Lyricist Sheldon Harnick and his wife, photographer Margery Gray

When composer Jule Styne passed away almost 20 years ago at age 88, his widow Margaret wistfully reasoned, “He just ran out of keys.” Lyricist Sheldon Harnick reached the same age April 30, and one can only hope—after watching him, one day last week, aggressively pursue an apathetic taxi up West 44th Street—that he never finds out.

“I’ve never been busier in my life,” the buoyant octogenarian had said just before his cab chase in an interview at Market Diner where he spent most of an hour in the future tense, with only a few forays down a very glamorous memory lane.

This is Mr. Harnick’s 60th year as a Broadway lyricist. Like “Melvin Brooks,” he was one of Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952, sweeping onto the scene with “Boston Beguine” from Off-Broadway and the golden age of New York cabaret. At the outset, he was his own composer, but, on the advice of fellow lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, he chose to spread himself thick. “There are more capable theatre composers than there are theatre lyricists,” Mr. Harburg told him. “You can facilitate your career by working with people besides yourself,” so he availed himself of a few—Richard and Mary Rodgers, Michel Legrand, et al.—before, and since, finding the “Mr. Wonderful” composer, Jerry Bock (1928-2010). They teamed ten times, from The Body Beautiful (1958) to The Rothschilds (1970), making beautiful musicals together.

They did only two musicals for the small screen, and both constitute the Saturday afternoon double-header July 28 at The Paley Center for Media: at 2 p.m., an hour-long 1966 version of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost written expressly for TV, and at 4 p.m., a 1978 BBC adaptation of their 1963 Broadway show, She Loves Me.

“It will be good to see them again,” Mr. Harnick confessed with a cautious air. She Loves Me is decidedly the more anticipated, and he had fond memories of the She (Gemma Craven). “I think it’s an hour and 45 minutes. The BBC cut 40 minutes, but it was so gorgeous I couldn’t even tell where the cuts were. I saw it when it was first broadcast, and they were very pleased with it—enough to repeat it the next year. I thought it was going to be done every year, but our lawyers asked for too much.”

The Canterville Ghost was one of the original television musicals commissioned for the prestigious if not overly popular series “ABC Stage 67.” It landed in late 1966 amid Richard Adler’s Olympus 7-000, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s On the Flip Side and, the undisputed pick of the litter, Stephen Sondheim’s Evening Primrose. Burt Shevelove, of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum fame, produced the show and wrote the book, retaining the original turn-of-the-century setting. (MGM moved it up to World War II when it was done in ’44 with Charles Laughton and Margaret O’Brien.)

“My memory of The Canterville Ghost is that Jerry and I did a good score, but we walked away from it,” recalled Mr. Harnick. “We thought, ‘It’s in capable hands. We don’t have to be associated with it,’ and we should have been because they cast non-singers—too many non-singers.” That didn’t include title player Michael Redgrave or Herman’s Hermits import Peter Noone. Tippy Walker, right out of The World of Henry Orient, got Mr. Harnick’s favorite song. “It was called ‘I’m Worried,’ a list of all the things she’s worried about, and the last line was ‘Sometimes, I worry that I worry too much.’ Jerry wrote a lovely, very English, modal-type song for the ghost.”

In the lobby of The Paley Center, available for instant autographing, will be his latest collaboration—The Outdoor Museum (Not Your Usual Images of New York), just published by Beaufort Books. He provided 11 poems that parade as introductions to 11 different slices of NYC life, all photographed by his actress wife, Margery Gray.

“Margie is constantly surprising,” he said, 47 years after first laying eyes on her in the chorus of his Tenderloin, a single mom and singular dancer-comedienne. “George Abbott just fell in love with her. When a principal left Fiorello!, he put Margie into it.

“Every once in a while, after we got married, she’d say, ‘Oh, I miss being on stage—but not that much.’ For a while, it was enough when we did benefits and Rainbow & Stars together. Now she is strictly a photographer. That’s her world right now. She hasn’t vocalized for a long time.”

She had studied painting at the Art Students League, he said, and had always taken photographs. Five years ago, the couple’s daughter gave her a digital camera for Christmas. “She fell in love with it and just kept taking more and more pictures, eventually graduating to Nikon top-of-the-line.”

A good three years elapsed before Mr. Harnick realized that either a profession or a possession had overtaken her. “She showed me several hundred pictures she’d taken, and I was just knocked out,” he admitted. He fell under their spell, and wanted to add his words to her “music.”

“There are some photographs you wouldn’t necessarily know were taken in New York, and I thought, ‘If I could write a poem, I can set up the fact that these are New York photographs.’ Also, Margie loves reflections. When I looked at those reflections of buildings in other buildings, I thought, ‘These are impressionistic. Omigod! That would be an interesting poem: If Debussy had been an architect.’”

For a good half of his career, Mr. Harnick thought of himself as a lyricist, not a poet. “I was ignorant of poetry, so I decided to get acquainted with the world’s poems and, about 30 years ago, started to read six pages of poetry every morning. I’ve tried to alternate a contemporary poet with a classical poet—starting, of course, with my namesake, Shelley. Over the years, because I’ve read so much poetry, I thought that it would be fun to use different types in this book—haiku, sonnet, free verse ...”

The poet in spite of himself has just set to words—and music—The Doctor in Spite of Himself, and is in talks with Classic Stage Company about a production here next season. “Now I have a reason to live,” he quipped. “I couldn’t think of a better title than Molière’s. The one title I did think of—‘Medicine Man’—means something else.”

He was a reluctant composer on this one, stepping in when his anointed composer hit a yearlong creative duster. “At that point, I decided to take a crack at it myself. Every time we talked, I’d explain what I wanted, so I think I knew what I wanted.

“When I’m writing lyrics, I hear music. I certainly hear rhythmic patterns, and they generally do arrange themselves into melodies. When working with Jerry, I realized I had to stop doing that. If a melody occurred to me, I had to delete it, because if Jerry wrote something I didn’t like as much as my melody, that made a problem.”

The two did not collaborate the last 40 years of Bock’s life. The last work they did was tinkering with their two Tony-winners and coming up with a new song for each.

“About a week into rehearsal of the last Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof,” said Mr. Harnick, “we had a meeting with David Leveaux, the director, and he said, ‘You’ve investigated the changing of tradition in lots of areas, but not what the changing of tradition is doing to the matchmaker. I’d like you to write a number for her,’ so we did. Called ‘Topsy-Turvy.’ It replaced a number we called ‘the gossip number,’ and now it’s optional: you can do the gossip number or ‘Topsy-Turvy.’”

Their very last work together was a Fiorello! postscript 20 years in the making. “There’s a scene somewhere in the second act where LaGuardia’s wife has died, he’s run for the mayoralty and lost by a lopsided amount. He’s told his staff to go home, and he’s all alone on the stage. It’s the lowest point of his life. We tried to write him a song there, and, no matter what we wrote, it sounded self-pitying. We wound up not writing anything. He does eight bars of ‘The Name’s LaGuardia’ and walks offstage.

“Twenty years ago, when I saw it, I thought, ‘It’s a copout. There should be a song there.’ Jerry kept saying, ‘We don’t need a song. The show won the Pulitzer Prize. It works without the song.’” Mr. Harnick persisted, trying out new material in a California production and two in Chicago. Even Mr. Bock thought it was improved, but he thought the addition was “formless,” and Mr. Harnick grudgingly agreed.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean, so I took part of this long monologue that I had written and I converted it into a song. Then Jerry set it to music. But once he did that, I then realized I had to revise some of the lyrics, and that’s what I’m doing now.”

So when City Center’s Encores! celebrates its 20th season January 30-February 3 with the same show that started the series, it will be a new, improved, more vulnerable Fiorello!

The Paley Center salute to Mr. Harnick started a year ago, when Bill Rudman and Ken Bloom contacted him about doing an appreciation of Hugh Martin’s lyrics for a CD they were planning called “Hugh Martin: Hidden Treasures,” spotlighting Martin’s lesser-known, lower-wattage output. The first Mrs. Harnick—Mary Harmon, his college sweetheart at Northwestern—made her Broadway debut in Mr. Martin’s Make a Wish, and the two tunesmiths became lifelong friends.

Next up for the Rudman-Bloom tribute-treatment is Mr. Harnick himself. He’ll be interviewed Friday for his forthcoming CD by Mr. Rudman, who will also lead the Q&A at the Paley event.

The second Mrs. Harnick, a fact long lost in the folds of time, was Elaine May. “It seems impossible,” is how Mr. Harnick answers the incredulous look he gets.

“We should have known. We went together two years, and broke up about six times, but her secretary got married, and I went to the wedding, and everything was romantic, so I proposed—and she accepted. We both knew, quickly, that it had been a mistake. She’s very fond of Margie, by the way. We’ve become friends, which is nice, because I have tremendous regard for Elaine. When we asked her to give us an endorsement for the book, she said, ‘I just don’t do that. I make it a rule. My best friend is Marlo Thomas, and Marlo did a book, and I wouldn’t give her an endorsement. I’d like to, if you can figure out a way that it won’t be a precedent.’ I said, ‘Well, how about saying you were married to me and you ruined my life by leaving me, all within three weeks?’ In effect, that’s just what she wrote.”

editorial@observer.com

“If you open your front door to people they just act like jerks,” agreed former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Now the managing editor of Animal NY, he favors abolishing comments sections altogether.

Blog proprietor Nick Denton has a different plan—he’s giving them the run of the place. The commenters are creating content, after all, just like the writers. What’s the difference?

“I want to erase this toxic Internet class system,” he told The Observer in a gmail chat.

“Nick has always loved to subtly and not so subtly insult his employees,” said Gawker writer John Cook. “He thinks of us as glorified commenters.”

In some cases, the writers are glorified commenters. For years, the sections served as a farm league for the blogs’ staffs. It’s where Drew Magary (BigDaddyDrew), Richard Lawson (LolCait), and Erin Gloria Ryan (MorningGloria) launched their writing careers.

Now, with a new commenting system called Kinja, Mr. Denton is offering a set of housekeys to anyone who wants them. Gone are the old barriers to entry—the invites, the followers, the star-shaped badges—that kept the comments cliquish. Under the new order, the commenters babysit themselves, while a secret algorithm ranks their conversations by relevance. In fact, their contributions are not even called “comments” anymore. Internally, the company has instituted a $5 penalty on anyone who uses the c-word.

“These are posts,” Mr. Denton explained, reclaiming a word once reserved for professional prose. “And we intend to hold the posts contributed by readers to the same standards as those of writers—and erase the rather old-fashioned distinction between the two castes.”

Which sounds utopian, unless you’re a Gawker writer who has found his or her job description radically altered by the new scheme. Bloggers trained to fear, ignore or disdain the commenters now have a mandate to engage with them, a job that is equal parts forum moderator, lifeguard and whipping boy. Or become obsolete.

Asked if Kinja, in its fully realized form, even required writers, Mr. Denton replied, “As long as readers want to see discussions in which our staff writers participate, we’ll have staff writers.”

Not especially reassuring news for his editorial employees, who are fretting that those who fail to adapt will be fired.

“Look, it’s been hinted at,” said Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio. “I’m taking that not quite at face value.” Gawker was the first site to use Kinja, which will roll out across other sites in upcoming weeks. Mr. Daulerio is now carefully monitoring the system’s use, to see which writers are being active in the comments and which are not, and brainstorming ways of embracing the new scheme without “frustrating or incapacitating” his staff. One potential strategy for worried bloggers: keeping their heads down and praying the boss moves on to a new obsession.

“I’ve worked at Gawker long enough to know that the best way to be is to be patient,” Mr. Daulerio said.

MR. DENTON’S SUDDEN POPULISM is especially surprising given Gawker’s snarky DNA. (“Who put ecstasy in his Coke?” wondered Mr. Johnson.) But the former Financial Times journalist claims that he got into the business to build a blogging platform that would replicate real-life reporter bull sessions; the editorial was merely an afterthought.

“Remember that Gawker was a hobby,” he said.

Gawker Media has been working on Kinja since CTO Tom Plunkett joined the company in 2005, though the development was “put on ice” during the recession, Mr. Denton said. Several Gawker insiders put its price tag at $1 million, but Mr. Denton said it had cost “much more,” accounting for infrastructure. And if, as he hopes, Gawker executive director of content Ray Wert manages to cement branded Kinja discussion threads as the advertising unit of the future, the company will climb out of the lowly ranks of content providers and join the Reddits and Facebooks of the world as a bona fide tech player.

For longtime readers, this has meant a somewhat rocky transition. Some have complained that the site’s writerly wit has been an unintended casualty of the change in focus. In recent months, Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker’s so-called traffic troll, has been charged with keeping the site moving with weird news and would-be viral videos, freeing up veteran writers to work on more ambitious pieces, as well as some that are decidedly unambitious. For instance, since Kinja rolled out, Gawker has published three posts debating the finer points of over-air conditioning.

“How do YOU keep warm in the cold office?” Hamilton Nolan asked his commenter comrades. They responded in earnest (“I’m lucky. I have my own thermostat.”). Well, except for Gawker-editor-turned-Awl-proprietor Choire Sicha and Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici.

The Observer asked Mr. Nolan if “privileging the idiots,” which is how one writer described the new system, ever got tedious.

“It’s not annoying if there are smart commenters, but it is annoying if there’s nothing but dumb commenters,” Mr. Nolan wrote in an email message. “And a lot of the smart commenters were chased off by our various redesigns. Hopefully they come back.”

FOR ALL ITS EGALITARIANISM, THE KINJA algorithm favors the comments that in-house bloggers are willing to engage with, effectively tearing down the treehouse longtime and starred commenters had built.

Mr. Daulerio described their discontent: “They’ve helped build the site, helped make Nick Denton rich, they actually care about the quality of the site, their voices are important. Now they can’t have their little chats with the people they’ve made imaginary friends with.”

The oft-banned commenter Brian Van Nieuwenhoven (a web developer who goes by the handle BrianVan) stopped commenting on Gawker when the site abandoned its New York focus and has since soured on the whole enterprise.

“I’ve moved on from the concept of commenting,” he told The Observer. “It’s not my calling. It’s not my job.”

Mr. Van was part of a tight-knit (if largely anonymous) cadre of hard-core commenters who helped drive up the site's traffic by swarming into the wake of every post to banter among themselves. This group has met each of Mr. Denton’s platform tweaks with indignant reproach and waves of defections—first, to The Awl, then to The Hairpin.

“God knows where it is now,” Mr. Denton said.

It may well be at Crasstalk, a popular Gawker separatist blog founded by Amy Frame, a 44-year-old charity manager, along with two fellow Gawker exiles who go by the handles BotswanaMeatCommissionFC and DogsofWar. (Its name refers to “Crosstalk,” the Gawker commenters forum where Ms. Frame says she lost many hours of her grad school years.)

“One can’t build for a small and nomadic band of wannabe writers,” Mr. Denton said.

Instead, Kinja is built for even more exceptional people: sources, subjects and experts who, Mr. Denton expects, will elevate the discourse and create conversations around each post that are every bit as engaging as the items themselves. Destroying the superstructure that separated the writers and the commenters is just the latest and most drastic move in Mr. Denton’s longstanding bid to serve as the Internet’s salonniere.

First, he tried to lure the establishment by fostering a sense of exclusivity, sending invitations to join the Gawker commenting community on printed noted cards. Invitees could extend the offer to their friends and, later, wannabe commenters could audition by submitting a comment. If it made then-intern Kaila Hale-Stern laugh, the commenter would earn a log-in.

But while the drive-by wits came to epitomize Gawker’s comments, they were hardly its platonic ideal. According to Lockhart Steele, Gawker’s former editorial director, there was one person whose participation would prove that Gawker’s comments were a success.

“We were always asking, would Kurt Andersen use this? Would Kurt Andersen comment?” he said. (The dream commenter is now said to be Brian Williams.)

But the commenting habit appears to have never really taken hold among the most desirable set. When Gawker’s commenter data were compromised by a group of hackers in late 2010, bloggers scoured them to figure out which Condé Nast editors and striving socialites were secretly commenting on every Gawker post. There were none.

GAWKER INSIDERS LIKE to cast the new commenting system as merely the latest obsession of their mercurial and adaptive boss. Remember 2010, when Mr. Denton declared text an inferior medium and said the future of Gawker was video? Or the year after that, when Gawker—having won the scalp of “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee—looked like the future of journalism? He changed the site’s tagline to “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,” but it has yet to repeat that sort of reporting coup.

Until now, Mr. Denton’s pivoting had little real impact on his employees. No matter what he declared in his widely read memos, young, ambitious writers came to work for Gawker Media to get a little bit famous and left, mostly unscathed, for jobs at more established outlets. But in Kinja, Gawker Media writers will be central to Mr. Denton’s experiment in public, collaborative, do-it-live journalism.

Here’s how it works: Don’t worry about nailing a story down, post what you have. “The work can be the product of a discussion,” Mr. Denton said, “a back-and-forth between writers, editors, sources, subjects and readers.”

He calls it “iterative reporting,” and he believes it reproduces conversational thought and gossip as faithfully as possible, bypassing the publicists and other gatekeepers who “chew the story over so much that all the flavor is removed.”

“I want the writing to be fun again,” said Mr. Denton, who has long threatened to make his writers’ chat rooms public.

Once the comments become a “safe space” for writers, as he put it—and not the battlefield of psychological warfare Jezebel writers are sometimes advised to avoid—the tipsters and insiders will stop depending on the privacy of the email tip box.

“Everybody will do everything in public,” he said. “Just give it time.”

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban did recently make an appearance in the discussion of Adrian Chen’s story about a cancer charity hoax, though he might have been laughed out of the old Gawker comments for confusing “its” and “it’s.”

And as for dream commenter Kurt Andersen, he is almost positive he never commented on Gawker. “Internet commenting, on Gawker or otherwise, is an activity I think not even Nick Denton’s genius can persuade me to take up,” he told The Observer. But he will appear in a Jezebel discussion next month, to plug his new novel, True Believers, in a Q&A with readers.

Kinja proved a useful medium for such Reddit-style Q&As when Chris Crocker, the  “Leave Britney Alone” video artist, stopped by Gawker last week to promote his forthcoming HBO documentary, Me @ the Zoo. Mr. Crocker—one of the most despised people on the Internet, Mr. Denton told us—reported back that his Kinja web chat was “the most pleasant hour in a day of media interviews.”

“That was a gratifying moment,” Mr. Denton said.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Once inside, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping beers, while New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary asked a panel of editors and writers to talk about moxie.

Why was it, Ms. O’Leary wondered, that as a young freelancer she had spent months refining every pitch while her male peers tossed off story proposals from every statistic or idea they encountered?

“You have to understand that rejection is part of the process,” Times metro editor Carolyn Ryan said. “It really is part of the engagement with ideas.”

Ms. O’Leary’s younger self would have worried that one bad pitch could get her blacklisted from editors’ inboxes.

“You’re not going to remember in a pejorative way someone who’s just eager,” Ms. Ryan said. “We have a reporter at our paper, Sarah Maslin Nir—she was a lunatic when it came to pitching. She was relentless.” (After freelancing across 11 sections, Ms. Maslin Nir was hired full time.)

Attendees jotted it all down in notebooks made by Muji and Moleskine.

The event was put on by “female nonfiction storytellers” group Her Girl Friday, but a handful of men dotted the crowd, either in solidarity or simply sensing a networking or hook-up opportunity. The mood alternated between J-school seminar and group therapy session (even The Observer found herself involuntarily pumping her fist as panelist Katherine Lanpher cried, “No is a bump on the road to yes!”), but the evening’s mission seemed grander.

“This estrogen halo in this room—it’s really wonderful, it’s really powerful,” said Ms. Lanpher, a public radio host. “But we’re here because those byline counts matter.”

She was referring to the annual tallies put out by The Op-Ed Project, a nonprofit that shepherds women and minority writers onto newspaper op-ed pages, and VIDA, a two-year-old organization for women in the literary arts best known for throwing the wildest party the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference has ever seen. (There were burlesque dancers and roller-derby girls.)

In the last three years, the groups have become a fixture in Manhattan media circles for their end-of-year counts, which distill the nebulous boys-clubbiness of publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker into easily rebloggable bar graphs and pie charts.

As a result, a conversation previously relegated to once-a-decade university research papers has become an annual media event, a regular and cathartic articulation of a long-running internal monologue.

“We call the count ‘The Count’ from our experience of quietly counting to ourselves every time we read The New York Times Book Review,” VIDA co-founder Erin Belieu, a poet and professor at Florida State University told The Observer. “We were always looking to see how many and what kinds of books by women are being reviewed.”

In addition to counting female-authored articles, stories and poems, VIDA keeps tabs on the number of books by women reviewed by tastemakers like the London and New York Reviews of Books. Less than 20 percent of the titles reviewed by the NYRB were written by women, a problem novelist Meg Wolitzer wrote about in The New York Times earlier this year.

Ms. Wolitzer told The Observer the statistics had validated a suspicion she and female novelist friends had long shared. “You just had that feeling there was excitement around male work,” she said. “That was something I couldn’t quantify but I felt.”

It’s hardly a new discussion. Katha Pollitt reportedly devoted a Nation column to the problem more than a decade ago. TIME online editor Ruth Davis Konisberg had her own byline count site in the mid-aughts, called Women TK. But for the same reason, VIDA’s numbers are shocking. How is it that in 2012, The Nation (helmed by a woman, Katrina vanden Heuvel, since 1995), is still 73 percent written by men?

There are a couple of theories. The most popular is that women pitch less, or less aggressively, than men. Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush said as much when confronted with her dismal statistics, calling the “dearth of female bylines” an “industry-wide issue.”

“When I saw the VIDA counts I thought, I don’t know why that is. I’m not in the right position to theorize,” Ms. O’Leary said. But having mentored young journalists, she knew pitching was a perennial concern, and one piece of the puzzle that could be solved. “I just thought, well, hey, why don’t we do something really practical?”

According to a blog post by former GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman, the gender makeup of a magazine reflects the genders of its editors and their professional networks of writers. Shortly after the first VIDA count, Ms. Friedman started Lady Journos!, a curated feed of quality, nonservice articles and essays written by women, in the hopes of keeping female bylines fresh in the minds of assigning editors.

The token male on Tuesday’s panel, The Atavist founder Evan Ratliff, agreed that editors should take responsibility.

“We have had a really bad gender byline balance,” he said sheepishly. The Atavist, which publishes very long form nonfiction, has only published two pieces by women, out of sixteen total, since it was founded in 2011.

Boos, though polite ones, rose from the crowd.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” he joked.

He explained that after the first two stories The Atavist assigned to women fell through (a total coincidence, he assured the crowd), they never managed to correct the ratio.

“There are a lot of male writers who just have a natural sense of entitlement to them,” Mr. Ratliff said. They just pitch and pitch until something sticks.

“It’s not a question of gender as much as it is a question of who feels entitled to take up the space,” Ms. Lanpher said, pointing out that Wikipedia has no editor and is 75 percent written by men. “They feel they can do that. It’s really not an ovary thing.”

With Jill Abramson at the top of The Times and Tina Brown at the top of Newsweek, it’s easy to forget that the publications were embroiled in landmark gender discrimination cases as recently as 1978 and 1970, respectively.

“The system at Newsweek was women researched and men wrote,” Gloria Steinem recalled at Monday night’s Women’s Media Center benefit. “It was absolutely airtight. So considering where we started I’m not surprised it’s still a problem.”

Whatever the causes, the gender awareness stoked by the VIDA count has added a new, political layer to the ritual grousing over National Magazine Award nominees. Ms. Friedman divvied up the count by gender this year and found no women had been nominated in prestige categories like feature writing, columns and commentary, essays and criticism, and reporting. (They fared better in the personal service category, home to “Would You Get a ‘Mommy Tuck’?”)

Meanwhile, election news analysis site The 4th Estate found that women contributed just 15 percent of the quotations in political articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and even named the worst offenders (will anyone volunteer to introduce Jeff Zeleny and Dan Balz to some chicks?), something VIDA has heretofore avoided.

“Shaming people has never really changed anyone’s mind,” Ms. Belieu explained.

VIDA was born from a viral email manifesto written in August 2009 by Cate Marvin, a poet and professor at the College of Staten Island. The AWP had just rejected a panel she had proposed for its annual conference, on the transgressive in female poetry, and she faced an absurdly large pile of infant laundry to fold. Writing to a handful of writerly friends, she likened herself to the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Ms. Belieu stayed up all night forwarding the email to like-minded women, who flooded Ms. Marvin’s inbox. They were frustrated that the conversation about women in the literary arts had devolved, in Ms. Belieu’s words, into “a retrograde, touchy-feely, moon-goddess-y, groovy” sort of thing.

Ms. Marvin and Ms. Belieu co-founded VIDA in part because, as established poets with professor gigs, they could speak freely about inequality in a way that made full-time poets and fiction writers more anxious.

“You undermine your ‘special woman’ status,” Ms. Belieu said, referring to those, like Louise Glück and Kay Ryan, who have been admitted to the literary boy’s club. “What happens when you go on the record as someone who doesn’t like this club?”

Few know better than Jennifer Weiner, the bestselling Good in Bed author. She has publicly fought the literary establishment on Twitter, even as her massive commercial appeal underwrites her publisher’s more artistic ventures.

Ms. Weiner first called attention to the disproportionate amount of attention paid to male authors in 2010, with the hashtag “Franzenfreude,” which she used to describe The Times and other publications’ slobbering over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

The keynote speaker at BookExpo America’s Blogger Conference on Monday, Ms. Weiner said her publicist had urged her not to speak out against The Times again, fearing they would take it out on her next novel.

“What else can they do to me?” Ms. Weiner asked. “Can they quote Jonathan Galassi—who is Jonathan Franzen’s editor—making fun of my made-up German? That happened.”

Now Ms. Weiner thinks that The Times may be misrepresenting her book sales. She said that her current paperback, Then Came You, was the eighth-best-selling book on Bookscan, but only ranked 22 on The New York Times Bestsellers List. When her publisher has called to contest her rankings in the past, she said, The Times said it doesn’t disclose its methodology.

In VIDA, there’s a third party that can hold The Times accountable, by one measure, without risking seeming whiny or paranoid.

“What ‘The Count’ is really doing is, whether they like it or not, editors are in a position of having to think about this,” Ms. Belieu said. “The volume just keeps getting louder.”

On June 18, VIDA will make its formal debut in New York literary society—well, Brooklyn literary society, anyway—with a fundraiser thrown by Riverhead Books at Brooklyn Brewery.

“My goal is: Everyone in publishing should be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t go to the VIDA fundraiser,” said Riverhead head of publicity Jynne Martin. (According to a 2011 count produced by The New Republic, Riverhead’s catalog breaks down 45 percent female and 55 percent male, compared with a 30–70 split elsewhere).

The fundraiser will help VIDA fund its first two program goals: creating a network of mentoring workshops and putting together an endowment that will allow it to offer no-questions-asked grants to writers.

“As a writer you’ll often want to apply for these projects and you’ll have to come up with some grand proposal,” Ms. Belieu said. “‘I’m going to go to Italy and study the saints blah blah blah.’ There are very few organizations where you can say ‘I would use the funds for this award to take care of daycare.’”

“It goes back to Virginia Woolf,” Ms. Belieu said, of writing. “You need enough money and you need a room to do it in.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

(Illo: Fred Harper)

Just before Christmas last year, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly hosted a small, cosmopolitan group of pretty young women in his office at 1 Police Plaza. Most were immigrants to the city, having come from Asia, Central America, Eastern Europe and around the United States. Because of the sensitive nature of what they would discuss, only two other officials were present—the NYPD’s chief counsel and the commanding officer in charge of vice.

The women spoke different languages but had at least one thing in common: they had all been brought to the city to labor in the sex industry. The non-natives’ first English words were “blow job” and “fuck.”

They told harrowing stories of being kidnapped, imprisoned and forced to sell their bodies. One immigrant without legal status in the U.S. described being shuttled around in a livery car, the driver delivering her to various “customers” one after another. “She was basically a prisoner,” said one participant at the meeting.

Mr. Kelly spent two hours with the women, an unusual investment of time for the commissioner. “He has a lot on his plate,” NYPD counsel Katherine Lemire told The Observer. “It was very, very moving. You could tell these women have been through a lot, and for them to come in to the NYPD and have them tell their stories was intimidating for them. That’s why the Commissioner kept the attendance on our side pretty low.”

Shortly after that meeting, which antiprostitution advocates had long been requesting, Mr. Kelly created a new antitrafficking squad, believed to be the first of its kind in an American city. And in the next two months, the NYPD shifted its focus for the first time to arresting johns rather than prostitutes. In two sweeps, one in January and one in February, 386 men were arrested. Many have since been arraigned, and fined between $150 and $250. Some are completing community service and have had their cars impounded. In exchange for leniency, the DA’s office has interviewed many of them, seeking information about trafficked women.

Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told The Observer that Mr. Kelly has now “directed commands citywide to respond to complaints about prostitution by identifying locations and then arresting the johns through the use of officer decoys and their back-up teams.”

“We are very much in agreement with how the NYPD is handling these cases, in terms of their stepped-up efforts in johns cases,” executive assistant DA Karen Friedman Agnifilo, chief of the trial division, told The Observer. The DA’s office has a number of human trafficking cases in the works, she said, including one against a New York City pimp who has “branded” his girls with tattoos.

The new law enforcement emphasis on the demand side was not apparent last week, as Anna Gristina, the “soccer mom madam,” was carted off to Rikers Island, where she remains, unable to cover a $2 million bond (despite being charged with only one count of promoting prostitution). Instantly, the mother of four became a tabloid cover girl, as law enforcement sources dangled leaks about her business. Ms. Gristina was sitting on a fortune, sources said. Her clients were rich and powerful. City officials had made it known that they had her on tape bragging about her well-heeled customer base. The Daily News, hard out of the gate on the story until it got beat on the first jailhouse interview, characterized the johns as “a roster of bold-faced names including royalty, state politicians, CEOs, club owners and members of the boards of city hospitals and art institutions.”

Clearly the authorities know who many of those johns are. No names have been forthcoming, however. Rather the “curvy strawberry blonde,” who had a soft heart for orphaned pot-bellied pigs, used the New York Post to assure her regular patrons that her incarceration wouldn’t alter the discretion for which some had paid the equivalent of the median American annual income.

“I’d bite my tongue off before I’d tell them anything,” she declared, in her Scottish brogue.

If history is prologue, the men have little to worry about. Like 90 percent of the johns in the United States, New York’s most famous prostitution customer, the notorious Client Nine, was never charged with a crime. Client Nine’s favorite rental girl, Ashley Dupré, was never aware that the square-jawed, important-seeming guy who fucked her bareback without ever removing his black socks was the governor of the state of New York, or that he helped write and then signed into law the nation’s toughest anti-human trafficking statute.

In New York State, patronizing a prostitute is a Class A misdemeanor. Theoretically, offenders can get up to a year in jail, but most are issued a desk ticket and walk away with a small fine and maybe some community service. (The crime becomes a felony only if the prostitute is under 14.)

Among Eliot Spitzer’s one-time comrades in the effort to shut down human trafficking is Norma Ramos of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Ms. Ramos, who works out of a serene, unmarked office not far from the Korean brothels in the 30s, is a self-described “product of the New York City foster care system” who equates prostitution with slavery and calls herself an “abolitionist.”

Ms. Ramos was one of the advocates who arranged for Mr. Kelly to meet with what they call “prostituted women”—placing the responsibility on the traffickers and customers, a distinction that has rankled advocates for the rights of “sex workers.”

“I say to them, ‘Why should anyone have to give a blow job to eat a sandwich?’” Ms. Ramos said. “They stopped inviting me to debates, because they can’t answer how that is empowering.”

For their part, supporters of sex workers, like the writer Melissa Gira Grant, assail the new abolitionists as prudish “moralists” who don’t get that sex work is just another part of the service industry. “There’s nothing feminist or new in the current wave of antiprostitution reformers who say … that all sex work is ‘sexual enslavement,’” she wrote last year in The Guardian.

Ms. Ramos and her fellow abolitionists frame prostitution as a gender-bias issue. “We live in a world where the whole enforcement apparatus around prostitution is constructed in a hugely, chokingly gender-biased manner,” she said. “Those who are sold are overwhelmingly female. And the buyers and sellers are overwhelmingly male. And resources always go toward arresting the victims. But if we stand a chance of putting the trafficking industry out of business we have to end the demand.”

Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education in San Francisco, produced a 2003 study based on interviews with 854 prostituted women around the world. She found that 68 percent of them met the criteria for PTSD. “The most severe damage of prostitution is not physical, it’s psychological,” she said. “The rates of PTSD are among the highest of any group ever studied.”

Prostitution, Ms. Ramos argued, has created “a class of human beings that are not allowed to say no.”

Former diplomat and Texas oil heiress Swanee Hunt has poured millions into the antitrafficking movement. Her Demand Abolition project surveyed 202 johns in Boston and found some disturbing attitudes. “I’ve never had emotional encounters with a prostitute,” said one unnamed survey respondent. “You tell a girl, like, can I put it in your ass and she’s like, ‘Oohh, I really like that.’ That has a good physiological effect.” More crucially, the survey found twice the level of criminality among the sex buyers it interviewed as among the nonbuyers.

The study recommended that police departments like Dallas, which have started to take DNA swabs of prostitutes they arrest—claiming that such women are more likely to be the victims of homicide—should start swabbing johns instead, since they are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior.

The “50 beauties” employed by Ms. Gristina, as the New York Post put it, were said to be a different type than the women enslaved by sex traffickers. They weren’t hookers, they were “escorts,” who come at a higher price and provide services that go beyond sex. Chief among such premium services is what Canadian journalist Victor Malarek, who has written a book on the john culture, calls the “Girlfriend Experience” or GFE (the basis for the Sasha Grey movie).

As one john explained to Mr. Malarek: “The GFE means that for the duration of the encounter, the provider does not make you feel like you are participating in a business transaction.”

Some of Ms. Gristina’s clients are said to have paid $25,000 for weekends in Europe, or $800 an hour. One of her employees, “Lizzie,” told the Daily News that she was flown on a private jet to Europe to help a john shop for a mansion. “I’m not a typical escort,” she said in a wide-ranging sit-down with reporters. “I don’t have big implants, I don’t dress [like a prostitute]. I don’t do drugs. I don’t even smoke … Did I travel first-class? You don’t understand. These are men who have their own jets. They have collections of cars.”

She thought of herself as a kind of well-paid surrogate. “I’m the companion, the therapist,” she said. “I can hold a conversation. I’m the person to whom they go when they need a retreat, when they want to get away from their wife.”

Reading those words, Ms. Ramos scoffed: “What I would ask Lizzie is, how did you get started in this business?”

Abolitionists advocating the prosecution of buyers point to the success of what is called “the Swedish model.” Since Jan. 1, 1999, it has been illegal in Sweden to purchase or attempt to purchase sexual services, punishable with fines or up to six months of imprisonment. Those who are prostituted risk no legal repercussions.

By 2004, the number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped 40 percent, and by 2007 the nation was estimated to have the lowest number of victims of human trafficking in Europe. At the time of the change in legislation in 1999, it is estimated that one in eight men bought sex. In 2009, it was down to one in 14. The numbers aren’t particularly surprising: Johns tend to have more at risk—their reputations, careers, families. The surprise, perhaps, is that they’ve been protected for so long.

Norway, Iceland and Finland have copied the approach and it is under consideration in Israel. Even free-wheeling Amsterdam has begun to crack down. In 2008 the mayor started a campaign to close the brothels in the red-light district, contending that the workers in it were trafficked. The city set up a hotline for buyers to call to verify whether an independent prostitute (a prostitute who does not work in a licensed brothel) is legal.

The NYPD’s new human trafficking squad consists of eight experienced investigators and a sergeant supervisor, all handpicked by Mr. Kelly with the involvement of antiprostitution coalition members.

Since the beginning of 2012, NYPD has run two citywide stings, one in January and one in February, dubbed “Operation Losing Proposition”—in which a total of 360 johns were arrested and 102 vehicles were seized. Mr. Browne said the new focus on the johns will continue. “While we have had Losing Proposition arrests in the past, they have been small in scope, not citywide like these,” he explained. “It’s a new policy in that the focus has switched to johns.”

In a statement to The Observer, Commissioner Kelly noted that “women are victimized by prostitution, often forced into it by intimidation and other forms of exploitation. It makes sense to focus on those who are creating the demand, and for them to realize that they face being arrested and having their cars seized.”

Mr. Ramos welcomes the developments as evidence that she and her cohorts have made a dent in police culture that generally abides the trade, or even participates in it. “These girls often say they know cops from the waist down,” she said.

The fact that Mr. Spitzer was never prosecuted not only reinforced the notion that the law enforcement apparatus in New York is not just casting a benign eye on the trade, but partaking of it as well, Ms. Ramos added. “You know, Spitzer apologized to a lot of people, to his family, his wife, the people of New York, but he has to this day withheld the one apology that would get him redemption. He has yet to apologize to the decade of women he bought, for using them as disposable things. He should have been prosecuted and the first one charged under the bill he signed.”

The NYPD’s new focus on johns began long after the five-year investigation that netted Ms. Gristina was initiated. The only male names that have turned up so far are those of two cops and a banker. Sergeant Richard Wall was seen entering and leaving the brothel building, and NYPD has asked for his log book, which presumably will explain the frequency of his visits. A former cop who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office, Sly Francis, was outed in the press as one of Ms. Gristina’s personal bodyguards. And a Morgan Stanley banker, David S. Walker, was meeting with Ms. Gristina in his office when she was arrested. He was reportedly discussing financing her planned expansion into online dating. Mr. Walker denied wrongdoing, but has been placed on leave.

The NYPD has run only two citywide john stings, and Ms. Ramos believes the police may be reluctant to continue because of tepid public support, especially from The New York Times, which covered the stings with critical comment from pro-sex worker advocates. “It is not a sound policy,” Audacia Ray of the Red Umbrella Project told The Times. “I don’t think we’ll see a big drop in prostitution because of these arrests.”

Ms. Ramos disagrees. “You don’t need to arrest them all,” she said. “But you need to arrest enough so you change the cultural and community standards and people realize that it’s not O.K. to buy sex and if you do this there will be consequences to the victimizer.”

Ms. Ramos plans to bring feminist icon Gloria Steinem with her to a meeting with the editorial board of The Times to discuss its coverage of prostitution. “Two men reported on the change in police policy, and quoted only the sex workers project,” she pointed out. “There is a huge problem at The New York Times.”

Besides The Times, the media response to sensational arrests like Ms. Gristina’s tends to be more winking than thoughtful. The tabloids kept the story on page one for three days, teasing out sensational tidbits. Ms. Gristina and her employees were variously described “mantraps” and “high-class hookers” satisfying “the sexual appetites of high-flying clientele” in “an uncut, XXX version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Amorous.” Even the Daily Beast, run by women’s empowerment maven Tina Brown, advertised the story with the headline “The Best Little Whorehouse in New York.”

Now sitting behind bars while her well-heeled johns go about their usual business, the “McMadam” appears determined to protect her clients. Whether prosecutors will do the same remains to be seen.

editorial@observer.com

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

On a recent post-NFL season Monday night, 7.3 million people watched a remake of Hawaii 5-0. Another 6.7 million watched Castle, a crime procedural that’s safely avoided buzz for four seasons. A crowd less than half that size, 3.2 million, watched an American furniture manufacturer tearfully repent for outsourcing the family business, met a real-life moon colonist, and saw a chimpanzee flip through a children’s book. “They like to look at the pictures,” the voiceover explained.

They had landed on the three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’s formidable charisma. Mr. Williams’s sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.”

“He’s got tremendous personality,” Mr. Hartman said in a phone interview with The Observer. “We wanted to give him an opportunity to show the breadth of his experience, his knowledge, his news sensibility, and the range of his personality.”

Since when do news anchors need a personality?

The previous generation of TV news gods—Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw—didn’t have personalities; they had jawlines, which were square, and brows, which they knit when they told us with patriarchal gravity how the country’s day went.

In 2010, network news lost more than 750,000 viewers, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Although NBC shed the fewest, the report noted that network news is on “a slide so long and gradual that few imagine it can now be abated, except perhaps by moving to new platforms.”

Mr. Williams has a lantern jaw and an expressive brow too, but he also has the comic timing and pop culture antennae that make him the kind of guy you’d want to make you a playlist. These traits, though by all accounts genuine, might have been reserved, in another era, for the anchor’s close friends and off-the-record confidantes. Instead, they’ve been drilled into us in what seems, retrospectively, like a company-directed cross-platform Brian Williams congeniality campaign.

He hosted SNL capably. He skewered himself on 30 Rock and he skewered his medium on Fallon, slow-jamming the news. As part of a roundtable assembled on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the biggest media story of 2010, Mr. Williams delivered a satiric monologue about The New York Times’s “discovery” of Brooklyn so uncannily pitch-perfect that it felt like watching Skynet (the Terminator’s artificial intelligence overlord) become self-aware. It knows it’s an anchor.

It seems to be working.

“When he got the anchor job, I distinctly remember having zero opinion of him,” Eric Cunningham, a 27-year-old sketch comedian told The Observer. “But then it’s almost like he went out of his way to let people who weren’t news junkies know that he was cool.”

Interestingly, NBC opened up programming space for Mr. Williams’s personality at the same time the ratings of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were surpassing those of every Fox News host’s except Bill O’Reilly. NBC Universal tried to lure Jon Stewart away from Comedy Central more than once, according to sources familiar with the matter. But judging from Mr. Williams’s 2007 turn as the host of SNL, they didn’t need to.

“Brian was funny before Jon Stewart,” said Alexandra Wallace, a senior vice president at NBC News and a longtime executive producer at Nightly. Ms. Wallace said that his move toward entertainment was organic but that the network opened up to his comedic outings when it saw they didn’t cost him any credibility.

“The news has become more personal,” she explained. “As the viewer, I want to feel more of a connection, and I want to feel that I’m getting to know the person who’s telling the news.”

Some NBC insiders said the laid-back, on-air Brian belies managing editor of Nightly News Brian, who has an assiduous, Type A personality and whose staff abides by a strict code of punctuality and professionalism. Mr. Williams has been through five executive producers in his seven-year tenure (the survivors went on to higher posts at NBC) and has said he wouldn't wish the job on anyone.

“You don’t get where he is without having really high standards for yourself and the people who work for you,” Ms. Wallace said. “I think Brian has a ton of fun, and the staff has a ton of fun but it’s a lot of work. So I’m sure there are some rules. But we might be getting on at 6:45 if there weren’t any.”

Last summer, Mr. Cunningham and some friends started a semi-serious Brian Williams for President campaign. Not because they viewed him as a paragon of trustworthiness and authority, but because he was funny.

The real signal of the anchor’s “indie comedy cred,” he said, was Mr. Williams’s turn on ASSSCAT, a regular improv show put on by the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Mr. Cunningham doesn’t watch broadcast news religiously—especially now that it appears BriWi (a nickname Internet gadabout Rachel Sklar takes credit for) won’t be running for office—but said that he’s seen Rock Center, and likes it. “It’s a lot like Dateline, but if Dateline were allowed to not do stories on cheerleader-murderers,” he noted.

For people accustomed to digesting news through a Twitter stream that contains both CNN breaking news and Onion headlines, it’s no big deal to see the man in the anchor’s desk toggle between hard news and comedy.

“I was talking with a friend of mine about how Brian Williams manages to make you truly care about tragic-but-evergreen stories you hear about nearly every day—in a way that’s hard to pin down,” Mr. Cunningham explained. “Then four minutes later, he’ll do a segment on the ‘Shit Girls Say’ videos and it doesn’t feel weird.”

Given Mr. Williams’s obvious chops as an entertainer, we wondered, does Mr. Cunningham think Mr. Williams is wasted doing the news?

“I would be shocked,” he replied. “He’s got it together up there and is too sharp to be drunk at the desk. No offense to Pat Sajak, but going toe-to-toe with Jon Stewart comedically is a lot harder than remembering which letters are vowels.”

Um, actually, we meant wasted as in, Is his true talent going to waste behind the news desk, reading other people’s words? Mr. Williams reportedly abstains from alcohol.

“Ha, oh man—sorry, BriWi just did a segment on Sajak being drunk last night, so I thought that’s what you were referring to,” Mr. Cunningham replied.

Just because Mr. Williams is allowed to loosen his tie once a week does not mean that NBC executives are preparing for hard news doomsday. Mr. Hartman noted that NBC News’s viewership is up, and Ms. Wallace believes the glut of information online has increased the demand for TV news’s distilled synopses. Still, it would be wise for the network to experiment with repurposing its talents sooner rather than later. In 2002, when Mr. Williams was Mr. Brokaw’s heir apparent, eight out of ten 18- to 29-year-olds got their news from television, according to Pew Research Institute. By last year, more than 40 percent of them had disappeared.

But watching a news anchor pander to a generation of news consumers who don’t remember his Peabody-winning Katrina broadcast can be a little bit painful, like watching someone’s freshly divorced dad try to figure out what he missed while he was off the market.

For example, if the new BuzzFeed is banking on the idea that breaking news is a viral meme, Rock Center is banking on the idea that viral memes are breaking news. Mr. Williams has already interviewed Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and the girl from “Shit Girls Say”—not just the comedians behind them but the memes themselves.

During the Marcel the Shell bit, Mr. Williams asked viewers to look at the number of times the video has been viewed, adding, “A lot of network prime time shows would kill for 14 million plus viewers.”

Mr. Williams comes by his new media interests honestly. He has two 20-something children. The elder, Allison, has been linked romantically with Ricky Van Veen, the College Humor founder, and is a star of Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO series about emerging adulthood in Greenpoint.

But his apparent awareness of the declining influence of the medium he’s mastered gives his coziness with Gawker a whiff of desperation.

On Jan. 15, Mr. Williams wrote to Gawker owner Nick Denton, a friend, to praise one of the site’s new weekend hires and shoot the shit. “I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage,” he wrote, adding, “Brooklyn hippster [sic] Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night — booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history, for starters.”

Mr. Denton forwarded the email to Gawker’s new editor in chief A.J. Daulerio, who promptly published it.

The post drew hundreds of thousands of viewers for several reasons. It had America’s news anchor piling on Lana Del Rey, a high-artifice songstress whose SEO, if not her record, is gold. It employed the term “Brooklyn hipster.” And it revealed a bit of in-house cattiness—the face of NBC News sneering at SNL’s booking!

But really, like most people who find themselves in Gawker’s inbox, Mr. Williams was asking the site—which attracts more than six million monthly visitors (twice as many as watch Rock Center each week)—for a little attention.

“I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage.”

NBC asked Gawker to take down the email. It declined. Others internally said they thought it was good for Mr. Williams’s image.

“We’re very busy with this show we put on,” was all Mr. Hartman would say of the matter.

In fact, the next week, a team of Rock Center producers were busy invading Gawker headquarters to film an upcoming profile of Nick Denton Gawker Media.

Though some bloggers presumed the segment was a public hatchet-burial, it had been in the works for weeks.

Next week, Rock Center will move from Monday nights to an earlier slot on Wednesdays, going head-to-head with ABC’s Emmy-laden Modern Family, a new Fox reality show about flash mobs and yet another crime procedural, Criminal Minds, on CBS.

“Prime time is valuable real estate,” Mr. Hartman said. “It’s a tribute to NBC News from NBC Universal and the Comcast Company that they have made this valuable real estate available to us.”

Indeed, some sources consider the creation of Rock Center a sop to the news division from the network’s new owners, which were then busily gutting its ranks.

Although the general interest newsmagazine appears to be trying to be everything to everyone, in many ways, Rock Center’s strategy is a concession to the fact that viewers consume news in many, disaggregate forms. At its core, Rock Center its an assemblage of videos in YouTube-friendly lengths that can be dismantled, liked and shared across platforms. Some Rock Center stories are posted online long before they air.

“I aspire to have people sample the program, people who might not be what we consider traditional viewers,” Mr. Hartman said.

With blandly palatable long form content and a host who is, by now, enough of a celebrity to carry even the dullest interviews, the show sometimes feels like an extremely well-placed billboard for Mr. Williams and his NBC News Superfriends like Kate Snow, and, yes, Chelsea Clinton.

But if NBC puts any stock in the notion that Brian Williams’s personality will outlast the waning primacy of the news anchor, the parable of Lana Del Rey might be instructive. In the Internet echo-chamber, even the most finely calibrated persona delivering expertly produced material isn’t immune to the negative impact of overexposure.

On Jan. 23, Mr. Williams moderated a GOP debate under the Rock Center banner. The spectacle was mostly put on by NBC’s politics and special events teams, but as a strategic branding opportunity for Rock Center, it was a triumph, doubling the usual ratings.

The next day, Mr. Williams’s friends at Gawker featured more TV coverage on the front page, deriding the “orange hipster” for overdoing it.

“Williams would not shut up,” John Cook wrote. “He uttered almost precisely the same number of words last night as Ron Paul, who was ostensibly there as a participant.”

If the criticism stung, Mr. Williams shouldn’t feel too bad. Ms. Del Ray has survived much, much worse.

kstoeffel@observer.com

“I’m here to assure you that you will see me on television this fall,” she said, tossing her blond bob so it grazed the shoulders of a sheer pink blouse.

“Our show was not canceled,” she added with signature Yankee brusqueness. “What we’re trying to do is to figure out a new way to do our show, just to keep evolution occurring.”

Earlier this month, the New York Post and others reported that Ms. Stewart’s long-running daily program, which moved to the cable Hallmark Channel in 2010, had been canceled due to low ratings. Adding insult to injury, the stories noted, Home Depot had decided to dump Ms. Stewart’s personally branded line of wall paints.

Cribbing from the Kim Jong Il playbook, Ms. Stewart staged a display of her power, turning up at the 23rd Street Home Depot, where she praised the building’s cast-iron details, to demonstrate to bewildered customers that it was business-as-usual in Marthaland. They could still purchase her paint colors; they would simply have to mix Martha Stewart-brand pigments—the whites, so the story goes, based on egg shells gathered in her hatchery and pasted into her Filofax—into a Glidden-brand base.

“They are selling like hotcakes, I am told,” she said, gesturing to an array of the swatches propped up before her.

The news that The Martha Stewart Show was on the butcher’s block (the Hallmark Channel neither confirmed nor denied the report) signaled the end of an era for the so-called Doyenne of Domesticity, a former Connecticut caterer who turned a monthly magazine and weekly half-hour how-to program into a publicly traded corporation, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, worth $1.87 billion in 2005. (“Omni-” includes mass-market merchandise.) The same week, papers reported that fellow daytime maven Oprah Winfrey was still struggling lead her network audience of six to eight million to the upper-register of the cable dial (115 on Time Warner Cable in Manhattan), where her one-year-old Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) had landed. The New Year’s Day premiere of Oprah’s Next Chapter, a weekly answer to The Oprah Winfrey Show, drew just 1.1 million viewers, suggesting a once-revolutionary media archetype—the self-made goddess of self-improvement—had entered her declining years.

It’s been quite a run. Oprah launched her nationally syndicated talk show in 1986, seven years before the arrival of Ms. Stewart, who, except for a brief 2004 stay in West Virginia, has been on the air nonstop since 1992. Between the two of them, Ms. Stewart and Ms. Winfrey were a tag team of ’90s empowerment that ushered their viewers—women that the economic boom had enabled to “opt out” of the workforce—away from the mind-numbing hell of endless soaps and channeled their latent ambition into near-militant homemaking and a determination to live their “best life.”

How could that not be a good thing?

There was a nice balance between them. If Ms. Stewart’s topiaries began to seem symptomatic of some Apollonian psychosis, we could always flip to Oprah, where “spiritualist” Iyanla Vanzant taught self-love so complete it bordered on onanism. Ms. Stewart stuck to surfaces and Ms. Winfrey plumbed our psyches, but both shows were built upon a similar promise of feminine self-betterment. Anything we missed on TV we could catch up on via their dueling monthly magazines, Martha Stewart Living and O: The Oprah Magazine, which took up the mantle of the antediluvian “Seven Sisters.”

Ms. Winfrey’s spirituality (to say nothing of her BMI and her feelings regarding her BMI) was a work in progress she tended to for our entertainment. When she wasn’t propagating delusional self-help programs (what was The Secret, again?), her bread-and-butter spots were a parade of Mall of America grotesques not so different from those of predecessor Phil Donahue. But while we sneered at Maury and Springer, Ms. Winfrey’s quickness to relate her guests’ stories to her own lifetime of adversity set off a chain reaction of transference. We gawked at them until we identified with them until we—cut to the studio audience, quivering, dabbing their eyes—sobbed along with them.

Her couch was the first stop for celebrities seeking public redemption. It was where Michael Jackson explained that his skin had lightened due to an obscure disorder, where Tommy Hilfiger promised that he never said he didn’t want black people to wear his clothes, and where James Frey was excoriated for fudging his memoir, which we’d read only because Oprah had recommended it.

While Ms. Stewart was frostily autocratic, Ms. Winfrey had the homey wisdom to know the difference between the things she could and could not do, as the 12-steppers say, plus the money to employ an army of gurus to cover for her weaknesses. Rather than keep this privileged life under wraps, she introduced us to her menagerie of specialists: her private chef, her personal trainer, Chicago’s hottest decorator, a renowned cardiac surgeon who advocated alternative medicine, the ex-psychologist who gave her legal counsel in her case against Texas cattlemen, and the sweat-lodge evangelist later convicted of negligent homicide.

The most faithful of them reaped unimaginable rewards, with posts on a Mount Olympus of syndicated spin-offs. As for the implements of fulfillment that couldn’t be taught on daytime television (high-thread-count sheets, personal digital assistants, tummy-tucking undergarments), she could always dole them out on the orgiastic annual “Favorite Things” giveaway spree.

This time last year, the launch of OWN was the talk of the Television Critics Association press tour, from Ms. Winfrey’s messianic news conference to the glitzy cocktail party packed with Oprah’s friends-turned-network costars. There was Gayle King, Ms. Winfrey’s loyal sidekick, and Dr. Laura Berman, Oprah’s talk radio sexpert, and Suze Orman, the credit card wizard. You get a show! And you get a show! And you get a show!

As The Oprah Winfrey Show wound down in May, reunion specials spiked ratings, giving the impression Ms. Winfrey had bested Ms. Stewart for good. That month, shares of MSLO dipped below $5 and the company brought in the Blackstone Group to advise on a potential sale.

But since then, Ms. Winfrey’s cultural stock has also taken a hit. Between sporadic scheduling and OWN’s unfortunate spot on the cable lineup, Oprah’s audience drifted away. So in July, Ms. Winfrey named herself CEO of the network, which launched a campaign instructing viewers where to find it.

At the same Television Critics Association event this year, all eyes were on Ms. King, but not, for once, because of any affiliation with Ms. Winfrey. In a recent overhaul, CBS made Ms. Winfrey’s consigliere coanchor of This Morning, alongside Charlie Rose and Erica Hill.

Asked if Ms. Winfrey would be making any guest appearances, Ms. King hedged.

When it made sense, she replied.

By then it was also becoming clear that a spot in Ms. Winfrey’s pantheon did not guarantee eternal, syndicated glory. Dr. Phil, the original Oprah spin-off, fell below Maury in daytime ratings, and The Nate Berkus Show was canceled due to low viewership. Meanwhile, over at the Hallmark Channel, it wasn’t just The Martha Stewart Show that was at risk of cancellation but all MSLO programming, including Martha Bakes and Emeril Lagasse, acquired in 2008.

As Ms. Stewart and Ms. Winfrey receded into to their respective boardrooms, onlookers sought an heiress apparent. For a moment, it seemed that Food Network star Rachael Ray was the one. She had Ms. Winfrey’s warmth and Ms. Stewart’s interest in entertaining. What she lacked in authority (she was one mispronounced ingredient away from giving Anthony Bourdain an aneurysm), she made up for in relatability. In 2005, she left Lake Isle Press for Clarkson Potter, Ms. Stewart’s first publisher, and launched her own magazine with Reader’s Digest, Every Day With Rachael Ray. The same year, Ms. Winfrey opened the door to syndication with a Harpo-produced cook-talk show, Rachael Ray.

The EVOO began to go stale in time. Late last year, Reader’s Digest blamed Every Day’s weak ad revenue for the company’s declining profits and sold the title to Meredith. The magazine sent subscribers a letter that said that the November book was so big, they would count it toward two of their subscription issues. Those who complained—some tipping off The New York Times along the way—got it refunded. The magazine will reportedly lose $10 million this year due to a 21 percent dip in advertising.

Interestingly, Ms. Ray’s most popular recent endeavor had nothing to do with imparting lifestyle advice. On New Year’s Day, the premiere of Rachael v. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off—in which she and fellow Food Network provincial fave Guy Fieri coach D-list celebrities like Aaron Carter and Summer Sanders in a cooking contest—drew 3.5 million viewers. That’s more than three times as many people as Ms. Winfrey pulled for a two-hour heart-to-heart with Steven Tyler.

In 2012, we’re less likely to see a high-functioning superwoman deified than we are to see the celebrities we’ve already exalted flap about as they try their hands at lowly housework. As if Bravo’s “Real” housewives weren’t already ample proof that money can’t buy Martha-grade taste, it seems we’re still doomed to get the latest news from the dysfunctional Kardashian domicile. As Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, and Every Day With Rachael Ray continue to scrap for advertisers, the Kardashians have reportedly been talking to tabloid giant American Media about launching their own magazine.

Businesswomen first, Ms. Winfrey and Ms. Stewart seem to have intuited and prepared for this shift in viewing tastes, even at the cost of totalitarian control of their brands. To make a big comeback upon returning from the big house, Ms. Stewart teamed up with reality television producer Mark Burnett and prostrated herself before audiences on her own season of Celebrity Apprentice. Even after she’d earned our forgiveness, she never really reverted to the old June Cleaver meets Catherine the Great shtick.

On a new daily show produced by Mr. Burnett, Martha, Ms. Stewart gave up declaring which things were “good things.” Instead she played anal-retentive straight woman to celebrity guests ranging from Alan Cumming to Snoop Dogg. Viewers tuned in not to learn how she frosts hot cross buns, but to watch her squirm when Seth Meyers messed up her pastry bag.

At the launch of OWN, there were two empty spots in the channel’s lineup. Unlike the other stars hand-picked by Ms. Winfrey, these were reserved for the winners of a reality show competition, “Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star” (yet another Mark Burnett joint). The contestants were nominated by an online audience vote. The winner, Karina Kuzmic, launched The Ambush Cook, which uses guerrilla tactics to rid the world of hapless home chefs.

Ms. Kuzmic will never reach as many viewers as Oprah and Martha did, but after their long runs, fewer of us need to be rescued. As a culture, we’ve long since graduated from their respective schools of self-improvement.

There’s nothing Ms. Stewart did—be it crafting, canning, or chicken-raising—that some kids aren’t now doing in Bushwick or Portland, albeit with a little less WASP-y flair. Far from living the good life, like Ms. Stewart at Turkey Hill, they’re likely looking to make rent with an Etsy store or saving up for a food cart.

As for the cathedral of catharsis on The Oprah Winfrey Show, it seems unlikely that any television show will ever replace it, but an afternoon spin on Facebook, a well of unsolicited confessions and personal narratives, is probably a satisfactory substitute.

All this was on our mind last Thursday at a cocktail party in the Edison Ballroom, which was being thrown to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Today show. We spied Jeff Zucker in the back, and there was Katie Couric, dancing on stage. Did their top-secret syndication collaboration aspire to fill the Oprah void? And there was first girlfriend Sandra Lee, whose proclivity for cooking with prepared goods, we imagined, Ms. Stewart must privately mock.

And then suddenly she appeared in the doorway. Like most of the camera-ready guests who’d turned up, Ms. Stewart was remarkably unlined for her age (she is 70) but looked queenly in a jacket made of white fur. It must have been faux—she renounced the good, bad stuff and became a PETA spokeswoman while in prison—but it was soft as a chinchilla when we tapped her on the shoulder.

We were looking for a little clarity regarding Hallmark’s statement on Martha.

“We’re not canceled,” she said crisply.

She’d promised she would be on the air in September; would she return on Hallmark or a different channel?

“We’ll be back,” she replied, averting her eyes, as someone whisked her away to a private balcony, an unimpeachable VIP.

kstoeffel@observer.com

The first issue.

Later this month, the longtime president of Nylon magazine, Don Hellinger, and its current chief financial officer, Jami Pearlman, will report to court for trial readiness. In February, US Attorneys charged them with money laundering and operating an illegal gambling business. They seek $44 million in forfeiture.

Judging from its pages, downtown New York is central to Nylon’s DNA. Its name was an amalgam of New York and London, and the magazine has operated out of a Greene Street loft since it launched in 1999. A September issue spread was shot at the city’s latest hipster enclave, Rockaway Beach. But the trial will take place in Philadelphia, Pa., where the crew of suits who cut its waifish writers’ checks have been devising scams and having run-ins with the Federal Trade Commission since before most Nylon readers were even born.

Launched in 1999, Nylon catapulted to influence on the reputation of its well-regarded founders. West Coast magazine power couple Marvin and Jaclyn Jarrett sold their stake in the influential yet illegible culture magazine Ray-Gun and formed a company called Pop Media. They decamped to Soho, picking up supermodel Helena Christiansen on the way and making her the magazine’s creative director. Nylon aimed to subvert the conventions of typical fashion magazines: It cast overweight or odd-looking models, consulted goth pop star Shirley Manson, of Garbage, for beauty advice, and hired Jason Lee’s wife to shoot the photos for his profile. The Observer dubbed it a New Yorker for the supermodel set, and in its second year, Nylon was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence, up against Harper’s, the longest running monthly magazine in America.

As many magazine editors know all too well, there’s no equity in an Ellie. During its first few years, Nylon ran up enormous debt, according to sources familiar with the company’s management. Around 2003, Larry Rosenblum was hired as a consulting chief financial officer, and he eventually became magazine president. Mr. Rosenblum reached out to an old friend, Don Hellinger, with whom he’d grown up in Philadelphia. Mr. Hellinger, who’d begun his business career working in his family’s kosher catering company, had gone on to establish a number of small consumer financial services firms and telemarketing companies. He opened his wallet, and in 2005 established Nylon Holding, Inc., to operate the company’s financials out of Langhorne, Pa., alongside his other companies.

The Nylon rescue mission was the first success in what became pattern of investments and acquisitions that would eventually establish Mr. Hellinger’s unlikely foothold in New York media.

Mr. Rosenblum developed an ambitious plan to run a consortium of niche titles that could share publishing resources, over which he would rule as the “Jason Binn of downtown magazines,” according to a Mediabistro article. In 2006, he bought the stylish Japanese ex-pat magazine Tokion from its founder Andrew Glickman for a reported $2 million. In 2007, he added the high brow tattoo quarterly Inked to his portfolio, which he gave the name Downtown Media Group.

One evening later that year, Mr. Rosenblum sat in the back of Tom and Jerry’s—the media-heavy watering hole on Elizabeth Street where he knew the bartenders by name—celebrating the acquisition of Animal, an underground magazine edited and published by media troublemaker Bucky Turco. Mr. Rosenblum mused about purchasing the New York Press. He picked up the drinks that night, but soon after, he stopped returning Mr. Turco’s calls and neither deal was consummated.

By then the recession was real, advertisers were disappearing, and the business of magazine publishing had begun to feel less like a game of Monopoly and more like hot potato. Mr. Rosenblum never even got one issue of Inked out before he sold it to Mr. Hellinger, who formed the company Pinchazo Media. In early 2009, Mr. Rosenblum sold him Tokion; like millions of American homes, it was in foreclosure. Having fled the publishing business, Mr. Rosenblum spent a year operating a NASCAR track in Virginia and then moved back to Philadelphia, where he now owns a popular Montreal-style bagel shop.

In May of that year, Mr. Hellinger made a solo media play, for the San Francisco–based shelter title Surface. He then branded his design-centric quartet (Nylon, Inked, Tokion and Surface) Quadra Media, LLC.

For the most part, Mr. Hellinger stayed out editorial operations, according to former editors. One exception was a clash with Inked’s editor in chief Jason Buhrmaster. A career journalist, Mr. Buhrmaster aspired to create a tattoo magazine with editorial content of a quality that would fit in with the rest of Quadra’s design-centric portfolio. Mr. Hellinger was less discerning, Mr. Buhrmaster said, urging the editor to take meetings with every reality television producer or tattooed freelancer he came across.

That may sound like a typical editor-publisher dispute. But more troubling signs of Mr. Hellinger’s business strategies soon began to reveal themselves. In April 2009, in what appeared to be a cost-cutting measure at Nylon, Mr. Hellinger sent an e-mail to the magazine’s subscribers, trumpeting a new fulfillment policy—digital editions.

“No more waiting for your new issues to come in the mail!” the email said. “We will email each new issue of Nylon to you the day our editors sign off on it.”

In an understated postscript, the email noted that if the magazine’s paid subscribers wanted to continue receiving hard copies of the magazine, all they had to do was ask.

“P.S. If for some reason you would prefer to receive the print edition of NYLON instead of the digital edition, simply call 1-866-639-8133.”

Publisher Jaclyn Jarrett later told WWD that the e-mail had only been sent to those who had picked up free gift subscriptions, but reports of financial instability at Quadra became routine. Later that month, rumors circulated that Quadra was foreclosing on Surface magazine. In June, the magazine’s staff moved out of its offices and began bunking with the parent company.

Nonetheless, Mr. Hellinger was enthusiastic about the business. He traveled constantly between Philadelphia, Miami, and New York, picking up all the local magazines along the way and showing them to his editors. He got Nylon prime spots at the ends of the racks at airport newsstands. He was new to magazine publishing, but he was a skilled marketer and hustler.

Indeed, before Mr. Hellinger got into the magazine business, he’d acquired something of a rap sheet. In 1989, he was convicted of tax evasion and mail fraud in connection with a phony coupon scheme and fined $30,000. In 1995, the Federal Trade Commission accused him of deceptively promoting credit cards via 1-900 numbers that charged as much as $24 a call (he settled). In the late ‘90s and early aughts, Mr. Hellinger and a cohort of suburban Philadelphia partners oversaw a suite of payment processing companies that helped a number of telemarketing companies dupe and defraud the elderly, according to court documents.

Telemarketers affiliated with Mr. Hellinger’s companies would inform their marks that they qualified for $6,000 government grant, less a $259 processing fee. Senior citizens provided their bank information, but instead of a deposit, they received a pamphlet providing more information about government grants.

Mr. Hellinger’s company Netchex used the bank information to print checks without the senior citizen’s signature; another company sold the names and numbers of those who had fallen for telemarketing schemes to other telemarketers. Among his partners were Ronald Hellinger, Donald’s twin brother, and Michelle Quigley, who had previously run various consumer fraud schemes under the name Madame Arielle DuPont.

Mr. Hellinger and the gang reportedly sold those businesses in 2004 for $3.83 million plus contingency payments of up to $5 million, and founded something called the Payment Processing Company.

In 2007, a disabled grandmother living on pension checks who had been fooled not once but twice by one of Mr. Hellinger’s companies filed a class-action lawsuit against Wachovia Bank for serving as the telemarketer’s financial conduit. Wachovia paid $144 million in restitution, but since PPC had been shut down by a federal judge a year earlier, for enabling fraud, nothing happened to Mr. Hellinger.

Now US Attorneys have assembled a case against Mr. Hellinger and his associates directly, involving money laundering and illegal online gambling operations that PPC ran in 2005, including sportsbetting.com and betonsports.com. PPC allegedly accepted tens of millions of dollars from overseas gambling companies and distributed it to bettors in small checks cut from anonymous sounding companies like DTX Cubepay and UC Safetex. The indictment calls for Mr. Hellinger and his associates to forfeit $44 million to the government.

“I have no comment on the case or my role in any business that I am currently involved in or may have been involved with in the past,” Mr. Hellinger wrote the Observer.

Jami Pearlman and Jaclyn Jarrett did not return calls from the Observer. Mr. Hellinger still describes himself as Nylon’s publisher and Nylon Holdings’ president on Twitter, though he is not on the masthead, and the tweets are mostly about Inked.

Former Nylon employees say the New York editorial office has virtually no contact with the Philadelphia office, except following up on behalf of the occasional freelancer fighting for his or her check. But with the business office several hours away, an improbably functional office culture has developed, sources say. Founder and editor in chief Marvin Scott Jarrett has receded to more of a figurehead role, distracted by side projects like the short-lived Nylon records and Nylon films. According to former employees, months go by with him out of the office, although Ms. Jarrett has taken on more of an editorial role than is typical of publishers.

Meanwhile, a small and young staff carries the torch of New York independent fashion, a little bit glossier and safer than the pre-recession days. New international editions published in Mexico and Japan are said to be major moneymakers for the company, with low editorial costs. Even the US additions are pretty thick for a scrappy independent fashion magazine. Despite its rocky start, at some point publisher Jaclyn Jarrett seems to have figured out how to run a magazine business, now she just has to hope her one-time savior Don Hellinger doesn’t drag it down with him.

“The newsroom stopped,” said one person inside the Wall Street Journal offices at the time, where the hearing was being broadcast on the televisions in the bullpen.

Outside, two NYPD cars were parked directly opposite of the building’s main entrance on Avenue of the Americas, while a CNN reporter filmed a report with Mr. Murdoch’s flagship building in the background. Inside, Mr. Murdoch’s operations tried to carry on: Fox News ran the London hearing live, and the Journal reporters—upon recovering—prepared a front-page story for the next morning.

But the pie-stained moment—which included Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, slapping the assailant, and his son, James, complaining to the police—was, in many ways, tailor-made for Mr. Murdoch’s favorite local outlet, the tabloid he had twice bought and most closely resembles the embodiment of his life’s work: Turning dry dispassionate reports of government bodies into dramatic, personal narratives of powerful men and business elites behaving badly. And yet, if any Murdoch news outlet had something resembling an emotional desire to protect the 80-year-old Australian on what he called the “most humble” day of his life, it was the New York Post, the money-losing property that has long felt like a physical extension of its doting owner. The Post ran the story on page 35. Read More

“Stand back! I’m here!”

As it turned out, “Doctor” Pogue was there as a representative of the “Industry Rescue Service” and his bedridden patient was “AM/FM.” Mr. Pogue vamped surprise, pieced the situation together out loud—the patient was a metaphor for the dying radio industry—then whipped out a laptop, and “prescribed” his “patient” an online radio site.

The video was typical of Mr. Pogue’s style: folksy and accessible, relentlessly service-oriented and generalized. More than anything, it was goofy and affable.

“We’re talking about a guy who was trained as a pianist and a magician,” said Jeff Yablon, a tech writer who met Mr. Pogue in the early 90’s, when Mr. Yablon was the president of the Computer Press Association and Mr. Pogue’s writing career was still in its earliest stages.

Mr. Pogue’s entertaining tech coverage has conjured a massive and devoted following, but his greatest trick might be convincing the stately Times not to make him disappear—despite raising some of the more thorny conflict-of-interest questions the paper has confronted in recent years.

Mr. Pogue has been accused of being an insidious shill for one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet, Apple, and was reported to be dating a publicist who represents many of the same companies he covers for the Times.

Seven days prior to the video’s release, Mr. Pogue and his estranged wife were each charged with disorderly conduct by police in Westport, Conn., after he allegedly hit her with—what else?—an iPhone.

In the video, the bite mark he reportedly received on his arm during the incident had apparently healed, or was well-concealed. It wasn’t noticeable. Not a single scratch.

If anything, it was classic David Pogue.

An Ohio native, Mr. Pogue graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1985 with a distinction in music. According to the biography on his website, Mr. Pogue moved to New York City after college, and worked a series of jobs in Broadway theater, with an ambition to compose for musicals. He eventually took up teaching at the New School and the Learning Annex, and went on to program and write manuals for various music software programs.

From there, he began teaching composers and Broadway stars how to use their computers, which evolved into—as he put it on his website—“Hollywood and literary celebrities, from Mia Farrow to Harry Connick Jr.”

“The first time I came across David Pogue he was working as Liza Minnelli’s geek-for-hire,” said Mr. Yablon. “He was doing social media marketing before that term existed. The routine was, ‘You know me, I work with these big names, you can trust me, I’ll set you straight on technology.’”

Mr. Pogue has often outlined his entertainment background as a foundation for his current work, once telling a music website that, as the youngest of three children, he is “a natural-born entertainer.” And, after a rare interview with Steve Jobs was criticized for a lack of skepticism, Mr. Pogue defended himself by saying, “I am not a reporter. I’ve been an opinion columnist my entire career … I try to entertain and inform.”

In 1988, Mr. Pogue began a regular column for the Apple fan magazine Macworld. In 1992, he wrote the second book in the “For Dummies” series, Macs for Dummies. He has written more than 50 books, making him, in the words of his own biography, a “ridiculously prolific author.” Only two of the books are fiction: a 1993 “techno-thriller” entitled Hard Drive and a 2010 young-adult book, Abby Carnelia’s One and Only Magical Power. (The Times’s own review noted that “Pogue, the personal-technology columnist for The New York Times and a former magic nerd himself, clearly has a lot of affection for kids.” In the second sentence of the review, the review’s author admits to crying at the end of the book.)

In 2000, Mr. Pogue brought his entertaining brand of explanation to the Times, where he was hired as the Personal Technology Columnist, and, since then, his State of the Art column has appeared regularly on the front page of the Thursday Business section.

He arrived at a crucial moment. Around the time of his hiring, the objects of Mr. Pogue’s affection and study—personal technology—started to transcend their roles as utilitarian aides and objects of geek affection and become fashionable accessories increasingly central to the lives of those who adopted them. When Apple released the iPod in 2001, Mr. Pogue became the go-to layman for the company’s new gadgets, and when the iPhone arrived, he filled his prose with apostlelike praise. (His Times video on the first iPhone is the second-most watched video ever uploaded by the newspaper, with nearly one and half million views.)

Mr. Pogue’s influence metastasized along with Apple’s market share, and his 1.3 million Twitter followers now dwarfs the digital presence of other marquee Times writers such as Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd. It’s more than four times the number of followers that Jenna Wortham, the Times’s decidedly hip, young tech reporter, has; Mr. Pogue, in fact, has more followers than the entire tech reporting staff of the Times combined.

“He’s like the Oprah of gadget writers,” said Michael Sebastian, the managing editor at PR Daily. “A single tweet from him can put you on the best-seller list.” Earlier this week, the appropriately named Cult of Mac tweeted out: “@Pogue...our servers just melted melted from your sorcery.”

“A review from David Pogue is the holy grail,” said a spokesperson from Open DNS. “After he wrote us up, we experienced the single biggest day of growth in the company’s entire history.” In the 24 hours after Pogue’s review appeared in the Times, Open DNS saw account creation jump 370 percent.

Mr. Pogue’s success has created some ethical entanglements. He has been attacked for taking paid speaking engagements, such as one for the Consumer Electronics Association’s “CEO Summit” near Los Angeles in June 2009. That fall—one month after then-public editor Clark Hoyt used an entire column (entitled “He Works for the Times, Too”) to admonish Mr. Pogue—he spoke at Disney World, in an event hosted by the defense contractor Raytheon Company.

In his column, Mr. Hoyt had challenged three media ethicists with Mr. Pogue’s case; all three agreed that Mr. Pogue’s interests were conflicted. His employment status remained unchanged. That same year, the Times fired a writer named Mike Albo, for taking a paid trip to write about junket travel culture for a separate publication—his first, and last, infraction. “Comparing this situation with one particular instance is not fair,” said Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy when asked to compare Mr. Pogue’s case with that of Mr. Albo. “There are different sets of circumstances involved. They’re handled on a case-by-case basis. We handle these situations in accordance with our policy. We are confident that our standards editor has made the appropriate judgment in each case.”

Jeff Jarvis, a best-selling author and journalism professor known for his strong, loudly broadcast opinions on media and tech, compared Mr. Pogue’s self-styled status an “entertainer” to that of Michael Arrington, owner of the blog TechCrunch, which was recently purchased by AOL. “When Mike Arrington says he’s not a journalist, he is really dismissing the label, because he began as an investor,” Mr. Jarvis explained. “I think Pogue is more specious, more for convenience. He expects us to trust him, but at the same time, he asks not to be held to the same standards.” Mr. Jarvis concluded: “I don’t buy his shtick about being an entertainer, not a journalist.”

Mr. Pogue’s harshest critics have focused on his undying praise of Apple products in the Times, and the potential conflict with his best-selling books on the company. Mr. Pogue has gone to bat for Apple’s products quite often, in his signature over-the-top style. An April post mocked the outrage over revelations that Apple was storing location data in its phones. “Ooh! Apple is spying! Ooh! The government is tracking! Ooh! Big Brother is watching!” he wrote. It also ominously noted: “The one legitimate concern [of Apple’s location tracking] is that someone else with access to your computer could retrieve the information about your travels and see where you’ve been. Your spouse, for example.”

A week after Mr. Pogue’s domestic dispute, Dan Lyons, a longtime press foe of Mr. Pogue’s, claimed an even more personal conflict. Mr. Lyons wrote for The Daily Beast that Mr. Pogue had been dating Nicki Dugan, a public relations executive who works out of San Francisco. A journalist dating a public relations executive is hardly novel, but Ms. Dugan is a vice president at OutCast, which represents some of Silicon Alley’s most prominent tech companies.

The Times responded by saying that Mr. Pogue had approached technology editor Damon Darlin in December with the news of his relationship, and that Ms. Dugan didn’t pitch Mr. Pogue stories. The Daily Beast produced several instances where Mr. Pogue seemed to write glowingly of OutCast clients and disparagingly of OutCast competitors. When speaking with The Observer, Mr. Darlin questioned that reporting, noting that OutCast doesn’t represent Amazon, but an Amazon business-to-business product. Mr. Lyons also cited a review by Mr. Pogue of a competitor to Netflix, which is an OutCast client. “No intelligent person would construe that as a positive review for Netflix,” Mr. Darlin noted. Finally, refuting Mr. Lyons’s argument that Mr. Pogue’s writing about Groupon and Skype was conflicted by another OutCast client, a venture capital firm with investments in both, Mr. Darlin argued that this is “a pretty thin string.”

“I can understand why there’s skepticism,” Mr. Darlin admitted, “and that’s always healthy under an intelligent readership. Because of these other questions that have been raised in the past, it’s very easy for someone to make that charge. In this case, that charge doesn’t stick.” Yet when asked if Mr. Pogue had been given preferential treatment by Times editors during past transgressions, Mr. Darlin noted that he wasn’t familiar with Mr. Albo’s situation, and that the Times has “addressed all of this. We’ve been satisfied that under the rules we’ve set up for [Mr. Pogue], and that there is no conflict.”

Responding to an emailed request to speak, Times executive editor Bill Keller referred The Observer to a spokesperson, noting simply: “We have rules. David followed them.”

An assistant in the office of the Times’s current public editor, Arthur Brisbane, responded: “[W]e dealt with this issue last week after the Daily Beast story” and included Mr. Brisbane’s response to a reader about the issue. In it, Mr. Brisbane noted that he had “spoken with [David Pogue] and Times editors and satisfied myself that Pogue has made the appropriate disclosures about his relationship with Nicki Dugan of OutCast Agency. Any time there is a conflict, it does create complications but I think in this case Pogue and his editor have taken the appropriate steps to comply with the newspaper’s ethics policy.”

Mentor and protege.

In the early summer of 2008, Arthur G. Cohen rode the elevator to Harry Macklowe’s 21st-floor office in the G.M. Building wearing a black suit and bright pink dress shirt. Mr. Macklowe, sporting navy blue pinstripes and a multibillion-dollar real estate empire under siege, signed away his beloved Drake Hotel site to an enterprise called CMZ for $850 million.

CMZ is one of the more bizarre development teams ever assembled in the city, yet its existence has remained hidden until now from all but a handful of insiders. One-time top developer Mr. Cohen joined Washington lobbying czar Paul Manafort and Brad Zackson, a scrappy former righthand man to Fred Trump Sr., in a baffling boom-time enterprise. They looked at billions of dollars’ worth of properties such as the Drake, the Manhattan House, the Helmsley Hotel and two Bahamian islands—but with some of the world’s best real estate almost in their grasp, they never bought a single trophy property.

By late 2008, their international investors began to lose confidence and withdraw. Executives exchanged frantic, sometimes accusatory emails. The company’s phone and Internet connections were repeatedly cut off. Hundreds of pages of public records, as well as multiple employee accounts and internal company documents and emails, all obtained by The Observer, provide a verifiable tale of the hubris and demise of these would-be kings of Manhattan real estate.

With their tower dreams in shambles, Messrs. Cohen, Manafort and Zackson never closed on the Drake, arguably the most valuable development site in North America, which instead went to California-based CIM for less than half their offer. “It will be beautiful,” an inside source said. “But it will be the CIM tower. It could have been the CMZ tower.”

With Clinton.

In 1995 a boyish Brad Zackson posed for Crain’s’ “40 Under 40” list in one of his few media appearances. His Dynamic Group’s portfolio of Queens apartment buildings had made the 34-year-old a multimillionaire, with a staff of 50 under his command. “I got the reputation as the person to call when a building was in trouble,” he told the business trade then.

Ten years later, the market was booming and the broker without a college education had built a modest fiefdom in the boroughs, gaining access to society’s inner circle through the Trumps and by dating actress Lori Singer. “Name a developer in the city,” said a former employee, “and Brad can show you the scar.”

Mr. Zackson set his sights higher—much higher—on a 2,000-acre emerald development parcel in the Bahamas. Eleuthera Island’s Sound Point was to be a destination for Palm Beach’s elite, with a casino, a P.G.A. golf course and a hotel. The small-potatoes New York developer struggled, however, to come up with financing and to navigate the labyrinthine Bahamian bureaucracy, so he teamed up with international players Messrs. Cohen and Manafort.

Mr. Cohen, now past 80, has his fingerprints all over Manhattan’s trophy real estate. He helped build the Olympic Tower with Aristotle Onassis on Fifth Avenue and the mammoth Worldwide Plaza, and he’s partnered with heavyweights from William Zeckendorf Sr. to Larry Silverstein. “There was a time when every deal had Arthur Cohen,” said Andrew Albstein, an attorney who worked with CMZ. “If there was a deal to be done in New York, you had to go through him. He could do anything … He was in construction, commercial, residential, financing—anything and everything.”

In 1998, Mr. Cohen paid $4.5 million to resolve claims that he funneled millions of dollars in loans into several dubious New York City construction projects, the largest settlement of its kind to that date. In the subsequent decade, Mr. Cohen faded from view, but he was salivating for a comeback.

He joined with Mr. Manafort, a long-time Republican strategist and senior adviser to Ronald Regan, Bob Dole and both George Bushes. The lobbyist brought political savvy and an uncanny ability to conjure investors, such as Ukrainian billionaire gas king Dmitry Firtash, for projects.

The trio started working together in 2007, and formally created a company called CMZ in June 2008. They planned, according to the initial partnership agreement and employee accounts, to create a billion-dollar fund to invest in distressed properties when those were still hard to come by.

Times proved very good indeed. Mr. Zackson moved a staff of half-a-dozen into a 25th-floor office in Mr. Cohen’s Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway. “At first I thought Brad was like a god,” said another former employee. “There was Paul and Arthur, and I thought, ‘Wow this must be, like, big time.’”

From early on, the power dynamics were unsettling, employees say, with the polished Mr. Manafort making only rare appearances in the office and Mr. Cohen providing only a trickle of funds. Mr. Zackson had a car and driver and a Lincoln Square spread, but groveled for money for day-to-day office expenses. “Everybody feared Arthur Cohen,” said one former employee. “Brad would just kiss his ass and do all of the work for their deals. ‘I need money for my wife,’ he’d say. He was living this big, high lifestyle and couldn’t afford it.”

With property prices about to peak, CMZ began bidding with frantic ambition. By then, they were in contract for Eleuthera Island and also began seriously eyeing a sprawling Soho development, encompassing three full city blocks, on the site of the St. John’s Terminal right on the Hudson River. It was going to be a four- to five-star MGM Mirage hotel, with 600 rooms and a five-acre private yard.

Everything else halted for the biggest prize of all, the former home of the Drake, at 440 Park Avenue, where CMZ wanted to partner with Harry Macklowe to build a soaring 65-story hotel/residential/office tower. Then the tiny acronym CMZ would finally pack a global punch.

Joseph Sitt, the local developer best-known for his controversial Coney Island plan, introduced CMZ to the Drake site in early 2008, but after an initial meeting he wasn’t invited back. Negotiations with Mr. Macklowe began and nothing was too far-fetched in that prelapsarian era of early 2008. It would be the Valentino tower! Nay, the Armani hotel/office/residential complex!

Finally, it was settled: 65 stories of Bulgari glory, including a mall with hologramed walls for retailers to advertise, a spa and a private club.

The purchase price: $850 million, with a tiny deposit. “If we receive $25mm, I would never give Harry more than that as a deposit and I would probably give him less—but this strategy will only work so long as we have no competition,” an attorney told Mr. Zackson in an email.

“Right on,” he replied.

Not that CMZ had anything like that kind of money, but back then you didn’t need it (just ask Mr. Macklowe, who shortly before had been spotted $7 billion from Deutsche Bank for a seven-skyscraper spree). Much of the equity was initially to come from French fund Inovalis, which agreed to arrange nearly $500 million, with confidence, according to a June 2008 letter from Chairman Stephane Amine, that the Bulgari brand “will ensure the project’s ability to generate nearly $3B in value.”

By the end of that summer Inovalis grew wary of the Drake deal. Gregg Hayden, an adviser to the fund, wrote in a text message to The Observer from China that CMZ “proved ineffective.”

The appraisal of the site came back in October at $780 million, well below the agreed price, but Harry Macklowe wouldn’t budge. The Drake site by then was slipping through Mr. Macklowe’s fingers anyway, as Deutsche Bank moved aggressively to foreclose.

Mr. Manafort then met with Ukranian billionaire Mr. Firtash, a part owner of Eural Transgas, in Kiev, and secured the promise of an initial $112 million for the project, but that fell apart when Mr. Firtash became distracted by an investment in troubled Bank Nadra back home. Grasping, Mr. Zackson wrote in an email in March 2009: “I have an idea to bring [Donald] Trump in on the Drake. I think it solves a lot of issues right away.”

By then, though, the Drake deal was basically dead, and CMZ too was in trouble.

Most employees were working for free all along, sustained by the promise of huge commissions when the big deals closed. By winter 2009, they were leaving in a steady trickle, until the company today has been reduced to Mr. Zackson and one assistant working from a single desk out of a borrowed office at 1501 Broadway.

“I’m sure there were a lot of people who thought they were going to make a lot of money out of the [Drake] transaction,” said Stephen Delman, an attorney who works with the company, “so they suffered personal financial adversities, but that really wasn’t a function of closing up shop.”

Nonetheless, the lights were about to go out. “Arthur, I expect the phone and internet to be cut off any moment,” another lawyer that worked with the company wrote in an email to Mr. Cohen in May. “The office will then not be able to operate, it will cease to function, callers will be told the number has been disconnected and there will be no point any of us coming in.”

Mr. Zackson was on the brink of losing the company he had built. As things unraveled, he poured his frustrations out in a virtually incomprehensible email: “Paul it s hard to take Arthur when I am place I am he is just plain dumb about real estate how I let him take me with his bulls hit and no $ I never came to him for this kind of $ he was the 10 percent now he give me $5000 last week and thinks he helped and how to get back overhead…I just can not live this way keep my head up.”

In another frantic email, Mr. Zackson wrote: “Arthur You and I do not have an end like this This is plane wrong, leaving me with all the headaces from our partnership and killing me and my company. Brad.”

Mr. Zackson met The Observer on a recent Tuesday afternoon in a conference room in his lawyer’s office on the 29th floor of 515 Madison. Now 51, he wore an untucked navy golf shirt and khakis, his small eyes still boyish but set off by deep dark circles. He twitched nervously, deferring many questions to his lawyer and speaking softly, in fragments, between sips of green tea.

“We, as a company, looked at just about everything in New York,” he said. “Just about every site that Darcy Stacom sold, every other major broker sold, Manhattan House, the St. John’s center. A lot of projects that we are very fortunate that we came close to and didn’t win because a lot of them are distressed sites right now.”

Mr. Manafort is no longer actively involved, according to Mr. Zackson, who is developing a 37-acre shopping center in Chicago with Mr. Cohen. Dynamic has also become an investor in renewable energy. (Messrs. Cohen and Manafort did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Mr. Macklowe.)

Despite the private feuding, Mr. Zackson maintains a childlike admiration for his mentor, Mr. Cohen. “He has not lost any skills,” Mr. Zackson said. “He works very hard. He works us very hard."

But past dreams of becoming one of the city’s great development teams are gone.

At the end of the interview, Mr. Zackson showed The Observer some weighty music boxes, private New Year’s gifts to Arthur Cohen from mall mogul Sam Zell. Mr. Zackson wound up one from 1999. A song, privately commissioned by Mr. Zell from Paul Simon and heard only by a handful of people in the past 12 years, floated forth:

"The problem is all inside your head," she said to me.

"The answer is easy if you think less logically.

I’d like to help you all get rich at 23.

There must be 50 ways to make a billion."

 

View the Bulgari Tower renderings here.

View the Drake site contract here.

lkusisto@observer.com