In recent weeks, the news desk has lost metro reporter Kevin Flynn to The New York Times , White House correspondent Kathy Kiely to USA Today , and metro reporters David Lewis and Lawrence Goodman, who left to pursue other interests. Earlier this summer, the paper lost media columnist Keith Kelly to the New York Post and Washington correspondent Thomas Galvin to a political consulting job. Three reporters-Scott Williams, Whitney Walker and Sallie Han-recently quit the features department. Even the sports desk has taken a hit, losing sports columnist Ian O'Connor, hockey writer Frank Brown and baseball writer Dave Kaplan. (On top of all that, drama critic Fintan O'Toole, who was brought to the News by Ms. Krenek's predecessor, Pete Hamill, is returning to Ireland at the end of September, ending a planned one-year stay at the paper.)

So why is everyone leaving? Interviews with News staff members suggest "a constellation of reasons," in the words of one reporter. Another News staff member gave this blunt assessment: "People are leaving because they feel it's a lousy place to work. They'd rather work someplace else."

"The core is that management is lodged in the cultural mindset of its war with labor, so that they're very, very shy about congratulating people in public because it might hinder their ability to fire people later on," said one staff member.

The staff has not been appeased by the paper's low standard raises, typically between 1 and 2 percent, according to several reporters. "You can't buy an extra box of tampons with these raises," said one newsroom denizen. Reporters say promotions are limited and that editors have even reduced the opportunities for reporters to get some enjoyment out of what they do by writing longer pieces. "There are not a lot of places for people to use their brains," said one reporter.

Tensions between management and the newsroom were recently exacerbated by the paper's evaluation system for reporters. News reporters receive annual numerical grades from their supervising editors and can be put on probation if their grades are low. There is no union at the News and no grievance process in place for reporters who feel their evaluations are unfair, and reporters complain that the grading system is often inconsistent. "Nobody knows how it works," said one reporter. "It's a mystery to all of us. People just generally get low reviews."

In June, several well-respected reporters were put on probation for reasons their colleagues found wanting, and those staff members demanded a meeting with Ms. Krenek and managing editor Arthur Browne. According to newsroom sources, Ms. Krenek said she did not want to meet with a large number of reporters. The meeting, needless to say, has yet to take place.

On a somewhat positive note, Mr. Evans has intimated that he's got changes in store for the newspaper. A redesign is slated for the fall, News sources say, and the Daily News management troika-Mr. Zuckerman, Mr. Evans and co-publisher Fred Drasner-are crossing their fingers that the color production problems at their Jersey City printing plant will be solved by year's end. News reporters, a hopelessly hopeful lot, say they hope Mr. Evans' involvement will boost morale. Neither Mr. Evans, who is on vacation, nor Ms. Krenek returned calls for comment.

The Village Voice 's Press Clips columnist, James Ledbetter, is leaving the weekly after eight and a half years to open a New York bureau for the new media magazine The Industry Standard . Mr. Ledbetter's first hire at his new job is Adam Penenberg, the muckraking Forbes Digital Tool editor who broke the Stephen Glass story; Mr. Penenberg said he will cover hackers and "e-commerce" for the magazine. Mr. Ledbetter, who served as the Off the Record columnist before moving to The Voice , wrote more than 400 Press Clips columns, notably a 1995 two-part series on race in the media headlined "The Unbearable Whiteness of Media," and established himself as the city's most prominent leftist media critic. "Jim did a terrific job for us, and I'm sorry to lose him," said Voice editor in chief Don Forst. "I'd take him back in two seconds." Mr. Forst said he has not chosen Mr. Ledbetter's successor.

"I love The Voice ," said Mr. Ledbetter. "This is an opportunity to cover an important industry and a growing part of the media world that I've only dabbled in." Mr. Ledbetter said he starts his new job after Labor Day.

Y M editor in chief Lesley Jane Seymour may well be the Michael Kinsley of the women's magazine world.

Ms. Seymour was a lead candidate to take over the editorship of Hearst Magazines' Redbook , a post vacated by the move of Kate White to Cosmopolitan . In the days following Ms. White's departure, rumors were even afoot that Ms. Seymour was in the final stages of negotiations for the Redbook job. But alas, no announcement was forthcoming. Here's the rub: According to a source familiar with the discussions, Ms. Seymour may have blown her chances for the Redbook post by engaging in a Hamlet act much like the one Mr. Kinsley performed when S.I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., offered him the editorship of The New Yorker back in July. According to this version of events, Hearst executives grew unhappy with Ms. Seymour's ambivalence, and cooled the talks. Lindsley Lowell, a spokesman for YM , told Off the Record, "As it stands, [Ms. Seymour] is the editor in chief of YM ." A Hearst spokesman would only say, "No one is currently in final negotiations for the Redbook job." We'll have to wait for the e-mail.

Even the editors of magalogs, those bothersome catalogues that are thinly disguised to look like life-style magazines, face perilous editorial decisions. Take the case of A&F Quarterly , the magalog produced by Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothier that once supplied Ernest Hemingway's wardrobe (and the shotgun he used to kill himself) and now sells baggy Gap-style garments to teenagers. The editors of A&F Quarterly -a publication that "aims to chronicle life on campuses in a fun, lighthearted way," according to company literature-recently ran an article called "Drinking 101" that exhibited a Hemingway-esque appreciation of booze. Bad move. The company received a number of angry calls and a condemnation by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, prompting a postcard-sized apologia to readers.

"Since a segment of the student population is over the age of 21, the magazine has included articles that discuss the use of alcohol," the message begins. "Based on a reaction to our recently mailed 'Back to School '98' magazine, it has become clear to us that some of the content appears to some readers to encourage underage drinking or binge drinking … Although it was not meant in a serious vein, we made a mistake in describing a 'drinking game' that could be interpreted as encouraging binge drinking. We regret that this article has given some readers the wrong impression about Abercrombie & Fitch's goals and concerns."

The mailing goes on to say that in the future, A&F Quarterly intends to work with advocacy groups to alert readers to the dangers of alcohol consumption. An Abercrombie & Fitch spokesman said the magazine was put out jointly by the company and its Greenwich Village-based advertising firm, Shahid and Company, and that the postcard was sent out because "'Drinking 101' went over the top."

Lest its customers forget, the postcard reminds them of the magazine's true editorial mission: "The A&F Quarterly is all about making the most of 'Back to School '98.' We want to plug our readers into what's new and what's coming. We don't want to lose anybody to thoughtlessness and stupidity …"

Entertainment Weekly 's experiment with a serious Hollywood business writer has come to an abrupt end. Earlier this year, EW hired ex- Variety film editor and reporter Anita Busch to provide newsy coverage of Hollywood and add some heft to a magazine that devotes more space than it sometimes should to the oeuvre of Aaron Spelling or exclusives like "The Spice Girls Talk About Life After Ginger." Ms. Busch had made her name at The Hollywood Reporter before going to Variety , but she quit Variety in August 1997 to protest what she said was a lack of journalistic integrity on the part of editor Peter Bart, whom she accused of softening stories so as not to offend his pals. Ms. Busch was eventually hired on at EW by managing editor Jim Seymore, and given the magazine's Reel World column, covering the movie industry. However, a source familiar with EW 's dealings with Ms. Busch told Off the Record that the reporter's New York editors, Mark Harris and Maggie Murphy, seemed little interested in the business coverage Ms. Busch was hired to supply. When they pressured her to turn out the kind of puffy copy EW is known for, Ms. Busch resigned.

"It was pretty cordial," Ms. Busch told Off the Record. "It just wasn't a very good fit for me. I come from a breaking news background." Mr. Seymore said that he could not discuss personnel matters.

According to Ms. Goldberg, she and Mr. Isikoff fell out over an Aug. 10 Newsweek article entitled "Lewinsky vs. Clinton," which Ms. Goldberg says portrayed her and her friend and client, Linda Tripp, in an unflattering light. "He made Linda and I out like the two witches of Macbeth , sort of plotting and scheming, which I didn't like," Ms. Goldberg said. (She didn't say what happened to the third witch.) "I didn't like the way they interviewed Linda," she said. "His magazine just has to be a little bit more fair when they deal with truth-tellers."

The falling-out could not have come at a worse time for Mr. Isikoff. It was back in October 1997 that Ms. Goldberg invited Mr. Isikoff to the Washington home of her son Jonah to hear Ms. Tripp's allegations against the President, a fateful meeting that helped expand the scandal to its current dimensions. Since then, Ms. Goldberg has been dispensing bits of information to favored reporters the way a zookeeper flips fish to seals. As the scandal rushes toward what may be its calamitous finale, Ms. Goldberg could be a conduit to the mother lode of scoops: Ms. Tripp's tape recordings of her phone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky.

So when Mr. Isikoff learned that Ms. Goldberg was angry, he tried to make nice. According to Ms. Goldberg, in the days after she recorded her answering machine message, Mr. Isikoff called repeatedly, asking for her forgiveness and arguing that in TV appearances he'd given Ms. Goldberg's side of the story. Still, the agent could not be appeased.

"I said, 'I'll let you grovel, but if you'll hold on a minute, I want to get this on tape because it'll be a collectors item,'" Ms. Goldberg told Off the Record. "So I put a tape in and he said, 'Fine, tape me groveling, I don't mind.' And he groveled some more. And he groveled and groveled . And I let him grovel."

Mr. Isikoff characterized the conversations somewhat differently.

"I did not retract anything or correct anything," he said. "What I apologized for was that, given that she was quoted in the article, I probably could have given her a better heads-up on what was said. The article is accurate, and we have no regrets about the article."

Answering machine warfare is nothing new for Ms. Goldberg. After receiving calls from an aggressive CNN producer in January, she recorded a message that told CNN reporters: "Lose my number." That one got played by Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News . "[Matt] Drudge has a Web site and I have an answering machine," Ms. Goldberg said.

Mr. Isikoff's groveling seems to have placed him back in Ms. Goldberg's good graces. The literary agent praised Mr. Isikoff, both as a reporter and as a physical specimen. "I find him small and perfectly formed," Ms. Goldberg said, before going on to laud Mr. Isikoff's reporting on the Lewinsky story. "Mike never gave up, and he deserves high praise."

"If I didn't like him so much personally, I simply wouldn't speak to him again," she added. "But he's a very interesting young man, and he deserves to live."

-William Berlind

When Charles Gibson took his seat in the anchor's chair on the set of ABC's World News Tonight the evening of Aug. 6, everything was going fine. The producer cued the bombastic musical intro, the cameras rolled, and Mr. Gibson, filling in for Peter Jennings, started delivering the 6:30 news. But then, about halfway into the live newscast, he was interrupted by a chorus of shrieking alarms and flashing strobe lights. Mr. Gibson calmly informed viewers that there was a fire in the building and cut to a taped news report as technicians figured out a way to shut off the alarm. Soon, smoke began to fill the hallways outside World News Tonight 's third-floor studio, and employees on the fourth and fifth floors were ordered to evacuate. Not long after that, the building was overrun by New York City firemen.

According to one ABC News producer, the fire originated in a wastebasket in the office of correspondent Bill Redeker, who is known to flaunt the office no-smoking policy regularly. "Everyone assumes it was a cigarette in the wastebasket," said another ABC source.

ABC News spokesman Eileen Murphy said the network had no plans to change the building's alarm system so that it would not interfere with live newscasts. "The reason we have a fire alarm is to alert people of a fire," she said. "I don't think that will be reconfigured." Ms. Murphy added that a memo had been circulated to the staff "to remind them of the company policy and city policy against smoking in the office." Mr. Redeker did not return calls for comment.

Advance Publications chairman S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr. is trying to make amends with outgoing Glamour editor Ruth Whitney, despite Ms. Whitney's harsh public criticisms of Mr. Newhouse's pick to succeed her, former Cosmopolitan editor Bonnie Fuller. After her forced exit was announced on Aug. 10, Ms. Whitney told the New York Post , "I'm very disappointed with the replacement" and complained to Newsweek that she feared Ms. Fuller would cheapen her magazine. Then Ms. Whitney declined to accompany Mr. Newhouse when he addressed anxious Glamour staff members a day after the announcement.

But 30 years at Condé Nast's most profitable magazine has earned Ms. Whitney a certain amount of deference from her superiors even as they shuffle her out the door. (In a rare moment of candor, Condé Nast president Steve Florio last year told The New York Times , "Without Glamour , I don't even want to think about what the bottom line of this company would look like.") A source at Glamour reports that Mr. Newhouse recently called on Ms. Whitney and persuaded her to allow him to host a reception in her honor. "They are giving me a reception," Ms. Whitney told Off the Record. "Si came down to my office to talk me into it."

"There's nothing wrong with the retirement bit," she added. "I just wish I had been consulted in some way about possible successors." Ms. Whitney said she is concerned about the fate of her staff, which she described as "very anxious." Ms. Fuller has already had breakfast and lunch meetings with a number of Glamour editors, and will begin her new duties at Condé Nast on Sept. 14.

Meanwhile, over at Hearst Magazines, Ms. Fuller's successor, Kate White, is negotiating the cultural divide between the square middle-American ethos of Redbook and her new post as editor of the gleefully trashy Cosmopolitan . One Cosmo source reports that when Ms. White was introduced to her new staff by Hearst Magazines president Cathleen Black, only an hour after Ms. Fuller announced her departure, Ms. White was wearing a pink dress-a definite Cosmo no-no. To compensate for the fashion faux pas, Ms. White assured her staff that she would be wearing more black.

Sometimes newspaper writers who cover professional sports teams attempt to transcend the daily drudgery of locker-room quote collection by playing at being powerful. Sometimes their gambits backfire.

Earlier this summer, Marty Noble, who covers the New York Mets for Newsda y, was eager to swing for the fences. Mr. Noble, the senior man on the beat, told some of his colleagues in the Shea Stadium press box that he could get the Mets' manager, Bobby Valentine, fired if only he could confirm that Mr. Valentine had said a certain "seven words." Mr. Valentine caught wind of this, and the relationship between the two men, which was already a little strained-they hadn't spoken to each other since last season-deteriorated further.

After The Observer reported this state of affairs, Mr. Noble's editors at Newsday asked their man to repair his relationship with the manager. Even though they had detected no signs of an agenda in his coverage, they were concerned, according to a source, that the appearance of one might hurt the newspaper.

"We all agreed, including Marty, that it was a good time to clear the air," said Steve Ruinsky, Newsday 's assistant managing editor for sports. "But Marty was not told to do it. He didn't need to be. He had an interest in doing it as well."

So, on July 28, out at Shea, Mr. Noble buttonholed Mr. Valentine and attempted to make peace. According to sources in the press box who claim to have knowledge of the conversation, the exchange went something like this:

Mr. Noble: Let's try to put this behind us .

Mr. Valentine: You've got to be kidding. You go around telling people you have seven words to get me fired. You are trying to cause me to not have a job, and now you want to be my friend? What do you want to do, go to the movies? See a Broadway show? Get the fuck away from me .

Clubhouse versions being what they are-that is, a cross between Rashomon and Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine-it's not surprising that both men confirm they had a conversation, but deny that particular account of it.

"That's fascinating," Mr. Noble said. "It was nothing like that at all. What I told him is that there was no agenda. We discussed it and had an amicable discussion."

Mr. Valentine wasn't so sure about the amicable part. "We talked," he said. "It was brief. It was without much substance, but I was all ears. I was willing to listen to a guy who I've known for a long time to see what his story was. But the problem is, he didn't tell me his whole story. He was just doing something he was told to do."

After their little summit, Mr. Noble stopped coming out to the ball park, and his byline disappeared from Newsday 's sports pages, giving rise to speculation among baseball writers that he was ducking Mr. Valentine to avoid getting in trouble with his editors over his failure to kiss and make up with the manager. But his editors say that's not so. "He's been in the hospital getting some tests," said Bill Eichenberger, Newsday 's deputy sports editor. "This had nothing to do with his relationship with Valentine."

Mr. Noble got the O.K. from his doctors, so by Aug. 17, he was back on the beat, though not necessarily back in the good graces of Bobby Valentine.

-Nick Paumgarten

You can reach Off the Record by e–mail at

wstjohn@observer.com.

Mr. Rivera, NBC's Clinton-Lewinsky scandal star and the company's problem child, was issuing another in a series of bigheaded pronouncements that have recently threatened his rehabilitated image. For a while, it seemed like Good Geraldo was winning out. The buttoned-down, bespectacled host of CNBC's Rivera Live enjoys a 26 percent ratings increase over last year. In December, he signed a six-year contract, worth between $24 million and $36 million, elevating him to the status of a full-fledged NBC News correspondent and scoring him a new gig as legal analyst on the Today Show , as well as a deal to produce four prime-time news specials a year on his own. And on top of all that, he has a new CNBC news show in the works, Upfront Tonight , which he says will "take some of the casual style of cable and marry it to the more traditional discipline of a network newscast," and, he hopes, give rise to a "new form" of evening news.

But no sooner had Good Geraldo established a foothold back at the network than the all-too-familiar specter of Bad Geraldo reappeared. You remember Bad Geraldo–the tabloid show clown who had fat from his butt injected into his forehead on live television and had his nose broken by chair-flinging Nazi skinheads?

During a July 28 Today Show appearance, Mr. Rivera got into a shouting match with conservative pundette Laura Ingraham. Today host Katie Couric snapped at him on the air, and Mr. Rivera got a call later from the show's producer, Jeff Zucker, telling him to behave. A few days later, Mr. Rivera reported on his show that "a source close to the President" had informed him that "there is human genetic material" on Ms. Lewinsky's notorious blue dress. What Mr. Rivera called a "bombshell" was deemed a dud by his colleagues at NBC News; a company-wide electronic message warned reporters not to go with Mr. Rivera's scoop.

The company flacks were still dealing with that one when Mr. Rivera stepped in it again, telling TV Guide that he was gunning for "the center chair at the desk of the wise men," a seat at NBC that is currently occupied by Tom Brokaw. Mr. Rivera complained bitterly that Mr. Brokaw was unsupportive, saying: "I hope that if I hang out long enough and if I'm quiet enough, it will evolve into a more collegial kind of relationship. But I don't expect it." A day after those comments were publicized, Mr. Rivera had to issue a statement, this time saying, "Tom Brokaw is a great newsman who does a terrific job and the rivalry between us is grossly overstated."

Mr. Brokaw's allies were not appeased. "He's a tabloid host," said a close associate of Mr. Brokaw's. "He's not a journalist, as such. He just rants on and on … It's a problem for [NBC president] Bob Wright and NBC."

"I think that's a cheap shot," said Ed Rollins, a Rivera Live regular. "He's played every element of the game. Whether news guys want to admit it or not, it's all about entertaining and who can attract viewers. The news is a vehicle."

"No one has acted as a style policeman," Mr. Rivera told Off the Record in a faxed response to questions. (His comments now are being screened by a CNBC publicist.) "I did have the call from Jeff Zucker … Everything Jeff said was taken with an open mind and, I hasten to add, Jeff was right. The Today Show is his show and Rivera Live is my show."

But, Mr. Rivera insisted, "They haven't tried to change me or give me a makeover."

Therein lies NBC's Geraldo problem. Every disaster, war and Presidential scandal tends to shove a particular TV news personality into the limelight. Dan Rather solidified his place in the public's collective TV memory as Richard Nixon's chief media nemesis during Watergate. And no matter how tainted his reputation may be after the recently discredited Time -CNN news report about the United States Army using nerve gas on defectors during the Vietnam War, Peter Arnett achieved media star status covering the Gulf War in 1991 as bombs fell on Baghdad.

Now, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, with one foot planted firmly in the White House and the other in the gutter, has snatched Geraldo Rivera out of the realm of tabloid trash TV and placed him in the upper echelons of the network news establishment. And those guys can't stand him.

Here's why. On a recent episode of Rivera Live , Mr. Rivera had, as usual, worked himself into his nightly frenzy over his sworn enemy, independent counsel Kenneth Starr. He posed this question to his guests: What would happen if President Clinton delivered a mea culpa to the American people and in return implored them "to stop this man from biting me on the ass"?

The guests–former Reagan Administration adviser Ed Rollins, former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Meyers, NBC correspondent David Gregory and Larry Klayman of the ultraconservative legal group Judicial Watch–fervently debated the question, as Mr. Rivera, in the role of conductor, kept time. He alternately goaded his guests, then cut them off; mocked them into silence, then incited them to cacophony.

"To hire … Harry and Susan Bloodworth-Thomason, [the Clintons] fired the travel office – " said Mr. Klayman.

"They didn't fire the travel office, Larry," Ms. Meyers interrupted.

"They fired you , Dee Dee," Mr. Klayman retorted. When the comment fell flat, Mr. Klayman looked to the maestro for guidance. But Mr. Rivera, savoring the blue note, said nothing. After a tense moment of silence, Ms. Meyers said, "Oh, you're a big man there, Larry."

"I'm just joking," Mr. Klayman sheepishly muttered. "You can take a joke."

"You're kind of a joke, actually," Ms. Meyers said.

Mr. Rivera had found his CNBC moment–not news, but a kind of news-related drama. Soon enough, the host kissed his fingertips and blew a peace sign to the television audience, a nightly gesture of farewell that surely makes Tom Brokaw's skin crawl. The evening's performance was over.

If history conspired to make a laughingstock of Mr. Rivera during the live opening of Al Capone's secret vault in 1986, it has come to his rescue in the form of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Rivera possesses a peculiar mix of high and low, of smarts and crassness, that seems particularly suited to the political carnival. Indeed, the story has all the elements of the confrontational, often salacious brand of television Mr. Rivera pioneered; depending on one's point of view, the current long-playing episode would be titled, "I Had an Affair With My Boss," "My Best Friend Betrayed Me to the Authorities," or maybe "Government Zealots Ruined My Life."

Instead of baiting lowlifes and hatemongers on his show, as he once did, Mr. Rivera now baits law professors and political consultants who are much more likely to hurl bons mots than chairs. But between Geraldo and the journalistic promised land lies a formidable obstacle: opposition from NBC News producers who fear that Mr. Rivera will demean the network.

Mr. Rivera's problems with NBC News date back to fall 1997, when he nearly left the company to join former CNBC president Roger Ailes at the Fox News Network. Mr. Rivera had decided to leave when NBC president Robert Wright and NBC News president Andrew Lack got him to stay by offering him the solicitous contract.

Mr. Rivera gave up his $5-million-a-year tabloid show, Geraldo , and recommitted himself to CNBC. Mr. Rivera's newly elevated status did not endear him to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who sought and received assurances from Mr. Lack that Mr. Rivera would not be a part of Mr. Brokaw's Nightly News . Mr. Rivera's role as NBC News outsider was underscored on May 8 when Today Show host Matt Lauer introduced him to viewers with this chilly welcome: "Over the years, Geraldo Rivera has been called a lot of things, among them, the father of trash television." To which, Katie Couric, a friend of Mr. Rivera's, deadpanned, "Yeah, that's his favorite."

Mr. Ailes, who is responsible for installing Mr. Rivera at CNBC in the early 90's, wasted no time decoding the NBC News division's response to Mr. Rivera's arrival. "They did something they didn't believe in," he said, referring to NBC's new contract with Mr. Rivera. "And when you do something you don't believe in, you screw up. They hate him … They gave him the money, but they didn't give him the respect."

"Fox tried and failed to sign Geraldo and failure is often followed by sour grapes," an NBC spokesman responded.

Mr. Rivera hit the mother lode when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke. Quickly asserting himself as a staunch critic of Mr. Starr's, Mr. Rivera provided a perfect counterpoint to Chris Matthews, the conservative host of the Washington D.C.-based Hardball , which precedes Rivera Live on CNBC. In the absence of fresh news on the scandal, Mr. Rivera took a cue from the Sunday morning news talk shows, publicizing his guests' more outrageous comments. That led to a bizarre phenomenon of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: Opinions have become news. A show like Upfront Tonight , which debuts on Aug. 24, will combine news with Rivera Live -style Op-Ed television and might be the perfectly efficient perpetual news machine; a single atom of hard news could generate 90 minutes of heat for Mr. Rivera.

That's an unsettling concept to Mr. Rivera's colleagues at NBC News, and he made himself an easy target for their criticism when he chose Diane Dimond, a former reporter for Extra and Hard Copy , as his co-host for Upfront .

"We don't get it," one NBC News producer told Off the Record. "If you want to be a grown-up, why are you hiring her?"

Mr. Rivera responded by calling Ms. Dimond "one of the most aggressive and professional investigative reporters I know."

Asked about the criticism from his cohorts at NBC News, Mr. Rivera said, "I don't believe for a second there's a Rivera News and there's NBC News. I just don't buy that. Factual reporting is factual reporting. Stylistically, there are differences from one correspondent to the next … If you watch MSNBC or CNBC, the on-air personalities tend to be more personalities, but that's a function, I believe, of much more relaxed time realities … That doesn't reduce the need to be accurate. That doesn't reduce the stakes if you're wrong."

Much of the dislike of Mr. Rivera among NBC News staff members may stem from the simple fact that he works at CNBC. Although NBC has done a fairly remarkable job integrating its three channels–NBC, CNBC and MSNBC–by sharing staff and programming, many producers for the individual channels view each other as threats. When told of the NBC News producer's comments about Ms. Dimond, one CNBC producer scoffed, "Sorry, but they do Dateline ." What other NBC News correspondent besides Mr. Rivera, the producer asked, is working on a news special about the relations between African-Americans and the police?

The biggest loser from Mr. Rivera's ascent may be within his own network. Equal Time , the show co-hosted by Bay Buchanan, is being canceled to make room for Mr. Rivera's new show, despite substantial improvement in its ratings during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. And some CNBC staff members say a turf war is already under way between bookers and producers for Mr. Rivera's new show and Rivera Live , with each vying for their host's attention.

The battle might be short-lived, if the Presidential scandal resolves itself in the coming months; CNBC could have an opinion-generating juggernaut on its hands, and little to comment on. But Mr. Rivera isn't worried.

"The one thing I've found out is that the world is an infinitely varied place," he said. "There's always another story … Something always happens."

You can reach Off the Record by e-mail at wstjohn@observer.com.

Mr. Rivera, NBC's Clinton-Lewinsky scandal star and the company's problem child, was issuing another in a series of bigheaded pronouncements that have recently threatened his rehabilitated image. For a while, it seemed like Good Geraldo was winning out. The buttoned-down, bespectacled host of CNBC's Rivera Live enjoys a 26 percent ratings increase over last year. In December, he signed a six-year contract, worth between $24 million and $36 million, elevating him to the status of a full-fledged NBC News correspondent and scoring him a new gig as legal analyst on the Today Show , as well as a deal to produce four prime-time news specials a year on his own. And on top of all that, he has a new CNBC news show in the works, Upfront Tonight , which he says will "take some of the casual style of cable and marry it to the more traditional discipline of a network newscast," and, he hopes, give rise to a "new form" of evening news.

But no sooner had Good Geraldo established a foothold back at the network than the all-too-familiar specter of Bad Geraldo reappeared. You remember Bad Geraldo–the tabloid show clown who had fat from his butt injected into his forehead on live television and had his nose broken by chair-flinging Nazi skinheads?

During a July 28 Today Show appearance, Mr. Rivera got into a shouting match with conservative pundette Laura Ingraham. Today host Katie Couric snapped at him on the air, and Mr. Rivera got a call later from the show's producer, Jeff Zucker, telling him to behave. A few days later, Mr. Rivera reported on his show that "a source close to the President" had informed him that "there is human genetic material" on Ms. Lewinsky's notorious blue dress. What Mr. Rivera called a "bombshell" was deemed a dud by his colleagues at NBC News; a company-wide electronic message warned reporters not to go with Mr. Rivera's scoop.

The company flacks were still dealing with that one when Mr. Rivera stepped in it again, telling TV Guide that he was gunning for "the center chair at the desk of the wise men," a seat at NBC that is currently occupied by Tom Brokaw. Mr. Rivera complained bitterly that Mr. Brokaw was unsupportive, saying: "I hope that if I hang out long enough and if I'm quiet enough, it will evolve into a more collegial kind of relationship. But I don't expect it." A day after those comments were publicized, Mr. Rivera had to issue a statement, this time saying, "Tom Brokaw is a great newsman who does a terrific job and the rivalry between us is grossly overstated."

Mr. Brokaw's allies were not appeased. "He's a tabloid host," said a close associate of Mr. Brokaw's. "He's not a journalist, as such. He just rants on and on … It's a problem for [NBC president] Bob Wright and NBC."

"I think that's a cheap shot," said Ed Rollins, a Rivera Live regular. "He's played every element of the game. Whether news guys want to admit it or not, it's all about entertaining and who can attract viewers. The news is a vehicle."

"No one has acted as a style policeman," Mr. Rivera told Off the Record in a faxed response to questions. (His comments now are being screened by a CNBC publicist.) "I did have the call from Jeff Zucker … Everything Jeff said was taken with an open mind and, I hasten to add, Jeff was right. The Today Show is his show and Rivera Live is my show."

But, Mr. Rivera insisted, "They haven't tried to change me or give me a makeover."

Therein lies NBC's Geraldo problem. Every disaster, war and Presidential scandal tends to shove a particular TV news personality into the limelight. Dan Rather solidified his place in the public's collective TV memory as Richard Nixon's chief media nemesis during Watergate. And no matter how tainted his reputation may be after the recently discredited Time -CNN news report about the United States Army using nerve gas on defectors during the Vietnam War, Peter Arnett achieved media star status covering the Gulf War in 1991 as bombs fell on Baghdad.

Now, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, with one foot planted firmly in the White House and the other in the gutter, has snatched Geraldo Rivera out of the realm of tabloid trash TV and placed him in the upper echelons of the network news establishment. And those guys can't stand him.

Here's why. On a recent episode of Rivera Live , Mr. Rivera had, as usual, worked himself into his nightly frenzy over his sworn enemy, independent counsel Kenneth Starr. He posed this question to his guests: What would happen if President Clinton delivered a mea culpa to the American people and in return implored them "to stop this man from biting me on the ass"?

The guests–former Reagan Administration adviser Ed Rollins, former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Meyers, NBC correspondent David Gregory and Larry Klayman of the ultraconservative legal group Judicial Watch–fervently debated the question, as Mr. Rivera, in the role of conductor, kept time. He alternately goaded his guests, then cut them off; mocked them into silence, then incited them to cacophony.

"To hire … Harry and Susan Bloodworth-Thomason, [the Clintons] fired the travel office – " said Mr. Klayman.

"They didn't fire the travel office, Larry," Ms. Meyers interrupted.

"They fired you , Dee Dee," Mr. Klayman retorted. When the comment fell flat, Mr. Klayman looked to the maestro for guidance. But Mr. Rivera, savoring the blue note, said nothing. After a tense moment of silence, Ms. Meyers said, "Oh, you're a big man there, Larry."

"I'm just joking," Mr. Klayman sheepishly muttered. "You can take a joke."

"You're kind of a joke, actually," Ms. Meyers said.

Mr. Rivera had found his CNBC moment–not news, but a kind of news-related drama. Soon enough, the host kissed his fingertips and blew a peace sign to the television audience, a nightly gesture of farewell that surely makes Tom Brokaw's skin crawl. The evening's performance was over.

If history conspired to make a laughingstock of Mr. Rivera during the live opening of Al Capone's secret vault in 1986, it has come to his rescue in the form of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Rivera possesses a peculiar mix of high and low, of smarts and crassness, that seems particularly suited to the political carnival. Indeed, the story has all the elements of the confrontational, often salacious brand of television Mr. Rivera pioneered; depending on one's point of view, the current long-playing episode would be titled, "I Had an Affair With My Boss," "My Best Friend Betrayed Me to the Authorities," or maybe "Government Zealots Ruined My Life."

Instead of baiting lowlifes and hatemongers on his show, as he once did, Mr. Rivera now baits law professors and political consultants who are much more likely to hurl bons mots than chairs. But between Geraldo and the journalistic promised land lies a formidable obstacle: opposition from NBC News producers who fear that Mr. Rivera will demean the network.

Mr. Rivera's problems with NBC News date back to fall 1997, when he nearly left the company to join former CNBC president Roger Ailes at the Fox News Network. Mr. Rivera had decided to leave when NBC president Robert Wright and NBC News president Andrew Lack got him to stay by offering him the solicitous contract.

Mr. Rivera gave up his $5-million-a-year tabloid show, Geraldo , and recommitted himself to CNBC. Mr. Rivera's newly elevated status did not endear him to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who sought and received assurances from Mr. Lack that Mr. Rivera would not be a part of Mr. Brokaw's Nightly News . Mr. Rivera's role as NBC News outsider was underscored on May 8 when Today Show host Matt Lauer introduced him to viewers with this chilly welcome: "Over the years, Geraldo Rivera has been called a lot of things, among them, the father of trash television." To which, Katie Couric, a friend of Mr. Rivera's, deadpanned, "Yeah, that's his favorite."

Mr. Ailes, who is responsible for installing Mr. Rivera at CNBC in the early 90's, wasted no time decoding the NBC News division's response to Mr. Rivera's arrival. "They did something they didn't believe in," he said, referring to NBC's new contract with Mr. Rivera. "And when you do something you don't believe in, you screw up. They hate him … They gave him the money, but they didn't give him the respect."

"Fox tried and failed to sign Geraldo and failure is often followed by sour grapes," an NBC spokesman responded.

Mr. Rivera hit the mother lode when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke. Quickly asserting himself as a staunch critic of Mr. Starr's, Mr. Rivera provided a perfect counterpoint to Chris Matthews, the conservative host of the Washington D.C.-based Hardball , which precedes Rivera Live on CNBC. In the absence of fresh news on the scandal, Mr. Rivera took a cue from the Sunday morning news talk shows, publicizing his guests' more outrageous comments. That led to a bizarre phenomenon of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: Opinions have become news. A show like Upfront Tonight , which debuts on Aug. 24, will combine news with Rivera Live -style Op-Ed television and might be the perfectly efficient perpetual news machine; a single atom of hard news could generate 90 minutes of heat for Mr. Rivera.

That's an unsettling concept to Mr. Rivera's colleagues at NBC News, and he made himself an easy target for their criticism when he chose Diane Dimond, a former reporter for Extra and Hard Copy , as his co-host for Upfront .

"We don't get it," one NBC News producer told Off the Record. "If you want to be a grown-up, why are you hiring her?"

Mr. Rivera responded by calling Ms. Dimond "one of the most aggressive and professional investigative reporters I know."

Asked about the criticism from his cohorts at NBC News, Mr. Rivera said, "I don't believe for a second there's a Rivera News and there's NBC News. I just don't buy that. Factual reporting is factual reporting. Stylistically, there are differences from one correspondent to the next … If you watch MSNBC or CNBC, the on-air personalities tend to be more personalities, but that's a function, I believe, of much more relaxed time realities … That doesn't reduce the need to be accurate. That doesn't reduce the stakes if you're wrong."

Much of the dislike of Mr. Rivera among NBC News staff members may stem from the simple fact that he works at CNBC. Although NBC has done a fairly remarkable job integrating its three channels–NBC, CNBC and MSNBC–by sharing staff and programming, many producers for the individual channels view each other as threats. When told of the NBC News producer's comments about Ms. Dimond, one CNBC producer scoffed, "Sorry, but they do Dateline ." What other NBC News correspondent besides Mr. Rivera, the producer asked, is working on a news special about the relations between African-Americans and the police?

The biggest loser from Mr. Rivera's ascent may be within his own network. Equal Time , the show co-hosted by Bay Buchanan, is being canceled to make room for Mr. Rivera's new show, despite substantial improvement in its ratings during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. And some CNBC staff members say a turf war is already under way between bookers and producers for Mr. Rivera's new show and Rivera Live , with each vying for their host's attention.

The battle might be short-lived, if the Presidential scandal resolves itself in the coming months; CNBC could have an opinion-generating juggernaut on its hands, and little to comment on. But Mr. Rivera isn't worried.

"The one thing I've found out is that the world is an infinitely varied place," he said. "There's always another story … Something always happens."

You can reach Off the Record by e-mail at wstjohn@observer.com.

Mr. Schmidt's memo notes that over the last two years, The Times has been approached by a "steady parade of movie producers, agents and studio reps," an industry trend that "reached its most extreme form in the magazine-cum-movie project announced earlier this month between Miramax and Tina Brown."

Mr. Schmidt, who polices conflicts of interest at the paper, wrote to staff members that while " The Times has not embarked on its own search for such synergy," at least 10 separate movies or television shows based on Times stories "are now underway or under negotiation." ( See Rick Bragg's feature on a prison rodeo and a Tim Weiner exposé on the C.I.A.)

With Hollywood increasingly on the prowl for ideas it can cull from newspapers and magazines, the situation can get sticky fast for working journalists. The question is: How can a reporter maintain his or her editorial integrity without the taint of a conflict of interest and still make a little dough on the side? Typically, Mr. Schmidt said in an interview, the paper has split option fees with writers, who also get to keep 100 percent of the "consultation" fees paid by movie studios. However, in his memo, Mr. Schmidt writes that while " The Times acknowledges its staff members should be able to earn legitimate outside income, these consulting agreements can pose tricky ethical questions …" To help negotiate this complicated terrain, he states, the paper is seriously considering bringing in someone "who would represent The Times ' interests-financial, ethical and otherwise-in any discussions or negotiations involving a writer or a writer's agent, and a filmmaker."

To some staff members, management's line has a familiar ring to it. Back in the mid-1980's, the paper took a similar tack when it partnered with Random House Inc. on the publishing house's Times Books imprint. Times writers were required to give the imprint the right of first refusal on book ideas that came out of their work, depriving some reporters of lucrative deals. At the time, reporters accused management of using ethics as a cover for company greed.

Mr. Schmidt told Off the Record that a Times agent would help police ethical disputes and would not act as a facilitator of synergy. "I do not mean to imply by that we're going into the film business," he said. "In some ways, I think you could describe it as an 'anti-agent' … Our concern is the integrity of the newspaper."

Until a new policy is conceived, the current Times policy remains in effect. Reporters and editors may not enter into talks with agents or film executives before a story has been published, and even after publication any contact with movie types has to be sanctioned by Mr. Schmidt's office. Also, staff members must refer interested agents to the Times legal department, "and it will decide whether or not the rights are available," Mr. Schmidt wrote. Finally, staff members must gain approval from management before entering into any "consulting" arrangements with movie executives, "to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest that could arise if staff members were to be seen trading on stories which they are covering."

Times management could face opposition on the plan from the Newspaper Guild, which is protective of the rights of its member reporters. Guild representative William O'Mara said the union had received a copy of Mr. Schmidt's memo. "We are examining it to see if there is a problem," he said. "We're not saying we agree or disagree yet."

If Condé Nast Publications president Steve Florio was hoping to combat Fortune magazine's recent portrayal of him as a compulsive liar, he did little to advance his cause with his recent handling of personnel changes in Condé Nast's corporate communications office. Indeed, it seems that Andrea Kaplan, the Condé Nast communications director who had the unenviable job of trying to convince reporters that Mr. Florio was on the level, quit her job because Mr. Florio wouldn't level with her.

Ms. Kaplan resigned from her post on July 30, just two days after Off the Record called her seeking comment on Mr. Florio's promotion of New Yorker publicist Maurie Perl to director of corporate communications at Condé Nast-a job description that sounded suspiciously like Ms. Kaplan's. Ms. Perl's appointment was news to Ms. Kaplan. According to associates, when Ms. Kaplan inquired about the rumor, she received assurances from Mr. Florio that the report was false. (Ms. Kaplan, whom colleagues said is currently negotiating her severance agreement, declined to comment for this article.) When the news item appeared on July 29, Ms. Kaplan, working off Mr. Florio's assurances, spent the afternoon doing damage control, calling various Manhattan media reporters to tell them that her duties would remain the same.

But a day later, Ms. Kaplan learned firsthand that Mr. Florio's word is not exactly his bond; she was summoned to the Condé Nast human resources department and informed of her demotion and Ms. Perl's new role. The ramifications of the change were apparent simply from the titles conferred on the two women: Ms. Kaplan was a Condé Nast vice president and Ms. Perl was being made a senior vice president. Ms. Kaplan apparently found the slights by her boss too much to bear and resigned later that day.

If he'd been inclined, Mr. Florio could have easily beaten a reporter to the punch in breaking the news to Ms. Kaplan. According to sources at The New Yorker , Mr. Florio first approached Ms. Perl about the post after his boss, the chairman of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr., addressed the New Yorker staff on July 9, only a day after Tina Brown left the magazine for a new venture at Miramax Films. Ms. Perl visited Mr. Florio's office at 350 Madison Avenue later that day, accepted her new post soon after, and subsequently turned down an offer from Ms. Brown for a job at Miramax. In short order, Ms. Perl's new responsibilities became common knowledge at Condé Nast, and Ms. Kaplan's colleagues privately wondered about her fate. Mr. Florio held his tongue, however, and somehow Ms. Kaplan never heard the news.

Condé Nast staff members speculate that Mr. Florio's mistreatment of Ms. Kaplan was retaliation for what he feels was her mishandling of the Fortune article. But even Mr. Florio's defenders at Condé Nast say that no publicist could possibly have spun away Mr. Florio's publicly stated fabrications that he played football for New York University (the school has no football team) or that he served in the military. (Mr. Florio is on vacation and Ms. Perl had no comment.)

Mr. Florio and Mr. Newhouse seem to have hoped that the Fortune article-in which writers Joseph Nocera and Peter Elkind pointed out that under the watch of Mr. Florio and his brother, Tom, The New Yorker had lost $175 million in 13 years, and that "in [Steve] Florio's hands, truth is a fungible commodity"-would simply go away, or at least be dismissed as a hit job by a competing company. But the article seems to have entered New York media lore. Mr. Florio's name rarely shows up in print these days without a mention of the Fortune piece close by. One Condé Nast source said that Mr. Newhouse was the one who had decreed that the company would not respond to the article, a decision that seems to have damaged his deputy. Another Condé Nast executive said that Mr. Florio's options are few. "What's he going to say," said the exec, "'We didn't lose $30 million in one year [at The New Yorker ], we lost $27.5 million'?"

But Mr. Newhouse's declaration didn't prevent Mr. Florio from criticizing the Fortune piece in a peculiar forum-an off-the-record lecture to students in the Radcliffe Publishing Course. In mid-July, Mr. Florio spent about 10 minutes critiquing the article to a group of twentysomethings at one of the Radcliffe seminars. But according to one student at the program, Mr. Florio's performance didn't go over particularly well. "We could understand from his explanation why he was upset," the student told Off the Record. "But we didn't buy it."

The appearance of John McPhee's byline in the current issue of The New Yorker isn't the only evidence that the magazine's new editor David Remnick is trying to bring back writers and editors alienated by his predecessor, Tina Brown. Mr. Remnick recently called writer Ian Frazier to find out if the onetime New Yorker regular might be interested in contributing to the magazine again. According to a source familiar with the conversation, Mr. Frazier, who resides in Montana and currently writes for Outside , The Atlantic Monthly and, from time to time, Allure , told Mr. Remnick that he wasn't interested. (Mr. Frazier declined to comment on the conversation.)

Mr. Frazier was never a big fan of Ms. Brown's New Yorker ; he got fed up and quit in 1995, when word got out that Ms. Brown had retained the comedienne Roseanne Barr as a consulting editor. Mr. Remnick said his approach to Mr. Frazier was "in no way a repudiation of Tina. She wanted very much for Sandy Frazier to be in the magazine." Mr. Remnick told Off the Record that he had put in calls to a number of old New Yorker scribes, and had assignments in the works by such writers as Alec Wilkinson and literary editor Roger Angell, whose outputs diminished substantially under Ms. Brown. He also confirmed that he recently had lunch with former New Yorker editor and current New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath, but he denied speculation that it was an attempt to court Mr. McGrath. Mr. Remnick took strong exception to the notion that he was trying to reheat a soufflé, as the saying goes.

"The idea that there is some sort of restoration going on, that this is a kind of backward-looking editorship, that's preposterous," Mr. Remnick said. "There are some writers who fell out with The New Yorker for some reason or other that I'm interested in talking to. But to think that's the only direction I'm looking in is totally wrong."

The July 20 Off the Record reported that New Yorker senior editor Deborah Garrison attended the meeting in which Tina Brown informed her "inner circle" of her decision to leave the magazine. Ms. Garrison did not attend that meeting.

Also, an item in the July 27 Off the Record may have given some readers the mistaken impression that New York Times media reporter Robin Pogrebin is switching beats in part because her sister, Abigail, took a job at Brill's Content . Ms. Pogrebin's transfer was voluntary and not related to her sister's position at the media magazine.

You can reach Off the Record by e–mail at wstjohn@observer.com.

Mr. Blumenthal's attorneys, William McDaniel and Jo Bennett Marsh, provoked the wrath of the Journal editorial page by serving civil subpoenas on John Fund, a member of the paper's editorial board, as well as on Barbara and Michael Ledeen, prominent, if rabid, conservatives who have written for the Journal Op-Ed page as well. Mr. Blumenthal's lawyers want to depose Mr. Fund and the Ledeens in an effort to ferret out the source of Mr. Drudge's August 1997 item in his gossip Web site The Drudge Report that Mr. Blumenthal beat his wife-a charge Mr. Drudge sourced to at least one "influential Republican" and retracted shortly after it appeared. In the subpoenas, Mr. Blumenthal's lawyers request "any and all documents" relating to Mr. Blumenthal, Mr. Drudge, former ambassador Richard Carlson and his son, Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson, the Ledeens and former American Spectator writer David Brock. "If you need a road map," the Journal editorial notes, "this is Mr. Blumenthal's enemies list, except that onetime enemy David Brock has apparently switched camp to become an ally."

Whether or not the list is composed of Mr. Blumenthal's enemies, the road map it certainly provides is of Mr. Blumenthal's legal case, which, his lawyer Mr. McDaniel indicated to lawyers for The Journal , will lead to John Fund as a source of the Blumenthal wife-beating rumor. Mr. McDaniel apparently told The Journal that he then hopes to name Mr. Fund in the libel suit as well.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Fund was at least a propagator of the rumor, if not Mr. Drudge's source. David Brock told Vanity Fair in December 1997 that two separate sources had cited Mr. Fund as the source of the rumor. Mr. Fund, according to The Journal , has said that he discussed the rumor with Mr. Brock at a Washington dinner party four years ago. (Mr. Brock told Off the Record that he had never heard the rumor directly from Mr. Fund.)

It's possible that the Blumenthal rumor originated at another dinner party at a conservative gathering at the Wye Plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore in August 1994. According to a source who attended the party, Mr. Fund boldly proclaimed that Mr. Blumenthal was "evil," and when challenged by his dinner companions to elaborate, offered as evidence the rumor that Mr. Blumenthal beat his wife. According to one guest at the party, Mr. Fund told all assembled that The Wall Street Journal was in possession of police records that would back up his account.

Through a spokesman at The Journal , Mr. Fund acknowledged having discussed Mr. Blumenthal that night. But the spokesman said that Mr. Fund "very specifically is certain that he never said that The Journal had police records that indicate that Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife, and he's certain because he's never had such records and never seen such records."

The Blumenthal subpoenas seem at least partially directed at this 1994 dinner party; Tucker Carlson was a guest, and he is a friend of David Brock's. (Mr. Carlson refused to comment, and has denied being Mr. Drudge's source.)

Mr. Drudge doesn't seemed particularly worried about the suit; his lawyers are working pro bono, and he has little to lose since he has little. "I have no problem with civil litigation. It's a great way to get relief," said Mr. Drudge. "But it's all very confusing to me … This is the first time in history that the President and Vice President have approved a lawsuit against a reporter." If these subpoenas are any clue, Mr. Drudge may not be the journalist Mr. Blumenthal is after.

Tina Brown's new masthead is shaping up to read like a Who's That? of the magazine world. Ms. Brown, who just left The New Yorker to head up a magazine for Miramax Films, has hired Howard Lalli, former editor and publisher of Central PA magazine, Jonathan Mahler, editorial page editor of The Forward and, as The Observer went to press, was finalizing her discussions with Sam Sifton, media columnist for the New York Press .

Of the three, Mr. Lalli, who will be the managing editor of the new venture, is the only one who has actually worked with Ms. Brown before, having logged a three-year stint as an assistant managing editor at The New Yorker . For most of his time at The New Yorker , Mr. Lalli held the position of "A-issue editor" and was known for his calm demeanor and organizational skills, according to one staff member. Mr. Lalli recently left Central PA to become executive editor of Atlanta magazine. On his way, he stopped in New York to serve as "acting managing editor" at The New Yorker during the editorial transition, and was snapped up by Ms. Brown. Mr. Mahler is slated at this point to hold the dual roles of senior editor and writer; at press time, Mr. Sifton's title had not yet been determined. The Walt Disney Company has found Ms. Brown's magazine a temporary home in the Carnegie Towers on West 57th Street. In about eight months, Ms. Brown anticipates that she will have a new, permanent office with room for a staff of 50.

One staff member who apparently will not join Ms. Brown in her venture is her trusty lieutenant, New Yorker publicist Maurie Perl. According to several sources at Condé Nast, Ms. Perl declined an offer to join Ms. Brown at Miramax after receiving a more attractive offer from Condé Nast president Steve Florio to become head of Condé Nast corporate public relations. From that vantage point, Condé Nast sources said, Ms. Perl will continue to oversee public relations for The New Yorker . How this move might affect current Condé Nast public relations director Andrea Kaplan was not immediately discernible. Ms. Perl and Ms. Kaplan declined to comment.

In other news from the intellectual property frontier, David Vogel, president of the Buena Vista Motion Picture Group, a Walt Disney Company subsidiary, has decided not to close the Manhattan development office put together by former Premiere editor Susan Lyne. In March, Ms. Lyne took a job as executive vice president of television movies and miniseries at ABC, another Disney fiefdom and, ever since, the fate of her New York office has been in doubt. Recent events-a steep cutback in Disney's production schedule from 37 films a year to 15, and Disney subsidiary Miramax Films' magazine-to-movies deal with Tina Brown-seemed certain to doom the operation. But according to Disney sources on the West Coast, Mr. Vogel has decided that, for the time being, he wants a New York presence. The four development executives in Disney's Park Avenue office will now report to him. One Disney source said that Mr. Vogel may eventually hire someone from the Manhattan media world to take over the office. Mr. Vogel did not return calls for comment; Ms. Lyne had no comment.

Ms. Lyne's office placed about 20 stories in the development pipeline over the last two years, and one story she optioned-a profile of tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand by Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner-is currently in production.

A recent article in the New York Post provoked an ominous letter to Post editor Ken Chandler from attorneys for Condé Nast Publications Inc. The article had nothing to do with the Post 's coverage of the recent woes affecting S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr.'s magazine publishing company, but rather addressed a subject that receives no small amount of attention in his magazines: brassieres.

"It has been brought to our attention that the July 20, 1998, edition of the New York Post included a feature in the 'Fashion & Beauty' section entitled 'The Bra Dilemma,'" the letter states. "The article talks about fashion trends for bras and includes pictures of women wearing various bras and shirts and either the word 'do' or 'don't' over the pictures." Condé Nast lawyers took particular offense at a line in the Post article which read, "Don't get caught, like these three New York women did, with your bra straps showing-a glamour don't."

The problem, the letter explains, is that Condé Nast's Glamour has run a monthly "Dos and Don'ts" fashion column since 1965, covering everything from hair to make-up. In fact, Condé Nast is so protective of its "Dos and Don'ts" franchise, its attorneys were happy to point out, that the company has even gone to the trouble of registering "Dos and Don'ts" with the Federal Trademark Commission. Condé Nast asked the Post to stop running its Dos and Don'ts feature in its "fashion and beauty" section, and demanded that the paper desist from any sneaky phrases like "a glamour don't," which might give the impression that Glamour has sanctioned the article.

Mr. Chandler said his paper meant no harm in its inadvertent appropriation of Glamour 's groundbreaking journalistic trope, and had his own "do's and don'ts" for Condé Nast attorneys: "Tell them I said: Do try and be less thin-skinned, and don't send me any more nitpicky letters."

You can reach Off the Record by e-mail at wstjohn@observer.com .

If Mr. Tullis is at an impasse with his Glass movie, it's not for lack of trying. Having worked hard at deflating the media and Hollywood from his perch as an editor at the now-defunct satirical magazine Might , Mr. Tullis recently threw irony to the wind and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in movie development. To subsidize his dream, he has been doing some freelance writing from time to time. He took an assignment from Brill's Content to write about Mr. Glass for the magazine's premiere issue and, perhaps seeing the Hollywood potential in the story, had the forethought to negotiate with Mr. Brill for the film rights to his assignment.

The Brill's Content piece, which Mr. Tullis co-wrote with associate editor (and former Off the Record columnist) Lorne Manly, was a straight reported story on the fact-checking processes that failed to catch Mr. Glass' many fabrications. After publication, Mr. Tullis ran the idea of a movie past "a friend of a friend" at Miramax, he said, who encouraged him to pursue the idea. Mr. Tullis had to work fast. His Content piece contained little of the biographical fodder Hollywood needs to make a movie, and an upcoming Vanity Fair story on Mr. Glass, by Friday Night Lights author William Bissinger, promises to be a more personal portrait.

To beat Vanity Fair , Mr. Tullis set out to secure the rights to Mr. Glass' life story, and quick. He had friends contact the writer to see if he'd be interested. The request couldn't have come at a worse time for Mr. Glass. On June 29, the California-based antidrug group D.A.R.E., or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, filed a $10 million libel suit against the writer for stories he wrote on the group in Rolling Stone and The New Republic . According to a source close to Mr. Glass, the writer said he wasn't interested in cooperating with Hollywood, at least for the time being.

Mr. Tullis has not given up on the idea of pitching a Glass film, but, without the writer, he may have to substantially alter the story line. The aspiring movie mogul told Off the Record that he was dismayed by the attention his project was getting. "There was never a pitch meeting," Mr. Tullis said. "We had a couple of phone calls and memos back and forth, and it's not news."

As Mr. Glass was being pursued by Mr. Tullis, Rolling Stone was wrapping up its assessment of Mr. Glass' work for the magazine. As one might have guessed, the results weren't pretty. Rolling Stone editor Robert Love issued the findings in a letter from the editor in the magazine's Aug. 6 issue. Four short profiles Mr. Glass wrote for Rolling Stone "proved accurate," he wrote. However, two longer pieces–an assessment of U.S. News & World Report 's college ranking system and Mr. Glass' D.A.R.E. story–did not. "Unfortunately, we have concluded that these stories contain anonymous quotes and incidents that we know to be fabrications," Mr. Love wrote, in what is becoming a familiar and woeful refrain by Mr. Glass' editors.

Still, some magazines are hot for a piece by Mr. Glass. Esquire editor in chief David Granger confirmed that one of his editors spoke with Mr. Glass' attorney about having Mr. Glass write for the magazine, but without luck. Mr. Granger said that Mr. Glass was being pursued for possible "Letter to" column in Esquire , not unlike the one conservative writer David Brock wrote in April. "It wasn't a firm idea," Mr. Granger said. "We're just curious is all."

The timing couldn't be worse for House & Garden editor Dominique Browning. On the heels of Time Inc.-owned Fortune 's evisceration of her boss, Condé Nast president Steve Florio, Ms. Browning's magazine has come out with a puffy photo spread featuring her friends, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine and his wife, the author Nancy Friday, lounging at Ms. Friday's Key West summer place. The piece fawns over their dwelling ("The house, wrapped in a deep shady porch, is a whitewashed island all but engulfed by a rich green crawl of tropical vegetation") and leads with a photograph of Mr. Pearlstine and Ms. Friday sitting on the back porch, living a life of comfort–no doubt in part because of the buzz Fortune has been getting out of articles that trash competitors like Condé Nast.

A Condé Nast spokesman said the photo spread was shot over three days in February, long before the Fortune piece was even assigned. Ms. Browning did not return calls for comment. But Mr. Pearlstine said, "I think it's important to note that it's Nancy's house, and we try to maintain separate professional lives … I've always respected the editorial excellence of Condé Nast publications, and certainly nothing in the Fortune article has changed my opinion."

Savvy publicists know that late summer is the time to pounce on the city's newspapers. That's when editors and reporters go on vacation and the skeleton crews left behind get desperate to fill the daily news hole. Recently, overtaxed crews at the Daily News and The New York Times reached the end of their editorial ropes and had to turn to book publicists for help.

First, on July 19, the Daily News treated its readers to an expansive spread devoted to Victoria Gotti and her new novel, I'll Be Watching You . The News ' coverage of Ms. Gotti was ostensibly built around the paper's serialization of her book, and while the tabloids often go to great lengths to promote coveted book excerpts, the News set a new standard: The editors put Ms. Gotti on the front page, posing stiffly and holding her book the same awkward way models from The Price Is Right present merchandise; a cover line shouted: "Blond Ambition: Gotti's Daughter Has Another Tale to Tell … and We're There." And that's not all. The paper ran an additional two-page profile of Ms. Gotti (and, of course, more photos) in the paper's news slot.

Why such exhaustive coverage of the Victoria Gotti beat? Conspiracy theorists at the News maintain that the paper's coverage of Ms. Gotti had less to do with the slow news cycle than with a series of coincidences that could form the subplot of a cheesy mafia novel. Ms. Gotti's publisher, Crown Publishers, hosted a swell book party for her on July 14. But the following day, when Ms. Gotti should have been reaping her publicity rewards in the dailies, the News led with the story that Dominic (Big Dom) Borghese had struck a deal with the Federal Government to inform against Ms. Gotti's brother, John Gotti Jr. (A witness at Ms. Gotti's fete noted that as word of the next day's News story spread, Ms. Gotti became agitated, and her party took on a decidedly more somber tone.) The theory goes that the front-page treatment of Ms. Gotti on July 19 was just an old-time payback for that inconveniently timed scoop about her brother.

Hilary Bass, Ms. Gotti's publicist at Crown, said that both she and her author were taken aback by the enthusiastic coverage in the paper and added that she had no knowledge of an editorial payback. News editor in chief Debby Krenek did not return calls for comment.

Only a day after the News did its level best to promote Ms. Gotti's book, The New York Times went to bat for a more sophisticated publishing entity: the Random Housed-owned Modern Library. Beneath the headline " Ulysses at Top as Panel Picks 100 Best Novels," The Times jumped on the millennial-list bandwagon to report on July 20 that an august panel of authors and scholars had put their heads together and come up with the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The Modern Library, The Times eagerly reminded its readers, "has been publishing classic English-language literature at affordable prices since 1917." The paper treated the story like a scoop, noting breathlessly that "the list is to be released on Friday at a workshop for young publishers known as the Radcliffe Publishing Course."

Quicker than you could mutter "What fresh hell is this?" the Associated Press picked up on the "breaking" news; by midday, it was the lead story on the wire service's hourly news summary. There was no shortage of controversy to report, of course. How, for example, did Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons beat out William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! for No. 100?

The problem with the list, as The Times meekly noted in the ninth paragraph, is that nine of the 10 judges are Random House authors and–surprise!–their list reflected an institutional bias: 59 of the 100 titles are published by Random House or its new owner, Bertelsmann A.G. As Random House acknowledged, the panel was basically a gimmick to promote the Modern Library series, which the company bought and is trying to "grow," as Random House editor in chief Ann Godoff put it.

Why did The Times play along? Deputy arts editor Martin Gottlieb said the paper had originally intended an even bigger story on the Modern Library list but had some misgivings because it was a "single company decision." "I think it was pretty reasonable to say, if you're dealing with Gore Vidal and that list, that [the] play was justified," Mr. Gottlieb said.

William Styron, the only panelist who actually made the list ( Sophie's Choice , No. 96), lamented that such millennial lists are "inevitable," adding, "Lists are fine to bring attention to books in general, but the ratings don't mean a lot."

It's Off the Record's solemn duty to report great turmoil on the city's media beat. Daily News media reporter Keith Kelly has been lured away by the New York Post to replace publishing and media columnist Michael Shain. Mr. Shain will become the editor of the Post 's television section. Current TV editor Adam Buckman, best known for his merciless coverage of the decline of David Letterman, will be writing a TV column. Mr. Kelly resigned from the News on July 20; as is the custom when a tabloid reporter leaves for a rival, he was told he wouldn't be needed past that day's deadline. Since the News has essentially ceded the media turf to the Post , Mr. Kelly is said to be eager to have editors who are more appreciative of his beat.

Over at The New York Times , Robin Pogrebin, the paper's media reporter since late 1996, will be switching over to cover the theater business in September. Ms. Pogrebin has a longstanding interest in theater. Her coverage of the magazine world had recently been complicated by the fact that her sister, Abigail Pogrebin, left her producer's post at 60 Minutes to join Steve Brill at Brill's Content . (Ms. Pogrebin recused herself from covering the magazine.) Media editor David Smith, who's been beefing up the paper's media coverage over the last year, has not yet chosen a replacement.

At The Wall Street Journal , publishing beat writer G. Bruce Knecht is making a long-planned move to Hong Kong to cover Asia. Journal veteran Patrick Reilly will take over publishing and continue to cover the music business while Wendy Bounds, a 26-year-old fashion reporter for the paper, will take over his old print media beat. Finally, New York magazine has a new media columnist: Michael Wolff, author of the new media memoir Burn Rate , who will apparently be turning his attention to both "new and old media."

You can reach Off the Record by e-mail at wstjohn@observer.com .

"I'm learning a lot, I'm learning a lot," Ms. Brown continued. "I guess when you're learning you're excited and refreshed. It's a very exciting thing. I could always be excited by the journalistic exchange, but now I'm getting exchanges on every kind of level-I move from the journalistic to the business back to the logistical. I'm involved in so many talks at the moment." Ms. Brown sounded as if she was about to lose it.

What about the rumor that you'll never start a magazine and the new venture will be pared down into a run-of-the-mill development office? "That is total nonsense," Ms. Brown said. "The magazine is the core excitement here … It certainly will not get in the way. It's the cultural search engine which is going to drive the company!"

Is Ms. Brown prepared to part with the Condé Nast editor's sense of entitlement and run a tight ship? "It's a very terrific financial box in which to complete a structure," she said, sounding a bit more serious. "That's fine; I completely understand that. Ron [Galotti] and I are going to work with the Miramax financial people to create a business plan that will be ready by the fall, and in that business plan will be the budget, and in that budget we will live inside."

Ms. Brown's departure from The New Yorker is being touted as "the end of glitz" by some old school New Yorker staff members, and that epithet might well describe Ms. Brown's new life as an entrepreneur. Her next big project: traipsing around Manhattan in search of a cheap office.

"We're looking for space, Ron and I," she said. "We're keeping our feelers out."

Uptown in Ms. Brown's old office, David Remnick, The New Yorker 's new editor, was holding his first editorial meeting. Mr. Remnick assumed his position at the tail end of one of the magazine world's most peculiar weeks in recent memory. It ended where it began, on the 17th floor of The New Yorker 's West 43rd Street offices, in an open space the magazine's staff members call "the piazza." It was there on the morning of July 8 that Ms. Brown broke the news to her slack-jawed staff that she was leaving the magazine. And it was there at 11 A.M. on July 12 that Advance Publications chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., 70 and as sphinxlike as ever, shuffled in front of roughly 100 staff members and confirmed the improbable news that Mr. Remnick was getting the job.

The staff knew how close they'd come to getting an outsider; by the late morning meeting, most had heard that the evening before, Mr. Newhouse had left Slate editor Michael Kinsley at the altar, and many had read Mr. Kinsley's extraordinary e-mail account of their fizzled courtship. In fact, only a day before, Mr. Kinsley told Off the Record, he'd had a conversation with Mr. Newhouse in which "we talked about breaking the news to Remnick and begging him not to leave." Instead, for the second time in recent memory, Mr. Kinsley, who managed to talk himself out of taking the editor's job at New York in 1992 (and later regretted it deeply), was left twisting in the wind due to his own indecision.

When the huzzahs for the new editor died down, Mr. Remnick, with Mr. Newhouse and Ms. Brown at his side, didn't go into great detail about what he had in mind but promised to bring "hilarity" to the magazine. Mr. Remnick mingled with his colleagues for a few minutes before heading up to the 18th-floor business offices to give an afternoon of interviews, and to face the pressure of moving from being the scrutinizer to the scrutinized. "There's a pull between wanting to be absolutely honest and not wanting to say something that would absurdly and wrongly piss off a colleague," he said. Asked if he was nervous about the transition, Mr. Remnick said, "Oh yeah."

Mr. Newhouse was eager to take credit for his popular choice, telling The Observer that he chose Mr. Remnick "based on my discussions with him and my own instinct about his ability and his leadership." But the truth is, Mr. Newhouse nearly blew it. Early in his search, he told one Condé Nast staff member that he wasn't considering Mr. Remnick because he didn't want a magazine that was too "Washington think tank." Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who had already passed on the job and barely knows Mr. Remnick, urged Mr. Newhouse to consider the writer, according to one source, and acted as a liaison between the two men, facilitating Mr. Remnick's appointment. (Mr. Remnick confirmed the account.)

Mr. Remnick was a popular selection in part because he possesses a rare mixture of youth and gravitas. Where Ms. Brown has shown herself fascinated by celebrity, power and what might broadly be labeled as "personas," the 39-year-old Mr. Remnick has proven himself more concerned with his subject's interiors than their status. His pieces are typically empathetic and concerned, at least tangentially, with questions of morality. While Mr. Remnick said his New Yorker will aspire to "an absolute devotion to the reader and at the very same time an absolute devotion to a range of artists and writers doing their best work," he said he also wants a magazine with "a moral and literary center."

When asked about the core values of her New Yorker , Ms. Brown framed her response in terms of appearance and decorum. "I suppose the conviction of a guiding sensibility which informed taste and choice … I think that's what I bring to the table."

What ended happily for Mr. Newhouse began as a meltdown nearly a week before. Mr. Newhouse was unprepared for Ms. Brown's resignation, which she delivered in person on July 8 in his office at Condé Nast headquarters at 350 Madison Avenue. Mr. Newhouse's deputies were away-editorial director James Truman was in Greece on vacation (and didn't come back) and Condé Nast president Steve Florio was on a sailboat somewhere in Long Island Sound. Mr. Florio quickly returned to port and helicoptered in to deal with a departure he had not seen coming.

Ms. Brown handled the announcement with the same kind of micromanaging zeal she displayed as an editor. On the evening of July 7, she faxed a close circle of editors and writers, asking them to attend a morning meeting about the magazine's "Next" issue. The following morning, after her meeting with Mr. Newhouse, she gathered her inner circle-editors Hendrik Hertzberg, Dorothy Wickenden, Deborah Garrison and Mr. Remnick, among others-and told them the meeting was really about what was "next" for her: a post at Miramax Films as a partner with co-chairman Harvey Weinstein and Vogue publisher Ron Galotti in a vertically integrated intellectual-property pipeline involving a magazine, book publishing, television and film production.

Ms. Brown then gathered the staff and gave a nice speech about her time at the magazine-she called it "waking Sleeping Beauty" but perhaps a better title would be "will to power"-and thanked everyone. Editors Susan Morrison, Lee Aitken and Deborah Garrison wept. Staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, a fountain of hyperbolic pronouncements on his editor's departure, described the reaction as one of "astonishment and horror."

Even before Ms. Brown had finished her remarks, a reporter from the Tina-obsessed New York Times was calling to confirm her departure. The Times ' coverage typified New York's ambivalence toward Ms. Brown: The paper flabbergasted many by running the news of her departure on the front page above the fold and surprised none with an editorial that derided "the Brownian personality, which held that the creation of buzz was the highest good."

The reasons for Ms. Brown's departure are by now well chronicled: She was weary of the day-to-day operation of her magazine and was equally weary of taking the heat for the failures on the magazine's business side, which continues to lose roughly $11 million a year on flat advertising sales. Ms. Brown and her editorial staff did not like the idea of being merged into the glossy ranks of their corporate parent, Condé Nast.

In the last few months, Ms. Brown was being pursued aggressively by Walt Disney Company chairman Michael Eisner, CBS executives who wanted her to produce a weeknight version of 60 Minutes , and USA Networks chairman Barry Diller. Working against all of these pressures was Ms. Brown's most-favored-editor status with Mr. Newhouse. But even that relationship had grown complicated, according to a source close to Ms. Brown, since last December, when Ms. Brown's husband Harold Evans left Random House. Soon after, Random House was sold to the German conglomerate Bertelsmann A.G., in part, a source close to Mr. Newhouse told Off the Record at the time, because great hopes of melding the book publishing enterprise with Condé Nast's magazine business never panned out. As the source put it, Mr. Newhouse had come to the realization that "synergy is crap."

Ironically, it is in the name of synergy that Ms. Brown is moving to Miramax, gaining her motivation in part from her mother's death, after a long battle with cancer, on July 2. "She told me, 'In my mother's death, I saw the death of a human body and nothing left after that,'" said a close associate of Ms. Brown's. "It can have a dangerously clarifying effect."

Indeed, it may explain why some of Ms. Brown's colleagues at the magazine get the feeling that she has quit something rather than really started something. Perhaps no one was more surprised by the news of Ms. Brown's move than Mr. Eisner. Mr. Weinstein said he told his boss about the deal only after it was inked. Mr. Eisner had, in a sense, written himself out of the conversation back in 1997 when he approved the idea of a Miramax-sponsored magazine, based on a prototype put together by, among others, writer Lynn Hirschberg and current ESPN Total Sports publisher John Skipper. Mr. Weinstein never greenlighted the project, called Bluff , after Ms. Hirschberg's dog, but armed with Mr. Eisner's permission, he never abandoned the idea of starting his own magazine. Mr. Weinstein gave the project another code name-"Max," this time after his father. It was under the banner of "Max" that Mr. Weinstein developed some innovative marketing ideas for his magazine-like listing the names of subscribers on the back pages to give the readership a clubby feel-some of which may be used in the new venture. But Mr. Weinstein said his new partner would be making those decisions.

"I'm not sitting around telling Quentin Tarantino what shot to take," said Mr. Weinstein. "I can't meddle and I'm not going to scream … Tina has editorial creative control."

Only hours after learning of Ms. Brown's departure, Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Florio paid a visit to the fourth-floor office of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, where they met with Mr. Carter and Vanity Fair publisher Mitchell Fox. The interior of Mr. Carter's office is plainly visible from the adjacent building of 360 Madison Avenue, home of such Condé Nast titles as Bride's , Allure and Condé Nast Traveler ; as the editorial sweepstakes for The New Yorker started to heat up, staff members in 360 Madison suddenly found themselves literally with a window into the discussions. A Condé Nast source confirms what staff members next door say they picked up from the subtle semaphore between Mr. Carter and Mr. Newhouse-Mr. Carter declined the New Yorker job. It was also in that room, said a source familiar with the discussions, that Mr. Carter broached the topic of Mr. Remnick.

On the morning of July 9, Mr. Newhouse's assistant, Ann Marcus, began making calls to possible candidates for Ms. Brown's job, contacting Smart Money editor Steve Swartz, Observer editor Peter Kaplan, former U.S. News & World Report editor James Fallows and Mr. Kinsley. When Mr. Carter reported back that Mr. Remnick was indeed interested in the job, he got a call, too. That afternoon, Mr. Newhouse met with a steady stream of candidates. The Observer 's Mr. Kaplan made his way to the 14th floor and had a half-hour talk with Mr. Newhouse. Mr. Remnick sat down with Mr. Newhouse that afternoon as well. Mr. Newhouse's office provided a surreal backdrop for the discussions about the august magazine and the fateful career choices being dangled before the candidates; it's decorated with dozens of old cartoon prints-Popeye and Krazy Kat.

That same day, the rumor mill again began to rev when Ms. Brown, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Galotti had lunch at the Four Seasons with Hachette Filipacchi chief executive David Pecker. A stand-alone magazine like the one Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Brown have in mind could save a lot of money on production costs if it partnered and shared infrastructure with a large publisher like, say, Hachette. Did the very public lunch foreshadow such a deal?

Mr. Weinstein denied any specific deal was in the works. "That lunch was all about saying, 'Isn't life wonderful?'" However, Mr. Weinstein acknowledged, "strategic partners are coming in all shapes and sizes."

In fact, nothing about the new company suggests that it might be so well thought-out as to have any such deals lined up. A colleague of Ms. Brown who has discussed the venture told Off the Record, "She's remarkably clueless about how it would work."

Mr. Weinstein said he thought such criticism was unfair, even as he confirmed that his venture is in its nascent stages: "We've got to go into the kitchen and work on the recipe. We just don't want to reveal the recipe."

On the evening of July 9, Ms. Brown threw a party for her staff at her Sutton Place apartment. She organized her guest list on the English model, with two distinct classes: Editors and esteemed writers were to arrive at 8 P.M., regular writers and staff at 9:30 P.M. There was one unfamiliar face at the party, a young woman lurking about the tight-knit group of editors and writers and speaking to no one. New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford finally asked the young woman who she was. Amy Waldman, a Times metro reporter. Mr. Buford politely asked the reporter to leave and told Ms. Brown about the incident. Perhaps feeling a little giddy about her career change-colleagues say she seems to be relishing the opportunity to be more open-Ms. Brown did something very un-Tina-like: She found Ms. Waldman standing out on 57th Street and asked her to come back at 10 P.M. for dessert.

On July 10, Mr. Newhouse called Mr. Remnick back for another hour of conversation about the magazine, and he put a call in to Mr. Kinsley, inviting him to New York for what would be the strangest interlude in the search for Ms. Brown's replacement. Mr. Kinsley had been offered the job but made a fateful error; he asked Mr. Newhouse to give him 48 hours to make up his mind, a move that suggests he did not quite appreciate the pressure Mr. Newhouse was under to find a new editor. Despite Mr. Newhouse's displeasure, the two men continued to negotiate over the next day, and Mr. Newhouse invited Mr. Kinsley to Sunday dinner at Sette Mezzo.

Mr. Kinsley showed up for dinner on Sunday night in his hiking boots. But Mr. Newhouse had already begun to have second thoughts. The meal concluded around 9 P.M. and the two men shook hands. "We talked about what time I should come to the staff meeting," Mr. Kinsley said, adding that the two men discussed how to deal with Mr. Remnick. "I was operating under the assumption that this was going to happen unless something unusual occurred," he continued. "I had no idea how unusual this would be."

Mr. Kinsley returned to the New York Palace Hotel, and found a message from Mr. Newhouse waiting for him. According to the now famous e - mail Mr. Kinsley wrote on the events, Mr. Newhouse rescinded the offer.

"I got off the phone and said, 'I have to write this down,'" Mr. Kinsley told Off the Record. He fired off an e-mail recounting the experience, and sent it to a few dozen friends. By the next morning, Mr. Kinsley had probably reached more readers than he would have as editor of The New Yorker . Still, he bristled at the suggestion he'd faltered by not closing the deal. "I didn't leave it at all open," he said. "I'm glad to have found out what a weirdo he was in time."

While Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Kinsley were going back and forth, the ever-studious Mr. Remnick spent his weekend producing a 3,000-word assessment of The New Yorker , which he dutifully faxed to Mr. Newhouse's office on Monday morning. Mr. Newhouse didn't need Mr. Remnick's memo to make up his mind. "I made the decision before reading the memo," Mr. Newhouse said. "It was really my intuition."

But even as Mr. Remnick received nearly unanimous praise from his colleagues, a strange force was percolating beneath the interoffice social fabric of the magazine-the pull of the cult of Tina. Several staff members acknowledge they've spoken to Ms. Brown about job opportunities with her new venture, and some have taken to sending her detailed faxes about how she could better run the business. Those likely to go with Ms. Brown include her spokesman Maurie Perl, managing editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy and editorial director David Kuhn. But Ms. Brown said it's unlikely she'll be poaching too many of her New Yorker scribes. "I don't want to take aboard literary lions," she said. "I want to grow some very exciting new voices and mix those with a couple of mainstay big talents." Ms. Brown said she will have some staff writers, "but not as many as at The New Yorker ," and issued this editorial edict: "May the best idea win."

But perhaps none of these events has upset Life staff members as much as Ms. Motley's firing of a 25-year-old assistant art director named Samuel Serebin. Colleagues insist that Mr. Serebin, a beloved if somewhat difficult protégé of Mr. Bentkowski, was fired on trumped-up charges of "creating a threatening work environment" as payback for refusing to accept a company severance offer.

Mr. Serebin, who declined to talk to Off the Record, joined Life in 1997 after a brief stint at Money and quickly distinguished himself as a gifted if moderately cocky art director. He was given significant responsibilities at the magazine for someone his age, colleagues said, and when Ms. Motley cut back the staff, she relied on him to help keep the art department functioning smoothly. Mr. Serebin played a key role in the design of the commemorative book Life put out on the death of Frank Sinatra, and colleagues said his role was so instrumental that Ms. Motley fended off another Time Inc. publication's attempt to hire Mr. Serebin away by disparaging him, even as she relied on the young employee to keep her magazine running.

But in late April, when Ms. Motley had successfully installed Mr. Ritter as her new creative director, colleagues said, Mr. Serebin's fate dramatically changed. On April 23, the assistant art director was summoned to Ms. Motley's office, according to several staff members familiar with the situation, where he was told his services were no longer needed. Ms. Motley offered him a modest severance package, but Mr. Serebin declined, saying that he did not want to leave his job. According to the same accounts, Ms. Motley suggested to Mr. Serebin that his exit would be made much easier if he quit voluntarily. Still, he refused to budge.

After that, Mr. Serebin's final days at Life played out like a scene from Franz Kafka's The Trial . The day after his meeting with Ms. Motley, Mr. Serebin was told he was being terminated for cause, though the cause was not specified. He was told he would be put on paid leave during a formal review of his case. Then he was escorted from the building by human resources personnel, still unaware of the reasons for his dismissal.

Two weeks later, Mr. Serebin was summoned back to Life 's offices for a meeting with human resources associate director Anne Rodgers, where things took an even more bizarre turn. According to colleagues, Mr. Serebin was told that he was being fired for making homophobic comments and for expressing an untoward fascination with firearms. Mr. Serebin strongly denied ever having made the comments or having any kind of fascination with guns. He was then read a list of five co-workers' names and asked what each individual might say about the allegations. Mr. Serebin counted a few of the co-workers as close friends, and he insisted that they could not possibly corroborate the charges. At the meeting's end, Ms. Rodgers told Mr. Serebin he was officially terminated. Ms. Rodgers did not return calls for comment.

That evening, Mr. Serebin wrote a letter to Ms. Rodgers in which he adamantly denied the charges and asked for his job back. "I absolutely deny such allegations, and assure you that such statements were never made by me," he wrote. "It is not in my nature, it is not who I am, nor is it anything I would condone of anyone else." Life employees sympathetic to Mr. Serebin said that the 25-year-old got along well with gay colleagues and never mentioned guns in their presence. Several employees suggested the charges were constructed carefully to demonize Mr. Serebin.

Mr. Serebin sent copies of his letter to Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner, Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine and, among others, the five co-workers whose names were presented to him as possible witnesses. Several of the "witnesses" were dismayed to learn their names had been used by Ms. Rodgers, and demanded that they be stricken from the list. Susan Bolotin, Life 's deputy managing editor who left the company recently, was one of the objectors. "When I asked about it, I was told that it was just a hypothetical list," she said. "I asked them to leave my name out of it." More puzzlingly, all five "witnesses" have come forward to deny they saw anything like the incidents Ms. Rodgers alleged.

Mr. Serebin has since hired an attorney, Daniel Alterman, founding partner of Alterman & Boop who specializes in media employment cases and has successfully handled racial discrimination suits against the Daily News . Mr. Alterman said that although Mr. Serebin is a member of the Newspaper Guild, his relatively low-level post is not covered by the union's collective bargaining agreement with Time Inc., so he'll either have to sue the company or hope for a settlement. Mr. Alterman said that he is not seeking a large sum of money, but wants Mr. Serebin's record expunged and a letter of recommendation from Life . Negotiations between the company and Mr. Serebin are currently at a standstill.

"We don't want this young man to be scarred for life by this innuendo and unfounded allegations," the lawyer said. He added that neither he nor his client have learned the name of the complainant, or even confirmed that the complaint is legitimate. Mr. Alterman said his client insists that he did not say anything that might have been misconstrued as homophobic, and that Mr. Serebin has no interest in guns. "If I thought my client was a homophobe, I wouldn't represent him," Mr. Alterman said.

Ms. Motley said she could not address the specifics of Mr. Serebin's case, but told Off the Record, "I can perfectly well see how many people would believe that Sam had been mistreated, but this company does not have a record of mistreating people. I don't have a record of mistreating people, and there would be no reason for us to do so."

Editors sometimes find themselves harassed by writers who'll do anything to get bylines in their magazines. Us editor Charles Leerhsen has the opposite problem: writers desperate to have their names taken out.

Four stories in the August issue of Us appear without bylines because of friction between Mr. Leerhsen, a former assistant managing editor at People who took over in May, and his dwindling stable of writers. Kitty Bowe Hearty, a freelancer who writes occasionally for Us , turned around a profile of actress Marisa Tomei in less than a week, and worked with a freelance editor to get the story into shape. But when she received a galley of the piece, she said, the story had been changed beyond recognition.

"It was basically not my take on Marisa," she said. "I felt misrepresented." Ms. Bowe Hearty said she was particularly disturbed that Mr. Leerhsen "used quotes and reporting that were not mine." She asked that her name be taken off the piece . Mr. Leerhsen said the original piece "wasn't up to our standards" and was "overly puffy."

Jason Kaufman, a staff writer at Us , took a similar stand on the profile he wrote of Gary Coleman, the former child star who now works as a film lot security guard. Mr. Kaufman thought a rewrite of his piece was gratuitously cruel to its subject, so he asked to have his byline removed. Mr. Leehrsen didn't take too kindly to Mr. Kaufman's show of conscience; on June 24, he fired Mr. Kaufman and gave him an hour to clear out his desk.

Two other stories in the August issue-one about actors' salaries and another on the death of comic Phil Hartman-bear reporting credits at the end but no bylines, because staff changes at Us made determining authorship impossible.

Mr. Kaufman is hardly the only casualty of the new editor's short tenure at Us . In the last three months, roughly eight editors and writers have left or been fired, depleting the staff at a time when Wenner Media Inc. is hyping the prospect of a weekly version of the celebrity rag. Mr. Leehrsen called the possibility of going weekly "an intriguing idea we're looking into very seriously," and said the staff changes and editorial frictions were occurring because "we're raising the bar." Mr. Leehrsen didn't seem all too concerned that he was called heavy-handed by his writers. "Sometimes it helps to rewrite, sometimes it's a mistake," he said. "I'll live with the enemies I make, or else I won't live with them."

Lean times over at Condé Nast. A week before Fortune magazine slapped company president Steven Florio upside the head with an exhaustive report on his profligate spending habits and serial lies, the powers that be at Vogue embarked on a new belt-tightening campaign-one that seemed in keeping with Mr. Florio's tendency to pluck "the low-hanging fruit," as Fortune described his past efforts at cost-cutting.

On June 23, managing editor Laurie Jones let it be known that Vogue was serious about cutting the fat in its reported $30 million budget. "In an effort to reduce Vogue 's overall budget, we can no longer expense birthday parties," her memo intoned ominously. "While we encourage celebrations and parties in the office, in the future, cash collections should be organized to pay for birthday cakes, refreshments, presents, etc. We will continue to pay for farewell parties for staff members, but expenses from birthdays will not be approved …"

No word yet whether staff members will be asked to pass the hat for editor in chief Anna Wintour's wardrobe allowance or Concorde tickets.

Additional reporting by Nick Paumgarten .

Sources within the unit say it was backed by John Klein, the CBS executive vice president and the executive producer of Bryant Gumbel's Public Eye . But as that show faltered, Mr. Klein couldn't provide the boosterism needed to keep the unit alive. (Mr. Klein is scheduled to leave Public Eye by the fall.) Mr. Heyward will distribute its producers between various news shows.

One CBS news producer upset with the changes read the breakup of the I-team as a signal of management's waning commitment to long-form news. "They were frightened to death of any story that people had to watch for more than three minutes," the producer said. "They're playing to the lowest sensibility."

CBS News spokesman Sandy Genelius disagreed strongly with that characterization. "CBS News' commitment to long-form journalism has by no means waned," she said. "We're probably doing more of that now than we have before."

You've got to hand it to Harry Evans. He left his glamorous post as president and publisher of Random House Inc. in 1997, under circumstances that can generously be described as requiring spin, to take the not-so-glamorous post of head tinkerer at Mortimer Zuckerman's mini media empire. And though Mr. Evans earned a reputation as someone who could spin or charm or bully himself out of any bind, earlier this year he engaged in a publicity battle with the shiny-headed young British scribe Toby Young and got trounced. But just as it seemed his game was fading, Mr. Evans has won an old-fashioned media staring contest against a considerable foe: Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter.

The two men recently faced off over a planned profile of Mr. Evans by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Margolick, which was scheduled to run sometime this summer. Mr. Carter assigned the piece earlier in the year, not long after Mr. Evans started his new job under Mr. Zuckerman. The idea was to see how Mr. Evans was handling the transition from book publishing back into newspapers and magazines. "We thought it would be really interesting to see how these two were getting along," Mr. Carter said.

Mr. Evans had other ideas; he told colleagues he thought he was being set up for a hit job. Though the two men ostensibly worked together under S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr., chairman of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., they never particularly got along. Their rift dates back to 1992, when Mr. Carter took over at Vanity Fair after Mr. Evans' wife, Tina Brown, moved over to edit The New Yorker . Condé Nast lore has it that Ms. Brown didn't exactly call the welcome wagon to greet her successor. According to one Vanity Fair source, Mr. Carter came to feel that Mr. Evans gave The New Yorker preferential treatment on Random House book serializations, to the detriment of his magazine. Suffice it to say, the two men kept contact to a minimum.

Fast forward to 1998: Mr. Carter's been riding high at Vanity Fair (ad pages rose 12 percent in 1997 and are up substantially in 1998) while Ms. Brown's New Yorker has floundered and Mr. Evans has had to leave Advance Magazine Publishers' premises. So … when Mr. Evans finds out Vanity Fair wants to do a piece on his transition, he tells the writer that he won't cooperate. "He told me from the outset that he wouldn't be talking to me," Mr. Margolick said. "His official explanation was that it was too early in his tenure."

Mr. Evans remembers it a bit differently. "My suggestion was, isn't there some serial killer or megalomaniac out there who's interesting?" he said. Then he sent Mr. Margolick a note saying, "At least you won't have to ponder how to make the piece balanced."

Mr. Margolick said he found the note "patronizing." "I don't need anybody's permission to do something I wouldn't do otherwise," he said. "I guess he thought this was funny."

Mr. Margolick tried another tack. He asked intermediaries to help persuade Mr. Evans to give him an interview. But a few of those intermediaries reported back that Mr. Evans feared Mr. Carter was "out to get" him. (Mr. Carter denied that he was going after Mr. Evans and said it was "insulting" to impugn Mr. Margolick's motives.) Not only did Mr. Evans decline the entreaties, he made sure that his allies didn't talk to Mr. Margolick, either. Neither Ms. Brown nor Mr. Zuckerman would take the reporter's calls. Mr. Margolick reported around the wall of silence and filed the profile in early May. "It's extremely straight and extremely fair," he said.

The piece was in the editorial pipeline at Vanity Fair when Mr. Evans played his trump card; he granted an interview to The New York Times on June 15 in which he gave an account of how he spends his time in Mr. Zuckerman's shop–the very subject Mr. Margolick had hoped to discuss. Mr. Zuckerman ponied up a quote or two himself. Soon afterward, Mr. Carter spiked Mr. Margolick's story.

Mr. Evans offered his own spin on the Times piece; he said he'd agreed to give the paper an interview as long ago as January and only snubbed Mr. Margolick because "I couldn't break a promise." Mr. Carter insisted that he tabled the Evans profile not because of the restricted access or the Times piece, but because, as it turns out, Mr. Evans' tenure under Mr. Zuckerman hasn't been interesting enough.

"I think readers find press stories in a magazine like Vanity Fair at the lowest end, so they better be good," Mr. Carter said. "The fact is, there was nothing really happening."

On this point, at least, Mr. Evans seems to agree. "I'm a well-drilled hole that's not yielding any oil," he said.

Attention, Stephen Glass: Call Dick Morris. Mr. Morris, the former Presidential adviser and call-girl patron, has been trying in recent weeks to contact Mr. Glass, the former New Republic writer who was fired for fabricating stories in the magazine. According to sources at Rolling Stone , which also published Mr. Glass' work, a man identifying himself as Mr. Morris has been leaving messages on the company voice-mail system, offering his services as a kind of one-man support group for scandal survivors. In a distinctive nasal voice, the man has asked the magazine to forward his number to Mr. Glass, and has explained a desire to console and encourage the beleaguered young writer. Several staff members assumed the calls were pranks.

Contacted by Off the Record, however, Mr. Morris confirmed that he was indeed the caller. He said he hopes to speak to Mr. Glass for "humanitarian reasons." He declined to comment further except to say that he not yet heard from Mr. Glass.

Richard Beckman, the successful, somewhat bigheaded publisher of GQ , recently ended a brief flirtation with Wenner Media Inc. Mr. Beckman left his perch at 350 Madison Avenue in mid-June to visit Wenner Media editor and publisher Jann Wenner and general manager Kent Brownridge at the company's Sixth Avenue headquarters. A source familiar with the discussions said that Mr. Beckman was being courted for the post of group publisher of Wenner's three titles, Rolling Stone , Us and Men's Journal , but that he had turned down an offer to join the company. Mr. Brownridge disputed that account.

"Explicitly, emphatically, totally, resoundingly No ! There was no offer," Mr. Brownridge said. "One guy shows up for one meeting in one building, and everyone in the industry gets atwitter about it."

Mr. Beckman was more coy, if not modest, when asked about the talks. "Talent gets approached all the time," he said, "I can say that I'm not leaving Condé Nast. I'm happy where I am." GQ editor in chief Art Cooper had another explanation for Mr. Beckman's decision to stay put. "He knew if he left, [Steve] Florio would break one leg and I'd break the other," he said.

In other news, Anita LeClerc, longtime executive editor of Esquire , will be setting up shop as deputy editor of The New York Times ' House & Home section. Ms. LeClerc, who edited the Man at His Best section, as well as the brunt of Esquire 's style and service sections during her tenure, left the magazine in April after difficulties with editor in chief David Granger. She put her exit in such vivid perspective at the time that Off the Record feels obligated to bring it back for a repeat performance: "It was either that or grow a dick." Give 'em hell, lady.

Recently distributed press editions of Cosmopolitan All About Men (an annual special issue) contain a short letter from Cosmopolitan editor in chief Bonnie Fuller that reads like a sexually charged haiku. "The effects of El Niño haven't been all bad–it's been raining men at Cosmopolitan . So let yourself get absolutely soaking wet!"

Towels, anyone?