mr. Lindgren said, "will you let me know?"

If you ask around the magazine world--at Condé Nast, at Hearst, at Time Inc.--you'll quickly find a consensus that something is wrong with the front of the book, once the calling card of great editors.

The front section usually is where publications speak in their own voice, on the broadest range of subjects with the most specific comments. And some of them are still pretty great. (Just ask any star who reads Us and realizes they're "Just Like Us.")

But many front-of-the-book sections are in deep trouble, a charticle-size version of the angst infecting the glossy world in general. When readers are bombarded online with short items and attitude all day, do they really want that when they relax with a magazine in bed at home?

The future of the front of the nation's biggest magazine titles is of interest well beyond their mastheads. These sections, after all, were created in part for advertisers, who wanted something light and breezy up front. Most magazines still cluster ads in the first third of their pages; weakness in the front of the book could exacerbate the industry's financial problems.

Some titles are ditching the FOB as we know it altogether. The Week keeps racking up readers and revenue in part by having no distinguishable front--the whole magazine is a news-roundup-and-commentary digest. Further upmarket, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (where Mr. Lindgren was executive editor before landing the Times Magazine job) was the last big, newsy title to be overhauled. The renovation, which met with surprisingly universal praise for a title not particularly beloved by media insiders, eschewed a traditional front section. Instead there are five and sometimes six sections on broad topics like global economics, policy, markets and finance, which together can take up two-thirds of the magazine's pages. It sounds dreary. But the reaction that nearly every first-time reader has, BusinessWeek staffers say, is surprise at how chock-full and info-packed and useful the book feels.

At New York, still the standard-bearer of the weekly magazine, the front of the book is perhaps the one thing editor Adam Moss hasn't totally figured out. Mr. Moss redesigned the weekly's Intelligencer section when he arrived and has continued to tinker with it ever since. In June 2007, readers thumbed past the table of contents to find the letters page replaced by one called Comments--"primarily because, well, so many of the comments about the magazine no longer come in the form of letters," an accompanying note read. "Instead, they come in emails, in blog posts, in Web links, and, in one glorious recent instance, through an on-air shout-out on The Colbert Report." (Old-fashioned letters, The Times noted earlier this month, now tend to be written only by the incarcerated.)

More recently, New York has itched to shake up its Intelligencer operation once again. Mr. Veis, a hot ticket, went to The Times Magazine only after turning down an offer from Mr. Moss to work on Intelligencer and other parts of the magazine, a position that eventually went to Rolling Stone's James Burnett.

Part of the problem is that taken individually, the things that have traditionally gone in front-of-the-book sections seem hopelessly outmoded. News roundups: terrible except in The Week. Short items with a dose of attitude: Your RSS reader is choking with these. Letters to the editor: Has any magazine component been better ridiculed by anyone than by Edith Zimmerman's "Letters to the Editors of Women's Magazines" on The Awl?

The Front of Book is Dead! Long Live the Front of Book! Click through for 9 Enduring Front of Book Features.>>

In 1993, Sports Illustrated's Jack McCallum came off the NBA beat to edit the weekly's Scorecard section. He and a collaborator, Rich O'Brien, wanted to make the pages more reader-friendly and modern. "But the charge," he told The Observer, "was still to be the editorial voice of the magazine." He invented a small recurring feature that soon became indispensable: This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse, a deadpan, one-sentence nugget from the tackier side of sports. It was a joke, and an entire unsigned editorial, all in the space of a few postage stamps, and an example of front-of-the-book magic that now seems lost. Mr. McCallum and Mr. O'Brien knew they had a hit when readers and other staffers quickly began inundating them with Apocalypse fodder, and the two rarely made it to a Monday close without several worthy candidates.

But then, in 2005, Deadspin came along and quickly established a monopoly on seamy sports news. If Will Leitch's blog published 60 items in a week, it seemed to the staff at Sports Illustrated that if Apocalypse wanted to be original, it would have to settle for the 61st-most-amusing thing that had happened on turf they so recently owned.

Another Scorecard element, They Said It, a pithy quote from the week in sports, was harder to drum up then and almost impossible now. "As sports coverage proliferated, Christ-by the time you found something interesting, it was not only in five places, it was 5,500 places." Mr. McCallum still reads Apocalypse, he said, but he often skips They Said It because he figures he has probably already seen the quote elsewhere several times.

Next to Scorecard, Sports Illustrated instituted a section called Players that featured smiling athletes' workout tips and recipes for shrimp and grits--"a front-of-the-book section filled with lifestyle pieces that could've been lifted from a dumpster behind the ESPN offices," as a withering Slate critic put it. Players was discontinued.

It's still possible to put out a very good FOB--even if you're Wired, whose up-to-the-nanosecond readers may be the most hostile bunch imaginable to the idea of a months-long delay between closing a section and its on-sale date. How does the editor of Start, which won the ASME award for best section in 2009, handle it? "I was hoping you'd have some tips for me," Robert Capps told The Observer. "It's not easy."

The trick, Mr. Capps said, is to deliver a comment in each item in the magazine's house voice. Namely: "a geeky, wise-ass older brother who's both smart and likes to crack a lot of jokes, but also totally wowed and interested in and excited by the changing technological landscape." Facts and figures are packed into the marginalia (an old Spy trick).

As the short takes in front have suffered, magazine's feature wells are thriving. Lovely as The Talk of the Town often is, The New Yorker matters most now because of very long, big-impact pieces by David Grann and Atul Gawand
e. (Mr. Gawande's article on health care costs was deemed so socially useful by the investor Charlie Munger that he cut the writer a check for $20,000, an action unlikely to result from any Tables for Two item soon. Mr. Gawande donated the money.)

During the recession, when readers were hostile to the kind of $400 shoes often featured in GQ's early pages, the men's title stayed essential with deep reportage by Robert Draper and Sean Flynn. @LongReads has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter, and is the salvation of anyone who sits down at a diner with nothing to read but an iPhone.

"You could say the front is the hors d'oeuvres and the middle is the main, or you could say that the whole thing is a special kind of experience," Ellen Levine, the editorial director at Hearst, told The Observer by telephone from her office. She pulled out a recent copy of Marie Claire and counted the spreads close to the cover. Other Hearst titles are moving in the same direction.

"There is no longer a front of book or a back of book," Ms. Levine said. "It is clearly a through-the-book concept. That's much more European." The Continental titles have been doing it for 10 or even 15 years, she said. "Now, this has not become an epidemic yet, but I do speak for myself in thinking that this is a very interesting opportunity to consider. I think it's actually very contemporary."

By April, though, re-engineered front sections are scheduled to greet readers of both The Times Magazine and Newsweek.

Those moves, by magazine veterans Mr. Lindgren and Tina Brown, could set the template for the sections industrywide. And it could inform advertisers whether they should be looking elsewhere for a place to put their money.

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Players currently runs in Sports Illustrated; the section was discontinued.

The Front of Book is Dead! Long Live the Front of Book! Click through for 9 Enduring Front of Book Features.>>

In early December, star Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley wrote a profile of Stanford professor John Ioannidis, whose research calls into question the medical studies performed by major drug companies. It's a great read. Good luck finding the story in a copy of the magazine, though. It hasn't run for more than a month -- and advertising is the reason why.

The piece had been edited, approved, fit to layout, and moved to the final stages of production before being abruptly spiked on the night of Dec. 9. Ms. Begley and others were told that the decision had been made because of an ad. Newsroom staff pegged Lipitor, a cholesterol drug manufactured by Pfizer, as the sponsor in question. The Ioannidis piece mentions, among other incorrect studies, a finding that statins are overprescribed.

Dan Klaidman and Nisid Hajari, who were then acting as interim editors of Newsweek as its merger with The Daily Beast was being lawyered, told The Observer Dec. 10 that Ms. Begley's profile had been held, not killed. The ad in question had been contractually obligated to run in calendar year 2010, they said, and this was the last regular issue of the year. Ms. Begley's piece had no specific time peg and could be temporarily shelved, while another piece by Washington reporter Eve Conant had a firm time peg to "Don't ask, don't tell" legislation. The editors ordered the swap. Ms. Conant's story and the Lipitor ad ran; Ms. Begley's piece entered a state of ad-driven limbo.

"We didn't kill Sharon's story. We have every intention of running it in January," Mr. Klaidman told The Observer at the time. The two editors made the case that the Begley decision was not a case of nefarious corporate intrusion on journalism, but rather an embarrassing -- and strictly logistical -- incident facing a weakened magazine with not enough pages.

A year-end special issue followed, and then two dark weeks because of lack of advertising and merger issues. But the next regular issue of Newsweek is on newsstands now -- and the Begley piece is still missing. Yesterday, after renewed queries from The Observer, a new interim editor of Newsweek, Steve Koepp, asked to be shown a copy of the article, which several staff members say had been left for dead. It's now slated it to run in next week's edition.

Ms. Begley declined to comment.

Fashion and lifestyle magazines routinely move or hold content -- not to mention tacitly create it -- because of advertising, but newsmagazines like to think they have more journalistic scruples. Usually, it's ad pages that are killed because of news: the classic examples are the removal of airline ads whenever there is coverage of a plane crash, or the disappearance of Japanese car ads when there is a retrospective on war in the Pacific. 

If an ad conflict arises in a fat magazine, editors can simply move the offending elements far apart from each other. But at skinny Newsweek, which brought in 33.8 percent fewer ad dollars in 2010 than in 2009, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, that's just not an option. Staff there are anxiously awaiting the arrival of power editor Tina Brown, whose reputation attracts advertiser buzz just as it does editorial. Once her tenure begins in earnest, their thinking goes, the church-state wall can be rebuilt more sturdily.

Ms. Begley is one of the highest-profile science writers in journalism, and more to the point, one of the few big-name journalists to stick with Newsweek through its recent troubles. Even so, the magazine's annus horribilis has been especially bad for her. In August, a piece by Ms. Begley on cell phones and cancer was killed from the magazine at the last minute, and ran online instead. Newsweek at the time carried iPhone advertisements on its back cover.

Time, reached for comment, declined to describe its own church-state policies.

(Disclosure: I worked at Newsweek until October 2010 and frequently worked under Mr. Klaidman and Mr. Hajari.)

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

In December, the magazine's deputy editor, Alex Star—a brainy sort who previously created the Boston Globe's Ideas section and edited Lingua Franca—left for the Times book review section.

And now Virginia Heffernan is departing as well. "The Medium," her column about Internet-age culture—everything from viral videos to Angry Birds—won't run in Mr. Lindgren's magazine, the writer told The Observer. "The Medium" started as the "Screens" blog on nytimes.com in 2006; it moved onto glossy pages in June 2009.

Ms. Heffernan said that various options for her next move at the Times are being discussed, but that nothing has been decided yet. Before the Times, Ms. Heffernan was the TV critic for Slate, and she also co-wrote the novel "The Underminer" with Mike Albo.

Mr. Lindgren did not respond to an email from The Observer.

After landing the Times Magazine job in August, Mr. Lindgren has hauled in some impressive talent. Early on, he tapped as his deputy Lauren Kern from the executive editor position at O, the Oprah Magazine, and then Greg Veis from The New Republic for front-of-the-book duties. New York's Adam Sternbergh and Sam Anderson came aboard in mid-December. GQ's well-liked Joel Lovell signed on as a deputy editor last month, too. The redesigned magazine will debut later this year.

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

"It was not a job interview," said The New Republic's Michelle Cottle, about meeting Tina Brown for coffee before agreeing to go to work for her at Newsweek.

"It wasn't an afterthought, exactly, but ..." said GQ's Joel Lovell, about the job offer from Hugo Lindgren at The New York Times Magazine. The two friends had been talking about how to reinvent the title so much that when they made it official, the moment was a bit of an anticlimax.

Three major media moves of 2010; three courtships best described as "meh." Can't a sought-after journalist at least eke out a fancy meal these days?

"The days of going to the Four Seasons and wooing someone are over," Mr. Lovell said via cell phone from a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he was nursing a nasty bout of pneumonia.

"Instead you do it over email, or you meet somebody at some crappier restaurant, or over a beer rather than a $300 bottle of wine."

The expense account days are long gone, it's true. But what the blizzard of media hirings that closed out 2010 proves is that for the select few publications that have the money to expand, it is a hirer's market. The media-jobs thaw that The Observer first noted in April has reached a stage that might best be described as like poaching fish in a barrel. Editors like Ms. Brown, Mr. Lindgren and Matt Winkler of Bloomberg News are getting the talent they want, when they want it, and with little foreplay. They are raiding dilapidated shops like The Washington Post--which lost Howard Kurtz, Robin Givhan and Blake Gopnik to Ms. Brown in recent months--as well as powerhouses like New York, where Mr. Lindgren plucked away Sam Anderson and Adam Sternbergh in the quiet days before Christmas.

These are sharp hires. Ms. Brown, for instance, is zeroing in on a particular kind of storytelling reporter with Washington chops; Mr. Lindgren, who needs to make the Times Magazine a Sunday must-read again, has cherry-picked some of the best culture journalists in the game.

Others have hired with a broader mandate. In November, Rupert Murdoch's The Daily cruised through the Manhattan media world like a great baleen whale, taking into its maw a staggering percentage of the city's up-and-coming journalists, plus big names like Sasha Frere-Jones, Richard Johnson and Reihan Salam. Mr. Winkler has continued adding to the Bloomberg rolls and was able to entice David Shipley, who had a plum job as op-ed page editor of The Times, with an even plummier position starting up the news service's opinion section.

The Observer, which loves a good hard-to-get tale, spent the holiday break ringing up the Christmas crop of transfers, asking if any had received the kind of treatment that Jeffrey Goldberg, then at The New Yorker, saw in 2007--when Atlantic owner David Bradley, frustrated that Mr. Goldberg had spurned entreaty after entreaty, finally resorted to the nuclear option. He brought two ponies to the Goldberg homestead for the writer's daughters to play with, a sort of reverse-Godfather move that he could not in the end refuse.

Three years and one recession later, Ms. Cottle told The Observer that livestock did not factor in her decision to leave The New Republic. "I am extremely boring," she said in her Southern lilt. "No one has to throw ponies at me. No one has to promise I get all white food in my office and wash my hair with Evian. I'm a print journalist. I'm used to a fair amount of abuse."

Ms. Givhan did manage to extract a sushi lunch from Ms. Brown's deputy, Edward Felsenthal, in New York. But all it really took to pluck the Pulitzer Prize winner from The Post was a cup of coffee. "I'd never met her before," Ms. Givhan said, about sipping with Ms. Brown at the Hay-Adams hotel in early December. "Mostly it was just a mini story-brainstorming session, and I just found it incredibly energizing." Ms. Givhan, who had already been thinking of leaving The Post, wrote Ms. Brown an exhilarated email afterward, and in a matter of days she was on board.

Mr. Kurtz, who wrote about Mr. Bradley's ponies in his Post media column in 2007, has now seen both sides of the talent-wooing game. After becoming Ms. Brown's bureau chief in Washington, he has run interference on her D.C. hires. "I would've been happy just to write for The Daily Beast, but the tipping point was the notion of becoming an editor and a bureau chief and having a voice in the site's development," he told The Observer.

Mr. Kurtz and Mr. Fournier--whose National Journal went on a delirious hiring spree over the summer--demurred from the view that this moment is entirely a buyers' market, especially in Washington. It's true that the best talent still commands high prices and excellent terms. And of course, a writer or editor jumping to a new publication necessarily creates a vacancy at her old desk--a ripple effect that will create an aftermarket extending into the spring.

"If you want to be an editor somewhere, and you're talented, now is an incredibly great time. It's so weird because it's coming so quickly on the heels of an incredibly bad time--it wasn't that long ago that we were thinking nobody would ever be hired again," said Mr. Lovell.

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

Correction: The chart accompanying this story lists The New Yorker as having lost Mr. Frere-Jones. Despite his new position at The Daily, he will continue writing for the magazine.

Here's a bomb blast in the war between Adam Moss and his former protege, Hugo Lindgren: Sam Anderson is leaving New York to join Mr. Lindgren's growing roster of talent at the New York Times Magazine. Two days ago, Adam Sternbergh made the same move, escalating the two editors' budding rivalry. Both hires were first reported in The Observer.

Mr. Anderson did not respond to a request for comment. As New York's book critic, he has built a reputation for sharp, deliriously crafted prose--see the first paragraph of this 2009 review for an example--but it was not immediately clear whether he would continue in a similar role at the Times Magazine.

Mr. Moss announced the move to his staff at New York with this memo just after 4 p.m.:

From: Katherine Ward
To: One Hudson
Re: A Message from Adam Moss

Everybody,

You all know by now that Adam Sternbergh is leaving us to join our friends and colleagues at The New York Times Magazine.  I am sorry to say that Sam Anderson will be decamping for the Times Magazine as well.  It goes without saying that we will miss them both, and wish them the best in their new uptown gigs.

Both have been important players in the evolution of New York over the past half-decade.  To name just a few of their obvious contributions, Adam provided the voice for the Approval Matrix, one of the signatures of this incarnation of the magazine.  He wrote stories such as “Up With Grups” and “The What You Are Afraid Of” that imaginatively covered the tensions of gentrification.  He got us to wonder what was wrong with wearing shoes; insinuated his sensibility all over our culture pages (“Beware the Curve of Undulating Expectations!”), gave us strong interesting ideas and provided critical gloss that helped define the way the magazine talked to its readers.  

Sam’s impact has also been far-ranging.  In my view, he redrew the boundaries of book criticism, infusing his reviews with erudition, a sense of adventure and an implicit throughline that explored the changing nature of how we read.  His features, on James Franco and Augusten Burroughs to name just two, were wild experiments with form--genre-bending, smart and fun. He is a fearless and committed writer and thinker.

When people tell me what they like about this magazine they often say they admire the way New York finds the intersection of seriousness and fun.  Both Adam and Sam have helped us figure out what that means — in print and online.  It’s a great corner of the world to inhabit, just where we ought to be.

It’s always painful when cherished colleagues leave this place and I can’t pretend I’m happy to see them go.  But it’s also true that this magazine has always had as its project the discovery of new, vital talent and that exciting work continues.  We won’t find another Adam and Sam; but we will find other wonderful new voices who will keep the magazine fresh and moving forward.  Our burden is that sometimes we’re so good at discovery that we are vulnerable to other publications that want what we have.  But that’s our opportunity as well.  In the perpetual hunt for talent, the magazine stays vital.  We are constantly remaking ourself; that’s the thrill for us, and also, when we do it right, for our readers.

Over the last few months, we have been lucky to have join us Nitsuh Abebe, as great and original a pop music writer as I’ve ever seen.  We have been proud to welcome as contributing editors Wesley Yang and Jason Zengerle; excited to publish such talents as Ben Wallace-Wells.  With this issue John Heilemann becomes our National Affairs Editor.  News editor James Burnett and senior editor Raha Naddaf (for those who don’t know, James was editor of Boston magazine, then did a stint at Rolling Stone; Raha rose as an editor at GQ, and then was a senior editor at O) are off to sensational starts.  Carl Swanson and, soon, Jada Yuan begin their next evolutions here working primarily as writers.  Young Danny Kim, until recently an intern at Time, has been making such amazing pictures for us that he will now become our official staff photographer.  They are just some of the reasons to love New York right now.  Since this seems to have morphed into a kind of year-end message, let me just say what I hope you all know: the rest of you are too.  The staff at this magazine is a true blessing.

Thanks, and happy holidays.

Adam

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

Mr. Star, who has been at the Times Magazine since 2004 and before that created the Boston Globe's Ideas section, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. He also edited Lingua Franca for several years.

"All of us at TBR are tickled by this lucky stroke. Alex is one of the premier editors of his generation, unmatched in the realm of ideas," Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus emailed The Observer.

Mr. Star's departure from the magazine comes as new editor Hugo Lindgren continues to put his stamp on the title, ahead of its relaunch next year. "He played an incredibly important role in the magazine in his six plus years," Mr. Lindgren emailed The Observer. "With the changes that are happening at the magazine, Alex decided that the Book Review would be a better place for him. They are lucky to have him. He is a great analyst of manuscripts, and he is the best read person I have ever met."

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

"A lot of the core business staff at The Journal hates what's happened and refuses to go down without a fight; they still win lots of scoops," I wrote.

After the story ran, a Journal staffer emailed me a spreadsheet that puts some numbers behind that idea. If accurate, they make a convincing case that despite Mr. Murdoch's influences, the Journal is still No. 1 on the mergers-and-acquisitions beat. They also show that the paper is annoyed that because of DealBook's high profile, it needs to make an extra effort to remind people it's not limping along.

The staffer's spreadsheet lists the 50 largest mergers-and-acquisitions deals this year, ranging in size from $2.31 billion to $22.33 billion. They're tagged by target, acquirer, industry, value, and—most important to media-watchers—who got the scoop. Here's a pie chart (top right; click to enlarge), and a breakdown by publication: 

Bloomberg: five scoops (E.ON US LLC, Sybase Inc, Millipore Corp, Isilon Systems Inc, Nicor Inc)

Financial Times & DealReporter: two scoops (Interactive Data Corp, Del Monte Foods Co)

New York Times: three scoops (CommScope Inc, Continental Airlines Inc, J Crew Group Inc)

Wall Street Journal: 14 scoops (Genzyme Corp, American Life Insurance Co - ALICO, Qwest Communications International Inc, Smith International Inc, Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc (North American Operations), East Resources Inc, Pactiv Corp (Bid No 2), OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc, Alberto-Culver Co, NBTY Inc, Talecris Biotherapeutics Holdings Corp, Burger King Holdings Inc, Baldor Electric Co, 3PAR Inc (Bid No 2), Oil & Gas Assets (Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico)

No scoop: 26 times (Enterprise GP Holdings LP, Bucyrus International Inc, Allegheny Energy Inc, Airgas Inc, McAfee Inc, Oil & Gas assets (Canada, US, Egypt), Tenet Healthcare Corp, NSTAR, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Southern Copper Corp (20%), Devon Energy Corp (Oil and gas assets in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, Brazil.), Hewitt Associates Inc, Terra Industries Inc (Bid No 2), Atlas Energy Inc, Mariner Energy Inc, EXCO Resources Inc (70.85%), Kraft Foods Inc (Frozen pizza business in the US and Canada), Abraxis BioScience Inc, King Pharmaceuticals Inc, AmeriCredit Corp, Oil & Gas Assets (The Appalachian natural gas and oil exploration and production business, US), MultiPlan Inc, Dresser Inc, US, ev3 Inc, PNC Global Investment Servicing)

I'd normally be hesitant to simply post something sent to me by a single source with skin in the game. But this is a fascinating set of data, one I haven't seen anywhere else, and I've reached out to representatives of the other publications to see if they have additions, corrections or comments. If they do, I'll add them below. (I expect there'll be a lot of disagreement on that "no scoop" category, and, in cases where rivals broke different parts of the same story, which one got the tally in the Journal's spreadsheet.) For now, it's just one side of the argument's numerical food for thought.

UPDATE Dec. 17: I've made a correction above, to reflect that DealReporter--a subsidiary of the Financial Times but not FT itself--had the Del Monte scoop. DealReporter also says it got the scoop on Nicor, plus some other M&A stories that didn't make the WSJ list.

UPDATE Dec. 17, 5:32 p.m.: So far, I've heard nothing on the record from the Times, FT or Bloomberg. A Reuters spokeswoman emails Joe Pompeo of Yahoo News this list of scoops:

Compellent Technologies up for sale ($1bln); Bain had struck deal to buy Styron ($1.6bln deal); General Growth was to accept Brookfield-led deal, over Simon Property $30bln bid; Value of the $35.5bln AIA deal; Ivanhoe Mines (market cap $13bln) is likely to sell itself in a two-step process; Miner Drummond's put its Colombian operations up for sale ($6-8bln); Fidelity National $15bln LBO collapsing; France's Safran was near a deal to buy L-1 Identity ($1bln)

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

Writers and editors from his network of sites had flown in from around the country and been put up on Gawker's dime, in preparation for the 2011 relaunch of the site that launched the blogger age. After team dinners and other partying, the bloggers streamed into Gawker's Elizabeth Street offices for presentations on Freedom of Information Act requests and the use of high-quality photos and video, all key to Gawker's rethink, expected in the first week of the new year. Mr. Denton, the company's founder, had laid out his case for the new scoop-based approach in an impressive 3,000-word "manifesto for 2011," which was still reverberating around the web.

To cap it all off on Friday night, Mr. Denton hosted the company holiday party at Double Crown, a restaurant on the Bowery with Southeast Asian fare by way of the British Empire. Unlike Gawker blowouts in the past, the guest list was strictly limited to current staff and significant others. The Observer was allowed in on two conditions: that we observe some set rules on attribution, and that we leave after two hours, before anyone got too drunk. Mr. Denton, tall and gray, cut through the crowd in a blood-reddish gingham shirt, dark pants and pointy black shoes. There was Secret Santa.

With his CTO, Tom Plunkett, Mr. Denton surveyed the scene at Double Crown. He thought: Great party. Fantastic year for stories and audience. Exciting new layout. Then, Mr. Denton recalled to The Observer, he and Mr. Plunkett turned and said to each other almost simultaneously: Something will go wrong.

The next afternoon, the Twitter account of Gizmodo, a Denton tech site, sent out a very strange tweet. And Mr. Denton's good week came to an end.

Check out The Year's Most Scandalous Media Shakeups. >>

BY THE TIME it was over, a group of unknown hackers operating under the name Gnosis hit Gawker with the biggest security breach of a media site ever. They published the source code of Gawker's proprietary content management system, making it worthless, and unleashed details on 1.3 million commenter accounts, including 188,279 decrypted passwords. That meant that people who had commented on stories on Gawker sites, thinking their opinions were anonymous, weren't.

In the media world, the episode was met with a mix of hand-rubbing and dread. There was, on the one hand, the view that Gawker was finally getting its karmic payback, having tormented the city and (arguably) violating other people's privacy for years. These, after all, are the acid-tongued outlets that had in the last year alone questionably obtained a lost iPhone, published a photo of Brett Favre's genitals, and paid to learn the particulars of a Tea Party Senate candidate's pubic grooming.

But there was also the very real chance that editors and writers across the city could now be outed publicly for dissing their bosses in private. One Gawker and Jezebel commenter with a Condé Nast email address, for instance, had written in about making up quotes at a women's magazine; the condition of Anna Wintour's 60-year-old skin; and her experiences with both circumcised and uncircumcised penises. Twenty-six readers registered with Times email addresses, 21 from Condé Nast, 12 from Time Inc., 18 from Hearst, nine from The Journal, six from the Post and three from the Daily News. An untold number more used harder-to-detect private accounts. But searching for media coworkers--and rivals--became as simple as plugging their personal email addresses into an easily downloadable 72-megabyte text file, a 1.3 million-entry fantasia of byline hunting. Did Jeffrey Toobin really register with the name "ValentinoAgamemnon"?

THE TWEETS FROM Gizmodo's Twitter account that Saturday afternoon included a boast that 1.5 million commenter accounts had been stolen. Scott Kidder, Gawker's director of operations, pshaw'd the possibility later that evening via Twitter, noting that the company's passwords were encrypted.

The hackers then sent proof of what they'd obtained to two news outlets, The Next Web and Mediaite, which had done early reporting on rumors of a Gawker attack. Colby Hall, Mediaite's managing editor, was in particular out in front of the story. As early as Saturday night and continuing into Sunday afternoon, he repeatedly tried to get the attention of Mr. Denton and Mr. Kidder, to no avail: They did not believe the threat was serious.

At 4:10 p.m. Sunday, the ultimate proof finally came in a post at the top of gawker.com, containing a link to download the raw source code of Gawker's CMS and the commenter database. It was illustrated with a picture of a young girl with Down syndrome and the words "DERP DERP DERP DERP."

Early reports about the breach pinned responsibility on 4chan--an anarchic message board that Gawker had done battle with over the summer. The real hackers didn't like this. They had pantsed the biggest bully on the playground, and someone else was getting the credit.

So at 5:20 p.m., one of them logged in to Gawker's internal chat room. Using the name and password of Gawker staff writer John Cook, the hacker wrote:

so like

i'm one of the guys

who released this dump

i wouldn't mind a chat

i'm not some 4chan faggot, and I don't like being lumped together with them.

The Observer tried to reach Gnosis through Mediaite and The Next Web. A representative for the group sent back word that they would consider making contact later in the week; they did not do so by press time.

For a technology company, Gawker did not handle the attack well. As far back as Nov. 11, according to the hackers, Mr. Denton suspected that his Campfire (internal chat) account had been "hacked," as he put it. Tech staff at the company assured him that this wasn't the case. Over the course of this past weekend, Gawker reacted slowly and even in a state of denial to a steady drip-drip-drip of events that indicated that a severe security breach had occurred.

"Fuck you gawker, hows this for 'script kids'?" the hackers wrote to Mr. Denton Sunday. "Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database's, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds!" THE BREACH OF trust--and the logistical nightmare of contacting 1.5 million users--is humiliating and harmful to Gawker in the short term, but not fatal. Ditto for the possibility that the hackers have up to four gigabytes of the Gawker newsroom's internal chat logs. Staffers said those conversations would be embarrassing if made public, but few if any great secrets are traded there.

What truly terrifies the Gawker staff is that Sunday's data dump was only the beginning of a WikiLeaks-style flood. In a juvenile and taunting timeline of their break-in, the intruders implied that they have had access to Mr. Denton's email for more than a month, and it follows that any staffers who used the same password for both the Gawker blogging and email platforms have had their in-boxes monitored, too--and possibly even downloaded in their entirety. These are emails that contain stories in progress, the identities of anonymous sources and God knows what else.

"I'm confident they have his entire email," one Gawker Media insider said of Mr. Denton. "I'm fairly confident they have my email." For a journalist, it is a horrifying prospect. 

"I'm focused on the vulnerability of commenters' passwords," Mr. Denton told The Observer. Humbled, he spent Monday in the Gawker commenting trenches, taking abuse from angry readers and explaining what the company was doing to fix the situation; he logged some 101 comments across the various Gawker sites by midnight.

The hack came just as Mr. Denton seemed to be transitioning from his flame-throwing years to more of a grown-up industry statesman role--though he would deny it--complete with a mainstream-certifying profile in The New Yorker.

"It's a little hard to mellow the dark lord of the Internet," said Jalopnik editor Ray Wert a few days before the hack, when The Observer asked how Mr. Denton had changed. "But Nick's smiling a lot more. Meaning at least once a week."

Something is different about Gawker Media's writers, too. In late November, in a contemplative mood, Mr. Denton took to his Facebook page one Saturday afternoon in an attempt to capture this--in his way.

"The current cohort of Gawker Media writers seem much less conflicted than the Sicha-Lisanti-Cox-Leitch generation," he mused. "Why is that? For the kids, maybe the literary or magazine career never seemed a possibility. For them, the New York intellectual life is a fading artifact rather than a personal dream that was painfully dashed."

His Facebook friends had some thoughts.

"I can attest to this," wrote Cody Brown. "When I started NYU Local, most students we interviewed for the site day-fantasized about a career at The New York Times or Vanity Fair after graduation. Oh, how this has changed in the past few years..."

"Maybe you've become a gentle, benign boss?" asked Sam Loewenberg, a freelance journalist.

"Or all the new Gawker writers work out their personal shit on Tumblr," wrote Nick Douglas, a longtime Denton ankle-biter.

"Is this even accurate?" dot-com gadfly Rex Sorgatz wrote. "Foster and Pareene and nearly everyone from Jezebel seem counter-examples."

"The decrease in lashings has helped," wrote Richard Lawson, a staffer. "Food rations are up. We get to see sunlight for ten minutes every few blogging-modules."

"I think it's just nice to have a livable salary typing nonsense about politics," wrote Jim Newell.

Mr. Newell is a second-time employee at Gawker--like Jezebel editor in chief Jessica Coen, Mr. Lawson and Mr. Cook. It's true that others have left and returned to Gawker in the past (including Choire Sicha and Doree Shafrir), but there is a feeling among staff that the high-churn era is over--no more overnight firings, and even stay pay for staffers who get job offers from rival publications. Mr. Denton crows that many of his writers have spurned the employment advances of Rupert Murdoch's iPad newspaper and other suitors; even the notoriously deep-pocketed Bloomberg News was unable to match the pay of one Gawker Media features editor.

Mr. Wert remembers years ago walking into the company's old offices on Crosby Street for the first time and asking a young assistant what to do with some receipts he had. What was the reimbursement policy?

"The day in which we have an expense policy," Mr. Kidder said in reply, "is the day in which we are dead."

"Now, he was obviously kidding," Mr. Wert remembered. "But it's funny, because that was my first experience with Gawker on the ground, and now we have an expense policy, we have a leave policy, we have a travel policy, we have a gifts policy."

Mr. Wert has even suggested to Mr. Denton the most unthinkable prospect of all: retirement.

"This was the big start of the push for the 401(k) plan," Mr. Wert said. "I said, 'Look, Nick, I'm willing to continue working here, but if you want me to see this as a place where I could retire from, then you've got to be able to put things in place that are going to allow us to have that opportunity.'"

Did Mr. Wert remember Mr. Denton's reaction? Was he stricken? Aghast?

"Shocked. Stunned. Just sort of like--he'd never thought of that. But it's not just me. I think there are others in the company who think of it the same way; they just might not be willing to express it."

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm