On Feb. 22, David Halbfinger was busy writing his first story as The New York Times' newest reporter covering Hollywood, in the position that was recently vacated by Mr. Weinraub, sharing the beat with Sharon Waxman.

"It's a great beat. It's hugely important in the culture. I love movies," said Mr. Halbfinger, on the phone from Los Angeles. "As much as people warned me about this town, I think I actually like this kind of person-the movie person."

Mr. Halbfinger has previously served as the paper's Atlanta bureau chief, covering eight Southern states, and more recently went on the campaign trail with John Kerry, where he said he traveled exhaustively and was "away from [his] new wife for 14 months straight."

"If you go from covering a Presidential campaign, there aren't a lot of things that are going to seem as important," said Mr.Halbfinger. "Given how much time on the Presidential campaign I was spending reading about Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, and Fahrenheit and Passion and everything that was coming out of Hollywood, it's kind of ground zero in terms of writing about America."

Mr. Halbfinger's name might also be familiar to readers who saw a personal essay he wrote in the September/October 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. In it, he described his sorrow over losing his laptop in a taxicab while covering the campaign. Besides holding contact information for all of his sources, his notes, family photos and irreplaceable interviews, the laptop had been his connection while on the road to his new bride. "When I powered up, she would stare out at me, smiling a full-screen come-hither smile as she lay in her wedding gown in our bridal suite," Mr. Halbfinger wrote.

At least she wasn't a studio executive!

Mr. Weinraub's wife is just that-one of the many points of emotional and professional torment in the exiting Times writer's own essay. The piece underscored the reputation of the Hollywood beat for chewing up reporters and spitting them out, as Mr. Weinraub bemoaned "the ferocity of a culture in which the players can be best friends one day and savage you the next"; complained that Jeffrey Katzenberg stopped calling him once he left the movie beat; and revealed that "detachment from the real, I soon learned, was closely bound up in the culture of stardom."

Mr. Halbfinger said that he'd read Mr. Weinraub's essay and appreciated its honesty.

"I guess I got a glimpse through his eyes of what it was like, and I thought it was human and charming, and I suppose there are aspects to it that could be somewhat cautionary," said Mr. Halbfinger. "I was grateful that he wrote it, and I was grateful to read it, and it was perfect timing …. It was like, ' Hello, this is what I'm getting into!"

In a December staff e-mail announcing the new appointment, Times cultural-news editor Jonathan Landman described Mr. Halbfinger as "an ambitious thinker and a writer who likes to have fun," and "a tough guy for a tough beat." The advertisement for Mr. Weinraub's spot was said to specify that candidates should have a thick skin and not mind being hated; when reached by phone, Mr. Landman said this was because "people in the movie business take their work seriously."

"I'm not planning to be hated," said Mr. Halbfinger. "On the other hand, do I need to be loved by everybody? No. I get plenty of love at home."

The effects of steroid abuse vary from person to person. For baseball players, steroids generally increase muscle mass and slugging power. For sportswriters, steroids increase flexibility.

Thanks to Jose Canseco, the easy, sunny rhythms of pitchers-and-catchers-reporting coverage have been badly disrupted this month. Two weeks ago, the Daily News blew hydrogen gas onto the embers of the hot-stove league with advance revelations from Mr. Canseco's Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big: syringes in the men's room! Hall of Fame–class sluggers on the needle!

The reverberations-amplified by Mr. Canseco's authorial publicity rounds-have left the sports press dazed and struggling to find an appropriate reaction to the former All-Star's stories. Some of Mr. Canseco's anecdotes have proven ridiculously easy to debunk: He said he talked steroids with the Mariners' Bret Boone at second base one spring, but the box scores reportedly say that he never made it onto the base paths against Seattle.

Yet Mr. Canseco's larger contention-that most of the offensive heroics of the past decade were built on under-the-counter medication-is harder to shrug off. Facing that claim, some professional lovers of baseball have settled on a pair of not-quite-reconcilable conclusions: It's terrible that Mr. Canseco took steroids, and it's terrible that he's talking about it.

Mr. Canseco, commentators have said, is only in it for the money. He has the "credibility of head lice." He's a "rat." He "shoved a shiv" in his old teammate Mark McGwire's back.

And now he's tearing down the game. "Canseco introduced us to this sordid story in the 1980s with his brazen bulging muscles and arrogant defiance, threatening to sue those who went public with charges of his steroid use," wrote the dean of right-thinking hardball scribes, The Washington Post's Thomas Boswell. " … These days, we can never put a sleazy topic to bed until we've utterly exhausted the subject, right down to the final excruciating details."

That represents something like Mr. Boswell's fourth stance on the subject of performance-enhancing drugs since Mr. Canseco swaggered onto the scene in the late 80's as a young hero-villain. It was Mr. Boswell himself who had gone public with charges back then, telling a TV audience that Mr. Canseco clearly owed his unprecedented combination of speed and power to steroids.

A decade later, when Mr. McGwire shattered the home-run record with confessed assistance from the not-yet-banned steroid androstenedione, Mr. Boswell had turned against disclosure. "Even in an age of compulsive debunking, we can act decent for a month," he wrote in 1998. "Let's keep our asterisks, innuendo, and, perhaps, even a bit of our conscience, in the closet. Some things are too good to spoil. McGwire is one of them."

But six years after that, when Barry Bonds had been named in the investigation of the BALCO steroid lab, Mr. Boswell was in favor of asterisks again. "All [Mr. Bonds'] records are now a steroid lie," he wrote last year. " … Throw every record that Bonds has set in the past four years into the trash can that history reserves for cheats."

The deeper the story gets-and with apologies to Mr. Boswell's latest opinion, the topic of steroids is far from exhausted-the harder it gets to pick out the principles. When Yankee Jason Giambi, reportedly named in the BALCO investigation and said to be suffering from ailments consistent with steroid abuse, faced the press earlier this month, the papers were savage about his refusal to say the word "steroids." "He's no Yankee, he's a Dodger," the wood in the New York Post blared the next morning.

This past weekend, Mr. Giambi's teammate Kevin Brown wrote into The New York Times to defend his teammate from columnist Dave Anderson, who'd written about Mr. Giambi's remarks under the title "Putting the Con Back in Confession." "Evidently, an apology doesn't make for a good headline, and the focus has to be on faults," Mr. Brown wrote.

There are faults, and then there are faults. The Yankees' Gary Sheffield was implicated in the BALCO case, too. He responded with a misdemeanor plea in the court of public opinion: He had trained with Mr. Bonds, he said, but he had no idea the substances he took were performance-enhancing drugs. Because he hit .290 with 36 home runs last year, while Mr. Giambi batted an enfeebled .208, Mr. Sheffield's story has largely passed muster.

But performance-enhancing drugs enhance performance. In the midst of it all, Murray Chass of The Times reported that Mr. Giambi had a history of avoiding the word "steroids": The Yankees had agreed to scrub specific language about steroid penalties from the slugger's contract when they signed him as the then-reigning American League M.V.P. in 2001. After a round of pooh-poohing in other papers (the Post couldn't bring itself to say in what newspaper the "published report" had been published), the Yankees eventually admitted that the steroid deletions had happened.

Except for Mr. Chass' coup, the steroid story mostly belonged to the Daily News, which was able to amplify and focus Mr. Canseco's allegations-including getting an F.B.I. agent to say that baseball had ignored warnings about steroids in the mid-90's. "It's been a good story for us," said reporter Michael O'Keeffe.

The question is why it's taken 17 years for the story to develop since the days when a young Mr. Canseco flexed a bicep to Boston fans chanting "STER-oids, STER-oids!" What followed has been a parallel, unprinted history of baseball, half-known by the press and the fans. A young slugger shows up with arms as big around as his legs; an 88-m.p.h. pitcher reappears as a thick-necked, flame-throwing closer. One veteran after another finds his second wind at an age where players of previous generations were fading away.

"The information may have been out [there]," Mr. O'Keeffe said, "but they're hard stories to get." The trouble, he said, is that steroids are illegal. It's a lot harder to accuse a player of committing a crime in print than to say he's lazy or overweight-or, for that matter, to praise his workout habits and savor his home-run totals. If a prosecutor hadn't sent a grand jury after BALCO, Mr. O'Keeffe continued, "We probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now."

So Mr. Canseco is a jerk. He's also the first player ever to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season. And he's saying that the era of big numbers that he ushered in was made possible by drugs. Steroids, Mr. Canseco has said while promoting his book, turn good athletes into great ones, and they make "a super athlete incredible, just legendary."

And sportswriters write the legends. Medically unsavory facts don't fit into legends very well.

Steroids are only one part of the tradition. When the Yankees traded for Randy Johnson, the stories said in passing that the last remaining cartilage had been scraped out of the 41-year-old lefty's right knee two years ago, and that he now relies on injections of "synthetic lubricant" to get him through each start.

No one mentioned the medical ethics of sending a 6-foot-10 man with maybe four decades left to live and walk out to the mound to keep grinding bone against bone. Nor did they mention the competitive ethics: Why shouldn't Barry Bonds be the Incredible Hulk if he has to bat against the Bionic Man?

-Tom Scocca

Deal the Gray Lady in! In a Feb. 15 memo to New York Times staff, national-desk editor Jim Roberts and deputy editor Alison Mitchell announced that the paper will be following the trail blazed by Mimi Rogers and Casey Affleck by creating a brand-new beat devoted to gambling issues.

Though Jodi Wilgoren muscled her way up to the felt with yesterday's page 1 piece on the spread of recreational no-limit Texas hold 'em in Minnesota, the gambling beat will actually belong to Times veteran Fox Butterfield, now in his 36th year with the paper.

Mr. Butterfield said he doesn't toss the dice, play the ponies or shake hands with the one-armed bandit.

"I don't bet," he said.

"We've only begun to discuss the parameters of the beat, but there's an enormousamountto cover," the editors wrote. "Between casinos, slots, lotteries and racetracks, legal gambling exists in one form or another in nearly every state."

Not to mention Hollywood. In a lengthy chronicle in the March Vanity Fair, Duff McDonald lists a spate of new gambling projects, which include Zak Penn's forthcoming poker mockumentary starring Ben Affleck and David Schwimmer, and NBC's recent deal with Lisa Kudrow's production company to develop a series based on female poker champion Annie Duke.

Mr. Butterfield, a National Book Award winner who has spent more than a decade covering criminal justice on such stories as the Tawana Brawley case, the methamphetamine trade and rampage killings, likewise said he had yet to think up the specifics of the new assignment.

"I'm really just beginning-it's totally open-ended," he said. "Gambling is everywhere now; it permeates American society. But you're getting way ahead of me. I have just begun."

Hint: The morning Greyhound to Mohegan Sun leaves the Port Authority at 8:15!

For a model of the starting-from-zero spirit, Mr. Butterfield could consult Ms. Wilgoren's dispatch, which informed readers that poker is a game "which combines the luck of the draw with strategy based on mathematical probability and more than a little bluffing."

Deputy national editor Ms. Mitchell said the idea for a gambling beat had been tossed around for the past six months. "It's an industry that's all over the place; it's an issue for states," she said. "Forty-eight out of 50 states have gambling. It's an influence issue, it's a political issue, it's a lifestyle issue-people are doing this as recreation."

This isn't the first time Mr. Butterfield has inaugurated a beat at The Times. In 1989, he wrote a page 1 piece about Willie Bosket, a violent inmate who had admitted to committing 2,000 crimes. Based on his reporting, he penned his award-winning book, All God's Children: Willie Bosket and the American Tradition of Violence, in 1996. After that, The Times made him its first national-desk reporter to cover criminal-justice issues full-time.

-Gabriel Sherman

Authorial standing is easy to measure these days: Neurotic midlist novelists, concerned about their place in the universe, can get through lonely nights by tracking their books-against those of everyone they know-in the Amazon sales rankings.

But what if you're not a long-form writer? "I haven't written a book yet," said New York Times Magazine contributing writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis. "So I can't obsess about my Amazon rating."

Instead, Mr. Denizet-Lewis said, he turns to a different source of instant feedback: the "Most E-Mailed Articles" list on the Times Web site. The list, which tallies the articles most frequently forwarded along by readers, is updated every 15 minutes. For status-conscious Times persons, the list has become the object of keen attention, if not simmering obsession: a real-time measure of their stories' impact and influence, judged by the readers rather than editors.

"It's become the alternate front page," one Times staffer said.

Unlike the regular front page, the "Most E-Mailed" list cuts across sectional fiefdoms and the news-opinion firewall. The rankings pit pundits and critics, feature writers and breaking-news reporters in one battle royal for eyeballs.

"I care what readers think, so I find it fascinating," said Glenn Kramon, The Times' associate managing editor for career development. " … I think there's no better way to encourage a reporter than to say, 'Hey, your article is at the top of the "Most E-Mailed Articles" list. You're ahead of Krugman! Ahead of Dowd! And congratulations!'"

Mr. Kramon cited an article by Westchester Weekly reporter Jennifer Medina about the new SAT exam that landed on the list when it ran Jan. 30. "I sent a note to the reporter saying, 'Way to go-you're getting that story that people care about.'"

Maureen Dowd said she checks the list once a day ("a trepidatious thing"). "If I get beaten by a reporter, I immediately go and read their story and make sure it's worthy," she said.

While The Times' national daily circulation is currently about 1.12 million, the paper counts more than 13 million registered online readers. Each day, some 100,000 articles are e-mailed from the Times Web site.

The Times first added the "Most E-Mailed" chart to its Web site in 2000, shortly after the paper introduced the feature that allows the e-mailing of articles. Eliot Pierce, who oversees the e-mail function for the Times site, wrote in an e-mail of his own that Op-Ed columnists generally score the highest, but that "the feature also exposes articles that would not generally be read by a large group of readers to gain significant attention."

Mr. Pierce cited a food-section piece by Eric Asimov, in which Smirnoff beat out fancy brands of vodka in a taste test, as an example of a story that had achieved e-mail fame.

This past October, The Times began highlighting the list by noting the top five "Most E -Mailed" pieces on both the home page and every article page. In January, the function was further refined: It now includes a cumulative tally covering the past seven days. As of lunchtime yesterday, half of the previous week's Top 10 were Op-Ed pieces; the other five covered topics including embattled Harvard president Lawrence Summers, a Web-based parody of Christo's Gates, and the possibility of building robot soldiers.

Writers confess that it's easy to get into the click-and-check habit. "Especially with my first pieces, I really did obsess about it," Mr. Denizet-Lewis said. His first list-watching experience, he said, came when his August 2003 article on "Down Low" African-American gay culture was published. "It came out on a Friday night," Mr. Denizet-Lewis said. "I started checking then-it was my first cover. So you're very excited. I was like, 'Should I send out e-mails just to get it started?'"

Name-brand Times writers-ones who do have books on the Amazon charts-aren't immune to the list's attraction. "You can see what people really care about, because they're sending it to someone saying, 'You need to read this,'" said columnist Thomas Friedman.

Mr. Friedman recalled one heavily e-mailed column in particular that he wrote in the run-up to the Iraq war, which called for India to replace France on the U.N. Security Council. "The Sunday columns move online about 9 o'clock Saturday night," he said. "I came home that Saturday night from a dinner and I looked at the 'Most E-Mailed' items, and the column was already No. 4 in an hour.

"I thought, 'Wait a minute-there's no way a bunch of people are online on a Saturday night sitting around waiting for this column.' Then I realized it was all the people in India saying, 'Wow! Look at this-India should replace France on the Security Council!' It was morning for them, and all these online readers in India were saying, 'Look at this!' It was just a very interesting insight for me into the power of this platform."

When the numbers don't move, that can be another problem. "On Jan. 27, I checked," Ms. Dowd recounted. "I wasn't in the Top Five, the Top 10 or even on the whole screen. I completely panicked. I wrote a piece about Armstrong Williams, and I didn't see anything there. I thought, 'Everyone hates me!' I thought I was the most unpopular girl in the world. I said to my assistant, 'What if there's a glitch?' Then I thought, 'What if there isn't?' Turns out there was a glitch-they had changed over the system, and my column didn't begin counting till 5 or 6 p.m. It made it to No. 3. All day long, I was really annoyed-I thought, 'Why was mine left out?'"

For legal-affairs reporter Linda Greenhouse, the rankings provided a bit of vindication. Last winter, Ms. Greenhouse was granted advance access to more than a half-million documents left by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, to write a two-part series that would commence the day that the Library of Congress released the papers to the general public. Ms. Greenhouse spent two months sifting through Blackmun's files and writing about how the material shed new light on such pivotal rulings as Roe v. Wade.

But according to sources familiar with the proceedings, editors "significantly" trimmed the second half of the series for space, sparking a vigorous back-and-forth between the Washington bureau and West 43rd Street.

When the pieces appeared online, the Web readership visibly sided with Ms. Greenhouse and her bureau. Soon after the pieces went up, they leapt to the top of the list. "An editor called to my attention it was one of the top e-mailed pieces," Ms. Greenhouse said. "I was very gratified … [the pieces] got a ton of response immediately …. [L]earning it was one of the top e-mailed pieces was the icing on the cake."

Not everyone inside The Times is impressed with the collective news judgment of the e-mailing masses. Columnist Frank Rich dismissed the notion that the tally should influence the paper's coverage of popular topics. "You can't run a newspaper like a popularity contest," he said. "News judgment has nothing to do with what's popular. If you ran a news organization according to the same principles that guide prime-time network television like the Nielsen ratings, you'd end up with all the crime and sex and forensics like they do.

"The barometer of popularity means something important to the people who make commercial pop culture," Mr. Rich continued. "This has nothing to do with the standards of journalism."

Easy to say for a writer whose Sunday Arts and Leisure column puts up CSI: Miami –like ratings. Mr. Friedman-of the Saturday postprandial list-checking-likewise disavowed any e-mail rivalry with his biweekly colleague, Maureen Dowd.

"We have different audiences, in a way," Mr. Friedman said. "I'm happy people are reading me, period. And Maureen has a huge following-bigger than mine, frankly.

"So I need to be really good to beat her," Mr. Friedman continued, before adding: "I never catch Maureen-she's way more popular than I am."

-G.S.

Just over a year ago, when The New York Times was hunting for a new chief for its Sunday Book Review, Bill Keller said that the paper's book coverage was too boring, and then-culture editor Steven Erlanger was quoted as saying, "If I could start another Mailer-Vidal fight, I'd gladly do it."

Well, instead of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, the Review has A.J. Jacobs and Joe Queenan, and instead of airing their rage in the letters column, as has been the tradition, the battle has migrated to the pages of the Review itself.

On Sunday, Feb. 13, readers were greeted with an amusing essay called "I Am Not a Jackass," by A.J. Jacobs, which appeared on the Review's back page. In 1,200-plus words, Mr. Jacobs proclaimed that he'd received "one of the most mean-spirited reviews in the 154-year history of The New York Times." He described his pain and anguish, his revenge fantasies and satisfaction over the fact that his book ( The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World) was a better seller than that of his reviewer, Joe Queenan ( Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country).

Mr. Jacobs, who is an editor at Esquire, had indeed been on the receiving end of a New York Times review so cutting that it left an imprint on nearly everyone who read it. On Oct. 3, 2004, Mr. Queenan, a contributing writer at GQ, called Mr. Jacobs' book "interminable," "corny, juvenile, smug, tired," taking issue with the book's entire premise and making sarcastic references to Mr. Jacobs' schooling at Dalton and Brown. It was sure to sting bad.

Normally, injured authors can seek restitution in the letters column, which has gotten rather bloody lately ( Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent even said it "can sometimes resemble the Battle of the Marne" in a recent column), so granting Mr. Jacobs an entire page of copy to respond seemed like an extra-special peace offering. Some in the book industry interpreted it as an indirect apology, a way of extending an olive branch to a bruised author whom they'd perhaps treated unfairly-Michael Cader, in his Publishers Lunch newsletter, referred to it as "a most gracious gesture."

According to Mr. Jacobs, he originally wrote "I Am Not a Jackass" in early January, at the behest of a Web site that had come to him with the idea (and which he declined to name). Shortly thereafter, he got a call from a Times Book Review editor asking him if he'd like to a review an upcoming book (another form of make-nice which seems popular with Review editors). It was his first assignment from the Review, and he said yes-and simultaneously submitted his completed but still unpublished essay.

"I sent it to them, and they accepted it that day," said Mr. Jacobs. "I sent it to my editor over there, and he said that he liked it and that Sam Tanenhaus liked it, too."

Mr. Tanenhaus, the New York Times Book Review editor, was on vacation and unavailable for comment, but his deputy, Julie Just, said: "We thought that Jacobs was really, really funny, so that's why we ran it. And when the Queenan review came in, we ran it, which is what we do with reviews."

"I guess I had heard they wanted to liven things up," said Mr. Jacobs. "I suppose it's nice to be in a literary feud-I just wish it was with someone with a bit more weight. I want Mailer next."

He's not the only one obsessed with Norman Mailer. Mr. Queenan said, "You sort of wish it was like Norman Mailer." Mr. Queenan claimed not to have read "I Am Not a Jackass," although he said that someone had alerted him by phone to its impending publication.

"When you get a review as bad as the one I gave him, normally people have the presence of mind to just let it go away," said Mr. Queenan. He added that his own book had been "slammed" in The Times by Molly Ivins, and in turn that he'd trashed books by Stephen King and Pat Robertson in The Times and The Wall Street Journal, respectively.

"Jacobs seems to have the idea that nobody's ever written a nasty review before," said Mr. Queenan. "He should take a look at Scott Peck's reviews …. Have you read Scott Peck?"

Did Mr. Queenan mean Dale Peck?

"Dale Peck! His review of Rick Moody? I mean, it's like having your book reviewed by Ghengis Khan."

-S.K.

"They were going to come out early," he said, flicking his tongue, crestfallen, looking a little like a kid who had a toy taken away from him. Earlier, before Mr. Matthews' coverage began, he told NYTV that Dr. Dean's media adviser, Steve McMahon, had told him "they're going to announce they won at 8:10." Foreseeing a close second, the Dean campaign projected that it would pull a Bill Clinton–style "comeback kid" moment.

Mr. Matthews' gut was telling him the theme of his show on this night might end up being "dramatize the Dean comeback," he said.

But exactly two minutes later, Mr. Matthews came back on the air and announced the breaking news coming through his earpiece-Dr. Dean had lost by double digits to Senator John Kerry. "A crushing blow … a heartbreaker for the Dean campaign," he said. Just a few minutes before, Mr. Matthews was ready to declare Dr. Dean "happy to be in second," but was quickly chastened by panelist and Newsweek political analyst Howard Fineman, who said just as the show faded to commercial break: "Not if he loses by 14 points."

"It's unfortunately not a surprise," Mr. Matthews said later, chewing on a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, his face still caked in make-up. "The polls were consistently double digits" for Mr. Kerry over Dr. Dean.

Earlier that evening, it seemed like a historic TV moment could be in the offing, as good as last week's historic TV moment in Iowa. Before the primary coverage had begun, Mr. Matthews and his panelists, Campbell Brown, Jacques DeGraff, Mr. Fineman and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, were basing their assessments on the Internet drama created from numbers posted on the Drudge Report by Rich Lowry, a political analyst for The National Review .

Mr. Fineman told NYTV he personally called NBC to confirm those numbers. "They called me back and they said, 'just between us, that's correct. That's the first wave.'" Those numbers projected that Sen. Kerry would get 37-percent of the New Hampshire vote and Dr. Dean 31 percent. It looked like a more competitive horse race was in the works, and the Bill Clinton comeback analogies were being quickly mounted.

"If you get between three and four points, that's a victory," said Mr. Scarborough, the host of MSNBC's Scarborough Country , in the break room on the set.

Mr. Matthews thought it was possible for Dr. Dean to pull off a Clinton-style comeback, comparing it to 1992, when Mr. Clinton lost by eight points to Sen. Paul Tsongas in New Hampshire but went on television at 8:00 PM to declare victory.

"There's some possibility that there's a secret Dean vote," Mr. Matthews said. "I think people are less disposed to give pollsters their information, if they're partial to Dean."

According to one MSNBC producer on the set, Dean staffers were out partying with the media in Manchester the night before the primary, exhilarated about a possible uptick.

At 6:17 p.m., Mr. Fineman walked off the set for a moment and said he'd received a call that the Los Angeles Times exit poll showed the race closer than the network polls that Mr. Lowry was using. But it proved wrong-as the numbers began rolling it, Sen. Kerry's 12 point lead matched the late Gallup and Zogby polls almost exactly. Mr. Fineman said on the air at 8:01, when the polls had closed, "the Democrats are unsettled about who they want to pick," and Mr. Matthews was still chomping for a dramatic close. "Win, place and show, just like in horse racing," he said. But the statistical odds remained distressingly accurate for a sports-loving man like Mr. Matthews. It was on to South Carolina, etc., but without that crazed frisson that gives a true political junkie good reason to smile.

But Mr. Matthews is still hoping Dr. Dean will put a spike in the E.K.G. At the end of his interview with Dr. Dean later that night, Mr. Matthews told the former Governor of Vermont, "In the weeks ahead, if you have something to say and want to say it, please come to Hardball and make it your podium," he said. "We want an exciting campaign, we want you to be a big noise in this campaign."

After weeks of scrutinizing Senator John Kerry, the press corps that followed him in a long white bus called the Real Deal Express were less than thrilled on Monday, Jan. 26, to be victimized by the same process. "I write stories," said Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post , "I'm not the subject of them."

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, Ms. Connolly had earned a reputation in Washington as one of the "Three Bitches of Eastwick," a trio of bad-girl political reporters who gleefully tortured Team Gore. Now, with Mr. Kerry positioned, Ms. Connolly sauntered back to the Kerry tour bus in candy-striped sunglasses and a black scarf around her neck, reeking pleasure at re-establishing her old part. But hordes of strange reporters were drifting on and off the bus, looking for a piece of her story.

Ms. Connolly wasn't the only one snarling at interlopers: David M. Halbfinger, The New York Times ' correspondent on the bus, sat next to Ms. Connolly in the makeshift press room in a recreation hall in Keene and suddenly gave a hard glare to poor NYTV, who sat idly on a couch. Scary!

"Who are you?" he asked, with the press corps looking on. "Who are you with? What are you doing here?"

He wanted to know if he was being quoted. Well, there was no Off the Record sign up. Later, Mr. Halbfinger relaxed and agreed to an interview. Why had he been suspicious?

"One of the other members of my press group expressed some concern, that's why," he said. "I mean, we're a pretty tight bunch."

Yes, they are. The handful of reporters who have been with Mr. Kerry for months or weeks, roaming the bleak Iowan landscapes during the hard times, well before "the surge," have formed a kind of tight-knit brat pack-correspondents from CBS, NBC, Fox News and the Boston Globe -who now cluster toward the very back of the Real Deal Express, away from the loners, old-timers and newbies up front.

In late 2003, these reporters could barely get their stories on the air or on the front page-Governor Dean was the story. But since Jan. 19, the number of Kerry reporters at events has quadrupled. And the candidate who once drank beers after a day of campaigning could barely feed the hundreds of media mouths.

"You definitely have this sense of 'the group,'" said Kelly Wallace of CNN, who has been with Sen. Kerry since Jan. 11. "They're the people who have been with him for five months or longer … the group who have been with him very step of the way."

And the Kerry pack has a sense of owning the story. Becky Diamond, a correspondent for MSNBC and NBC, said she felt she knew Mr. Kerry better than almost anyone after spending all last fall with him. "I feel liked I've logged the hours," she said. "You have a lot more freedom when you're not covering the front-runner. You have time. And that's wonderful. The downside is the network doesn't have the appetite for your story. Not as much of your stuff gets on air. I don't have the kind of access to Kerry that I used to have. Now, there are 50 journalists instead of five."

She said that she and Ed O'Keefe of ABC News "used to drive around in a van" with Sen. Kerry. "That doesn't exist anymore." "It was so quick," said another Kerry-packer. "It was an explosion of people …. Everyone wants a piece of this guy. We used to hang out all the time." "It's gotten three to four times bigger," said Pat Healy, the Globe reporter, with Sen. Kerry since September.

"People on the Dean bus are joking about trying to get on the Kerry bus," said Ms. Wallace.

On Monday, Jan. 26, the Kerry caravan traveled from Portsmouth and back to Manchester. A pool of six reporters and photographers traveled with Mr. Kerry by helicopter to two photo ops, while a dozen reporters followed in the Real Deal bus, driving 15 hours through bleak, frozen landscapes that melted away before they could be remembered, stopping in hot, dry, mobbed high-school gymnasiums where they found makeshift desks, plugged-in laptops, assaulted deadlines.

Along the way, the bus was morbidly quiet, except for the occasional barked cursing at the cell-phone signals that flashed in and out of the mountains near Keene.

But even those on the helicopter didn't get much face time with Mr. Kerry.

"I had a lot of trouble getting an interview today," said Mr. Halbfinger late Monday in the Salem High School auditorium. "Thirteen minutes, it turned out …. A month ago, I could have time with him any time of day … but you weren't taking advantage of it everyday, because you didn't want to be greedy for access when it wasn't going to get into the paper. We gave him his space and we had our space."

The Kerry pack, attuned to micro-variations in the stump speech, often compared notes. "I've edited packages and had my direct competitors look at them," said NBC's Ms. Diamond. "And they've given me honest feedback."

"I've heard that other press campaigns can be very cutthroat and competitive," said Mr. Halbfinger. "We will compare crowd counts and check each others' estimates. I often rely on my colleagues if I missed a quote. We back each other up because it's sort of like a mutual-aid society." The reporters said they sensed Sen. Kerry's rise early on, reporting the growing numbers of Iowans at his rallies. But their editors weren't always listening-and some began to question their instincts.

"The story was inside the paper, 800 words, no picture," said Mr. Halbfinger. "I saw it on the ground and we put it in the paper, and I even felt then that the polls weren't showing this yet, and I was thinking, 'Mmm, I either look smart, or hopefully people will forget this."

In the Kerry pack, Mr. Halbfinger was the cool guy in a black leather jacket with a decidedly dark pose. Mr. Halbfinger has been at it since August, when there was only a rental car to follow Mr. Kerry. He was married in November and went immediately back on the campaign trail. Alternately pissy and poetic, he was the dark prince of the bus-and hey, he kind of liked the sound of that.

"It kind of sounds cool," he said. "It sounds flattering in a way."

But, said Ms. Diamond, "We are all for one, one for all. These are my closest friends. I don't have a life …. I don't have time to call my best friend who just had a baby. When I want to talk to my boyfriend, it's in front of 15 people. There's no privacy, so if you're not friends with your colleagues, you're going to be lonely."

"I wouldn't call it the love bus," Mr. Halbfinger said. He called it the "Let's Not Kill Each Other Competitively for Things That Are Insignificant" bus. "Look, I will bust my butt and beat my friend's brains out to get a scoop. But we don't sweat the small stuff … need to eat, need to communicate with your loved one, need to sleep, sometimes somebody falls asleep, and usually we'll just wake somebody up if something happens." He bristled at the suggestion that a kind of Manchester Syndrome might set in, in which they fall in love with Mr. Kerry and each other. But, he said, "the funny thing is, it's like, we are all in a tunnel-I mean, we have the same blinders on. And we can only see things through the windshield of our bus. If you spent your whole day watching one guy, what are you going to talk about? And who are you going to talk shop with? There's only so many times I can call my wife and say, 'Guess what John Kerry did today?' … He once meant to say 'Wahhabi' fundamentalism and he said 'wasabi.' Yeah, I wrote that."

Then he remembered: "No, actually I gave it to another reporter who used it in a piece about fatigue."

"You're in this little cocoon" said Christopher Wilson, a Washington editor for Reuters, "and you're traveling with his people, going to his rallies. It's not all that easy to break out."

At the end of the day, a palpable sense of relief settled over the press corps as everyone filed. Middle Eastern food was served in the cafeteria of the Salem High School. There was no news, but Mr. Halbfinger managed to tweak it in The Times : "Sleepless, Grueling Days Are Fine, But, Please, No More Lasagna."

Later, Mr. Halbfinger walked up from his encampment in the back of the bus. "Truth is," he said, "it's almost a better story when the campaign is going down in flames. It's more fun to write wicked prose than rah-rah prose. And a badly imploding campaign-look at Howard Dean. He was on Page 1 more than John Kerry was. That goes to show you, it was a better story." That was Monday.

Jack Paar, 85

Jack Paar, the affable, spiritual godfather to all talk show hosts, died on Jan. 27 at the age of 85. His health had been shaky since suffering a stroke last year, which was preceded by bypass surgery in 1998.

Mr. Paar, an whose soft baby-face and a dimpled chin-he called it "adorable"- made his nightly visits on NBC's Tonight an institution from 1957-1962, invented the talk show form as we now know it, personalizing it in a way that no one has since. His stammering, extemporaneous style was neurotic and germ-free as only a midwesterner could be, and he gloried in the American personality, making a suburban cocktail party-complete with coffee table and couch-that was the ideal match for the age of O'Hara, Updike and Cheever. His guests were the erudite and the corn-fed: George S. Kaufman, John F. Kennedy, Brendan Behan … and Dody Goodman. His jokes were anecdotal, his wit genuine, his marriage to Miriam Paar, a model of love, friendship and respect.

Bob Wright, chairman and chief executive of NBC, described the legend in a statement yesterday as "unpredictable, spontaneous, and endlessly entertaining. [He] brought a unique flair to the small screen. His success at the 'Tonight Show' helped establish late-night talk shows as an important part of American television." In another statement, Conan O'Brien called him "a brilliant television pioneer."

Born in Ohio in 1918, Paar's comic acuity was first recognized during World War II, when he enlisted in the Army-he thought going on his own would be more "chic" than being drafted. He started performing for troops on the Guadalcanal-his big shtick had to do with making fun of officers-and was discovered by Jack Benny, who was touring the area. Benny told him to call when he was back in civvies. Call he did. After temporarily replacing Benny on his radio show for a summer, Paar got his own radio show in the mid-40's and took over for Tonight in 1957, six months after fellow TV legend Steve Allen abdicated.

He streamlined the format of the typical variety show, favoring the use of just a couch and chairs, inviting on a roster of guests that read like the ultimate dinner party: John F. Kennedy, Dorothy Parker, Buddy Hackett, Woody Allen, Hermoine Gingold, Alexander King, Liza Minnelli, Richard Nixon, and on and on. And he managed to elegantly weave together the silly with the serious: He would talk about being vehemently against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, but also enjoyed bringing onto the show a guy who could say and spell things backwards. "I'd like to thank you, Kcaj Raap!" he'd say.

"He created the form," said Paar's longtime friend, writer Larry Gelbart of M*A*S*H fame. "It was a time when people actually talked on talk shows. They didn't just come on to promote a movie or CD or to pitch a product. It was called conversation, and he was a wonderful conversationalist because not only did he listen, he could also make witty remarks without upstaging his guests. He was unique. He had the ability to be sensitive and shy and a braggart all at the same time, which was not an easy thing to do."

"In Paar's hands, 'The Tonight Show' became the whole country's Algonquin Round Table. His guests were wits, zanies and bon vivants; many told richly amusing stories, and so did he," wrote The Washington Post 's Tom Shales wrote in 1983. "No one, ever, has made conversation on television more entertaining."

Mr. Shales notes in that article that even media critic Marshall McLuhan was perpetually taken with Paar's charisma.

Paar was best known for freely showing his emotions-laughing, crying, screaming, and generally using the live medium to the fullest. One day he called Ed Sullivan "a liar" on air. The next, he told Sullivan through his broadcast that his daughter really wanted Beatles' tickets and asked if there was something that could be done.

"It was reality TV," said Mr. Gelbart. "This was not a guy who put a face on things. It wasn't laugh clown laugh. If he felt that way, it was cry, clown, cry…You know what he was? He was a sabra: prickly on the outside but incredibly sweet on the inside."

Much of Paar's teariness was the result of the movement from live TV to taping. When, in February 1960, a joke he made referring to a "water closet" was not cut before it aired, he threw a tantrum the following night and walked offstage. He returned shortly thereafter and stayed on for another two years, but ultimately left at the top of his game. Or did he?

"No, it wasn't the end of the game," said Mr. Gelbart. "It was the end of that part of his game. His life was his game. He painted, he traveled, he was a father and a husband and a grandfather. He was fiercely uncompetitive, which is an oxymoron, I know, but I mean it: He didn't need to competitive to be 'on.' He enjoyed talking and listening and could be happy talking to someone across the table or with an audience of millions."

But Paar perhaps put it most succinctly in his discussion with Mr. Shales in 1983. "TV," he said. "got in the way of living."

-Anna Jane Grossman