Ben Smith (Photo via Twitter).

On Monday night, PBS aired an interview between Charlie Rose and President Barack Obama. Earlier that afternoon, PBS sent an email to some 50 news organizations with a transcript of the interview. The transcript was embargoed until 11 p.m., when the interview was scheduled to air on the network. It was sent as a courtesy, so that journalists could write stories about it ahead of time and be ready to publish as soon as the interview aired.

But not all recipients honored the embargo: BuzzFeed Politics published an excerpt of the transcript at 4 p.m., scooping Mr. Rose on his own interview.

NBC reporter Chuck Todd took to Twitter to condemn BuzzFeed’s breaking of the embargo. “Wow, so in the obsessive world of trying to get clicks, we have news orgs no longer respecting embargoes?” he asked. “Can we have some rules respected?”

Other journalists, notably Commentary’s John Podhoretz, defended BuzzFeed’s actions, arguing that both parties had to agree to a news embargo for it to be valid. If the writer never agreed to the embargo and PBS just sent the transcript unsolicited, he argued, then there was no embargo.

BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith, meanwhile, portrayed his breaking of the embargo as a victory for readers. Respecting the embargo, he suggested, would mean depriving his readers of important information in order to please a clubby fraternity of his journalistic peers.

But it’s not as though BuzzFeed was bravely exposing secrets that the government wanted embargoed; he stole a scoop from a public television network. “Come on,” Mr. Todd tweeted in response to Mr. Smith. “It’s a crappy thing to do to PBS.”

Katie Couric. (Photo credit: Kevin Mazur, Getty Images).

On a rainy Monday, Marie Claire threw a luncheon at Marea, the chic Columbus Circle seafood spot, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Equal Pay Act. And how better to acknowledge the state of working women (we hear they are leaning in of late) than by eating lobster salad and listening to highly accomplished women recount their early successes?

Speaking at the lunch were Tory Burch, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Sarah Jessica Parker and Katie Couric—who were featured in a spread in this month’s magazine along with Serena Williams, who was expected to attend but was stuck in Paris doing publicity after winning the French Open.

Anne Fulenwider, who returned to Marie Claire to replace Joanna Coles as editor in chief last September, played emcee for the afternoon. 

“Now that you have your own daytime show, Katie, the only time slot left for you to conquer is late night,” Ms. Fulenwider said when introducing Ms. Couric. “So, if there’s anything you’d like to announce, we’re all ears.”

Over the weekend, The New York Post’s Page Six ran an item claiming that the future was hazy for a third season of Katie, Ms. Couric’s ABC daytime show. Perhaps, the Post speculated, Ms. Couric might follow her former executive producer Jeff Zucker to CNN.

But no announcement was forthcoming. “Is there anything better than a room full of fantastic women? I say absolutely not, right?” Ms. Couric said. “I love the smell of estrogen in the morning, or in the afternoon.”

Ms. Couric congratulated Ms. Fulenwider on helming Hearst’s thinking-woman’s mag.

“We have a lot of story meetings on the show, and inevitably, when someone pulls out an article, it is from Marie Claire,” Ms. Couric said.

Despite being the first woman to anchor the evening news solo, Ms. Couric said that she is held to different standards than her male counterparts. “I always joke that I got into television news at a time when 'harass' was two words instead of one.” Ms. Couric waited as the crowd worked out the joke.

“When I became the first female anchor of the CBS Evening News, people talked more about the fact that I was wearing a white jacket after Labor Day,” she said. “So it’s clear that women continue to be held to a higher standard in many industries, not simply mine.”

Narrative 4 Executive Director Lisa Consiglio and Colum McCann (Photo credit: James Higgins).

Last Friday night, a slew of literary luminaries gathered at a cocktail party in an Astor Square penthouse to celebrate the launch of Narrative 4, an organization co-founded by authors Colum McCann and Luis Alberto Urrea to promote social change through storytelling.

“It’s like a United Nations for young storytellers,” Mr. McCann, clad in his signature skinny scarf, told Off the Record, standing on a balcony overlooking downtown Manhattan. “The whole idea behind it is that the one true democracy we have is storytelling. It goes across borders, boundaries, genders, rich, poor—everybody has a story to tell.”

The premise of the project is that it will connect teenagers from very different backgrounds (for example, a victim of gun violence in Chicago could be paired with a teenager in Newtown, Conn.) and encourage them to learn “radical empathy” by exchanging stories from their lives.

To kick off the project, Narrative 4 partnered with Esquire to get 106 writers, including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Edna O’Brien, Kurt Andersen, Amy Bloom and Téa Obreht, to contribute an original story on the subject of “How to Be a Man.” About a dozen of the short stories were published in the June/July issue of Esquire (the rest are available on Narrative 4’s website for a $5 donation ).

“I was just impressed at how short you were able to write,” Esquire editor in chief David Granger told Mr. McCann about his entry.

“I know, usually I just blather on and on and on and on,” Mr. McCann replied in his lilting Irish accent.

Plenty of big names contributed to the project—including actor Gabriel Byrne. We asked the Irish actor how he became involved in the venture. “I slept with him,” Mr. Byrne, said, pointing to Mr. McCann. “He’s joking,” Mr. McCann quickly clarified.

“We are storytelling creatures. Almost the first thing we want after mother’s milk is someone to tell us a story,” Salman Rushdie told OTR. “We are the only creature on earth that tells stories.”

“My daughter will tell you that dolphins tell each other stories,” Mr. McCann volunteered, after a partygoer challenged Mr. Rushdie’s assertion.

“Well, we are probably the only species that tells lies,” Mr. Rushdie conceded. “In other words, fiction. I don’t know that dolphins have fiction.”

They certainly don’t have book parties.

“I’m writing another epistle here, Salman,” Mr. McCann said, as he signed Mr. Rushdie’s copy of Transatlantic, his new novel (the event doubled as a book party for the 2009 National Book Award winner).

As guests sipped white wine and watched the sun set over Manhattan, Mr. McCann continued to talk about the reasons behind the organization.

“You go to all these festivals, and it’s nice, and everyone slaps you on the back,” Mr. McCann said. “But in the end, you want to do something beyond the fiction.”

Joanne Wasserman

“I feel like a Broadway play that’s won a Tony—after closing!” Daily News veteran editor JoAnne Wasserman said last week while accepting an award for mentoring from the Silurian Society. Ms. Wasserman was the Brooklyn borough chief until she was laid off this month as part of the News’s restructuring.

During her 27 years at the News, Ms. Wasserman had a no-nonsense, at times abrasive approach to toughening up interns and young journalists. For example, Ms. Wasserman recounted in her speech, she handed a flip-flop-clad intern the shoes off her own feet before an interview.

While it has always been difficult to find mentors in the newsroom, the Internet has made it even more difficult, she said.

“Today, with young people working at online publications, often alone at home, or in a Starbucks, new reporters don’t often interact with more seasoned colleagues, don’t get the chance to watch, learn, ask questions, imitate,” she said in her speech.

“Online journalism isolates reporters in a way my generation, which thrived in the wacky chaos of newsrooms like the Post’s, could not have imagined.”

Ms. Wasserman started as a copy girl on the “lobster shift” (an old newsroom expression for the graveyard shift), working as a waitress and making 50 cents a column inch freelancing for the now-defunct Chelsea Clinton News. Back then, Ms. Wasserman’s rent for a room in a classic six on the Upper West Side was $120 a month.

During Ms. Wasserman’s nearly three decades at the News, she worked on features, education and City Hall, and became borough chief for Brooklyn. She also met her husband, former News managing editor Stuart Marques.

Being married to a fellow journalist means that there is someone who is “very accepting and understanding of the need to check your phone” and go into work at all hours.

Given the state of the industry, would Ms. Wasserman still recommend that young people go into journalism?

“Yeah, because we need to make sure someone is still watching the store,” she told OTR. “But I worry about the economics of it.”

Peter Lauria

When BuzzFeed announced the launch of its new business vertical, many people skeptically wondered how a site that is known for its animal listicles would carve out space in the relatively straitlaced world of business reporting.

“People on Wall Street like to laugh, they have humor,” Peter Lauria, editor of Business Buzz, told Off the Record. “So I think being able to mix serious scoops, smart analysis and fun stuff together is a fun recipe that we have the ability to do that no one else does.”

True to form, two of their inaugural stories last week had animal themes: the site launched with a story called “14 CEOs And Their Animal Doppelgängers” and followed that two days later with a post titled “The Life-
cycle Of A Goldman Sachs Transaction Is Exactly Like The Mating Embrace Of Frogs,” which compared a chart explaining the bank’s transaction-review process to amphibian sexual habits.

“It’s been fantastic to see Peter, his great team and their exclusive reporting right in the middle of the business conversation from Day 1,” said BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith. “We are also very proud of our dead-on CEO animal doppelgängers.”

Overall, a big part of the aim of the new business vertical is to engage BuzzFeed’s core audience of 18- to 25-year-olds. To that end, Mr. Lauria said that he planned the section so that he and his team of reporters will cover the corporate angle of media and entertainment, specialty retail “important to the BuzzFeed audience” (such as The Gap, Urban Outfitters and, one imagines, American Apparel), consumer technology and Wall Street—but with a sexy angle.

“I remember that part of my life as moving in with my girlfriend, investing in 401ks, maybe looking to buy a house, so those things are becoming more prominent in their lives,” Mr. Lauria said about his time in the BuzzFeed demo. “We don’t need every Wall Street Journal reader or every BuzzFeed reader, but if we can get portions of those two audiences to overlap on a Venn diagram on a regular basis, then I think we have the basis of something really good.”

So far, in addition to animal comparisons, posts include a piece on the experience of calling the cable company as told through pop-culture gifs, a selection of 14 comics about post-collegiate job hunting, and a scoop about the Abercrombie and Fitch CEO’s partner.

We asked Mr. Lauria whom he sees as his major competitors.

“To me, that’s an old-media question. That’s thinking about what platforms compete with editors,” Mr. Lauria told OTR. “In 2013, my competitor is everyone out there on Twitter, because what we want is for people to talk about and look at our work. I don’t care where you go to look at it, but we want to be in that conversation, dominating that conversation.”

And where else can you find stock tips from Grumpy Cat?

Judith Miller, who was jailed in 2005 after refusing to reveal a confidential source (Getty Images)

Faced with criticism over the government’s secret spying on the Associated Press and Fox News, President Barack Obama has tried to burnish his free-press bona fides by pushing for the passage of a federal shield law to protect journalists and their confidential sources.

Without the protection of a shield law, journalists can be held in contempt of court and sent to jail for refusing to testify in court about anything—including their sources.

That is what happened to Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who was jailed in 2005 after she refused to reveal her confidential source to a federal grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame scandal. More recently, Fox News reporter Jana Winter was threatened with jail time after she refused to reveal her source on a story about the Aurora, Colo., shooting to a judge in Colorado.

Currently, 49 states have shield laws on the books—Wyoming is the only outlier—but many are relatively weak, according to proponents of a Federal Shield Law. Colorado’s shield law, for one, isn’t much of a shield. It still allows prosecutors to force journalists to testify about their sources, so long as they have first tried “any other reasonable means” of identifying the sources.

Since Colorado prosecutors already tried and failed to identify Ms. Winter’s source, they can now demand she reveal her source or face jail time.

The proposed federal shield law before the Senate is even weaker than Colorado’s. It simply allows journalists to petition a judge, who weighs the story’s public interest value and decides whether the journalist should be forced to reveal his or her sources.

The Society of Professional Journalists, which has been pushing for shield laws, said that something is better than nothing, but it nonetheless called for stronger protections.

“Of course I’d love to see a stronger law, and I think the membership would as well,” said Sonny Albarado, national president of the SPJ. “It would be nice to have some stronger protections.”

In addition to barely protecting journalists called to testify, the bill does little to protect those journalists who write about the government. Two weeks ago, the AP revealed that the Department of Justice had secretly subpoenaed dozens of journalists’ phone records to figure out who their confidential sources in the government were. The shield law might prevent AP reporters from being forced to testify about their sources, but could it prevent the government from finding them through phone records?

“I don’t think the bill, in its current form, would protect against that,” Mr. Albarado said. What it would do: “force the Department of Justice to have a judge review the subpoena.” A judge could decide not to grant the subpoena, or to narrow its scope.

Then again, there haven’t been many indications that federal judges want to prevent the Department of Justice from investigating press sources. It was a federal judge who approved a search warrant against Fox News reporter James Rosen, which allowed the government to gain access to his private Gmail account and even track his movements. His crime? Talking to a source in the State Department who gave him confidential information.

“It’s really creepy—‘outrageous’ is the word—that the government would track his comings and goings, treating him like a spy,” said Mr. Albarado. “It’s unprecedented, and it sets a dangerous precedent.” The search warrant also named Mr. Rosen as an “aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator,” suggesting that the government believed Mr. Rosen himself could be indicted for doing his job as a journalist.

The Village Voice

What a week!

First, “restructuring” at the New York Daily News resulted in a flurry of long-anticipated pink slips.

“It is a process that has been difficult and painful,” News editor in chief Colin Myler and publisher Bill Holiber wrote in a staff memo that was first obtained by Capital NY. “But it is an inevitable consequence of the challenges we continue to face.”

The difficult and painful process spanned two days and culminated in at least 20 reporters losing their jobs. Big names were let go, including columnists Albor Ruiz and Joanna Molloy, and Pageview books blog editor Alexander Nazaryan.

The borough bureaus were hit hardest, with Brooklyn borough chief JoAnne Wasserman, Bronx borough chief Patrice O’Shaughnessy and Queens borough chief Paul Shin reportedly among those laid off.

Mr. Myler announced that the paper would create Daily News Local, a new website led by former Brooklyn Paper editor in chief and New York Times hyperlocal vet Gersh Kuntzman and Zach Haberman, a Patch.com alum (and son of Times metro desk columnist Clyde).

The rejiggered borough coverage, Mr. Myler wrote in the newsroom memo, “will also offer our many local advertisers with an improved opportunity to grow our commercial partnerships.”

Although last week marked the most significant bloodletting at the paper since Mr. Myler took over back in November 2011, there had been a slow trickle of departures over the past months.

Features editor John Oswald left in March, replaced by Raakhee Mirchandani, and features reporter Jacob Osterhout vented his rage in a goodbye email after he was let go earlier this spring.

Meanwhile, the features desk increasingly resembles that of the Post. Ms. Mirchandani, herself a former Postie, is joined by several former Murdoch employees. Features writer Sheila McClear and TV editor Don Kaplan came aboard this spring, as did the team behind the new gossip page, rebranded as Confident@l last summer: Lachlan Cartwright, who recently returned to New York, Marianne Garvey and Brian Niemietz.

The Post had a bumpy week as well. Even after the defections to the News, the rival tabloid had to announce a plan to encourage select journalists to take buyouts.

Post editor in chief Col Allan said that the aim was to cut 10 percent of newsroom staff through “voluntary buyouts.” And just as The New York Times announced when it trimmed its newsroom through buyouts earlier this year, the threat of layoffs becomes a real possibility if a buyout target isn’t met.

Then, as the tabloids were trying to reduce their payroll, Columbia Journalism Review lost its editor in chief, Cyndi Stivers, to AOL.com, right before it handed out some pink slips of its own to top editors, prompting rumors that the entire operation was on shaky ground.

Longtime executive editor Mike Hoyt and editor-at-large Justin Peters were told that their time at the journalism watchdog organization will come to an end in June.

And even the well-oiled Bloomberg machine ground its gears. On Friday, a story broke in the Post that Bloomberg journalists were under fire for using the media organization’s terminals to “spy” on their sources. Although Bloomberg journalists contend that the story was blown out of proportion (there is only so much information they can actually access), the alarm, which was raised by Goldman Sachs, prompted Bloomberg editor in chief Matthew Winkler to apologize for the practice in an editorial on Sunday night.

The week’s dubious good news was that there are still editors who will take the fall for their staff. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that The Village Voice’s editor in chief Will Bourne and deputy editor Jessica Lustig decided to leave the beleaguered downtown paper rather than lay off any more of their staff.

Voice Media Group executive editor Christine Brennan had told Mr. Bourne and Ms. Lustig that they would have to eliminate or drastically reduce five of the 20 newsroom positions.

“We are both leaving because I was summoned to a meeting and asked to get rid of five people and we are on a short string already,” Mr. Bourne told the Times. “When I was brought in here, I was explicitly told that the bloodletting had come to an end.”

The week ended on a low note for the Obama administration when the Associated Press announced on Monday that the Department of Justice had obtained two months of the news collective’s phone records without a subpoena.

Or maybe it was a high note: at least the media world could band together in collective outrage.

Is this literature?

The PEN World Voices Festival, which took place at several venues throughout the city last week, is ostensibly devoted to highbrow literary achievement, featuring the likes of Philip Roth, Lewis Lapham and Naomi Wolf.

So it was surprising that Manhattan Mini Storage was the subject of a panel held Sunday in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union.

Off the Record enjoys the storage company’s playful and provocative ads as much as the next media column—“Does This Butt Make My Room Look Small” is a classic—but on what basis do they qualify as literary achievement?

Jakab Orsos, the festival’s director, told us he had thought of the panel himself, shooting down our theory of some kind of paid sponsorship. He said the ads are “more than funny.”

“They’re smart, brave, ironic in certain instances, and they always challenge the reader/potential client,” he told us via email. “Quality literature is always raising disturbing questions.”

Some examples: “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose,” says one memorable poster, with a metal hanger stenciled ominously in the background. Or in a more comic vein: “I’ll hang out here till my owner realizes his new girlfriend’s a bitch,” reads the thought bubble of a blow-up doll.

At the panel, titled “Flexibility in Advertising,” John Kenney, a copywriter and novelist, compared the ads to the textual art of Jenny Holzer—whoa!—whose work can be quite political.

Archie Gottesman, chief branding officer for Edison Properties, the parent company of Manhattan Mini Storage, is the brains behind the operation.

Years ago, she decided that storage alone just wasn’t that interesting and started to mix things up with the help of a copywriter.

The ads weren’t political at the beginning: “Peking duck service at chop suey prices,” read one from 2002.

In 2007, though, when the “right to choose” poster came out, things started to change. The next year, Manhattan Mini Storage printed this jab at Sarah Palin: “What’s more limited? Your closet or her experience?” And one lampooning George W. Bush as well: “Your closet’s scarier than Bush’s agenda.”

It’s a testament to the ads’ place in the city’s cultural milieu that the company was asked to design PEN’s program cover this year. It looks exactly like a certain Manhattan Mini Storage ad—featuring a woman holding up a poster that hides her face—except it uses the festival’s slogan instead of ad copy: “Without literature, it’s all words.”

But where to put them all?

The Empire State Building Lit Up For FT. (Photo credit: The Financial Times).

The Financial Times celebrated 125 years of newspapering last week with a tasteful fete befitting both the age and the stately demeanor of the British newspaper. May Day, which is known in other parts of the world as International Workers’ Day, seemed as good a day as any to toast a long-lasting, highly regarded newspaper devoted to financial news.

The first floor of The Academy Mansion felt appropriately dignified (a Fifth Avenue double-wide townhouse with stained glass circa 1920 is as close as we get to legacy on this side of the Atlantic). An old-timey jazz trio played in the center of the courtyard as the many British-accented guests, among them Gawker’s Nick Denton, Sir Harold Evans, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, FT’s own John Ridding and Lionel Barber, sipped champagne and vodka, thyme and pink lemonade cocktails.

Michael Bloomberg stopped by to salute the paper for a run that has lasted even longer than his own. Off the Record arrived just as he was rushing off to another event.

“The FT, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Observer are the best newspapers,” Mr. Bloomberg, clad in a red bow tie and clutching an iPad mini, told OTR.

“In the English language, that is,” he added. “There might be some others out there.”

But alas, when we read The New York Times the next day, we learned that the mayor had given a different version of his top three, with the Gray Lady joining the two business titles in place of our own publication. Politicians!

Michael Bloomberg Toasts The FT. (Photo credit: The Financial Times).

The Moët was flowing, but the food portions were rather dainty, inspiring a few grumbles from an increasingly tipsy crowd.

“I’ll take seven,” OTR overheard a hungry guest say as he grabbed a bite-sized burger.

“You only took one,” replied a confused waiter.

According to one former investment banker-turned-journalist, carrying the FT instead of the Journal is like wearing a bespoke suit: it suggests worldly sophistication.

“It’s kind of an older crowd,” General Assembly co-founder Matthew Brimer said. The tieless Mr. Brimer, in a green oxford shirt, hovered directly outside the door where the waiters emerged bearing trays of diminutive canapés (prompting OTR to mistake the tech star for a reporter).

“I used to be famous,” said James D. Watson, the scientist who helped discover DNA and who wrote The Double Helix. Mr. Watson, who had just returned from Dublin—where he said he was thinking of buying a house, because, why not?—was talking to Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director, next to the bar. The FT Group has a 50 percent stake in The Economist. (British financial press has to stick together!)

The celebration drew heavily on the age of the paper. Actors dressed as newsies handed out the next day’s newspaper and gift bags containing a facsimile of the first salmon-colored edition from 1888. The inaugural paper, whose motto reads “without fear and without favour” lists its friends: “The Honest Financier, The Bona Fide Investor, The Respectable Broker, The Genuine Director, The Legitimate Speculator” and its enemies: “The Closed Stock Exchange, The Unprincipled Promoter, The Company Wrecker, The ‘Guinea Pig,’ The ‘Bull,’ The ‘Bear,’ and The Gambling Operator.”)

As we left, we saw that the Empire State Building, which was built 43 years after The Financial Times published its first issue, had illuminated the city with a salmon-colored glow for the occasion.

Brian Stelter. (Photo via Facebook.)

Last week was quite a whirlwind for New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter. Top of The Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, his look at the world of morning television, hit shelves, and Mr. Stelter found himself in the potentially awkward situation of appearing as a guest on morning shows to talk about a book about morning shows.

At press time, Mr. Stelter had done around 20 media appearances, with more scheduled. He was on Morning Edition, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN’s Early Start, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. Revelations were sprinkled throughout the tabloids and on the cover of Us Weekly, which featured a smiling photo of Ann Curry in a yellow cardigan, arms defiantly resting on her hips, with the headline “Stabbed in the Back: They called her ‘Big Bird’ and plotted to get rid of her. How Ann Curry’s coworkers tortured her and why she won’t forgive Matt Lauer.” 

“I feel the same way a morning producer feels at 9 a.m.—proud of my work, happy that people have seen it for themselves and dog-tired,” Mr. Stelter told Off the Record over the weekend.

Although The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story the weekend before the book came out on some of the juicier elements about Ms. Curry’s ouster and the drama with Matt Lauer behind the scenes, the newspaper itself panned the book in a review

“Brian Stelter’s book on the nefarious network morning show wars ends up being like a breakfast made not quite to order,” veteran television critic Ed Bark wrote. “The eggs over easy have one hard yolk, and the bacon’s a little limp. The toast is well-buttered but burned, and the coffee’s short on heat. Edible? Yes. Fulfilling? Not quite.”

Mr. Bark then took the reporter to task for his use of metaphor, which, when comparing a book to breakfast in the opening of a review, seemed a tad unfair.

“It’s a breezy read with more than a little overblown prose, some of it just plain silly,” Mr. Bark continued, noting that the author, at 27, still has “ample time really to get the hang of this.”

“I expected a tough review,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. “If it had been glowing, readers would have rolled their eyes.”

Tough review or not, it did little to quell the celebration. Mr. Stelter’s girlfriend, NY1 traffic reporter Jamie Shupak, organized a book party at The Park in Chelsea. (The book is dedicated to Mr. Stelter’s parents and to Ms. Shupak: “For Jamie, my love, who makes every morning a good one.” Of course, Ms. Shupak is usually at the NY1 studios before dawn to report on traffic conditions.)

Sunlight streamed through the large windows, making it difficult to see the media people, drinks in hand, who stood with their backs to the view of the High Line.

“You know, Jamie was the social director of her sorority,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. We didn’t doubt it. The bubbly brunette, in a lime green minidress, acted every bit the hostess, posing for pictures and thanking people for coming. In keeping with the theme, the dessert table featured chocolate cakes shaped like miniature TV sets and peanut butter balls shaped like tiny suns.

“Matt Lauer and Ann Curry send their regrets,” joked Mr. Stelter, before thanking both his and Ms. Shupak’s moms and a host of editors and colleagues, many of whom were in the room.

“The hardest part was putting together a guest list,” Ms. Shupak said, explaining that she had to keep adding people at the last minute. But Ms. Shupak evidently did a good job. In addition to her family and his, there was a strong Times contingent: Michael Grynbaum, Michael Barbaro, Christine Haughney, Dave Itzkoff, Julie Bloom, Stephanie Clifford, Julie Bosman and Bill Carter all seemed relaxed despite a Politico hit piece on executive editor Jill Abramson’s tenure that ran earlier in the week. Bloggers, television execs and NY1 hosts rounded out the list.

Out on the balcony, media reporter David Carr smoked a cigarette in the setting sun while talking to a friend of Ms. Shupak’s mom.

As we were leaving, NY1’s Pat Kiernan reminded us to grab a copy of the book. They were almost gone.