“New York Post Circulation: 652427,” the sign reads. The latter two numbers are blurry, as though they are the last two digits of a quickly upticking counter. “Go ahead and stare,” the billboard copy taunts near the bottom. “They’re real.”

In what has seemed so far like the cleanest, most businesslike “tabloid war” the city has yet seen, it was the first truly bitchy moment--the first sign that interest in the battle between the minions of Murdoch and Mort might soon redound past the corridors of the papers’ respective strongholds.

“Frankly, I was just being mischievous over the summer,” explained Lachlan Murdoch, the baby-faced New York Post publisher and heir apparent to his father’s News Corp. chairmanship, of the Post’s decision to get down and dirty. “I know morale there is terrible, which is understandable. We thought it was an opportunity to celebrate our circulation figures and let them know it.”

(Whether Mr. Murdoch’s attack on unit cohesion is working may be a debatable point: Asked about the billboard, Daily News spokesman Ken Frydman said: “What sign?” Or maybe that’s just a little slap back.)

Mr. Murdoch’s view of his chief competitor (and daily obsession) is not so far off. According to sources within the newsroom, the Daily News--whose staffers seem only remotely satisfied with their workplace following the citywide disasters they covered to general acclaim--is gripped by uncertainty, both over the future of the paper’s leadership and its editorial direction. Now four months in the job, editorial director Martin Dunn has yet to name an editor in chief to replace Ed Kosner, who retired last year. In the meantime, executive editor Michael Goodwin--forever a controversial and unpopular figure within the newsroom--has continued to officiate at the morning and afternoon news meetings.

At the same time, the News has done its best to add oomph to its profile. There have been diet stories involving News readers, in which they report on their efforts to shed pounds. Color has actually showed up in the pages of Rush and Molloy. On Tuesday, Feb. 10, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model dubbed “THE HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST” popped up on page 3. (A Page Three Girl, on this side of the drink?) At the same time, the paper kept up its promotional-giveaway style with what seems an endless series of free Yankee tickets, All-Star Game trips and Six Flags Great Adventure passes--most lately offering up four Mazda Tributes for four lucky readers to drive off in, simply by mailing in the entry form printed in the paper.

Mr. Frydman said: “The News has for years been committed to running quality promotions that add value to our readers and advertisers. We had a terrific advertising and circulation year in 2003, and we look forward to another bang-up year in 2004.

“The Post tends to copy our promotions,” he continued, “and does a pale imitation of them.”

Of course, the Post has had its share of giveaways under the current regime. The paper has made promotional--er--vehicles a prominent part of its circulation-growth model. (Remember the Lizziemobile?) For most of the fall, it seemed, we were smacked in the face with those glossy Yankees anniversary magazines. Then came the Master and Commander preview DVD’s. Now, it’s 10 free trips to Cancun. But Post executives said their promotions are more desirable.

“We think very carefully where our audit number is sitting,” said Post general manager Geoff Booth. “We have targets for circulation growth in the next audit period. We know where we need to be six months from now, what promotions to do where and when, what sales we have to have.

“Lachlan will look at what we’re proposing,” Mr. Booth continued. “He has a very keen eye for what works and what doesn’t for a promotion. From a content perspective, he has a critical eye over how the programming’s put together. It’s a great balance, really. He knows all the right questions to ask.”

Both Mr. Booth and Mr. Murdoch, though, pooh-poohed the idea that the News has followed the Post’s example when it comes to promotions. Well, sorta.

“I don’t think they’ve followed us at all,” said Mr. Murdoch. “I think our promotions have been very much focused on quality, not quantity. We like to have a promotion we know will lift circulation as people sample the paper, and we’re so confident in the quality of the paper that people stick reading us after the promotion is over. We’re not about doing promotions all the time just to keep our circulation figures up.”

Ah, circulation. The fire at the heart of this great fight--the one the Post executives have dubbed the last great newspaper battle in America. (It may, at least, be the last one.) Since Mr. Murdoch took command of the paper, the Post (aided by a price cut) has shrunk the News’ edge in circulation from 260,512 to 76,698. It’s raised overall circulation from 443,951 in September 2000 to 652,426. Mr. Murdoch has led the paper to six consecutive quarters of 10 percent circulation growth. With new Audit Bureau of Circulation figures due in March, Post executives expect to make that seven.

“We put a plan in place a year ago now,” Mr. Murdoch said. “We built it 18 months ago, and it’s been in place for a year--building our circulation and doing it legitimately, with real sales and a better editorial product and a certain amount of marketing to have people sample the Post. And they’re sticking.”

(Post executives have long complained that the News has used bulk sales to maintain their circulation numbers. On this issue, Mr. Frydman declined to comment.)

Asked about recent similarities in the papers’ editorial product, Mr. Murdoch said: “Clearly, there is a marked difference now between the Post and the Daily News every day.

“We look at them every day where we’re competitive,” Mr. Murdoch continued. “But we see ourselves in very different markets …. We see ourselves as a savvy, vibrant, exciting read, with things that you’ll miss if you don’t pick up the paper. I don’t think you’ll find them in the same category.”

Post editor in chief Col Allan said simply: “I think the Post is a paper that is publishing with some confidence at the moment.”

Whether that confidence will give Mr. Murdoch what he wants--the lead in circulation--remains to be seen. With the billboard, he said, he wanted to give News staffers fair warning.

“If they’re ever going to wake up to it,” Mr. Murdoch said, “now’s the time.”

It was Monday, Feb. 16, three days after Mr. Moss was officially taken off the payroll of The New York Times , where he had served as the cultural-coverage czar for six months after leaving his five-year position as the top New York Times Magazine editor. But the 46-year-old, dressed casually in a white shirt open at the collar with the sleeves rolled up, was still finishing up business on West 43rd Street. In his Times office, there remained a couple of moving boxes. A fake cover of The New York Times Magazine , which had been given to him when he left in October, had been updated so that the New York magazine banner was splashed across the top. Books lay flat where they fell together in the mostly empty shelves. It was hard not to sense that he was at the end stage of some amicable divorce with a spouse of long standing; as he moved his effects into the new office at 50th and Madison, mostly his mistress was on his mind.

Mr. Moss said his involvement with New York began innocently enough three to four weeks ago. He knew Bruce Wasserstein and New York Holdings chief executive Anup Bagaria were talking to various people around town, soliciting opinions on their new prize, when he got a call from Jack Berkowitz, an executive with the Wasserstein-controlled American Lawyer Media. Afterward, he and Mr. Bagaria met "very casually" in what Mr. Moss said didn't feel like a job interview. A couple of weeks later, Mr. Bagaria suggested that Mr. Moss meet with Mr. Wasserstein-which Mr. Moss did.

"There wasn't a job aspect to the conversation," he said. "I wasn't planning to leave here. Then they called me on Friday [Feb. 7] and asked me if I would have dinner with them on Sunday night. I started to smell something at that point." New York announced Mr. Moss' appointment three days later.

It's been a decade, perhaps more, since New York generated the kind of emotion and conversation that it has in the past few months. First came word that Primedia-the Henry Kravis–led company that stripped and bled the magazine for years-was selling the former Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune . When a gossip-driven media mob salivated at the thought of a consortium of Harvey Weinstein, Nelson Peltz and Mort Zuckerman swooping it up, in came Lazard chief executive Bruce Wasserstein with a $55 million check. Then, as we settled into the thought that Mr. Wasserstein and Mr. Bagaria would keep the talented but much beleaguered Caroline Miller on as editor, in stepped Mr. Moss, assistant managing editor and culture czar of The New York Times .

In doing so, Messrs. Bagaria and Wasserstein have guaranteed that New York 's actual physical product-the magazine itself-will be a topic of conversation for months, if not years, to come.

Under Mr. Moss, New York will be pored over in both the lower ranks of senior editordom in Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, and in the Manhattan corridors of editorial power-Michael's, the Four Seasons. His reinvention of the brand will be the most watched since Tina Brown ran rampant in the offices of The New Yorker . But he needs time.

"It takes a while to imprint something like this. It takes actually longer than a monthly, because you have to put the magazine out. The job of thinking in the present and future simultaneously is harder. We're going to move as quickly as we can-but also deliberately, smartly.

"New York is not Cincinnati," Mr. Moss said. "And that is a gigantic difference. Think about the way people talk to each other: The conversation ranges from the 9/11 memorial to some sample sale where they got this great sweater, to what they thought of The Dreamers , to whether they're for Bloomberg or against him. All of that happens within two minutes of conversation.

"New Yorkers have a lot of things going through their head at once," Mr. Moss continued. "And the magazine needs to do as good a job as possible of reflecting the range of interests and passions New York has. New York is a highly emotional place, and it needs to be a highly emotional magazine."

Oh, yeah, he's on a mission. This is not "Let's redesign the front of the book with some entry points." Nor is it an attempt to draw younger readers with photos of unshaven men in $3,000 suits and sneakers. Mr. Moss is out to reinvent the city-magazine genre itself: the particular package of service and stories that New York created, that was then copied in Oklahoma City and Little Rock and Richmond and that, over time, has simply become unbundled. Under its former owners, Mr. Moss said, the magazine, "rather than continue to refresh and reinvent that genre … had started to imitate what other, lesser cities had done-particularly the service-package approach that was so much a part of the Primedia strategy.

"I think part of the problem with the way they did service is, it so overwhelmed the rest of the magazine that a lot of good journalism they were doing got obscured. The second thing is that the service itself was more encyclopedic-more like a directory than it was journalism solving particular New York problems.

"That strategy is sometimes very effective," Mr. Moss said. "I have a lot of respect for what those editors and writers have been going through. Caroline Miller is a very good editor and a tremendous professional. She and her staff have been trying to put out the best magazine they could under a set of corporate directives that, in my view-and maybe also in their view-were misplaced."

(The irony is not lost that, when asked what he liked about the magazine, Mr. Moss, in addition to its sales and bargains and shopping, pointed to two recent covers featuring a murder at Rao's restaurant and the disappearance of Spalding Gray. Ms. Miller executed both under the auspices of the new ownership, a symbol of what the staff believed was Mr. Wasserstein's confidence in her and her final break from the Primedia corporate dictates.)

That's not to say service is bad, Mr. Moss said. But there's a difference between what he deems the "encyclopedic" approach (500 best doctors, 2,000 best schools, 3,000,000 things you could do on the corner of 79th and Lexington with a banana and some gummy worms) and being an authority on "how to beat the system."

"When Adam Platt tells me where I should eat," Mr. Moss said, "I find it immensely useful. That's valuable. All of that stuff is what New York magazine should always be about. And yet, it can't be the only thing the magazine does. The magazine has always been a tricky balance, and that's the fun of it: to balance out the service and the journalism and have it come from the same place-which is to say, have them come from an idea of what New York is and what New Yorkers are."

Mr. Moss comes to the job with both promised largesse and flexibility. He said Messrs. Wasserstein and Bagaria gave him no specific dollar amount to play with, but that together had run through a number of "scenarios," after which he was confident of adequate resources and support. Likewise, Mr. Moss said, he wasn't given a template of what should or shouldn't go in the magazine.

"Nor did I present them with any sort of template," Mr. Moss said. "We just talked generally about values more than any kind of specifics-that New York was a magazine that needed to take its readers seriously. That it needed to speak from a sense of where New York is right now. That it needed not to coast on people's nostalgic attachment to what Clay Felker created. That the conventions of a city magazine probably ought to be looked at."

That city magazine, that city-perhaps to the chagrin of the 11 o'clock crowd at Elaine's-is not Clay Felker's New York . Ms. Miller, Kurt Andersen, Ed Kosner-every editor in chief who has come after New York 's founder and great avatar has labored under his legacy. His city.

"The main thing that's in common with Clay Felker's New York and the present New York is the sense of a place apart," Mr. Moss said. "A place absolutely unlike everywhere else. The mistake the previous ownership made was that they tried very hard to make the magazine like everywhere else. And I suspect the editors railed against that.

"I can't emphasize 10,000 times," Mr. Moss said, "as I speak about the magazine they put out, that it had actually some really great things. But it was buried under what seemed a corporate idea. Now we have to dig it out."

It will not be easy. As Mr. Moss observes, " The New York Times was not in the lifestyle business" when Mr. Felker was building New York . There was no Internet. No Time Out . And the demands of a city magazine publishing weekly can't be overstated. New York must move with the force of a newsweekly while giving its readers a blueprint on how to get by in one of the toughest cities on earth.

"The magazine needs to be a careful mix of a lot of things," Mr. Moss said. "Information. Voice and reporting revelations. A magazine like New York needs as its main job to find things out that you didn't know and want to know and that you need to know. That's its main job."

Mr. Moss could have died at The Times . A former editor at Esquire and editor in chief of the short-lived weekly magazine 7 Days , he edited The Times Magazine with distinction for five years before agreeing to become culture czar last August.

"I liked this job," Mr. Moss said. "I didn't like every aspect of it. But it's true that the job description was too far removed from actually doing stuff, and I missed playing in the sandbox. I missed actually making something; I missed seeing my impact on something in a direct way. My impact was meant to have a kind of long-term effect, and, you know, I'm impatient."

In his previous job, Mr. Moss filled two roles, according to Times executive editor Bill Keller: "creative rainmaker" and thinker on the culture sections of the paper, and the chief advocate for features, which often get lost in a paper that stakes its day-to-day existence on the strength of its foreign and political news.

"Both of these are roles that I'd like to have filled," Mr. Keller said. "I'm not sure whether we fill them in one person or two. For the moment, [managing editor Jill Abramson] and I will probably spend a little more of our time dealing directly with culture, the book review, styles and so on. I don't think that's a bad thing." (Mr. Keller said the plan Mr. Moss submitted to overhaul the culture sections through, among other things, additional personnel and space is currently with him and Ms. Abramson, and is being prepared for presentation by the business side of the paper.)

"I'll come to miss a lot of things about The Times ," Mr. Moss said. "But I'm a magazine guy. And if you're a magazine guy, and if one of the legendary magazines is presented to you, and the opportunity is offered to rethink it and take it forward and the resources are there to do it right, what person with my DNA could ever turn it down?"

And now a word from The Observer culture reporter. Naomi Wolf is back in the news. Nearly two decades after graduating from Yale, Ms. Wolf is taking on her alma mater and the patriarchy, in the form of eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom. According to sources at New York magazine and Yale University, in the course of reporting an article slated to run in next week's issue, Ms. Wolf has been claiming that Mr. Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate 20 years ago.

Mr. Bloom didn't agree to be interviewed for the New York magazine story, and he declined an interview with The Observer. Sources close to Mr. Bloom, however, told The Observer that the 73-year old Shakespeare scholar has called Ms. Wolf's claims a "vicious lie." These same sources also note that Mr. Bloom wrote Ms. Wolf a recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship when she was a Yale undergraduate, a scholarship which she subsequently won. When asked about the Rhodes recommendation letter and how it might bear on Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, Serena Torrey, said, "I can't comment on the content of a story that's not closed." She described the story as "a broader examination of the way that Yale and institutions of higher learning handle incidents of sexual misconduct and harassment." After being contacted about the controversy, Ms. Torrey called back to say that the article may not appear in next week's issue: "It's subject to a number of reviews. We can't be sure when it's running."

Ms. Wolf declined an interview and issued a statement through Ms. Torrey: "My story will speak for itself."

According to Yale University, Ms. Wolf approached the university last month with various requests. For one thing, she wished to explore filing a complaint of sexual harassment against Mr. Bloom. Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, said Ms. Wolf was told that "you are not permitted under Yale statutes to file sexual-harassment complaints 20 years after an alleged event occurred. There were policies and procedures in place when Ms. Wolf attended Yale and the alleged harassment took place, yet she did not avail herself of them." (Yale has a two-year statute of limitations on such complaints.) Ms. Klasky said that last month Ms. Wolf also contacted the offices of Yale president Richard Levin and the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, as well as the public-relations office, in the context of writing her article. Furthermore, according to Ms. Klasky, Ms. Wolf "requested an apology from the university, and was told that an apology could only be issued if wrongdoing was found-and unless one's filed a formal complaint, there cannot be any apology."

Ms. Wolf made her name as the author of the 1991 best-seller The Beauty Myth , and more recently has written books on motherhood and adolescent sexuality. Her notoriety seemed to have peaked when she famously advised Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, suggesting that he wear more "earth tones" in order to appeal to the women's vote, and reportedly collected a monthly fee of $15,000 for her advice.

Sources close to Mr. Bloom said that Ms. Wolf never tried reaching the professor at home-his number is listed-but rather left specific, and potentially incendiary, phone messages with administrative assistants at his two Yale offices.

In her 1997 book Promiscuities, Ms. Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs after showing up at her apartment to discuss her poetry. Other classmates, she claimed, had had similar experiences, but she thought she could resist. "My whole body, my whole self-image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame. I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"

Ms. Wolf's editor at New York, Joanna Coles, a former reporter for the Times of London , denied that Ms. Wolf had contacted Yale about a sexual-harassment claim. Ms. Wolf had been "working with a lawyer on this story," Ms. Coles said. "She is fully aware of what is on the statute, and she had no intention at all of bringing a claim against Harold Bloom."

Ms. Coles told The Observer that Yale had been uncooperative with Ms. Wolf in her efforts to report on its sexual-harassment policies. "She's been back and forth trying to talk to people at the university for months and months," Ms. Coles said. "She succeeded in talking to some of them, but she didn't get the information that she was looking for."

Ms. Wolf's article landed during a particularly turbulent few weeks at New York magazine, with editor in chief Caroline Miller departing as former New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss prepares to take over the reins.

Camille Paglia, who traded blows with Ms. Wolf in the early 1990's over their radically different views on female sexual power, said she was no longer at war with Ms. Wolf, but was "shocked" to learn of Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, who is a long-time mentor of Ms. Paglia's.

"I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990's, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70's and has health problems-who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world-to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and a basic sense of fair play," said Ms. Paglia, who is professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she said she helped institute that university's sexual-harassment policies in the 1980s.

"At the beginning of the 90's, people said, 'Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,'" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she's managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn't want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"

Since Ms. Wolf's days at Yale-she graduated in 1986-the university has, like many of its counterparts, strengthened its sexual-harassment grievance procedures. In the late 1990's, the university instituted a strict policy forbidding student-teacher relationships.

Sources at New York said that Ms. Wolf's article was being fact-checked, and may change significantly in the next few days.

-Rachel Donadio

And now for Off the Record's New Yorker scorecard update ….Nicholas Lemann, who's in his second semester as dean of the Columbia journalism program, will return regularly to the magazine's pages with a press column this spring. The column-called "Wayward Press"-revives the franchise established by the magazine in 1927 and once written by A.J. Leibling.

"When Liebling wrote the 'Wayward Press,'" New Yorker editor David Remnick said, "he lived in a world of newspapers-scads of them-but no television to speak of, no 24-hour news cycle, no rumor-go-rounds on the Web that can tip a Presidential election. In addition to the reporting that Ken Auletta gives us, Nick is interested in, and wise and funny about, the language and mechanics of media today."

In addition, Los Angeles–based writer Caitlin Flanagan will join The New Yorker as a staff writer. Since 2001, Ms. Flanagan has written essays and book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly , where she was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award. At The New Yorker , she'll write pieces on "modern domestic life."

"If it were possible to splice the DNA of Mary McCarthy and Erma Bombeck without the world exploding," said Ms. Flanagan of her new gig, "that's what I'm going for. I'm interested in the kind of keen social observation and-at times-caustically precise criticism of McCarthy, but my subject is domestic life. Middle-class Americans used to think of work as a burden and home life as a pleasure-but now people tend to think just the opposite. I'm interested in how and why that change took place. If a household is a tiny state-as, of course, it is-I want to be its chronicler."

"NewYork Post Circulation: 652427,"the sign readsThe latter two numbers are blurry, as though they are the last two digits of a quickly upticking counter. "Go ahead and stare," the billboard copy taunts near the bottom. "They're real."

In what has seemed so far like the cleanest, most businesslike "tabloid war" the city has yet seen, it was the first truly bitchy moment-the first sign that interest in the battle between the minions of Murdoch and Mort might soon redound past the corridors of the papers' respective strongholds.

"Frankly, I was just being mischievous over the summer," explained Lachlan Murdoch, the baby-faced New York Post publisher and heir apparent to his father's News Corp. chairmanship, of the Post 's decision to get down and dirty. "I know morale there is terrible, which is understandable. We thought it was an opportunity to celebrate our circulation figures and let them know it."

(Whether Mr. Murdoch's attack on unit cohesion is working may be a debatable point: Asked about the billboard, Daily News spokesman Ken Frydman said: "What sign?" Or maybe that's just a little slap back.)

Mr. Murdoch's view of his chief competitor (and daily obsession) is not so far off. According to sources within the newsroom, the Daily News -whose staffers seem only remotely satisfied with their workplace following the citywide disasters they covered to general acclaim-is gripped by uncertainty, both over the future of the paper's leadership and its editorial direction. Now four months in the job, editorial director Martin Dunn has yet to name an editor in chief to replace Ed Kosner, who retired last year. In the meantime, executive editor Michael Goodwin-forever a controversial and unpopular figure within the newsroom-has continued to officiate at the morning and afternoon news meetings.

At the same time, the News has done its best to add oomph to its profile. There have been diet stories involving News readers, in which they report on their efforts to shed pounds. Color has actually showed up in the pages of Rush and Molloy. On Tuesday, Feb. 10, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model dubbed "THE HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST" popped up on page 3. (A Page Three Girl, on this side of the drink?) At the same time, the paper kept up its promotional-giveaway style with what seems an endless series of free Yankee tickets, All-Star Game trips and Six Flags Great Adventure passes-most lately offering up four Mazda Tributes for four lucky readers to drive off in, simply by mailing in the entry form printed in the paper.

Mr. Frydman said: "The News has for years been committed to running quality promotions that add value to our readers and advertisers. We had a terrific advertising and circulation year in 2003, and we look forward to another bang-up year in 2004.

"The Post tends to copy our promotions," he continued, "and does a pale imitation of them."

Of course, the Post has had its share of giveaways under the current regime. The paper has made promotional-er-vehicles a prominent part of its circulation-growth model. (Remember the Lizziemobile?) For most of the fall, it seemed, we were smacked in the face with those glossy Yankees anniversary magazines. Then came the Master and Commander preview DVD's. Now, it's 10 free trips to Cancun. But Post executives said their promotions are more desirable.

"We think very carefully where our audit number is sitting," said Post general manager Geoff Booth. "We have targets for circulation growth in the next audit period. We know where we need to be six months from now, what promotions to do where and when, what sales we have to have.

"Lachlan will look at what we're proposing," Mr. Booth continued. "He has a very keen eye for what works and what doesn't for a promotion. From a content perspective, he has a critical eye over how the programming's put together. It's a great balance, really. He knows all the right questions to ask."

Both Mr. Booth and Mr. Murdoch, though, pooh-poohed the idea that the News has followed the Post 's example when it comes to promotions. Well, sorta.

"I don't think they've followed us at all," said Mr. Murdoch. "I think our promotions have been very much focused on quality, not quantity. We like to have a promotion we know will lift circulation as people sample the paper, and we're so confident in the quality of the paper that people stick reading us after the promotion is over. We're not about doing promotions all the time just to keep our circulation figures up."

Ah, circulation. The fire at the heart of this great fight-the one the Post executives have dubbed the last great newspaper battle in America. (It may, at least, be the last one.) Since Mr. Murdoch took command of the paper, the Post (aided by a price cut) has shrunk the News ' edge in circulation from 260,512 to 76,698. It's raised overall circulation from 443,951 in September 2000 to 652,426. Mr. Murdoch has led the paper to six consecutive quarters of 10 percent circulation growth. With new Audit Bureau of Circulation figures due in March, Post executives expect to make that seven.

"We put a plan in place a year ago now," Mr. Murdoch said. "We built it 18 months ago, and it's been in place for a year-building our circulation and doing it legitimately, with real sales and a better editorial product and a certain amount of marketing to have people sample the Post . And they're sticking."

( Post executives have long complained that the News has used bulk sales to maintain their circulation numbers. On this issue, Mr. Frydman declined to comment.)

Asked about recent similarities in the papers' editorial product, Mr. Murdoch said: "Clearly, there is a marked difference now between the Post and the Daily News every day.

"We look at them every day where we're competitive," Mr. Murdoch continued. "But we see ourselves in very different markets …. We see ourselves as a savvy, vibrant, exciting read, with things that you'll miss if you don't pick up the paper. I don't think you'll find them in the same category."

Post editor in Chief Col Allan said simply: "I think the Post is a paper that is publishing with some confidence at the moment."

Whether that confidence will give Mr. Murdoch what he wants-the lead in circulation-remains to be seen. With the billboard, he said, he wanted to give News staffers fair warning.

"If they're ever going to wake up to it," Mr. Murdoch said, "now's the time."

Off the Record remembers a time when American Media was some zany company in Florida pumping out tabloids like The National Enquirer for millions of Americans stranded at the checkout counter while the cashier asked for a price check on Cheez Whiz.

That was before David Pecker brought on the mighty Bonnie Fuller-formerly of Cosmopolitan , Glamour and Us Weekly -as his editorial director. But as Mr. Pecker starts taking the Enquirer slowly upmarket, readers in high places are no longer simply giving them the brush-off. Comic actor and onetime tab-fodder Tom Arnold couldn't contain himself after he learned about an article in the Enquirer 's Feb. 17 issue. The story goes to extraordinary lengths to document Friends ' star Matthew Perry's "SAD RETURN TO DRUGS & BOOZE." How far? In a "major world exclusive," the tabloid quotes extensively from his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where Mr. Perry detailed his fight for sobriety.

Courts don't confer a confidentiality privilege on things said in A.A. meetings, the way they have on things said to one's confessor, husband or wife, doctor or attorney. But the unwritten rule in the media has long been that taking leaks from an A.A. meeting is beyond the pale.

Mr. Arnold has penned an open letter to the Enquirer .

"I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict of over 14 years and I'd like to ask a favor," he wrote. "I'd like to ask you to change your current policy and NOT print people's conversations in 12 step meetings or in rehab. We addicts have a disease as fatal as cancer but it can be treated if we are given the opportunity to share honestly and openly with other addicts. You printed one such share by a friend of mine and it has sent shockwaves throughout the sober community. These meetings save lives and should be treated like the church confessional. Can you imagine the guts and humility my friend had, standing up in front of a room full of strangers and admitting he'd slipped but was back on track?"

Ms. Fuller, who took flack for a decision made by the Enquirer to identify and publish a photograph of the woman who has accused Kobe Bryant of raping her, is no stranger to gonzo reporting tactics.

A spokesman for Ms. Fuller did not return a call by presstime.

But Mr. Arnold insists he's not trying to spoil anyone's Schadenfreude .

"Now on the other hand if some celebrity is drunk or high or generally acting like a jackass IN PUBLIC we're fair game," he wrote. "(Look for me in your archives in '89). Take Care, Tom Arnold."

Investigative reporter Tim Golden, whose fiery departure from The New York Times last year came to symbolize the acrimony of the last days of the Raines regime, has returned to the paper.

"He's a relentless digger and good thinker," Times executive editor Bill Keller said of Mr. Golden on Monday, Feb. 9. Channeling Drew Barrymore, he said: "He's capable of magical writing.

"I still think of the Elián González piece he wrote for The Times Magazine [in April 2000] as by far the best thing I read on the whole episode, and one of the best things I've ever read on Cuba," Mr. Keller continued. "It's a fabulous example of the kind of thing he can do."

That Mr. Golden-who returns to his position reporting out of the investigative unit and will write for The Times Magazine-would ever set foot inside the 43rd Street newsroom again seemed as likely as Bobby Ewing coming back to South Fork after he, um, "died." When Mr. Golden resigned last April, he had grown angry with Howell Raines' leadership, particularly over his decision to spike several pieces by Mr. Golden and fellow reporter David Kocieniewski on then–New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli in 2002.

Mr. Golden's frustration grew after Douglas Frantz, the paper's investigative editor, abruptly left the paper in March 2003 to work from Istanbul for The Los Angeles Times . Soon after, Mr. Golden departed as well.

Mr. Golden, who joins Times Magazine writer Deborah Sontag as a new addition to the unit, said he had "moved on" from the episode and felt no awkwardness slipping back into the third-floor newsroom.

"I thought it might feel a little weird, but it's been really great," Mr. Golden said. "It's always been the best paper in the world, and it's going to be better than it's ever been."

But we wanted Gallagher!

On Friday, Feb. 12, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller will do "stand-up" in the ninth-floor auditorium of The Times ' 43rd Street Building in an event called "Throw Stuff at Bill Keller." (Delicacy forbids Off the Record from speculating on what might have been thrown at his predecessor.)

"I'm going to subject myself to interrogation from the staff," Mr. Keller explained. "I'm doing three shows to accommodate for the fact that we have people doing three different shifts. It's to talk generally about how I think the paper's doing after my first six months or so on the job. Mostly, I'll take questions or comments."

Asked if he would bring along the toy moose that publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. produced as a symbol of openness during the infamous post-Jayson town-hall meeting last year, Mr. Keller deadpanned: "No stuffed animals."

Rich Turner, formerly the deputy editor of The Journal 's Media and Marketing section, has been tapped to take over the section when Nik Deogun becomes the paper's deputy Washington bureau chief next month.

Mr. Turner-now on his second stint at The Journal -formerly wrote on media for New York and Newsweek , and toiled as executive editor and New York bureau chief of the long-since-vanished Industry Standard .

The move comes as media reporter Matthew Rose leaves the beat to take on an editing gig for The Journal 's Page One.

Paul Steiger is not a metrosexual.

"The only thing I have to decide is whether it's going to be blue or gray," said The Wall Street Journal 's managing editor, when asked about his closet's morning offerings.

But Mr. Steiger-sitting with his wife, Wendy Brandes-is not completely out of the loop. Speaking to Off the Record special Fashion Week correspondent Noelle Hancock on the evening of Feb. 9, at the Marc Jacobs show at the Armory at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, Mr. Steiger said that he could appreciate the duds, even without an innate fashion sense of his own.

"He's hot!" Mr. Steiger said of Mr. Jacobs. "We had a big Page One story about him and the tensions within LVMH, and that makes him a good story. And his fashion is always interesting.

"I consider myself someone who has a wife who's a woman of style," Mr. Steiger added, as Ms. Brandes-who was sporting a leopard-print cowboy hat-nodded and laughed, her arm casually draped across her husband's shoulders. "She can dress me up or she can't take me out," Mr. Steiger concluded.

Later, our correspondent approached a more fashionably confident Anna Wintour, outfitted with child (her daughter Bee), boyfriend (Shelby Bryan), her power-bob, jeans and a fur-collared leather jacket.

While Ms. Wintour has refrained from using her editor-page letter for frothing rants, she had no problem with Condé Nast editor in chief Graydon Carter's tirades in Vanity Fair against George W. Bush, the Bloomberg administration, and the proposed smoking ban for our colony in Mars.

"I think it's great!" she said of Mr. Carter's monthly manifesto. "I put my opinion in about different things, too, and I think Graydon's letters are interesting and informative and opinionated and fun to read. I congratulate him on them."

Mr. Marzorati was speaking late in the afternoon on Feb. 2, having sparked the loudest conversation of his term since taking over for current Times culture czar Adam Moss last summer-a Jan. 25 cover story on sex slavery in the United States dubbed "The Girls Next Door."

The 8,244-word investigation, written by Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Landesman, posited that perhaps "30,000 to 50,000" women-along with girls and boys-were being held as sex slaves in hundreds of "stash houses." More than arming the Sunday-afternoon brunch crowd in New Canaan with something to actually talk about, it stoked the ire of Times watchers, most notably the Web site Slate 's media commentator Jack Shafer, who charged the magazine with using puffed-up statistics, shoddy reporting and worse logic in order to prop up a supposition into a national epidemic.

The Times , according to a Feb. 3 report in the Daily News , officially reviewed the piece and stands by it.

Likewise, Mr. Landesman told Off the Record, "The only thing that really matters in this entire debate is the story, its integrity, its sourcing and its revelations. The story must speak for itself. It is the result of months of exhaustive reporting and painstaking editing and checking. It doesn't flinch under scrutiny; it's of vital importance. I stand behind it, and so do the editors of The New York Times Magazine ."

And Mr. Marzorati, sitting with his feet on his desk in his darkened eighth-floor office on West 43rd Street, seemed undeterred, even defiant, at the tempest that blew up so early in his tenure at the magazine's helm.

The new editor has not made dramatic or sudden changes to the magazine-he's a veteran, after all, who had a run there as editorial director for five years before taking on the top of the masthead. But as Mr. Marzorati defended his magazine from the firestorm of attacks, a picture-however hazy-emerged of how the magazine sees itself in relation to the paper that mothers it.

Anytime, he said, you run a piece that asserts something in the subterranean tunnels of American life, you're going to draw fire.

"You're going to run that kind of risk," Mr. Marzorati said. And that's the job of the magazine.

This scandal has been different from the ones that ate up Jayson Blair or Michael Finkel. There's no charge of duplicitousness here. This has become an intellectual's debate, about journalistic ethics, and about deductive reasoning and logic.

As Mr. Shafer pointed out in the first of his five pieces on the subject, Mr. Landesman relied on governmental and non-governmental sources that were merely guesstimating the actual numbers of people trafficked into the United States each year. Mr. Landesman never witnessed actual trafficking, using a few anecdotal cases to stand for what he claims are thousands of women-and he admits as much. Plus, one of the women he spoke to told him she suffers from a multiple-personality disorder.

"From beginning to end, this is an incomprehensible piece of journalism," Mr. Shafer said in an interview with Off the Record. "What he's talking about is coercion and abduction and pure enslavement. I think the piece suffers from journalism of good intentions. Landesman found some real suffering and wasn't content to describe the suffering he knew about. He's intent on portraying a greater, mass form of suffering."

"Any kind of sex crime automatically entails estimates," said Mr. Marzorati, who wrote a lengthy response to Mr. Shafer's critiques on Slate after Mr. Landesman lashed out about Mr. Shafer. "We don't even know how many women are raped in America. We don't know how many prostitutes there are in America. We don't know how many cases of child abuse there are in America. Then you add this extra level of international organized crime as you would with cocaine or anything else."

The story's reporting, Mr. Marzorati said, was involved, but not out of the ordinary.

Mr. Landesman, Mr. Marzorati said, began working on the piece last summer, after sources at the Los Angeles Police Department and the United Nations told him of the scope of human trafficking into the United States. He was in contact with the editors, and-unlike in some recent cases at The Times -they knew where he was traveling because they'd get his expense-check requests. The piece arrived in early December as an "unwieldy" first draft, Mr. Marzorati said: roughly 13,000 words. Over the next several weeks, intensive fact-checking took place, including conversations between the editors and the girls who were the subjects of the story.

"It was a very, very difficult story for him to report in the way of getting inside any organized-crime unit or syndicate would be," Mr. Marzorati said. "Also, in certain ways we were inhibited by the fact he was let in on a number of ongoing investigations, and the way he was allowed to get in on those investigations was to not mention they were taking place.

"He had many, many things off the record," Mr. Marzorati said, "on deep background, which gives some readers cause for skepticism, coupled with the fact that the reality, the existence of this phenomenon is hard to comprehend. But for most of our readers, they understand it's The Times . The Times doesn't just throw things out at the readers without going through an enormously painstaking vetting process. The piece was carefully read by a number of readers, by me many, many times, and I stand by the story."

"What happens when you do a piece like this," Mr. Marzorati continued, "it doesn't unfold in a natural, seamless narrative. You're not going to get two or three or four corroborating sources on the record. You can't just go wandering into a stash house and talk to girls. There are guards, drivers, people who usher in johns. There are all kinds of situations. Which is why these stories are hard."

No one will concede that prostitution isn't a problem in the United States. But this is sexual slavery-a term that carries with it specific connotations. Mr. Marzorati said he didn't hesitate in using the term in the piece. Is a prostitute a sex slave? What about a prostitute who is working off an exorbitant price to get smuggled into the United States illegally?

"Well you know, here's my feeling," Marzorati said. "In this country the issue of sexual trafficking isn't a liberal or mainstream feminist issue. Here, it's mostly an issue associated with the right and to some degree the Christian right, and I think in the polarized culture we have, there's suspicion with any issue associated with those groups, it seems to me. I'm quite convinced there's something called sexual slavery or sexual trafficking, for want of a better word, that's different than prostitution. Life is a matter of degree, and there is a vast degree of difference between their lives and the kind of economic system they're operating in and the age they are than prostitutes. You know, it didn't seem very complicated to me.

"We didn't use the word slave without the word sex," Mr. Marzorati said. "It does carry a meaning that's different. Just in the way there's trafficking to do manual labor or agricultural work. There's trafficking of people to perform sexual acts. It's something different. The system is something different."

Over the years, of course, The Times Magazine has jump-started the national conversation. Remember when we were scared of killer mold? Remember tackling your 3-year-old before she poked her finger inside a jar of peanut butter? Remember how women-that is, well-off women with husbands-were leaving the workplace for the sanctity of home life?

But this feels different. Larger. Certainly, as Mr. Shafer pointed out, The Times newspaper-which boasts a team of investigative reporters-might have been a better venue.

"The magazine is constantly addressing things that aren't in the paper," Mr. Marzorati said. "That's sort of our mandate. There's this vast, multi-faceted news organization here, and God knows we provide our readers with enough duplication, as hard as we try not to. Magazine pieces are written in a different way. They have a point of view. They're often written with more intensity. They're often allowed a kind of normative ending. Most of the cover stories that we do, even if they weren't the length that they were, are pieces the paper won't do. That's part of our mandate.

"There are times when I think this story belongs in another part of the paper," Mr. Marzorati said. "But it's never because the subject is too controversial or the topic is too incendiary or something like that. It's more like maybe it'd be better in Arts and Leisure. The magazine is a general-interest magazine. It's the sum of the interests of the editors here and the writers who write for us, and we respond to those curiosities."

In similar fashion, Mr. Marzorati said the piece's scope fits with the demands of a narrative structure not in place in the newsprint pages of The Times .

"The standards for a magazine piece, for a piece of long-form nonfiction, are different than they are for a news story," Mr. Marzorati said. "When you're putting together a magazine piece, organizing a magazine piece, you're allowing things like point of view and creating long scenes. This is not the function of newspaper writing, where the writing is: An event happens, you get comments from people on those events, you get other comments from people who disagree with the comments of people you just spoke to. Your conventions are such that you create something fair and balanced. That's not the magazine convention.

"When we're writing a story on these kids who write [computer] viruses and worms, we don't turn over half the story to people who say viruses and worms really aren't a big problem," Mr. Marzorati said. "That's not a convention of any magazine."

For the next year, David Kirkpatrick-formerly the man charged with covering the book publishing industry-will cover conservatives. Not the Republican Party or the Bush administration. No, it's real conservatives.

In an announcement earlier this month Times national editor Jim Roberts said that Mr. Kirkpatrick "will examine conservative forces in religion, politics, law, business and the media-a job that will take him across the country and make him a frequent presence in Washington.

"His coverage will cut across the political campaigns this season," Mr. Roberts continued, "but we expect that much of what he does will transcend the race itself and delve into the issues and personalities that drive-and sometimes divide-conservatives."

"I winced a little when I read that job announcement," said Times executive editor Bill Keller, "because it was a little like ' The New York Times discovers this strange, alien species called conservatives,' and that's not what this is about."

If it seems a little wacky, well, it is. Intellectual movements seldom draw the attention of beat reporters. There is, after all, no correspondent covering think tanks for The Washington Post . What The Times ' new beat means to do, Mr. Keller said, is this: Give a great big bear hug to the disparate but at times interconnected conservative organizations-evangelical Christians and anti-abortionists, for example-all as a way of gaining a peek into who the Bush administration listens to, and why.

"Maybe they figured out that's where the intellectual energy in this country is coming from," said Paul Gigot, editor of the neoconservative's sports section, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. "Maybe they could save time and read us. Cut out the middleman."

Mr. Gigot's assessment is not so far off. Since the Bush administration took command in January 2001, the administration has drawn its collective strength and power not so much from individual power-brokers in Congress as from a vast network of conservative groups that have fed it, nourished it and sent it forth with policies into the world.

"You sort of use the shorthand you use for any interest group without always trying to get down in the thinking-without trying to figure out why people believe what they do, how big their constituency is, where it comes from," Mr. Keller said. "We haven't always had a real three-dimensional understanding of where conservative activists are coming from.

"Everyone knows this is not the most accessible administration in the history of the Beltway," Mr. Keller continued. "And it seems to me their reasoning and their strategies are often clouded in secrecy and spin. And in an election year, that's likely to be more true than ever."

While perhaps a reasoned, well-thought basis for a beat, The Times assigning a reporter to cover conservatives still feels strange, if not off-putting-a little like Judge Reinholt peering through the bathroom window at Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High . This is not The New York Sun or even the New York Post , but The Times (or to conservatives, the equivalent of the local-coffeehouse beatnik magazine). Under Mr. Keller's predecessor, Howell Raines, critics howled that The Times misstated former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's position on the war. When it was revealed in December 2002 that the Raines administration had spiked sports columns disagreeing with the paper's editorial-page policy, the paper was accused of advancing social policy through its news coverage. In the first days of the war, the New York Post labeled a front page of The Times "News by Saddam," saying the paper was trying to put "the darkest possible spin on Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Asked if he was concerned about any further attention his new beat might draw from conservatives, Mr. Keller said: "That's really not the point. It's to understand an important force in American political life, and I think that's a subject that matters to readers on the left, on the right and somewhere in between."

"I don't think it's going to suddenly make Gary Bauer a champion of The New York Times ," Mr. Keller said. "The point of it is not to change minds and persuade conservatives that we're with them. I don't want anyone to think that we're aligned with them ideologically."

So far, the early attempts have felt stilted, forced: a little like trying to write the story of Brooklyn's feelings about their would-be basketball team and arena by talking to people walking down Flatbush Avenue. There's been a story on how "Bush's Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives." Mr. Kirkpatrick followed with a piece reporting that "Conservative Groups Differ on Bush Words on Marriage." On Jan. 25, Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote a story titled "A Concerned Bloc of Republicans Wonders Whether Bush Is Conservative Enough."

Susan E. Tifft, co-author of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times , said The Times ' new area of study is a throwback to a long-standing Times man mantra.

"Scotty Reston once said the biggest story of our time or any time is change itself," Ms. Tifft said. "That's one of the hardest things to cover. It's not really a trend. What they're trying to do here is get at this idea-change itself."

When asked why The Times hadn't dispatched a correspondent to cover the far left, Mr. Keller said: "If the country was governed by a liberal executive branch and a liberal Congress, and the best access to their thinking would be assigning a reporter to cover liberal thinkers and lobbyists, I'd be happy to do that.

"It just happens to be conservatives in this case," Mr. Keller said.

On Jan. 12, the first issue of New York magazine hit the stands since financier Bruce Wasserstein finalized a deal to buy the legendary magazine from Primedia on Dec. 16.

The cover story, "Murder at Rao's," chronicled the evening when Manhattan's film, media and political elite found itself witness to a bloody hail of gunfire that ended in murder in the exclusive uptown Italian eatery.

A teaser box above featured a comely woman seated in the lotus position and bore the tagline "Spa & Fitness Special."

According to the magazine's editor in chief, Caroline Miller, the original plan-before the deal with Mr. Wasserstein-had been to make the spas story the cover. Unleashed from Primedia, the Rao's story took center stage.

"With the publisher's encouragement and the new owner's support, we led with the news story, and we were delighted to do it," she said, speaking on the afternoon of Jan. 27.

It's fair to say that Ms. Miller seems happy these days-several sources at New York have said she's all smiles. But in the media world, speculation about her future at the magazine remains fierce.

Over the years, gossips have had Ms. Miller being ousted for a rogue's gallery of would-be replacements (David Kuhn, Maer Roshan, Joe Namath), and she has always survived. But Anup Bagaria, Mr. Wasserstein's seneschal at New York , has hinted that staff changes won't be coming hard and fast. And recently it was reported that Ms. Miller's close to a deal to remain at the helm of New York ; one source told Off The Record that her situation was set to be finalized by the end of the week of Jan. 25.

Asked if such a definite timetable was in place, Ms. Miller said: "I'm not interested in talking about my future."

But she talks like someone who plans to stay at the helm of the magazine for some time.

"We've gone through a period of austerity caused by the recessions and are looking to make substantial investments in the magazine," Ms. Miller said. "We focused on what we could do very well. Social trends. Sexual politics. Covering social comedy. I think we've done really well with pieces like the Spalding Gray story this week." Now, Ms. Miller said, she wanted the magazine to pursue "more informed and articulate pieces about the city's power structure."

Why should a new owner so substantially influence the way New York sells itself to the public?

When Primedia sent the magazine into the welcome arms of Mr. Wasserstein in December, the company unloaded a magazine that had gone from making an estimated $8 million a year in the mid-90's, when Ms. Miller took over, to claiming somewhere around $1 million a year.

But beleaguered New York staffers had, under Primedia, endured a harsh pillorying in the press for the magazine's reliance on product-and-service-oriented cover stories that the owners had insisted upon to move copies. They had endured cost-cutting mandates that stripped the magazine's walls, leaving it defenseless against critics clamoring that they didn't make it like Clay Felker or Kurt Andersen had anymore.

With the change in ownership, Ms. Miller said, she has begun to exercise new freedoms, beginning with that true-crime cover story from Rao's.

Mr. Wasserstein also brought along bigger purse strings, Ms. Miller said. In the coming weeks, New York will announce a number of hires "focusing on business and political coverage. We're looking for both people who can write great magazine stories and editors who can bring them in," Ms. Miller said. "We're looking for writers with voices and substantive reporting skills who can write about the city's power elite.

"These are not new things in New York magazine at all," Ms. Miller continued. "These are things we've been doing. But they do reflect what we'll be doing going forward."

Of course, she's willing to admit that budgetary constraints-and lackluster support for her staff's vision of the magazine-at least hemmed them in.

"We have every intention of keeping the coverage of news and sophisticated service and great storytelling. It's just a question of altering the mixture somewhat and being able to lead with our best stories," she said. "We think we're going to be running more stories on national politics and about the issues in front of this city, and are looking for provocative writers to do that."

For those restaurateurs panting at the thought of feeding the buff Bill Buford as The New York Times ' new restaurant critic, forget it.

According to sources familiar with the situation, the strapping Mr. Buford, author of the forthcoming book Heat (about Babbo chef Mario Batali), turned down the chance to replace William Grimes as the paper's man about flan.

Internet rumors had him pegged as the final choice for the job, which was vacated Dec. 31 when Mr. Grimes wrote his last column, about Tom Valenti's Upper West Side restaurant Cesca.

Mr. Grimes had been The Times ' restaurant critic for five years, and he said of his exit: "As a critic, you've got so many meals in you."

Mr. Buford is currently taking an extended break from working for The New Yorker to complete his book, and a New Yorker spokesperson said of his return: "Bill is a staff writer, and we look forward to seeing him back in the magazine soon."

One source said novelist Julian Barnes, British former television critic and award-winning novelist ( Flaubert's Parrot ), has likewise passed on an offer from The Times .

But The Times hasn't been entirely spurned in its literary aspirations for its next food critic. Rumors aside, sources tell Off the Record that Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney-who's become an accomplished wine writer with his column at Condé Nast's House and Garden is still in the running.

His talks with The Times , however, are continuing.

Mr. McInerney and Mr. Barnes could not be reached at press time; Times executive editor Bill Keller declined to comment on the search.

"You're flattered anytime somebody likes your work," Mr. Wise said about the e-mail from Mr. Garcia-Ruiz. "But when it comes from The Washington Post , it definitely makes you take a second look."

Mr. Wise took more than a second look. Within three weeks, he had met with Mr. Garcia-Ruiz and others at The Post and signed a sweetheart deal: He'd be writing a twice-a-week column, plus long features, for a salary bump. It didn't hurt matters that Mr. Wise recently got engaged to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

In jumping to The Post , Mr. Wise, who is 40, becomes the third young high-profile reporter to leave The Times ' sports section in less than a year, joining Buster Olney, who left for the wilds of ESPN: The Magazine , and Mike Freeman, whose tenure as a columnist at The Indianapolis Star ended before it began when it was disclosed that he'd lied on his application about having graduated from the University of Delaware. (Mr. Freeman did in fact attend the school for four years and never claimed alumnus status while working for The Times .) Mr. Olney toiled as the country's signature baseball-beat writer during the Yankees' late-1990's championship run, and later covered the New York Giants. Mr. Freeman, meanwhile, had recently helped oomph up the section's profile, with pieces on college-recruiting parties and possible academic violations at Ohio State. Mr. Amdur recruited Mr. Olney, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Wise in the 1990's as he built the section from a black-and-white afterthought to a splashy stand-alone section.

And while all three left for different reasons, their departures expose fault lines in the foundation of a section still seen as significant in growing the paper's national reach. Like the Montreal Expos, the paper now finds itself dealing with the unfamiliar scenario of having bred and raised talent, only to see its homegrown stars seek more lucrative or more high-personal-profile posts.

What's more, the department's subtractions make it unmistakably clear that opportunities now exist for sportswriters to transform themselves into more than just breakfast-table reads, becoming high-priced, marketable stars across a variety of platforms. That is, if they don't work for The Times .

"In the mid-1990's, Neil Amdur basically brought in some really talented young people who all did very well and made names for themselves and became quite marketable," said Times columnist Harvey Araton. Referring to Messrs. Freeman and Wise, he said, "Their ages make them quite attractive to other major sections across the country, who maybe are more willing to pay people in sports than maybe The Times would pay. It's a reflection of a full column lineup and nowhere really to go. You run into a wall where people ahead of them are not going anywhere right now."

Indeed, Mr. Araton himself currently stands at the head of a line of columnists more immovable than Fordham's famed five blocks of granite. In addition to him and sportswriting dean Dave Anderson, the paper fields George Vecsey, William Rhoden and Ira Berkow. Former tennis-beat writer Selena Roberts used a considerable offer from ESPN to win a column post one and a half years ago. And, more recently, Murray Chass returned from an extended medical leave to pen a regular baseball column. Before making his ill-fated move to Indianapolis, sources said that Mr. Freeman-who had turned down a column offer from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March 2002-grew frustrated after being reassured that his time as a regular Times columnist would come sooner rather than later.

"Everyone can't be a columnist," said Times sports editor Tom Jolly. "We have a great group of columnists now. I think anyone who writes enterprise kinds of stories has the opportunity to make as much impact as a columnist. They-Mike Wise and Mike Freeman-certainly did some stories that made an impact. But their ambitions were in columns, and it just so happened those opportunities existed on the outside rather than from within."

Mr. Wise, who himself turned down the lead columnist's job at the Chicago Tribune in 2002, said he never demanded a column from The Times , but diplomatically added: "I don't think it would be wise for The Times to ask a Dave Anderson or George Vecsey or Ira Berkow to cut back on their columns so I could be appeased. These are icons in our business, and they should go out how they want. Dave Anderson once ran quotes for me on my first month on the job because I was struggling on deadline. That's the kind of people that work there."

And yet, as iconic as Messrs. Vecsey, Berkow and Anderson remain, their faces remain relatively unknown in a sports landscape where the mugs of the sports columnist from the Dallas Morning News to the Topeka Capital Journal seem to make it onto ESPN each night. Indeed, in an age in which newspapers themselves wither under the weight of Internet and cable sports coverage, their sports columnists have become their signature players, yapping continuously and regularly on air about the travesties of the B.C.S. rankings. While Times sportswriters can occasionally make television appearances, rules prohibit them from becoming regular fixtures on shows or signing a deal with a particular network, as The Washington Post 's Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, who host ESPN's Pardon the Interruption , have done. (Mr. Rhoden does appear on occasion on ESPN's Sports Reporters .)

"It seemed like a smart thing to arm myself with," said Mr. Olney, who left The Times last year with a lucrative offer from ESPN after bristling under the last throes of Howell Raines' regime, speaking about television appearances. "As part of a sports empire, I can get on TV five times a week, just because they have so many networks."

Likewise, Mr. Wise said: "On one hand, the whole celebrity cult of journalists is scary and wrong for our business. On the flip side, there's so much ancillary income out there, and how long do I sit back and say, 'One of my peers is able to cash in-why can't I?' I think every person in the business says that to himself at one point."

Asked if The Times would change its policy regarding television appearances, Mr. Jolly said it's "not something we're discussing right now."

"It's a personal choice each individual needs to make," he said. "I respect people who want to become personalities and pursue a television career. I think it's extremely important that we continue to report the news, and that we don't evolve into a completely column-driven sports section. I think we have tremendously smart people. All those people are among the best and brightest in the business and the truth of reporting the news."

What precisely the section will look like going forward will be determined in the coming months, as the Raines era begins to fade from 43rd Street's immediate collective memory. Perhaps no area of the paper felt the so-called Howell doctrine more strongly than sports, where college football became the section's primary focus and Augusta its obsession.

Mr. Wise, for his part, leaves with no hard feelings. The Times may be having trouble holding onto the likes of him these days, but in his view, the state of his soon-to-be-former employer is just fine, thank you. "Anybody that wants to say there's a problem, look at it when Neil got there and look at it now," Mr. Wise said. "I'm very proud of what Neil Amdur did, and proud of what people who followed him continue to do. It will be one of the best sections in the country because of who works there."

"He was a highly stylized character," said Mark Monsky. "To a certain degree, he was a creature of his own making. Jerry Nachman set out to be Jerry Nachman, and he succeeded."

Mr. Monsky, Mr. Nachman's longtime running mate, was speaking on the afternoon of Jan. 20, following the death of his friend from cancer at the age of 57. In an epic career, Mr. Nachman-most recently the vice president and editor in chief of MSNBC-did nearly everything you could do in this business: Writing columns for the New York Post . On-air reporting on radio and television. Running the behind-the-camera operations as WNBC news director and vice president of news for WCBS.

As recounted in New York Post reporter Steve Cuozzo's book, It's Alive: How America's Oldest Newspaper Cheated Death and Why It Matters , on Mr. Nachman's first day as editor, he declared war on the "Klingons" from the rival Daily News .

It was certainly a spirited attack. In his nearly three years in the captain's chair, Mr. Nachman's Post -then owned by Peter Kalikow-tore after stories, exposing sexual abuse at Covenant House and problems with the New York State Regent's Exam. When a subway train ran over a dog in Harlem, the Post nicknamed it "Token."

"We milked it for weeks," said Post reporter Bill Hoffman.

Mr. Nachman's official memorial is slated for Thursday, Jan. 29, at 11:45 a.m. at the Riverside Chapel. But another sendoff of sorts, a "war-story night," is currently being planned for Elaine's.

"Everyone will sit around the campfire and tell Jerry stories," Mr. Monsky said. "That's what'll send him off smiling. He liked nothing better than Jerry stories."

Off the Record can be reached by e-mail at spappu@observer.com.

When, according to Times sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Cohen sat down with members of the bureau, things only got worse. As evidence of the growing mistrust among Times Baghdad staffers, the beleaguered Ms. Sachs pulled out a tape recorder, demanding that the conversation be recorded. (Mr. Cohen declined to comment for this story. Ms. Sachs did not respond to a request for comment.)

Iraq is no longer the problem of either Mr. Cohen or Ms. Sachs. In the weeks that followed, Mr. Cohen was forced from his post as foreign editor, and on Tuesday, Jan. 13, The Times announced that Susan Chira, currently the editorial director of book development, will be his replacement. In March, Mr. Cohen will begin writing a regular column for The Times ' Eliza Doolittle, The International Herald Tribune .

Ms. Sachs, meanwhile, was called back to New York to consult with top editors in December and is currently working on an investigative project. She had held the Baghdad bureau-chief post since October 2003.

But it remains the concern of Times executive editor Bill Keller. In recent weeks, Mr. Keller has dispatched editor Jack Cushman from Washington to look over things in Baghdad temporarily, as Times sources contacted by Off the Record questioned whether internal backbiting and ego-driven arguments have hampered The Times ' reporting on the most important story in the world-a story The Times should have owned.

One Times source described the situation at the Baghdad bureau as its own "war" with "major turf and ego battles, swaggering and big-footing by some and plenty of pouting, thrown elbows and bureaucratic jujitsu in return."

"This is a huge problem we have to get hold of. This is a big story," another source said, referring to Iraq. "This is huge. I've never seen it like this where we [have] operational problems of this magnitude while we try and get on top of the story itself."

Perhaps just as significant, Baghdad represents the first big internal test of Mr. Keller's tenure. While Mr. Keller's predecessor, Howell Raines, at points seemed to relish the idea of Times men clawing and poking each other's eyes out as a way of encouraging a "performance culture," Mr. Keller rode in on a wave of good feeling. Mr. Raines' star system-cf. Bragg, Rick-and the problems that came with it was to be dismantled. A kinder, more team-oriented Times would equal a better paper.

Speaking to Off the Record on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 13, Mr. Keller said: "I'm not going to comment on the internal dynamics of the bureau, except to say you shouldn't melodramatize what's gone on there.

"The bureau had some rough spots," Mr. Keller said. "And I think we've got them sorted out."

Mr. Keller did say that the bureau-chief title is "on hold."

"We're going to try the idea of having an editor on the premises and see how that works," Mr. Keller explained. "This bureau is an amazingly complicated management job. There are dozens of local employees who maintain and drive the cars, translate, provide security. At a given time there are four or five and often six or seven correspondents deployed in different parts of the country.

"All of this is going on in a dangerous place that seems to be getting more dangerous for Americans as time passes," Mr. Keller continued. "So we thought we'd try out the idea of an editor there who'll do a lot of the coordinating, keeping track of who's doing what, talking on a regular basis to New York and Washington and just overseeing the kind of running of this large staff and free the correspondents to do their jobs."

Sources within The Times saw the move was meant to ease what had become an untenable situation for Ms. Sachs. According to sources, there were numerous disagreements between Ms. Sachs (who, in addition to her managerial responsibilities, was expected to write and report) and Messrs. Burns and Filkins over a variety of issues. As reported in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 29, Ms. Sachs and Mr. Filkins clashed over his carrying a weapon. According to one Times source, Ms. Sachs was extremely frustrated in dealing with the staff, most of whom were hired before her arrival in Baghdad by Mr. Burns, and who she felt remained loyal to him. (Mr.Burns and Mr. Filkins did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.)

One Times source likened Ms. Sachs' former post to "coaching soccer for 6-year-olds.

"Everyone on the team is going for the ball," the source said.

The presence of such strong personalities would be hard in any situation, but was exacerbated by the bureau's tight quarters and undesirable location. Call it Real World: Baghdad . Put a bunch of reporters together to live and work together and see what happens when they stop being polite and start being real. Houses used by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ( The Post has a pool and a garden) are nicer than those used by The Times , where often four or five reporters live in the bureau with no locks and no privacy, while sharing one bathroom. One Times source said the conditions were reminiscent of the John Landis masterpiece Animal House . And, around Baghdad, the bureau has been nicknamed "The Jail," because of its tall wire fence.

This, said sources, only adds pressure to what Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran said was "unlike any other bureau-chief role anywhere else in the world."

"In addition to having cover the most important foreign story of our time," Mr. Chandrasekaran said, "the job involves dealing with security issues and logistical matters that's different than any operation we have in the world. It's not pure journalism. It's security. It's dealing with the American bureaucracy in Iraq. It's dealing with the local government. The Bush administration. The military. You're working 18-hour days. It's a hell of a lot of work to ask of someone to do."

Recently, Mr. Keller instated a weekly conference call between New York and the Times bureaus in Washington and Baghdad to "talk about ways in which everyone can collaborate."

"We just felt the need to know what everyone else was doing and what everyone else was planning to do so we could plug in stuff from Washington to things the bureau picks up in Baghdad, plug in things to what we're hearing from the military on the ground to what we're hearing from the Pentagon."

Before his turn as managing editor under Joe Lelyveld, Mr. Keller served as the paper's foreign editor and Johannesburg bureau chief. During his tenure as Moscow bureau chief he won his Pulitzer Prize.

The importance of the Iraq bureau to him-and to The Times -can't be understated. It's The Times franchise story. It's the kind of story that is supposed to show why the paper exists, and to cement its place as the most important institution of journalism in the world. Yes, it's swell that The Times can tell you which Nation of Islam financial adviser is whispering in Michael Jackson's ear. But that's dessert. Iraq and what goes on there is the meal.

"We want the bureau to keep us ahead on the story," Mr. Keller said. "That's its mandate. And they know it."

But, even according to several sources within The Times , concern has grown over what's seen as The Washington Post 's superior reportage from the region. While The Times has had its share of advances, it's been The Post -with Mr. Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid-that has better answered the larger questions surrounding the occupation. Who are the factions we're negotiating with? What are the Sunnis up to as a political force? Can the political steps taken so far win support among them?

Asked about the Post coverage, Mr. Keller said: "I certainly can't deny that I admire a lot of the work" the paper had done.

"I think The Post has done an excellent job and they've got two fine correspondents on the ground who have the virtue of having been there almost continuously since the war," Mr. Keller said. "And they also have done a really remarkable job-Bart Gellman in part-on the W.M.D. question. I think that last story he did caused everyone who competes with him a serious case of indigestion followed by admiration.

"We haven't thrown in the towel on that and will try and find ways to get ahead on that aspect of the story."

Still, not unexpectedly, Mr. Keller stood up for his troops, citing, among other stories, its coverage of the lack of American security surrounding weapons depots that helped armed the insurgency.

"I feel pretty proud of the bureau," Mr. Keller said. "I think it's done exemplary work against a lot of stiff competition and under conditions of stiff personal peril."

From now until the end of the Presidential campaign, Philip Gourevitch, best known for his superb dispatches from Rwanda in the mid-1990's, will write The New Yorker 's "Letter From Washington."

But hold on, Matt Labash! Before you plan a year of nonstop partying at the Palm with Mr. Gourevitch, you should know that he won't be writing from Washington. The New Yorker staff writer plans to keep Brooklyn as his home base, while traveling wherever the '04 campaign takes him.

"This is a Washington beat that's not happening in Washington this year at all," Mr. Gourevitch said. "I just got married. I want to stay living at home and Brooklyn is where I will be going to the airport from. I'll be going to the airport tomorrow to get to New Hampshire and Iowa and won't be back for a couple of weeks. I imagine I'll spend some time in Texas and wherever the campaign takes me. Where I'll be is pretty much on the road."

Mr. Gourevitch's move fills the vacancy left when Nicholas Lemann took the deanship of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism last year, and an attempt to lure James Bennett from The New York Times to replace him was aborted. (Mr. Lemann wrote from Westchester, and didn't need a Presidential campaign as an excuse!)

And while he's never done time sucking down lukewarm coffee and crullers on a Gephardt campaign bus, New Yorker editor David Remnick said Mr. Gourevitch's foreign experience is what's needed to cover Decision 2004.

"Unlike 1992, when the campaign focused on 'it's the economy stupid' and other domestic affairs, it's pretty clear that this one will center around issues of America's place in the world, the war in Iraq and national security," Mr. Remnick said. "Philip is one of the most rigorous reporters and thinkers around, as his book on Rwanda makes clear. He has a fine mind and is a real writer, an important writer. I can't wait to read him on the Presidential race."

And now for an Off the Record special N.B.A. scouting report:

On Jan. 8, Time Inc. editorial director John Huey was one of many turned away from the Knickerbocker Club. Mr. Huey had made the mistake of wearing a turtleneck to a book party being held there for Fools Rush In , Vanity Fair contributing editor Nina Munk's tome on the AOL–Time Warner merger, eliminating the prospect of borrowing a house tie to bring his outfit up to code.

So he did what any red-blooded, house-band guy with a screw-the-man spirit would have done: He headed to Madison Square Garden with CNN anchor Bill Hemmer to see Brooklyn high-school hero Stephon Marbury's home debut with the Knicks.

Alas, there, too, he ran afoul of local convention, showing more interest in the visiting team than the return of New York basketball's prodigal son.

"We were there to see Yao Ming," Mr. Huey said, referring to the Houston Rockets center.

Sitting behind Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Messrs. Huey and Hemmer got to see the 7-foot-6 Ming score 15 points in an 111-79 win.

Asked for his professional evaluation of the second-year Chinese big man, Mr. Huey said: "He's tall. That's it."

In the story, reporter Sharon Waxman quoted an unnamed source claiming that CBS in effect paid Michael Jackson $1 million for the access that led to an interview on Dec. 28 on 60 Minutes with Ed Bradley. The story, which suggested that a sacred separation between the CBS Entertainment division in Los Angeles and CBS News in New York-one of the last remaining bastions in the electronic media-had been breached, sparked a war between the two powerful news kingdoms. In the press, The Times stands by its story, continues to pursue the story and is proud of the story that raised questions of "checkbook journalism" at CBS, and of a kind of cultural acid rain at the network in which lack of integrity falls equally on the news, newsmagazine and entertainment divisions.

Meanwhile, CBS executives accuse The New York Times of shoddy reporting. And in recent days, back channels running between The Times ' West 43rd Street newsroom and CBS's West 57th Street headquarters have carried a heated exchange-including private phone calls between the editors of The Times and CBS News executives-that is only escalating. After days of wrestling in the Michael Jackson tabloid compost pile, the two sides remain defiant. The Times loves its story. And CBS has come no closer to presenting a coherent narrative of how the network got that interview, except to say that there was no payment.

Mr. Erlanger stood by Ms. Waxman, the Times reporter on the Michael Jackson beat. Likewise, CBS News has stuck to its guns, launching its own fusillade of denials and counterattacks at The Times , primarily to defend the good name of Ed Bradley, who, The Times article implied, actually promised Mr. Jackson remuneration for his appearance.

Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes , told The Observer that CBS chief Leslie Moonves had called him personally to tell him that The Times ' claims were without merit.

"He said no money changed hands," said Mr. Hewitt. "No money was paid to the Michael Jackson people to appear on 60 Minutes ."

Did Mr. Hewitt believe Mr. Moonves?

"Yes, I believe him," he said. "I have no reason to believe that that isn't the exact truth. I don't believe he would have told me if it wasn't true."

Mr. Hewitt was therefore adamant that the interview was a perfectly legitimate journalistic enterprise, unburdened by secret deals made by the CBS leadership or its entertainment division to drive up ratings.

"All I know is that the interview fell in my lap with no strings attached," he said. "I made no concessions and there were no strings attached, and I'm very pleased with the job Ed Bradley did on this story."

Armed with that conviction, Mr. Hewitt blasted The Times in a letter published in part in USA Today on Tuesday, Jan. 6, assailing Ms. Waxman's use of an unnamed source.

"Because we at 60 Minutes do not allow people with axes to grind to make wild, unsubstantiated accusations," Mr. Hewitt wrote, "we assumed all news organizations worth their salt adhered to the same standards."

Aside from his official statement calling the Times story "categorically false," CBS Entertainment executives involved in the Jackson special have also publicly denied the facts in the article.

Mr. Erlanger said that CBS News president Andrew Heyward and Mr. Bradley had both called representatives of The Times to complain about the story.

"They call a lot," Mr. Erlanger said. "Not just about this story. CBS is a serial caller on stories about CBS."

The two news organizations have one thing in common: Mr. Jackson. Although the entertainer is usually fodder for Hollywood trade publications like Variety or the glossy tabloids and gossip columns like Rush and Molloy and Page Six, it's been The Times that's been driving the story this time around, becoming the first place for all things Jacko and legitimizing the story as cultural reporting to the mainstream press, including 60 Minutes .

But on Dec. 31, Ms. Waxman reported that Mr. Jackson had "struck a deal with CBS to be paid in effect an additional $1 million" for an interview with Mr. Bradley that ran on Dec. 28. The money, she reported, was in addition to $5 million paid by CBS Entertainment for a one-hour special that was originally slated for Nov. 26, but was postponed because of the child-molestation allegations. (The special, Number Ones , eventually aired on Jan. 2.) Ms. Waxman reported that an earlier interview scheduled for February of 2003 was canceled because Mr. Jackson demanded payment that CBS wasn't willing to offer, citing confirmation from an unnamed CBS executive. The story further reported that later in the year, CBS held out on airing and paying Mr. Jackson for the show unless he agreed to sit down for an interview with CBS News.

In addition, using anonymous sources, Mr. Waxman detailed an earlier interview attempt by Ed Bradley and 60 Minutes in February 2003, in which Mr. Jackson refused to cooperate unless he was delivered the money previously agreed upon for the special.

"Michael was in his room," Ms. Waxman quoted a business associate of Mr. Jackson as having said. "Ed Bradley had set up. Basically Michael wanted to see the rest of the money. Bradley kept saying, 'Don't worry, we'll take care of it.'"

The story sent shock waves throughout CBS. Was it true? Had the network's most venerable newsmagazine show paid a tabloid celebrity to appear, as part of a bribe sweetened with a special produced by CBS's entertainment division?

Of course, the two shows were connected in one respect: As CBS spokesman Chris Ender made clear in Ms. Waxman's Times article, CBS News gained its leverage to get the Michael Jackson interview through the entertainment division. The one-hour special had been filmed before charges surfaced on Nov. 20 that Mr. Jackson had allegedly molested a young boy. CBS, Mr. Ender told Ms. Waxman for her article, "informed Mr. Jackson's people we couldn't broadcast the special if he didn't address the charges on a CBS news program."

CBS faces more than a publicity problem in the wake of the Jackson interview. Inside the organization the Times article has cast a shadow of doubt about the whole affair.

"Nobody knows what the facts are," said one producer. "I haven't really heard a full accounting in the press on the part of CBS …. I don't believe them yet because I don't think they've fleshed out their explanation."

60 Minutes staffers returning from holiday vacations found a workplace that was a heady mix of confusion, anger and skepticism about the allegations printed in The Times . If they were true, the thinking went, CBS News had lost its independence from the network's entertainment division.

"The hope is that we didn't pay anything because it's a line we've never crossed," said the producer.

In fact not everyone at 60 Minutes is so reluctant to give their side of the story. Michael Radutzky, the producer of the Michael Jackson segment, detailed in an interview what happened at the Jackson estate in February of 2003. He contradicted the claim by an unnamed source in Ms. Waxman's story that Mr. Jackson demanded money from Mr. Bradley in order for the interview to proceed, and that Mr. Bradley tried to assuage the entertainer by promising that the money would be forthcoming.

"Ed Bradley never, ever said anything to anyone suggesting, implying or stating outright that he would take care of Michael Jackson or pay any money for an interview," he said. "Categorically untrue. Did not happen."

"I was there, that's why I know, in the room," he added.

He said Mr. Bradley and the crew arrived at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 8, to set up their equipment, and were met by their contact, Mr. Jackson's lawyer, Mark Geragos, who was and continues to be Mr. Radutzky's central source with the Jackson camp. Mr. Bradley had only one conversation with Mr. Jackson, said Mr. Radutzky, and it was early in the day, before Mr. Jackson would eventually leave them hanging around for 10 hours without an interview.

"Michael Jackson briefly came out and said hello and welcomed us to his house," he said. "He went into a room and spoke very briefly with Ed and Ed told him that he would treat him fairly. And Michael Jackson started talking about a spider bite he had and Ed Bradley said he had had a spider bite, too. That was the extent of the conversation."

Mr. Jackson then bowed and left to go put on makeup, said Mr. Radutzky, and didn't return.

The CBS contingent included CBS Entertainment division executive Jack Sussman, who had drafted the original deal between Mr. Jackson and CBS for the one-hour documentary special. Mr. Sussman and the CBS News staffers waited all day for Mr. Jackson to return. One report said that Mr. Jackson received a phone call from Marlon Brando advising him against the interview, which is why it was eventually called off.

"Nobody ever confirmed that as a fact, but it was among the things being discussed among his people there," said Mr. Radutzky.

While the Times story stated that the 60 Minutes team spent two days waiting for Mr. Jackson to do the interview, a CBS spokesperson said Mr. Bradley left the next day to return to New York, while the producer Mr. Radutzky stayed in Los Angeles for a few more days.

Mr. Radutzky and other producers at 60 Minutes were adamant that their pursuit of the Jackson story was a legitimate journalistic enterprise that took place separately from any entertainment deals that Mr. Jackson may have struck with CBS. He said he'd been trying to obtain a Michael Jackson interview since 2001, when a number of TV producers had been vying for access to create a documentary about Mr. Jackson. Previously, CBS had aired a Nov. 2002 special on Mr. Jackson.

"I've been working on this since before the Bashir interview that he gave," he said, referring to the two-hour documentary, Living with Michael Jackson: A Tonight Special , that Martin Bashir made for ABC. "I was trying to get the interview for 60 Minutes and when I found out that Bashir had done the interview with him, I was surprised. And afterwards, Jackson was very pissed off about the interview and indicated that he wanted to do something with 60 and we went out there to do what we thought was going to be an interview in February."

That interview never happened, but Mr. Radutzky said he spoke with Mr. Jackson's lawyer, Mr. Geragos, "several times" after that to try and re-establish an interview. It was just a few days before Christmas when Mr. Radutzky next received a call from Mr. Geragos-he never heard from any CBS Entertainment executives, he said-that an interview was forthcoming.

It took place on Christmas night.

Was Mr. Sussman, the CBS Entertainment division executive, there at the second interview as well?

"I believe he was there for the second one," said Mr. Radutzky, but he maintained that he never had a conversation with Mr. Sussman or any other entertainment official that involved money. "All I know is I never talked about money with the Jackson camp," he said. "I didn't talk to the entertainment people about what they had on the table. All I did was pursue my story as a 60 Minutes producer."

Asked about Mr. Sussman's role in the interview, Mr. Hewitt said Mr. Sussman did not interact with his news crew. "At no time did he open his mouth," he said. "He was there but he never volunteered anything or asked a question or said anything."

The presence of a mysteriously silent CBS Entertainment executive on the set of a news show may seem odd, even confusing. And the news division's spare, official rebuttal of the Times piece does little to settle the question.

"For the record," a CBS press release said, "CBS News does not pay for interviews and did not pay Michael Jackson or anyone connected to him for this interview, directly or indirectly."

But spokespersons for CBS and for Mr. Sussman have yet to answer detailed questions about the deal, or describe how it came to be. And if the special helmed by Mr. Sussman had nothing whatsoever to do with the interview for 60 Minutes , why was Mr. Sussman present on the set for Mr. Bradley's interview?

CBS Entertainment spokesman Mr. Ender told The Observer that Mr. Sussman "was there as a CBS representative who has had a long-standing relationship with Michael Jackson and his representatives. He had no editorial role, input or involvement in the interview process whatsoever."

But what about CBS Entertainment? Could Mr. Sussman have arranged a sweeter deal for the one-hour special in order to secure the 60 Minutes interview? Mr. Sussman has said no, but provided no description of how the booking actually took place. And without a look at the contract between the entertainment division and Mr. Jackson it's hard to say whether some other arrangement between CBS Entertainment and Mr. Jackson's representatives might have "in effect" paid Mr. Jackson to appear on the CBS News program.

That confusion, said The Times ' Mr. Erlanger, was part of the story.

"To me this is one of those stories where news and show business gets confused," he said, "where the lines get blurred and that's what's interesting to me about it."

And, what's more, the sharpness and speed of the paper's reporting effort has spotlighted new priorities at the culture section under Mr. Erlanger. While The Times is no stranger to breaking entertainment news-television reporter Bill Carter broke the negotiations between ABC and David Letterman in 2002-devoting that kind of reporting focus to celebrity scandal is still pretty new; it's generally been saved for the business pages, rationalizing it as business reporting, while the paper's culture pages covered SUNY academics and chronicled internal strife at Lincoln Center.

"This is one that falls between spaces," Mr. Erlanger said. "In general, this is the kind of story I want Arts to cover. It's certainly not a police blotter story per se." Michael Jackson, he said, "is first and foremost an artist. He has a significant reputation and following. He is an important figure to big companies. And there's interest.

"You could say Britney Spears ought to be a business story, but I think the bias of coverage of Michael Jackson ought to be an arts story."

For Mr. Erlanger that has meant it's been a Sharon Waxman story. A longtime Washington Post staffer who did roughly eight years covering the Hollywood beat, Ms. Waxman was tapped as former Hollywood correspondent Rick Lyman's replacement in October 2003 after what was an extended and exhaustive search.

"She's a very welcome hire," Mr. Erlanger said. "As you know, we'd been working to fill that job for quite some time. We were eager to get an aggressive reporter who knew the landscape and had a reputation for being hard but straight."

The first of her stories on Michael Jackson plopped on page A-1 on Dec. 30. In a piece entitled "Dispute in Michael Jackson Camp Over Role of the Nation of Islam," Ms. Waxman asserted that "officials from the Nation of Islam, a separatist African-American Muslim group, have moved in with Michael Jackson and are asserting control over the singer's business affairs," citing sources among the entertainer's friends, employees and business associates. The story was denied by both official representatives of Mr. Jackson and The Final Call , the Nation of Islam's newspaper.

"It was an accurate story," Mr. Erlanger said. "It also fleshed out and made clear in a concrete fashion what had been rumored but unsubstantiated."

For her part, Ms. Waxman said that her later article, on Mr. Jackson's arrangement to appear on 60 Minutes , was accurate and used multiple sources. She said that subsequent reporting had only affirmed up her faith.

"I feel very solid on that story," she said. "All the reporting I've done since the story's been published has reinforced my reporting originally. I haven't come across any information in my reporting that's led me to believe the story's incorrect apart from the official denials."

Though Ms. Waxman spoke to executives from CBS, including Mr. Sussman, she did not receive any comment from 60 Minutes itself.

"I asked to speak to Ed Bradley," Ms. Waxman said. "I was told Ed Bradley was on vacation, and even if he was not on vacation he would not be available to be interviewed. I asked to speak to Ed Bradley's producer. I was told that he was on vacation and even if he was not he would not be available for an interview. I asked to speak to Don Hewitt. I asked to speak to anyone from 60 Minutes . I was told no one would be available for the story."

And The New York Times is not ready to stop reporting the story. "I'd like to further explore the themes I've identified," said Mr. Erlanger. "I certainly want more information: a copy of the contract. It's a very rich theme in today's United States if that doesn't sound too awful. In companies with a variety of interests it's sometimes hard to separate interests and responsibilities. Even if you think you've done a good job of separating, it's not always clear to people you want to interview, or promote or sell records for. It's a complicated topic that every big media company, including this one, has to deal with."

They saw the top editors of the most important news organization in the world undone by hubris and the lame fabrications of an ambitious young reporter. They saw magazine executives under oath in a celebrity trial copping to fraudulent circulation figures. And what's this? A onetime "It" girl turned tabloid matron says nuthin' while one of her publications runs the name and photo of a woman alleging rape.

But it was a moment-even if it was the moment that made 2003 one of the business' only serious occasions for introspection in years. By December, those clubhouse doors were slammed shut again. While Jayson Blair made us question our integrity as news organizations in summer, by fall we barely blinked at a lengthy editor's note about Los Angeles reporter Charlie LeDuff's account of his Los Angeles River adventure-and its debt to a book by Blake Gumprecht published four years before.

Perhaps it's all best summed up thusly: A year that began for newspapers with preparation for war in Iraq ended with a war over the soul of New York magazine-waged in true Trollopean fashion largely at cocktail parties and over lunch at Michael's, but won in whispered weekend conferences at a frequency inaudible to Manhattan's media-obsessed masses, who dropped their Merlot en masse over a recent Tuesday lunch hour when word spread of billionaire Bruce Wasserstein's coup.

There were losses: former Atlantic Monthly editor Michael Kelly in Iraq. Paris Review editor George Plimpton in New York. Wall Street Journal Hollywood reporter Tom King and GQ editor Art Cooper. The weight of their absence can't be measured by any instrument we here at Off the Record, in a year-end roundup, possess. It's perhaps embarrassing in the shadow of their departures to find ourselves on the cusp of 2004, still watching while the media-or the people at the media's center-continue to pry and claw at each other with the ferocity of unfed dogs.

But that's the spirit of neurotic introspection laced with attention to absurd spectacle that keeps you coming back. And it's in that spirit that we unapologetically bring you the 2003 Year in Media Awards, otherwise known as the "Pappu-litzers" ( pace all you folks at Columbia University's journalism school and Dean Nicholas Lemann).

A note to the winners: The $5,000 we asked from our big-cheese editor to give an awards luncheon at the Subway sandwich shop on Lexington Avenue and 57th Street got lost in the mailroom. In 2004, we'll make up for it with some pear salad and sole and maybe a handful of those little cookies.

Best endorsement of an autobiographical hip-hop movie: Howell Raines, former executive editor, The New York Times . About Eminem's 8 Mile , he said in an interview about The Times ' cultural coverage in January: "Marshall Mathers has a presence that's quite interesting. And I liked the depiction of urban working-class life, which is something I know a great deal about, having grown up in a grim industrial city. And I liked the performance aspects. And in particular, though it was hokey, I liked the dramatic climax."

Best use of Photoshop: The New York Post . Only those mischievous Murdochians could so-subtly, was it?-morph the heads of U.N. representatives of France and Germany into weasels.

Worst use of Photoshop: The New York Post , for its Sept. 11, 2003, wood. Only the Post could so tackily turn the Twin Towers into a pair of burning candles à la Gerhard Richter on the anniversary of this city's greatest tragedy.

Worst trend to come out of Gulf War II: Movie critics as war correspondents. When the Post dispatched Jonathan Foreman to the front, it put too many ideas into the heads of too many idle editors. We're readying Rex Reed's flak jacket for North Korea as we speak.

Best military-strategic use of an embedded reporter: The Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (M.E.T. Alpha). When the team charged with hunting down weapons of mass destruction allowed The Times ' Judith Miller to write on its interrogation of a supposed Iraqi scientist with knowledge of the country's illicit weapons program, it laid down some, shall we say, unconventional conditions:

"Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of M.E.T. Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home," Ms. Miller wrote on April 21. "Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

"Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted," Ms. Miller continued. "They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked."

Worst new job: Editor in chief, the Star . Hey, Joe Dolce, that albatross round your neck is Bonnie Fuller.

Worst use of an editor's column to rail against George W.: Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair . Having vanquished the Bush administration on Iraq, in the September issue, Mr. Carter moves the fight into the fiscal field of battle-attacking the budget deficits run up by George W. and his father: "Never let it be said that the son hasn't lived up to the accomplishments of the father." Dude, can you just introduce the Annie Liebowitz spread and be done with it?

Best use of an editor's column to rail against George W.: Ruth Reichl, Gourmet . Just substitute "Iraq" for "pie" and "Saddam Hussein" for "Serrano ham." It's fun.

Best display of genitalia, newspaper: The New York Post. On Feb. 8, the paper ran a story headlined "Nutty Nudes Protest War," about a group of naked people who registered their displeasure with the Iraq buildup by spelling out "No Bush" while lying in the snow in front of Central Park's Bethesda Fountain on Feb. 7. Though it was a long-distance shot, there was no missing the shrubbery.

Worst display of genitalia, newspaper: The Daily News , which chose to vague up the scenery through photo manipulation.

Biggest narc, non– New York Times scandal category: Whichever Vanity Fair employee called the nicotine police about the smoking that's been going on there.

Best recycled trend: The New Republic getting conservative-again.

"I read the magazine because it's full of trenchant critiques of the Bush domestic policy," said Hendrik Hertzberg, TNR 's editor from 1981 to 1985 and 1988 to 1991. "When I see a piece saying 'Nancy Pelosi is a Stalinist,' I just skip it.

"The old 'Even The New Republic … ' scam was getting a little old in the 1980's," Mr. Hertzberg continued. "Now it's a quarter of a century old."

Best fact-checking discovery: People . When the magazine published an excerpt from the memoir of its West Coast style editor (and Today regular) Steven Cojocaru, People 's fact-checking department busted Mr. Cojocaru for lying about his age.

When, according to sources, Mr. Cojocaru discovered that the magazine planned to run his real age, he called to beg for mercy. Alas, People managing editor Martha Nelson stood by her staff and let the magazine print Mr. Cojocaru's real age-40, not 36.

"I'm going to do a Joan Collins on you and say, 'No comment,'" Mr. Cojocaru told Off the Record. "It's ludicrous-I'm 23!"

Best use of a wedding reception as a cocktail party for the city's political elite: Howell Raines and Krystyna Anna Stachowiak, whose pre-Jaysongate "regrets only" bash at the Bryant Park hotel included Senator Charles Schumer, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and CBS anchor Dan Rather, as well as PBS interviewer Charlie Rose.

"I'm a sucker for love," said Mr. Rose.

Best suck-up to new employer: Allen Barra. Brought in by Howell Raines earlier this year, Mr. Barra grew up and went to college in Birmingham, Ala., where he worshipped Times executive editor Howell Raines' early career.

"Everyone wanted to be him," Mr. Barra said of Mr. Raines. "He was so cool."

Quietest exit: Allen Barra, who left The Times shortly after Mr. Raines' dismissal by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Saddest exit: Come back to us, Mr. Big!

Best use of stealth for political commentary: The Wall Street Journal 's "Personal Journal" section. On March 5, the advertiser-friendly service section of the paper ran a map assessing the risk for traveling abroad. While later editions of the paper ranked France as "No more dangerous than any other Western country," readers of the first edition were treated to a slightly more snide remark. "France," the copy read: "Sure, as long as you don't mind French whine."

Best mystery: Who left the "object that might possibly be an animal part" on the 18th floor of the Condé Nast building?

Least surprising magazine closure: Penthouse spawn and Spin founder Bob Guccione Jr.'s shuttering of Gear .

Best reporting on distant locale from Brooklyn: Tad Friend, The New Yorker. Despite getting the gig to pen the magazine's "Letter from California," the former Mr. Latte has maintained his 718 area code. We really felt like we were there, Tad!

Worst reporting on distant locale from Brooklyn: Jayson Blair. He might have gotten away with it if he had just put a coal mine instead of a tobacco field in the front of Pvt. Jessica Lynch's West Virginia home.

Best revenge, ex-employee: Led by former Times national editor Dean Baquet, the Los Angeles Times won three Pulitzers, the most in its history. The haul included a Pulitzer for national reporting, recognizing the work of former Times Atlanta bureau chief Kevin Sack, who left the fold when the paper refused to let him continue to report from Atlanta.

Worst use of a stuffed animal to win back the affection of your staff: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. When the Times publisher brought a stuffed moose onstage at the May 14 post-Jayson town-hall meeting, the place was up for grabs.

Worst post-disgrace gaffe: Jayson Blair. He had a point, but someone should have told him that down on 43rd Street, they were looking for a bit of contrition.

"I don't understand why I am the bumbling affirmative-action hire when Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective-and I know I shouldn't be saying this-I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism," Mr. Blair said. "He [Glass] is so brilliant, and yet somehow I'm an affirmative-action hire. They're all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them. If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?"

Then again, he already has a book deal and may yet have a movie deal.

Worst post-disgrace backfire: Howell Raines, who dished about the complacent culture of his former staff on Charlie Rose three days before Bill Keller's ascension to the executive-editor post at The Times . It was like a big backhanded hug for the new boss.

Best escape: Bonnie Fuller. After never signing her seven-figure, three-year contract with Jann Wenner, the queen of photo captions and fashion tidbits took her late deadlines and cost overruns to David Pecker's American Media.

Worst career move: Having scorched the good feelings at Condé Nast, Hearst and Wenner, and now inextricably linked with the tabloid antics of the National Enquirer and the Globe, one wonders if any glossy will ever open its doors to Ms. Fuller again.

Best use of money to exact personal vengeance: Soon after Ms. Fuller bolted, His Jann-ness canceled his company's distribution deal with Mr. Pecker.

Best use of little people to get yourself kicked out of a job: Greg Gutfeld. When the former editor in chief of Stuff sent three little people to disrupt an ASME panel that included Maxim editor in chief Keith Blanchard, Dennis executives put him where he couldn't do more damage, or where his antics might be more appreciated-in television.

Best sign that God doesn't read the Times editorial page: An Oct. 8 editorial supporting a Red Sox–Cubs World Series.

"With all due respect to our New York readership-Yankee fans among them-to George Steinbrenner and to the Yankees themselves," the editorial read, "we find it hard to resist the emotional tug and symmetrical possibilities of a series between teams that seem to have been put on earth to tantalize and then crush their zealous fans."

Best response to a Times Sunday Styles trend story: Anna Wintour, editor in chief, Vogue . After The Times declared the end of fashion's relevance in a Sept. 14 Sunday Styles piece, Ms. Wintour shot back to an Observer reporter during fashion week: "Rubbish. Total rubbish. The Times is always down on fashion. Always! I don't know why. I love a lot of what I'm seeing in these shows-so much color and femininity. There are wonderful things happening in fashion. The Times should be celebrating it. Just look at the scene here tonight!"

Worst response to a Times trend story: ESPN Radio morning host Mike Greenberg. The man can't stop yapping about his life as a metrosexual. We get it: You like manicures. And you're not gay. Please talk about football.

Worst use of a scandal for self-promotion and profit: The New Republic . TNR not only put its former staffer on its Nov. 10 cover, but for weeks its Web site ran advertisements for Shattered Glass , the Hayden Christensen vehicle, like it was Star Wars .

Media alliance that best resembled the Legion of Doom: Mort Zuckerman's would-have-been, should-have been coalition to buy New York that included Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, Arby's czar Nelson Peltz, advertising wizard Donny Deutsch and media columnist Michael Wolff.

Biggest media-writer nemesis: Bruce Wasserstein. When the Lazard C.E.O. swooped in to take New York for $55 million, he robbed magazine chroniclers who planned on years and years of covering the backbiting between Mr. Zuckerman and pals.

Most missed media figure: Jazzy, the Yorkshire terrier and property of New York Post columnist Cindy Adams. It was a short ride to celebrity on Ms. Adams' coattails (the book deal! the Barneys appearances!), but a sweet one.

Best adieu to 2003: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. In a letter sent out to people receiving the Times 2004 "diary," a traditional year-end digestif , Mr. Sulzberger wrote: "When you consider the hundreds of stories around the globe over the past 12 months that involved war, peace, life and death, all the internal tumult that we had to grapple with at The Times now seems a bit parochial.

"As Bogie told Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: ' It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world .'

"What does amount to a hill of beans," Mr. Sulzberger continued, "is how we hold fast to our sense of humor and the respect and dignity with which we treat ourselves and each other. So we turn the final page of one diary and open the first page of a pristine volume that yearns to be filled. May it overflow with stories of joy, accomplishment and fulfillment, from January through December."

To which Off the Record says: God bless us, every one!

It was the stealth assault of 2003, stealing the march on the noisy parade float of city moguls led by Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, who had placed an all-over-but-the-shouting bid that most analysts expected to be successful.

Late in the afternoon on Dec. 16, Mr. Zuckerman called Mr. Kravis, the co-founder of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, which controls Primedia. Only the day before, Mr. Zuckerman and his team had all been declared as winners by The New York Times in their bid to take over the 35-year-old magazine that had begun as a weekly supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, then was bought and started as an emblem of a revitalized New York of the 1960s and 1970s by its founding editor, Clay Felker.

Now Mr. Zuckerman, who wanted the magazine, and had joined with an all-star team of New York power-including movie studio head Harvey Weinstein, fast-food mogul Nelson Peltz, advertising legend Donny Deutsch and the increasingly disillusioned matchmaker for the whole mob, media columnist Michael Wolff- learned that Primedia had agreed to sell the magazine to leverage buyout king and Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein for $55 million.

When, according to sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Zuckerman offered a higher bid, it was "rebuffed."

A Primedia spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Zuckerman through a spokesman also declined to comment, saying only, "We wish Mr. Wasserstein well."

Thus climaxed one of the more rococo episodes in recent media history, one that New York itself would have delighted in. Since October, when the company first announced the sale of the magazine, it had a barrage of offers, spurring the passion of groups from the Learning Annex to Miramax and Cablevision. Only the Church of Scientology and the Boy Scouts of America seemed to be uninterested, and even that can't really be ascertained.

In more recent days, with the submission of final bids on Dec. 11 one of two candidates seemed poised to win: former Hachette Filipacchi CEO David Pecker's tabloid empire, American Media, owner of the National Star, editorially being reshaped by turnaround diva Bonnie Fuller. And of course, Mr. Zuckerman's giant Al Hirschfeld mural of limited partners that included Bill Clinton cohort Jeffrey Epstein, Arby's czar Mr. Peltz, Miramax co-chairman Mr. Weinstein and ad man Mr. Deutsch.

According to one source familiar with the situation, American Media's bid came in the low-to-mid $40 million range, a bid that matches New York's current annual revenues. The same source said Mr. Zuckerman's bid was around the mid-$40 million area.

"We're very pleased that the sale is complete," said New York's Caroline Miller, the valiant and beleaguered editor in chief who had somehow seen the weekly through the ordeal not only of the sale but of life with Primedia, which never seemed quite sure what to do with it.

"It's been a long, rather dramatic process," she said, "and we're very comfortable we're going to be in great hands. We've met with the Wasserstein people several times. We're delighted. They're very careful. They know what they're buying. They're not just buying the romance of a magazine in 1968. And they're serious about making some investments."

In other words, Ms. Miller and her staff were euphoric. They were thrilled that the magazine was not going to either one group that may have been the strangest team assembled since the X-Men, or another they considered threateningly downmarket. And to an owner who seemed to appreciate the currency of what the current New York staff had done with it, not besotted with the city magazine's past, when it participated in the birth of the New Journalism as well as service journalism.

Ms. Miller said she had met with Mr. Wasserstein twice: the second time coming on Sunday, Dec. 14. Mr. Zuckerman, according to sources, expressed concern about Mr. Wasserstein's bid the evening of Monday, Dec. 15, but remained confident of his group's chances as late as Tuesday morning.

However, the magazine now belongs to Mr. Wasserstein. The brother of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Mr. Wasserstein, 55, a highly-educated financier who attended the University of Michigan, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, Cambridge University, where he was Knox Fellow. He was known in the business press as "Bid 'em up Bruce" for persuading clients to spend high on acquisitions, first did time at First Boston Corp. from 1977 to 1988, before founding the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perella with Joseph Perella. While currently C.E.O. of Lazard, Mr. Wasserstein remains the head of Wasserstein and Co., the private equity fund that controls American Lawyer Media, which publishes the American Lawyer and the National Law Journal.His firm also controls The Daily Deal, and Real Estate Media, which includes a number of real estate trade publications.

"It's a great brand," a spokesman for Mr. Wasserstein said. "They see a great future for it. They've shown a great deal of expertise on other publications dealing with so-called `professional New York.' One of the things they're looking for from New York magazine is to take it upscale and maybe expand business coverage, and, for example more coverage of the fashion industry. They've been involved with the process from very beginning," the spokesman continued. "They took a very low profile as way of operating and it served them well."

But Mr. Wasserstein, still C.E.O. of Lazard-and questions have arisen about the conflicts that his position there as well as the owner of a journalistically aggressive publication will add up to-has paid a lot of money for a magazine that will take a great deal more in reinvestment to restore to a profitable position in the media.

"It's really weird," said one private equity investor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I don't understand why he's doing it. This may be an interesting hobby, but it's not an investment. There is some economic value to the magazine. This is a real entity. But in order to justify $55 million, you have to have cash flow north of $5 million annually. At the moment, it's $1 to 2 million."

"I think one of the things that helped the deal is that a rebound is anticipated, certainly next year," said Reed Phillips, managing partner of the media investment firm DeSilva & Phillips. I think that helped push the price on the deal. They wouldn't have got $55 million if there wasn't a rebound in the future. Another tough year would have reflected in the price. I think the price reflects the optimism."

There's optimism, and there's $55 million worth of optimism-a price, sources indicated, that even Mr. Zuckerman and his group weren't willing to reach until late Tuesday, when it no longer mattered. From the beginning, according to multiple sources, Mr. Zuckerman aggressively sought people he knew were dreamy eyed for New York. According to sources, when he learned that Michael Wolff, the magazine's media columnist had lined up Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Epstein as potential investors, Mr. Zuckerman swooped in, convincing them that if they wanted to do this, they should do it with him.

Mr. Wolff declined to comment and Mr. Epstein did not return a call seeking comment. A spokesman said Mr. Deutsch was unavailable for comment. As did a spokesman for Mr. Weinstein, who had been considered well distanced from the magazine business with the wreckage and closure of Talk in early 2002. While the staff of New York was jubilant over Mr. Zuckerman's failure, the media press missed out on the greatest potential limited partnership collision in New York since George Steinbrenner cames to the Bronx.

"I think the consortium was the weakness," said Mr. Felker, the magazine's founding editor. "I mean, the thing is that it's very difficult to have a consortium run a publication, because the editorial process becomes pulled in many directions.

The thing is that a successful magazine must have one voice behind it, and if you have a strong voice like Wasserstein, then the magazine has a chance to work. And some very powerful people have run very tough publications, and they've had all the legal and financial and social entrée and position that anybody can want: Kaye Graham, Henry Luce and Rupert Murdoch. I mean, the power comes from running honest publications with a point of view."

From Off the Record's special correspondent, Michael M. Thomas:

Some three weeks ago, I sent an e-mail to an acquaintance telling him I was thinking about him and rooting for him. It was the most I could do; it-like the prayers and good wishes of all his friends and fans, like the best modern medicine could do-simply wasn't enough. Bob Bartley died last Wednesday, Dec. 10.

Once upon a time, when a gallant and worthy opponent went down, one doffed one's hat and stood aside and paid tribute to a fight well fought, a race well run.

I should like to do so now. In the 15 years I wrote a column for this newspaper, Robert Bartley (and his column in The Wall Street Journal) was the most fun and the most challenging of my targets of choice.

I first met him back in the old days at the Lehrman Institute, in the early Reagan years, when he played the role of Suslov to the new regime's men of the moment, putting bright words in the mouths of idiots, at least one of whom still operates at the very summit of federal influence. Like many persons of strong theoretical conviction, Bob tended to downplay the corrupting human element in the working-out of grand designs in the real world and in real time, and it was there that we had our differences-symbolized by one name: Michael Milken.

But that means nothing now. Bob was smart, he was committed, he was talented, he was influential-largely for the better, I think-and he was honorable and decent. He will be missed enormously, and I can do no better than dip my ensign to him as the last salute is fired.

To his family and colleagues, I extend condolences and sympathy. In the long goodnight, I wish Bob Godspeed.

-Michael M. Thomas