Mr. Heilbrunn is older than Mr. Beinart–he's 34–and was known as the "liberal hawk" of the New Republic staff, according to one of his friends. (This apparently meant that he was liberal on domestic issues but wrote about foreign policy from an anti-isolationist perspective.)

Mr. Beinart described Mr. Heilbrunn's departure as "voluntary and mutual," but wouldn't comment on why. When asked about whether he'd done any other hiring, he said, "I hired an assistant." When reached at his office at The New Republic , Mr. Heilbrunn said he was "contemplating" what he would do next.

For the last few years, Mr. Heilbrunn has been one of the weekly's main writers on foreign policy issues. But, according to another Washington journalist who knew him, he'd lost his most-favored-young-man status with New Republic owner Martin Peretz and literary editor Leon Wieseltier earlier this year. Mr. Heilbrunn was hired as an associate editor under Michael Kelly, apparently at their behest. New Republic watchers said his ejection was also their idea.

On Oct. 18, a report surfaced that Mr. Beinart had killed a piece by a freelancer on Bill Bradley's Senate record. The move raised suspicion at the magazine, owned by the pro-Al Gore Martin Peretz, who also holds the titles chairman and editor in chief of The New Republic .

"Clearly, a fair and unbiased analysis of Bill Bradley's Senate career by someone who doesn't have a preference in the Democratic Presidential race does not belong in Peter Beinart's New Republic ," said Jake Tapper, the author of the piece on Mr. Bradley, in an interview with The Washington Post .

Mr. Beinart, who attacked Mr. Bradley in the pages of The New Republic before Mr. Peretz made him editor, said he just wanted to keep political writing in-house.

Susan Casey, the former creative director of Outside magazine who'd been nicknamed "Lady Macbeth" by some of her staff, has been hired by Time Inc.'s editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine. She'll serve on his special squad of editors-at-large. She joins seven other people, including former Life managing editor Dan Okrent (the original Time Inc. "editor at large"), investigative reporting duo James Steele and Donald Barlett, deep thinker Roger Rosenblatt and former Vibe editor Danyel Smith on the Pearlstine SWAT team.

Ms. Casey's first gig will be helping to launch eCompany Unlimited , a print and Web magazine about the Internet. It's going to be based in San Francisco.

Ms. Casey left Outside on April 1, after the owner of the magazine refused to let her spend what she wanted to launch Women Outside , for which she had created a test issue. "To me, that represented my future," said Ms. Casey. "When that was taken away, I had to get out as quickly as possible."

"She was not your average art director; she functioned as much in an edit capacity," said one editor who worked with her at Outside . "Everyone here knew she had a burning ambition to edit a magazine."

That ambition, together with the fact that she was dating Outside editor Mark Bryant at the time, caused some friction among the Outside staff. She and Mr. Bryant left Outside at the same time.

"I've never seen design as something that you do in a vacuum," she said of her combined interests in editorial and art direction. "I don't see them as being separate."

Journalists at Bruce Wasserstein-owned American Lawyer Media were surprised to be ordered, in an internal memo on Oct. 28, to no longer talk to other reporters. The e-mailed memo, sent from A.L.M. chief executive William Pollak to editors of the company's publications, which include various regional legal newspapers as well as The American Lawyer and The Daily Deal , started out battening down the hatches: "I want to be very clear about American Lawyer Media's policy with respect to inquiries from the outside press," it began. "No one is authorized, under any circumstances, to speak directly with reporters about our company without first discussing the matter with Melique Jones, our director of corporate communications." The memo went on to note, "Related the above, you should know that in recent days Fortune magazine has been working on a story concerning The Daily Deal and A.L.M. Should you or members of your staff receive calls from these reporters, please refer them back to Melique."

"I guess the reason that it changed was that we didn't always have a communications director here at American Lawyer Media," said Ms. Jones, who arrived about six months ago. She said, "There's no sinister reason for my being hired," but chalked it up to the company growing, which includes the launch in September of Mr. Wasserstein's expensive new baby, The Daily Deal . "Because our company is financed by publicly traded debt," Ms. Jones said, "there are certain rules that we have to adhere to governing the release of information concerning the company."

Not that reporters are necessarily running scared. "I didn't see it. I probably forgot about it immediately," said one journalist at The Daily Deal .

But still, as an American Lawyer Media employee put it, "If Brill were still running things, there wouldn't be a memo like this. Instead, he would just announce: 'There's some asshole from Fortune doing a piece on us. You can talk to him, but you'll be misquoted because they do a hatchet job on everything.'"

In any case, there wasn't much to the Fortune article, which was short and made all the obvious points ("… but is this niche large enough to sustain a daily? And does Wall Street really need another financial pub?").

It comes out in the Nov. 22 issue, which closed the day after the memo came out. Angela Key, the writer of the piece, said, "I wasn't trying to talk to reporters at all."

When asked what the penalty would be visited on American Lawyer Media's employees who talked, Ms. Jones said, "What kind of penalty would that be? No, there's no penalty. It's just a matter of policy."

Mickey Kaus, 48-year-old establishment journalist, who punched in at Harvard, The New Republic , Harper's , The Washington Monthly , Slate and Newsweek , decided he didn't need to be hemmed in by a staff job anymore. He wanted to go into business for himself, taking his opinions directly to the reading public, and so he went and put up a Web site. It's called Kausfiles.com, from which he lashes out at regularly employed journalists like Joe Klein and Bernard Weinraub, and generally tries to call attention to himself and what he has to say. Which is pretty typical Web behavior. It's also the dream of a lot of writers–No editors! No deadlines! Unfettered self-expression! But Mr. Kaus eventually found out that he couldn't pay his bills floating around in cyberspace by himself and, as of Oct. 28, he hooked back up with his old friend, Slate editor Michael Kinsley, and sold Slate rights to post his column for 24 hours before it can appear on his own site.

Readers of Kausfiles.com might be forgiven for thinking that it already was a part of Slate because, well, there's a Slate ad on top of the Kausfiles page, and its design mimics Slate 's. Mr. Kaus said that Slate didn't pay for the ad; he put it up for free "to make it look professional."

Mr. Kaus took a pay cut on the deal in exchange for a link from Slate to Kausfiles.com. "I've been living off savings. This deal with Slate is to pay the rent," said Mr. Kaus, who lives in Battery Park City.

But how's he planning to make money? "Drudge is the business model," he said. "At some point, you want it to get big enough to sell ads. I bet half of my readers are journalists. Someone will want to reach those readers."

Mr. Kinsley spun it as part of the glorious cyberfuture. "It is a trend," he said. "If I may get pompous and philosophical for 30 seconds, the walls between publications on the Internet is purely metaphorical. One page in Slate and another page in Slate are not more connected than one on another site."

New York magazine's annual "singles" issue came out Nov. 1 and features something called "Brandon Jones's Journal," which is supposed to be a kind of takeoff of Bridget Jones's Diary , only written by a man. The "bachelor on the make" depicted in it is pretty pathetic: He pops the anti-baldness drug Propecia, worries he's gong to slip up and become gay, quotes Austin Powers, calls telephone sex lines, refers to his apartment as "the Batcave." Word around New York magazine is that it's supposed to be based on Andrew Stengel, flack on the make for Miramax Films.

Is it? "Pffffff," said Mr. Stengel. "Call Maer Roshan. I've heard that, too. It's not, it's not."

Off the Record called Mr. Roshan, New York 's deputy editor, who oversaw the singles issue. "It was meant as a composite," said Mr. Roshan. He wouldn't say who made up the composite.

The Daily Deal is an American Lawyer Media publication, shepherded by the company's publishers, editors and strategic planners, but it is Bruce Wasserstein's beast. Two years ago, a fund controlled by Wasserstein Perella Group Inc., his investment banking firm, bought American Lawyer Media, then added The National Law Journal and the New York Law Journal . This collection of legal publications (21 in all) gave Mr. Wasserstein a launching pad for his media mogul fantasies, whatever they were. (Mr. Wasserstein did not return calls for comment.)

As it turns out, the rumpled 51-year-old investment banker wanted to do a daily newspaper, a rigorous record of deals as procedure. Ideally, the paper would describe his world and simultaneously help him rise above it. As the spirit presiding over a must-read, he would become the spirit presiding over its readers. And as a Wall Street personality and product of the 80's who had both benefited from and been buffeted by press coverage, he would satisfy that yearning so many news subjects seem to have to control the media, be the media.

Mr. Wasserstein is a deal geek who nevertheless aspires to some measure of cultural greatness. But his thing is transactions. Mr. Wasserstein seems to be on a campaign to cast himself as the avatar of the deal, as though in anticipation of some distant era when economic historians will reduce the last quarter of the 20th century, the I-Banker Period, down to one or two memorable, well-documented legends. He wants to be that guy. First, last summer, there was his book, Big Deal , a kind of textbook. There it was, on beaches and in bookshop windows, aligning the author with the craft of the deal. And what a nifty juxtaposition, right there on the cover in silver and blue and in all capital letters: "Bruce Wasserstein Big Deal."

Then, also last summer, Mr. Wasserstein, a fan of Daily Variety , convinced executives at American Lawyer Media to start developing a daily trade paper that would serve his peers, the people who get a thrill, or at least a living, out of the buying and selling of companies. The executives were hesitant. A daily paper for a narrow audience, in a competitive category, sounded like a real money pit. But Mr. Wasserstein pulled rank.

"Bruce had a number of people working for him whose first and second reactions were, 'This can't work. It's too expensive and the market's not big enough,'" said one executive familiar with The Daily Deal 's inception. "But Bruce kept saying, 'Stop telling me how it won't work, because we're gonna do it. Tell me how we're gonna make it work.' He persisted in the face of the people who were crunching the numbers."

"I wouldn't say it's his baby," said Jack Berkowitz, the vice president for strategic planning at American Lawyer Media. "It came out of his idea. He was absolutely the motivator. He said, 'Here's the concept, go do it.' There was no opposition, though there was definitely skepticism. Nobody thought it was stupid. His first idea actually was to do something for the corporate lawyer and the deal lawyer, with some tangential readership in the banking community. But at some point we realized it was a publication for the deal-making community."

This is their newly minted demographic, a superset of corporate lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, venture capitalists, chief executives-anyone, basically, who makes a living feeding off corporate America's endless reshuffling of capital and debt. As a group these people don't have a trade paper, as the entertainment community does with Variety . Mr. Wasserstein believed that these constituents would share his appetite for the arcana of the deal, the nuts-and-bolts tactics and the smaller transactions that don't make it into The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times . A heady mix of gossip and regulatory ramifications! As a recent promotional mailing from the publisher puts it: "From antitrust to tax matters, dead hand pill provisions to cross-border deals, regulatory rulings to corporate governance questions, delayed-redemption provisions to changing securities laws, deal-making today is as complex as it is fascinating."

American Lawyer Media believes that there are approximately 125,000 who might share that fascination. That's the deal community: 125,000. But out of the gate, The Daily Deal 's publishers are aiming for a circulation of 25,000. Of that, about 10,000 will receive the paper free. The others will have to pay $750 a year, or $3.50 per issue (in theory at least). The paper will come out five times a week. The Web site, for which subscribers will have a password, will be updated three times a day. The paper will be hand-delivered to subscribers, and only in selected cities on the two coasts (plus Chicago).

Last December, they hired an editor, Robert Teitelman, from Institutional Investor , who began assembling a staff comprised mostly of reporters and editors from other financial trades. By August, an editorial staff of about 40 was cranking out semidaily prototypes.

"The big papers have a business audience, and they cover transactions from a shareholder perspective," Mr. Teitelman said. "At the other pole are lots of smaller publications, like Investment Dealers Digest and Institutional Investor that sort of cater to the Wall Street crowd. What we've done is define this community that comes together in deals, a collection of different groups. I don't think anyone has taken them all and put them under one tent."

In a prototype dated Sept. 31, this is what you might find in The Daily Deal : Theodore Forstmann's "biggest equity investment in his fabled buyout career," China Airlines on the block, the ramifications of the demise of the pooling of interests (that old accounting tactic), an arb spread scoreboard and a ranking of the Top 20 advisers to U.S. target companies (Wasserstein Perella comes in 20th). All of it is presented crisply, in a design that oddly recalls Rolling Stone .

American Lawyer Media is plowing millions of dollars into the new paper. Mr. Berkowitz estimated that by year's end the company will have spent $4 to 5 million. The budget, as it stands now, is in the "low double-digit millions," he said. No matter, that's a lot of money for 25,000, whether or not they're the right 25,000. It's an expensive startup, with not much of an apparent upside. It's not like the ranks of these deal makers are expanding exponentially, or even expanding at all.

"To me, The Daily Deal is the daily disaster," said Porter Bibb, an investment banker and former journalist. "Despite the fact that there are more and bigger deals in history, the bloom is off the M&A deal making rose. There's no room for personalities anymore. Even with something like CBS-Viacom, the biggest media deal in history, its not about Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin. It's about a hundred anonymous specialists in tax law, [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulations and other technical skills who made this happen. It's all banalities."

Those people are The Daily Deal 's ideal readers, but they are also its necessary subjects, which will make for a much less arresting paper. It is a paper for deal geeks. Even if it sells, it will hardly delight, entertain or even instruct, since the arcana of these deals tend not to be applicable to other deals.

On the Street, much of the target audience from Mr. Wasserstein's line of work is skeptical-of its prospects, and therefore of Mr. Wasserstein's motives. "It's Bruce hubris," said one investment banker. "It's an ego trip," said another. "It's an indulgence," said a third. They scoffed at this antique-news on paper, delivered by hand-and cited the countless streams of information made available to them each day on their various screens.

But others are preparing to make room for it. "Everyone is gonna have to read it," said one arbitrageur, whose job it is to gauge the likelihood of deals being completed. "If other guys have it, I have to have it. I hate to admit it, but I think that this thing is gonna be a success." In other words, it will have to be indispensable, so that even the legions who breezily declare that they don't have the time will be forced to find a way to make some.

The editors know their readers are busy. "Our window in the morning is about 10 minutes long," Mr Teitelman said. He and a few other staffers have been making the rounds for months, meeting with potential readers, subjects and sources, trolling for input and leaks. "When we talked to bankers and lawyers and deal makers about patterns of reading, they don't have a helluva lot of time."

That may not matter, as long as they subscribe. As someone who was considering taking a job at The Daily Deal was told by one investment banker: "That thing will make money even if nobody reads it."

Mr. Teitelman laughed when he heard that one. "Hey, no problem," he said. "That means we get fewer letters. If it makes money, that's what we're here for, but we'd like it to be read."

So, presumably, would Mr. Wasserstein. There are easier ways to make money than by starting a daily newspaper.

Over the course of his career as one of Wall Street's most successful deal makers, Mr. Wasserstein has been both the media's darling and its whipping boy. During the 80's, when he and Joseph Perella made First Boston one of the top firms on the Street, the press helped him build a reputation as the father of modern M&A. But as many of the deals he put together foundered early this decade, he got labeled with the nickname "Bid-'em-up Bruce," referring to his penchant for urging clients to spend lavishly to get deals done (and thereby secure his fees). Through it all, he became known for leaking information strategically to the press. He understood the media, and used it to make himself one of the legends of the 80's. He also had an enduring interest in journalism, dating back to his days as a reporter at the Michigan Daily , the college paper at the University of Michigan. (He spent the summer of 1969 as a reporter-researcher at Forbes .)

"I remember Bruce showing me how to write editorials," said Jim Gaines, editor of Travel & Leisure Golf and a former managing editor at Time , Life and People , who spent a semester working on the Michigan Daily with Mr. Wasserstein. (They went to high school together, too, at McBurney School on the Upper West Side.) After Michigan, Mr. Gaines didn't run into Mr. Wasserstein until 1989, when Mr. Gaines was managing editor of Life and Mr. Wasserstein was advising Time Inc. in its $13.4 billion bid for Warner Communications. "I said, 'You're doing well,' and he said, 'We try.' I remember [Time Warner chief executive] Jerry Levin telling me: 'Bruce would rather have your job than his.' So I guess it was a bug that never left him."