A tragedy better suited to longform magazine journalism could hardly be imagined. (image via Esquire.com)

While the Giants clinched victory down in Indianapolis Sunday night, a contest of editorial mettle was taking place between New York’s top men’s magazines.

Shortly before kick-off, The New York Times reported that Hearst’s Esquire would post a movie-style trailer for a March print story about the Zanesville zoo massacre (remember when that suicidal exotic animal collector released 56 dangerous animals into a small town in Ohio?) along with a preview of the piece by Chris Jones. The latest in a series of editorial widgets (last month’s: a QR code on cover boy Bill Clinton’s crotch!), the trailer was designed to build buzz and boost sales of the print issue. The full story and a longer trailer would be online later, according to The Times.

During halftime, Mr. Jones, an Esquire staff writer, pointed his 10,000-odd Twitter followers to the trailer, which had gone live on Esquire.com.

Mr. Jones’s tweet set off an email chain among editors at rival GQ (including web editor Sean Fennessey, who was at the Super Bowl). The Condé Nast title was sitting on its own 11,000-word piece about the Zanesville zoo, penned by its own staff Chris, Chris Heath, for the March issue.

GQ planned on publishing the story a few days ahead of the magazine’s on-stand date but had built the web version weeks in advance, anticipating Esquire’s drop.

“The conversation was: ‘How fast do we put it up?’” GQ senior editor Devin Gordon told Off the Record.

Because Esquire published only a preview of its story on Sunday night, the editors decided to take the rest of the night to make sure display copy and homepage art were perfect, and hit publish Monday morning. By noon on Monday, Esquire had ditched its big publicity plan, and had published Mr. Jones’s story in full.

“Good old-fashioned hand-forcing,” Mr. Jones tweeted later that day.

“We’ve known about this for weeks,” Mr. Gordon said. “We’ve been calling it ‘The Zoo-Off.’”

But until this week, the zoo-off had been pretty cloak-and-dagger, as far as glossy men’s magazines go. Mr. Jones and Mr. Heath discreetly stalked each other in December, when both writers were in Zanesville, reporting their pieces. Mr. Heath spotted Mr. Jones around town, but GQ editors, judging from Mr. Jones’ forthcoming tweets about his reporting, assumed the Esquire writer didn’t know another reporter was hot on the trail.

In fact, Mr. Jones had known GQ was working on its own Zanesville zoo story almost immediately after he pulled into his town. He scheduled his first interview, with the county sheriff on Monday at 1 p.m. They talked for two hours and Mr. Jones said, half-seriously, that it would be helpful if his source didn’t speak to anyone else. The sheriff responded that he had one more interview scheduled for later that afternoon.

“As long as it’s not GQ,” Mr. Jones joked, and the sheriff’s face dropped.

“You always want the story to be yours but GQ is particularly a rival,” Mr. Jones told Off the Record when we reached him at home in Port Hope, Ontario.

It turned out the Chrises were staying at the same Hampton Inn. Unfamiliar with Mr. Heath’s appearance, Mr. Jones routinely checked the hotel desk to see if he was still there. It was a rainy week and Mr. Jones was fighting off pneumonia, in addition to the paranoia.

“I played all sorts of games in my head,” Mr. Jones said. “How should I write this so its different?”

In the end, Mr. Jones put GQ out of his head and wrote the story straight, like he pitched it.

“It’s one of those stories where you get out of the way,” Mr. Jones explained. “You’re a small town Ohio deputy in the woods, looking for tigers.”

Which is exactly what GQ expected he would do. Mr. Gordon said that in editorial discussions, Mr. Heath predicted Mr. Jones’s visceral, action-movie style but knew that his magazine’s piece would take a different approach, including recreating, through reporting, the menagerie’s late owner, Terry Thompson.

“My wife said it’s more philosophical,” said Mr. Jones of his rival’s piece. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to read his story. I’m super insecure.”

“He’s really good,” Mr. Gordon said of Mr. Jones, “The story is big enough and amazing enough for two good stories to be reported. I am biased, but I think ours is better. I think its scope is incredible.”

Both pieces were written by men named Chris (Heath for GQ and Jones, for Esquire). Both are online in full, although the magazines don't go on sale for weeks. Only one of them has a trailer.

Grantland's homepage

Writer Chris Jones has gone on record as loving the dining experience at dear, departed Elaine's -- but despite that, he has a sophisticated palate. Yesterday and today, Mr. Jones, of the sportswriting-as-attending-church website Grantland (as well as Esquire, the magazine that once published "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold") went on a Twitter spree while deciding what to eat for lunch, noting that he had "never been let down by a BLT." When a follower told him not to patronize Subway for his BLT, he replied, "Why on earth would I ever get one at Subway? God, no."

Grantland, whose prominent banner ad currently advertises Subway's special barbeque pulled pork sandwich, is "presented by" the sandwich chain.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The ongoing rivalry between ESPN’s Grantland blog, founded by Page 2 star Bill Simmons, and Gawker Media’s Deadspin is shaping up to be more entertaining than anything either blog covers on the field.

For a second, it seemed Deadspin was losing yardage to Grantland, which had seen its buzz steadily increase since ESPN announced a writerly line-up including Molly Lambert, Lane Brown and Deadspin’s own Katie Baker. In a New York Times Magazine profile last week, Mr. Simmons aimed a barely veiled jibe at the home of the Brett Favre dong shots.

“The worst thing that’s happening [to sportswriting] is that people are writing things just to drive traffic and get attention,” he told the Times.

Simultaneously, Grantland editor Daniel Fierman (formerly of GQ) had been putting the moves on Deadspin senior editor Tommy Craggs, eventually offering him a position. But ESPN put Mr. Cragg’s offer on hold after he wrote a mocking blog post on Deadspin about ESPN.com editor Lynne Hoppes. Discussions were tabled pending a make-nice lunch with ESPN exec John Walsh.

Then, Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio began narrating the drawn-out hiring process with the same giddy bloodlust the site has shown in its coverage of other ESPN operations, despite admitting that “someone close to the situation” had warned him that doing so further jeopardized Mr. Cragg’s employability there. “He still works at Deadspin and I still work at Deadspin and this is a story we’d cover had any other potential Grantland writer become entangled in such stupidity,” Mr. Daulerio wrote.

He then promptly sent a pink gorilla singing telegram to Mr. Cragg’s lunch with Mr. Walsh at the Essex House. She sang the SportsCenter theme song. (Watch for that on the expense account, Nick Denton.)

Mr. Craggs and Mr. Daulerio separately told Off the Record that Mr. Daulerio’s actions hadn’t sabotaged Mr. Cragg’s shot, and that the discussion had already deteriorated. Mr. Daulerio added that no Gawker Media blog expects to keep employees forever, but that the process illuminated the appeal of working at Deadspin.

That doesn’t mean the competition has calmed down. Mr. Daulerio recently hired Tom Scocca, a former Slate blogger who on his last day posted—what else?—a critique of Grantland’s hype. Around the same time, Chris Jones—whose writing Mr. Scocca has eviscerated on Slate—was named a Grantland contributor.

Better yet, Mr. Jones’s interactions with Mr. Scocca seem to have left him willing to play at Deadspin’s level. In this month’s Esquire he has a short piece called “How to Win an Internet Feud.” “There is a school of thought that fighting on the Internet is childish and foolish,” Mr. Jones wrote. “That school of thought is populated mostly by sanctimonious pussies and old people.”

Game on!

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

His new title looks very 2.0: "Senior Product Manager of the Business and Technology Verticals." The Times is about to expand its business and technology Web presence and currenty is on the hunt for some editors and reporters to help fill that space.

Another Portfolio editor also made his way over to the Times recently: Jim Impoco joined the paper in February.

Here's a memo that just went out from Nicholas Ascheim, vice president:

The answer appears to be no. But Mr. Jones’ departure may still tell us something about the fledgling glossy’s growing pains. According to two people familiar with the situation, the editor left because he believed that the growing influence of the magazine’s business team was compromising its editorial independence.

According to two sources at Portfolio, the general manager of digital media, Ari Brandt, formerly of Yahoo!, has been increasingly trying to assert control over the Web site, which was originally expected to be run jointly by the editorial and business sides. In recent weeks, Mr. Brandt has been suggesting that the business side should have a bigger role in the Web site and, said one source, has been using the phrase "return of investment programming" to argue that the site's content should be evaluated on its ability to generate page visits and hits, rather than its journalistic quality.

Since it launched, Portfolio.com has been an exception for a Condé Nast publication, in that it hasn't been used primarily as a tool to boost subscribers, but rather as an extension of the magazine's editorial voice. Could that be changing?

Mr. Brandt did not return a call for comment, and David Carey, the magazine's publisher, declined to comment for this story.