According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year." He goes on to quote Times executive editor Bill Keller as saying:

As for that internecine warfare, Mr. Mnookin quotes photographer Ashley Gilbertson saying that in the early days of the war, "It was Iraqi and American politics by day and New York Times politics at night."

One example (among many) Mr. Mnookin recounts is the conflict between John Burns and James Glanz, which:

Just last week, The Times sent out a memo announcing that Mr. Glanz was appointed to the paper's Investigations desk.

In June, The Observer spoke to several reporters from The Times and other news organizations about life during wartime. (And in 2007, Politico's Michael Calderone, then of The Observer, wrote about Messrs. Burns and Glanz.)

Also, this week in The Times' Play Magazine, Dexter Filkins talks about how watching and listening to football got him through his Iraq experience, which Mr. Mnookin describes in Vanity Fair as a "collection of close calls [that] sounds like a horror-film montage."

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.

Chief among them is that even if you grab hold of a part of the truth, it has a way of becoming false. Second: If you manage to find a true story, don’t depend on anyone back home wanting to hear it.

Bob Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Associated Press, filed this June 1: “U.S. military deaths plunged in May to the lowest monthly level in more than four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too, as Iraqi forces assumed the lead in offensives in three cities and a truce with Shiite extremists took hold.

“But many Iraqis as well as U.S. officials and private security analysts are uncertain whether the current lull signals a long-term trend or is simply a breathing spell like so many others before.”

Mr. Reid has been covering conflicts for over 30 years, in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, the Sudan, the southern Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bosnia. But this, he says, is different.

“Someone the other day told me that they thought Iraq had gone through a sea change,” he said by phone from Baghdad a little before midnight, June 9. “All of us who have been longer know that there is a cyclical quality to the violence here.”

Mr. Reid was sitting in the small house his wire service keeps in the Red Zone of the city, finishing work and planning to go to bed after a workday that started around 8 a.m.

He calls his life “Groundhog Day.” He goes to bed in the same building he worked in—with a book or, if he’s lucky, an English-language movie on Arabic satellite television—falls asleep, wakes up and starts all over again. Like the war, it has its predictable, grinding rhythm, and yet, like the war, every day is completely different.

“Iraq has receded,” said John Burns, from a ferry off the Isle of Man, England, where he’s covering a motorcycle tournament. Mr. Burns was perhaps the Iraq war’s best-known correspondent, who from 2003 to July 2007 was the chief of The New York Times’ Baghdad bureau. “War is surprisingly easy to cover,” Mr. Burns said. “I always said this. The story dictates itself. There’s never one morning when you get up and wonder what you’re going to do today.”

But it’s not a war anymore; it’s an occupation. And for many reporters, one thing that is missing is a narrative, a frame of reference to describe the events they report but can’t quite explain.

“The Best and Brightest was written 5 or 10 years after the events it described,” said George Packer, who has covered the war for The New Yorker. “Books will come out 5 or 10 years from now telling us things we don’t know now. Right now we’ve probably pushed it about as far as it can go from the limited point of view of a Western journalist in the middle of the events he’s describing.”

“For a long time, there was a single thrust of narrative,” said Damien Cave, who went from The New York Times’ Newark bureau to Iraq in July 2006 and returned in December 2007. “Now I think it’s harder to figure out what the narrative is. You’re trying to figure out: What features speak to the news? And because Iraq has become more fragmented, the narratives are more fragmented. A story in Basra is different from a story in Mosul and that’s definitely different from a story a few years ago.”

“I think there are a lot of people who really want information and that’s why we’re there,” said New York Times Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz. “But when somebody asks if it’s getting better? It’s a fine place to start a conversation. But the thing about Iraq, it’s about double exposures and overlays and things like that. It’s a complicated place. It’s a place where if you really want to boil it all down, then the complexities of the systems have defeated all these solutions. And you really can’t think about it any other way. There’s no simple story line.”

Richard Engel of NBC News acknowledged the recent drop in violence, and said it gave reporters more room to report.

“How much you can move is impacted by the level of danger. … I recently went down to Najaf, which is south of Baghdad. I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security protection or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn’t done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in ’06 and ’07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer.”

The conventional wisdom has always been that a reporter can’t stay in one place for more than 20 minutes—the amount of time security experts think it takes for eyewitnesses to report their whereabouts to potential kidnappers, and for the kidnappers to lay their trap. Journalists are routinely increasing their stays to 45 minutes or more.

The BBC’s Jim Muir visited the National Archive, which is currently being patched back together after the war, for an hour and a half. But his security people were not happy about it.

“In general terms, it has made life a bit easier,” he said. “Six months ago, I was able to go to one of the worst Sunni neighborhoods, a place called Ameriya, which had been a really, really rough neighborhood. But you could go there because one of the developments, which has fed into the security improvement, is that a lot of the young Sunni guys have turned away from Al Qaeda and have signed up to fight them alongside the Americans. In that sense it’s expanded the range of stories you can do, and the places you can go with relative security. … Violence is down, but it’s down to like more than 500 Iraqis being killed violently every month rather than 2,000. Those levels are still not very nice.”

“There’s no question it’s not the same front-page story it was last year,” said Tina Susman, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times. “It just needs to be approached differently. It’s human-interest-oriented. … That’s the way wars work. They go in ebbs and flows. In March and in the first half of April, we were on the front page frequently. It’s inevitable. I
t doesn’t mean the story is over, but, O.K., if the daily news isn’t grabbing attention, then what is? What’s another way to tell the story?”

“There’s a marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq,” said ABC News correspondent Terry McCarthy. “That’s partly due to the election, partly because of fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don’t see them anymore. A drip, drip story that’s getting a little bit better day by day doesn’t make a headline. We have to struggle to get more stories on the air. We have to do more feature-type stuff. The news of the day is not really here anymore.”

“It’s not difficult to judge what’s going to be on page one,” John Burns said. “We had a rhythm of stories like that for three or four years. It was a journalistic high.

“It’s a lot more difficult now. The reporter in Iraq finds himself similar to the problem of the reporter in Paris and London and Hong Kong. You’ve got to show enterprise. You’ve got to dig for the story, and very often it’s a feature. And then you’ve got to compete on an equal basis to get that story on the front page.”

“We will be more likely to go ahead and file a story on military activity around the country that doesn’t rise to the level of top of the foreign news page,” said Mr. Reid of the AP. But, “our editors are showing increasing interest in features and a decreasing interest in ‘Iraqi troops capture x amount of people and five bombs went off,’ unless it really does rise to the level of a huge explosion or something like that.”

The question is, what level of risk makes a story like that worth reporting?

“We could almost sit on a downtown bus, the entire Western press corps these days,” said Mr. Ware of CNN. “Other organizations will keep the bare bones of a bureau in place, but often it won’t be fully staffed. We only see visiting correspondents.”

According to Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, CBS keeps a bureau in Baghdad, including one full-time producer/bureau chief there, six months on, six months off, but no full-time correspondent. There is a pool of correspondents for CBS, including Lara Logan, who show up to do stories over there. “We cover the story when it changes in some significant way,” said Mr. Friedman, who confirmed reports that CBS News had had talks with CNN about using its resources and reporters. The deal fell through because of “rights issues.”

“It’s very hard to send people into dangerous places,” said Mr. Friedman, “knowing that the likelihood of what they report getting on the air is low.”

THREE CASTLES

There are three large compounds that house many of the American journalists still working in Baghdad.

“It’s almost like little castles,” said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has reported in Baghdad since the beginning of the war.

All three are in what’s called the Red Zone, outside of the protective checkpoints that define the city’s Green Zone.

NBC is in one of the three “castles,” along with some other American media outlets.

“We happen to live right next to The Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times and Time magazine,” said Mr. Engel. “We are all in one compound. It’s a hotel surrounded by some houses. We’ve put around some perimeter security. Iraqis live within that compound as well.

“We’re quite close. It’s a media center. We live together. They’ll come over to our place for a barbecue. Or I’ll go over to The Washington Post for a drink or a barbecue. It’s very easy. We can walk. There are no security restrictions.”

But he doesn’t socialize much with journalists outside of his “castle.”

“You have to move through the badlands from one to another,” Mr. Engel said. (To avoid targeting by suicide bombers and kidnappers, the locations of all three are generally not made public; but each is at least a mile from the next.) “I go out every day reporting. But it’s not really worth it to go and organize security and take risks to go on a social call to visit people at CNN or Fox.”

Jamie Tarabay, formerly chief of the NPR bureau, lived “across the badlands” from Mr. Engel. “We have a garden where we live,” she said. “We have barbecues every now and then. CNN. ABC. Fox. CBS. Every now and then there’s a block get-together, especially in the summer. It’s nice. Because you’re all alone. But you’re alone together. It’s nice to be able to share your frustrations and chill out and relax.”

“We’re in an undisclosed location,” said Fox News’ Courtney Kealy of Castle Number Two. “We refer to it as the concrete media village. I refer to my place as an armed fortress, which it is. We have nice brief respites where we can visit each other, and have barbecues, within somebody’s compound.”

“We’re not in the Green Zone. We never have been. The vast majority of the press has not been. If we are accused of hotel journalism, fair enough. But when we lived in the hotel, we were under siege just like the rest of the city was. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, yawn, I want to order room service because I don’t want to go outside.’ We have a really great gym. We have a massive amount of DVDs and books. And there is a local Iraqi guy that made us a pool table, which is great. But … a card game, or watching TV, or sitting outside and having a barbecue is pretty much the relaxation you get—with hopefully a couple times at the gym, because you literally aren’t going anywhere else. The irony of this war is that you gain weight.”

“In a limited way, yes, if you’re in one of these enclaves, you can hang out with the people there a little bit,” said The Times’ Mr. Glanz. He was sitting at an outdoor table at the bistro Le Monde in Morningside Heights. He’d been in New York for two weeks and would be here for a few more. Fifty-one years old, his hair is graying; he drank two café au laits and fielded a phone call from a neck specialist.

“But you can’t move from place to place. … I used to go shopping in Baghdad, and I used to go to restaurants. Then at a certain point we started asking ourselves, O.K., if I’m out with my friend Dexter Filkins and a bomb goes off—as it did one night with The Washington Post a few years ago—and let’s say Dexter gets killed. So I’m going to go back to Dexter’s parents, let’s say, and say, ‘In the line of duty, Dexter was killed.’ And they’ll say, ‘What was he doing?’ And I’ll say we were out having kebab at a restaurant. And they’ll say, ‘My son died while you’re bureau chief because you were at a restaurant?’

“You can’t do that anymore. You can’t do that. I can’t say that he was out there carrying out the mission of reporting, and we didn’t realize there was this presence, there was an unfortunate incident where there was this person there and he came from around the corner, and blah blah. I’m the one who has to call the wife, the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, and say, you know, ‘Your son or daughter is dead.’ I’m the one who will have to explain what was going on at the time. … If I let someone go into harm’s way for no journalistic reason, I’ll never be able to justify it.”

THE WAR AT HOME

“I flew out on like the 16th of December,” said Jamie Tarabay of her exit as
the NPR’s Baghdad bureau chief near the end of 2007. “And on the 18th, I was in New York trying on my wedding dress. In January, we got married. Then we went to Paris for a bit.

“It is a head trip leaving,” she said. “In any case, wherever you go, being able to walk along a footpath by yourself without an escort is great. Having electricity 24 hours. Being able to pick what you want to eat.”

But Ms. Susman, the L.A. Times reporter, does not feel she comes home a hero for her reporting.

“The level of ignorance is distressing,” she said. “It shows people aren’t paying any attention to the stories. They’re asking me about details like, ‘Do you go out, do you go to the Green Zone?’ And I tell them, ‘Just read the stories!’ If you just read the stories, they wouldn’t have to ask. They say they’re paying attention, but they don’t. If they ask you what the situation is like, they’re not reading. The New York Times, Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles Times, they produce a lot of copy! It’s so easy to criticize the mainstream media for not covering the story, but there’s a lot of coverage.”

And if you do try to retell the story, it’s not always so warmly received.

“It’s a conversation stopper,” said Phillip Robertson, a freelance reporter who covered Iraq for Salon. “It’s not dinner-table conversation. Digging up bodies in mass graves. Even the people who didn’t see a lot saw way too much. That has a real effect.”

“Because the press put out all that stuff in the early days in 2003, the press is now blamed,” said Courtney Kealy of Fox News. “People say to me, what’s the real story in Iraq? I say, read the books that have come out and won Pulitzers. Look at my friends’ articles. Look at the stories I’ve done. They’re not looking, and they’re not reading; they don’t want to. And now the press corps gets a whole heck of a lot of, ‘Well, you’re just hotel journalists.’ I come home, people say to me, ‘What’s it like, have you been brainwashed?’ People who like Fox have said, ‘Well, I like your stuff, but I won’t read that paper.’ I say to them, anybody who has covered Iraq for a serious time frame, they’re a solid reporter. You can pretty much trust and read their stuff and forget about thinking there’s some great media conspiracy that we’ve all been co-opted by some right-wing or left-wing agenda. But no one can get their heads around that anymore.”

“There is a chance for this place to remain quiet. There is a chance for the Iraqi army to get better. There is a chance for a timetable for withdrawal that could work. The only issue I have is when I talk to people in the States … they really just ask me, what should we do, have we won or lost, how long are we staying? I think that winning and losing should be struck from the lexicon right now.

“I just try and stay away from, ‘What’s a good news story, or what’s a bad news story, or why did we come here?’ It’s like people who are 35 and can’t stop talking about their childhood. No matter how bad your childhood was, at some point you have to take responsibility for it and deal. Whether we were supposed to come here or not, we’ve been here for five years. History books have already been written.”

But the networks and, in many cases, the print media are keenly aware of the questions their readers and viewers want answers to. They are not always that complicated, and they don’t always require live reporting from Iraq.

“I have to say that’s an appalling indictment of the media,” said CNN’s Mr. Ware. “This is the Vietnam War of our generation. This conflict is going to have repercussions that far exceed that of an Indo-Chinese, essentially, civil war. Yet for a litany of reasons, which may or may not be legitimate, from cost to security to audience fatigue, the media has dropped the ball on this conflict. It is a tragic indictment on the Fourth Estate.

“Obviously, the media is a business at the end of the day,” said Mr. Ware. “There are advertisers to attract. We’re also about much more than that. We don’t always have to follow the market. Sometimes we have to lead it. And illuminate it. That’s where the media is failing the longer this drags on. How many people cut their teeth in conflicts in Vietnam? This is the war of this generation. Where is the graduating class of this conflict? That is something that has long saddened me. Not enough of our breed has picked up the cudgel of this war.”

“The press has not gotten the credit it deserves from the broad public,” said Mr. Packer of The New Yorker. “The idea that there was a group of people in Vietnam who were really changing the nature of journalism and its relation to the government. … I guess the mythologizing of those guys was more successful than this group. And I think it’s partly the sense that the press no longer has the clout and credibility it did. You don’t look to three or four people for the truth the way you once have done. There just is too many ‘truths’ out there.

“And second, I think it’s because the press is just part of the war, whether it wants to be or not.

“The press did discredit itself in the lead-up to the war. But I think the press redeemed in Baghdad what it missed in Washington. I’m not sure the public even knows that.”

“I think this is the story for my generation, the way that Vietnam was the story of the generation before us,” said Mr. Burns of The New York Times. “It’s the defining moment. I think, if I ask myself, what was the most challenging? At which story did I need to draw upon all the lessons I learned along the way? Iraq was it. I was not just a reporter, but I also had the good fortune of being a bureau chief. I don’t want to sound too pious here, but to see young people come into that bureau with little experience and no experience at all with the world at war and see how they prospered—and I think I helped them—was really extremely rewarding. It was the toughest and hardest assignment.

“It’s always hard to come into war when the trajectory has changed—and it isn’t so dramatic. For a reporter now, it is tougher. It was a lot easier. But this war is a long way away from over. We may be taking the temperature of this a little too soon. The numbers will come down and the surge will end and the Iraqis themselves will become less assured of an American presence, and there will once again be a great risk of the politics of ethnic schism in Iraq. We may not have seen the worst of it yet.”

fgillette@observer.com, mhaber@observer.com, jkoblin@observer.com

It was Sept. 20, the day after The Times had confirmed that reporter Fakher Haider, one of its Iraqi stringers, had been abducted and killed in Basra. It was the second murder of a journalist who’d worked for The Times in that city in two months—both times reportedly with the perpetrators dressed as police or presenting themselves as police.

Ms. Chira said that it was too soon to tell what connection, if any, Haider’s Times work may have had to his death. “To be completely honest with you, we’re still trying to understand completely what the circumstances are,” Ms. Chira said. The paper, she said, would “be making inquiries.”

Before now, if The Times wanted to know the details of an incident in Basra, it would have turned to Haider, 38, for assistance. He had been part of the paper’s nationwide network of frequently anonymous reporter-fixer-correspondents, its eyes and ears in places where it could be difficult or dangerous for Western reporters to work.

Haider “knew the lay of the land and didn’t sort of attract attention,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller.

For the Baghdad bureau, which hired Haider at the outset of the invasion in 2003, the loss was deeply personal. “It’s devastating,” Times Iraq reporter James Glanz said, reached on the phone while stateside in New York. Mr. Glanz said that Haider had been his companion on a number of major assignments. They had covered the elections together, he said, and had taken a “pretty elaborate reporting trip” to witness the restoration of the marshes in the south.

Haider had also, Mr. Glanz said, worked with him on a piece that ran in the Week in Review section this past February—in which Mr. Glanz described Basra as a tranquil and secure city that “seems to be in a different country from the grim battlefield that much of Iraq has become.”

“It was just the closest thing to normal reporting you could find,” Mr. Glanz said.

Five months later, The Times published an Op-Ed by freelancer Steven Vincent, describing the deteriorating conditions in Basra. Two days after that, in early August, Mr. Vincent was seized in the street and killed; his translator, Nouraya Tuaiz, was shot and wounded.

Times reporter Kirk Semple, also in the U.S. at the moment, said he went to Basra for a week in August, doing reporting for a yet-to-be-published story about Mr. Vincent’s murder. Haider accompanied him.

It was clear, Mr. Semple said, that the mood in the city had taken a turn for the worse. “It was a fairly tense assignment,” he said—requiring him to walk into interviews with unfriendly officials, on their turf.

“Without Fakher, I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said.

As with other Iraqi stringers, Haider’s contributions to The Times were sometimes anonymous. But on some occasions, his name would appear on his work—including a story that ran on Sept. 19 (with his name spelled “Hadar”), the day his body was found.

Mr. Glanz recalled Haider as a good-natured and talkative companion—“a wry sort of guy”—who habitually wore a jean jacket. He had made himself an integral part of The Times’ news operations, despite limited English. He would file dispatches in Arabic, Mr. Glanz said, and staffers in Baghdad would translate.

“He had a Western side that was about 30 percent of his personality,” Mr. Glanz said, “and an Iraqi side that was about 70.”

Mr. Glanz said that Haider had a knack for securing interviews and assistance through an elaborate network of friends, relatives, and friends and relatives of friends and relatives. “If that didn’t work, then Fakher cracked jokes,” he added.

Mr. Glanz said that Haider might not necessarily secure a requested appointment at the specified hour, but he would secure it. “He’d joke about being on Arabic time rather than Western time on those occasions,” he said.

Despite his mature age, Mr. Glanz said, Haider had the character of a freshly minted young reporter. The fall of the Baath regime, Mr. Glanz said, “gave Fakher an opportunity, and he took it. And he was a brother in the trade.”

Next week marks the second anniversary of the arrival of much-gossiped-about gossip columnist Lloyd Grove at the Daily News. But his tenure at the Mort Zuckerman–owned tabloid may not extend through a third year.

Sources familiar with the circumstances of Mr. Grove’s hiring say that the scribe has been working under a two-year contract, which began in September 2003. That deal would expire at the end of this month. According to Daily News sources, the talk inside the paper is that Mr. Grove is in contract negotiations with News executives.

Both Mr. Grove and Daily News editor Michael Cooke declined repeated requests for comment on the Lowdown columnist’s contract status. Mr. Zuckerman said through a spokesperson that the paper doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

Mr. Grove’s first Lowdown column appeared in the News on Sept. 29, 2003, a day after The New York Times ran a 1,600-word piece on his arrival from The Washington Post—where he had served as the Reliable Source columnist for three years. At the time, Mr. Grove denied reports that he had signed a three-year deal with the News worth $250,000, calling such accounts “false.”

Change the numbers to $225,000 and two years, and you may be closer to the actual terms, according to a source familiar with the hire.

Mr. Grove isn’t necessarily perceived as a fixture on the New York gossip scene. For months, Slate’s Mickey Kaus has been using his Web log to nag the Los Angeles Times: “Hire Lloyd Grove.”

Coincidentally, Daily News staffers noted that Mr. Grove had traveled frequently to Los Angeles.

“Grove has a girlfriend out here,” wrote Mr. Kaus on Feb. 27 of this year. That relationship has since ended, associates say, sometime around the end of the summer. Mr. Grove hasn’t returned to L.A. since.

Mr. Kaus—a proponent of rear-wheel-drive cars and of Democrats bucking teachers’ unions—isn’t necessarily a prophet of the actual. But the West Coast Times, which currently has no gossip column at all, could offer wide-open space to a cramped New York scribe.

And since the addition of Mr. Grove, the gossip beats inside the News have gotten as crowded as the elbow-filled lane at Madison Square Garden. Unlike the New York Post, at which the prime gossip gets channeled through Richard Johnson’s Page Six empire (while Cindy Adams and Liz Smith work their respective niches), the News has no clear hierarchy. Mr. Grove leads off the section with one page, then Rush and Malloy—the franchise gossips before Lowdown’s arrival—follow with a page-plus spread. Throw in Ben Widdicombe’s Gatecrasher column and it’s hard to know where to turn for what kind of gossip, or where each column falls on the ladder.

According to News insiders, Mr. Grove’s column has heightened the jurisdictional confusion by steering into entertainment froth, away from the politics-and-media material that made up his portfolio in Washington. Editors, sources said, have had to arbitrate scoops when the two columns have reported similar items.

Last summer, insiders said, the overlap grew so frequent that editors instituted a formal traffic-control system. Now, when columnists wish to cover particular events, they put in requests in advance, and editors make assignments.

“We were stepping on each other’s toes,” a News gossip staffer said.

But one gossip denied those accounts, saying that “we’re all surprisingly cordial, considering that we’re nominally competitors. There’s really no behind-the-scenes drama.”

Whether Mr. Grove stays or goes, in one sense, his column has been pulling a vanishing act all along. When it first appeared, Lowdown sometimes ran to 1,100 or 1,200 words and rarely dipped below 800. Mr. Grove’s longest column last month was 899 words, and one of his efforts checked in at 651.

—Gabriel Sherman

Forget athletes or Hollywood ingénues: Lately, Condé Nast’s fashion and shipping titles have been turning to the Good Gray Lady for inspiration. On newsstands this month, the October Domino pops into the kitchen of New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser.

Besides offering advice for entertaining (“Always invite a gregarious person to sit mid-table”), Ms. Hesser gives an auto-aspirational lifestyle survey of some of her favorite edibles and kitchenware, complete with price tags.

The Times foodie recommends dousing ice cream with La Colombe coffee ($11.25 per pound from lacolombe.com), tells about serving eggs with chorizo ($8.50 at tienda.com) as an appetizer, and praises her 31¼2-quart “modern white” Le Creuset casserole (“If I could only have one piece of Le Creuset, this is it”; $135.99 through cooksworld.com). She even works in one of her trademark puffs for a celebrity chef’s product: “I read about Edmond Fallot Dijon mustard in Thomas Keller’s cookbook Bouchon.”

“I think it’s unfortunate,” Times standards editor Allan M. Siegal said of Ms. Hesser’s Domino appearance. Mr. Siegal swiftly cited Paragraph 59 of the paper’s Ethical Journalism Guidebook as the governing rule. That passage specifically forbids Times writers and editors from offering “endorsements, testimonials or promotional blurbs for books, films, television programs or any other programs, products or ventures.”

But despite the rule—and despite the open question of who would want step-by-step instructions on how to emulate the life of a Times staffer—there has been a steady flow from West 43rd Street over to 4 Times Square.

Then–deputy Arts and Leisure editor Ariel Kaminer took her turn as Timesperson-turned-consumer-muse for the August edition of Lucky. Over four pages, the magazine explained how a “culture-savvy New York Times editor” manages her wardrobe through a week: “Kaminer looks for pieces that are professional without being somber, feminine but not overly girly.” The piece ended by laying out an assortment of clothes (a $355 Diane von Furstenberg cardigan; a $187 pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans from Scoop) and then combining them on seven days’ worth of tiny head-to-toe images of Ms. Kaminer (“Wednesday: cashmere top + wool pants + suede heels + leather satchel—lunch with a writer”).

Ms. Kaminer was followed by war correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, who appeared in the debut issue of Men’s Vogue, standing between The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson and Fox News’ Christian Galdabini. For the occasion, Mr. Gettleman wore a $795 Burberry jacket, $495 Dolce & Gabbana sweater, and $50 pants from the Gap.

Ms. Kaminer declined to comment on her Lucky appearance; Ms. Hesser didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.

—G.S.

As promised for months, on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 17, The Wall Street Journal became a part of New Yorkers’ weekends. For Journal reader Billy Hutchinson, it was an indirect process.

Mr. Hutchinson, a 42-year-old trader, was holding a copy of the paper’s new Weekend Edition at the Soho Starbucks. But he confessed to scavenging it—he subscribes to the Journal at his office on weekdays, he said, but never got around to giving the paper a home address for weekend delivery. “I guess I’ll get my copy on Monday morning,” he said.

A few tables over, another Journal reader, Abdul Seck, a 33-year-old financial risk manager, said he had recently canceled his weekend subscription to The New York Times in anticipation of receiving the weekend Journal at his Nolita apartment. “I’ll probably still buy the Sunday Times,” Mr. Seck added.

The red-framed Weekend Edition logo was popping up around the city on the paper’s first morning. So were a few stories of readers—10 percent of subscribers, by the paper’s estimate—who hadn’t yet arranged to get their copies at home. Marty Kenny, a real-estate developer from Hartford, Conn., had The Journal at a sidewalk table at the Caliente Cab Co. Mexican restaurant on Seventh Avenue South. But Mr. Kenny said he’d been forced to make a run to the newsstand that morning, because he hadn’t yet set up weekend delivery.

At an uptown Starbucks on Columbus Avenue, however, investment banker Scott Whitworth was holding his own home-delivered copy. Mr. Whitworth said he welcomed The Journal’s weekend foray.

“Sometimes [The Journal] plays catch-up with everything that’s happened since Friday,” he said.

Michael Devito, a supervisor for the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, was reading The Journal’s editorial section at the Sony Plaza on West 56th Street. Mr. Devito, 46, said his usual Saturday newspaper diet consisted of the New York Post, but his Journal had been free. “They’re giving out huge stacks of them at Rockefeller,” he said.

How’d he like it? “It’s interesting,” Mr. Devito, 46, said. “They still have their regular editorial section. I like their editorials because they’re right of [the] Senate.”

According to a Journal source, the Weekend Edition rolled off the press without any printing or production snafus. The staff had prepared for the event with a pair of simulated closes earlier in the month. Employees from the weekend paper’s centerpiece lifestyle section, Pursuits—including lame-duck Condé Nast–bound deputy managing editor Joanne Lipman—gathered at the Tribeca lounge Dekk after the editorial close. By 11, they were passing around early copies fresh off the presses.

One night earlier, the Journal had held its public rollout party, on the second floor of the Standard Oil Building in lower Manhattan. Attendees entered the party through a hallway covered with an artificial-turf putting green, while sounds of chirping birds were piped in, à la the Masters, for added atmosphere. Around the corner, a video-golf simulator continued the simulated-leisure-time theme.

In the main party space, servers wearing aprons with the new edition’s motto—“Have a Brilliant Weekend”—doled out miniature hamburgers cooked on electric grills. A bartender poured pints of imported English ale.

At the rear was another room, island-themed, featuring a row of beach chairs. Another nature recording—the peaceful sloshing of waves—battled the raucous beats leaking in from the dance floor.

Dow Jones chairman Peter Kann was across from the burger stand, expressing optimism for the project. “I don’t want to exaggerate,” Mr. Kann said, “but we’re the only company making a commitment to print.”

And speaking of commitment, what about Ms. Lipman’s recently announced plans to jump ship to Condé Nast? Mr. Kann downplayed the impact. “I’m a big fan of Joanne,” he said. “But overall, [Pursuits] has been guided by [Journal editor] Paul Steiger and a lot of others.”

Mr. Steiger, meanwhile, said that despite the focus on Pursuits and its lifestyle coverage—cue crashing surf!—the new six-day week would be good for the news desks. “We’re not running away from news,” Mr. Steiger said. “Friday is often a heavy news day. A large part of why we’re publishing on Saturday is so we can break more news.”

—G.S.; with additional reporting by Brad Tytel, Erin Coe
and Nicole Pesce

New York Times pundit standings, Sept. 13-19

1. Frank Rich, score 25.0 [no rank last week]

2. (tie) Maureen Dowd, 22.0 [rank last week: 1st]

Thomas L. Friedman, 22.0 [4th]

4. Paul Krugman, 12.0 [3rd]

5. John Tierney, 10.0 [6th]

6. David Brooks, 9.5 [7th]

7. Nicholas D. Kristof, 6.5 [5th]

8. Bob Herbert, 2.5 [2nd]

The TimesSelect pay-for-content experiment is underway. And in science-fair terms, the New York Times pundits who published on Sept. 19 are like the tomato plants grown in total darkness. During the last six days of free access, the paper published 13 columns by the Op-Ed columnists—and 12 made the Most E-Mailed list. On the first day of restricted access, it published two pundits’ columns—and neither one made the chart. Sorry, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof!

Even as the pundits’ scores begin to shrivel, though, The Times offers them a bit of cheer. Now that the old system of charging for access to articles more than a week old has been superseded by TimesSelect, the Web site includes a new, third version of the Most E-Mailed list—this one covering the past 30 days. On that one, the pundits occupy 19 of the top 25 slots. Oh, weren’t those the days!

—T.S.

It was Sept. 20, the day after The Times had confirmed that reporter Fakher Haider, one of its Iraqi stringers, had been abducted and killed in Basra. It was the second murder of a journalist who’d worked for The Times in that city in two months—both times reportedly with the perpetrators dressed as police or presenting themselves as police.

Ms. Chira said that it was too soon to tell what connection, if any, Haider’s Times work may have had to his death. “To be completely honest with you, we’re still trying to understand completely what the circumstances are,” Ms. Chira said. The paper, she said, would “be making inquiries.”

Before now, if The Times wanted to know the details of an incident in Basra, it would have turned to Haider, 38, for assistance. He had been part of the paper’s nationwide network of frequently anonymous reporter-fixer-correspondents, its eyes and ears in places where it could be difficult or dangerous for Western reporters to work.

Haider “knew the lay of the land and didn’t sort of attract attention,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller.

For the Baghdad bureau, which hired Haider at the outset of the invasion in 2003, the loss was deeply personal. “It’s devastating,” Times Iraq reporter James Glanz said, reached on the phone while stateside in New York. Mr. Glanz said that Haider had been his companion on a number of major assignments. They had covered the elections together, he said, and had taken a “pretty elaborate reporting trip” to witness the restoration of the marshes in the south.

Haider had also, Mr. Glanz said, worked with him on a piece that ran in the Week in Review section this past February—in which Mr. Glanz described Basra as a tranquil and secure city that “seems to be in a different country from the grim battlefield that much of Iraq has become.”

“It was just the closest thing to normal reporting you could find,” Mr. Glanz said.

Five months later, The Times published an Op-Ed by freelancer Steven Vincent, describing the deteriorating conditions in Basra. Two days after that, in early August, Mr. Vincent was seized in the street and killed; his translator, Nouraya Tuaiz, was shot and wounded.

Times reporter Kirk Semple, also in the U.S. at the moment, said he went to Basra for a week in August, doing reporting for a yet-to-be-published story about Mr. Vincent’s murder. Haider accompanied him.

It was clear, Mr. Semple said, that the mood in the city had taken a turn for the worse. “It was a fairly tense assignment,” he said—requiring him to walk into interviews with unfriendly officials, on their turf.

“Without Fakher, I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said.

As with other Iraqi stringers, Haider’s contributions to The Times were sometimes anonymous. But on some occasions, his name would appear on his work—including a story that ran on Sept. 19 (with his name spelled “Hadar”), the day his body was found.

Mr. Glanz recalled Haider as a good-natured and talkative companion—“a wry sort of guy”—who habitually wore a jean jacket. He had made himself an integral part of The Times’ news operations, despite limited English. He would file dispatches in Arabic, Mr. Glanz said, and staffers in Baghdad would translate.

“He had a Western side that was about 30 percent of his personality,” Mr. Glanz said, “and an Iraqi side that was about 70.”

Mr. Glanz said that Haider had a knack for securing interviews and assistance through an elaborate network of friends, relatives, and friends and relatives of friends and relatives. “If that didn’t work, then Fakher cracked jokes,” he added.

Mr. Glanz said that Haider might not necessarily secure a requested appointment at the specified hour, but he would secure it. “He’d joke about being on Arabic time rather than Western time on those occasions,” he said.

Despite his mature age, Mr. Glanz said, Haider had the character of a freshly minted young reporter. The fall of the Baath regime, Mr. Glanz said, “gave Fakher an opportunity, and he took it. And he was a brother in the trade.”

Next week marks the second anniversary of the arrival of much-gossiped-about gossip columnist Lloyd Grove at the Daily News. But his tenure at the Mort Zuckerman–owned tabloid may not extend through a third year.

Sources familiar with the circumstances of Mr. Grove’s hiring say that the scribe has been working under a two-year contract, which began in September 2003. That deal would expire at the end of this month. According to Daily News sources, the talk inside the paper is that Mr. Grove is in contract negotiations with News executives.

Both Mr. Grove and Daily News editor Michael Cooke declined repeated requests for comment on the Lowdown columnist’s contract status. Mr. Zuckerman said through a spokesperson that the paper doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

Mr. Grove’s first Lowdown column appeared in the News on Sept. 29, 2003, a day after The New York Times ran a 1,600-word piece on his arrival from The Washington Post—where he had served as the Reliable Source columnist for three years. At the time, Mr. Grove denied reports that he had signed a three-year deal with the News worth $250,000, calling such accounts “false.”

Change the numbers to $225,000 and two years, and you may be closer to the actual terms, according to a source familiar with the hire.

Mr. Grove isn’t necessarily perceived as a fixture on the New York gossip scene. For months, Slate’s Mickey Kaus has been using his Web log to nag the Los Angeles Times: “Hire Lloyd Grove.”

Coincidentally, Daily News staffers noted that Mr. Grove had traveled frequently to Los Angeles.

“Grove has a girlfriend out here,” wrote Mr. Kaus on Feb. 27 of this year. That relationship has since ended, associates say, sometime around the end of the summer. Mr. Grove hasn’t returned to L.A. since.

Mr. Kaus—a proponent of rear-wheel-drive cars and of Democrats bucking teachers’ unions—isn’t necessarily a prophet of the actual. But the West Coast Times, which currently has no gossip column at all, could offer wide-open space to a cramped New York scribe.

And since the addition of Mr. Grove, the gossip beats inside the News have gotten as crowded as the elbow-filled lane at Madison Square Garden. Unlike the New York Post, at which the prime gossip gets channeled through Richard Johnson’s Page Six empire (while Cindy Adams and Liz Smith work their respective niches), the News has no clear hierarchy. Mr. Grove leads off the section with one page, then Rush and Malloy—the franchise gossips before Lowdown’s arrival—follow with a page-plus spread. Throw in Ben Widdicombe’s Gatecrasher column and it’s hard to know where to turn for what kind of gossip, or where each column falls on the ladder.

According to News insiders, Mr. Grove’s column has heightened the jurisdictional confusion by steering into entertainment froth, away from the politics-and-media material that made up his portfolio in Washington. Editors, sources said, have had to arbitrate scoops when the two columns have reported similar items.

Last summer, insiders said, the overlap grew so frequent that editors instituted a formal traffic-control system. Now, when columnists wish to cover particular events, they put in requests in advance, and editors make assignments.

“We were stepping on each other’s toes,” a News gossip staffer said.

But one gossip denied those accounts, saying that “we’re all surprisingly cordial, considering that we’re nominally competitors. There’s really no behind-the-scenes drama.”

Whether Mr. Grove stays or goes, in one sense, his column has been pulling a vanishing act all along. When it first appeared, Lowdown sometimes ran to 1,100 or 1,200 words and rarely dipped below 800. Mr. Grove’s longest column last month was 899 words, and one of his efforts checked in at 651.

—Gabriel Sherman

Forget athletes or Hollywood ingénues: Lately, Condé Nast’s fashion and shipping titles have been turning to the Good Gray Lady for inspiration. On newsstands this month, the October Domino pops into the kitchen of New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser.

Besides offering advice for entertaining (“Always invite a gregarious person to sit mid-table”), Ms. Hesser gives an auto-aspirational lifestyle survey of some of her favorite edibles and kitchenware, complete with price tags.

The Times foodie recommends dousing ice cream with La Colombe coffee ($11.25 per pound from lacolombe.com), tells about serving eggs with chorizo ($8.50 at tienda.com) as an appetizer, and praises her 31¼2-quart “modern white” Le Creuset casserole (“If I could only have one piece of Le Creuset, this is it”; $135.99 through cooksworld.com). She even works in one of her trademark puffs for a celebrity chef’s product: “I read about Edmond Fallot Dijon mustard in Thomas Keller’s cookbook Bouchon.”

“I think it’s unfortunate,” Times standards editor Allan M. Siegal said of Ms. Hesser’s Domino appearance. Mr. Siegal swiftly cited Paragraph 59 of the paper’s Ethical Journalism Guidebook as the governing rule. That passage specifically forbids Times writers and editors from offering “endorsements, testimonials or promotional blurbs for books, films, television programs or any other programs, products or ventures.”

But despite the rule—and despite the open question of who would want step-by-step instructions on how to emulate the life of a Times staffer—there has been a steady flow from West 43rd Street over to 4 Times Square.

Then–deputy Arts and Leisure editor Ariel Kaminer took her turn as Times person-turned-consumer-muse for the August edition of Lucky. Over four pages, the magazine explained how a “culture-savvy New York Times editor” manages her wardrobe through a week: “Kaminer looks for pieces that are professional without being somber, feminine but not overly girly.” The piece ended by laying out an assortment of clothes (a $355 Diane von Furstenberg cardigan; a $187 pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans from Scoop) and then combining them on seven days’ worth of tiny head-to-toe images of Ms. Kaminer (“Wednesday: cashmere top + wool pants + suede heels + leather satchel—lunch with a writer”).

Ms. Kaminer was followed by war correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, who appeared in the debut issue of Men’s Vogue, standing between The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson and Fox News’ Christian Galdabini. For the occasion, Mr. Gettleman wore a $795 Burberry jacket, $495 Dolce & Gabbana sweater, and $50 pants from the Gap.

Ms. Kaminer declined to comment on her Lucky appearance; Ms. Hesser didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.

—G.S.

As promised for months, on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 17, The Wall Street Journal became a part of New Yorkers’ weekends. For Journal reader Billy Hutchinson, it was an indirect process.

Mr. Hutchinson, a 42-year-old trader, was holding a copy of the paper’s new Weekend Edition at the Soho Starbucks. But he confessed to scavenging it—he subscribes to the Journal at his office on weekdays, he said, but never got around to giving the paper a home address for weekend delivery. “I guess I’ll get my copy on Monday morning,” he said.

A few tables over, another Journal reader, Abdul Seck, a 33-year-old financial risk manager, said he had recently canceled his weekend subscription to The New York Times in anticipation of receiving the weekend Journal at his Nolita apartment. “I’ll probably still buy the Sunday Times,” Mr. Seck added.

The red-framed Weekend Edition logo was popping up around the city on the paper’s first morning. So were a few stories of readers—10 percent of subscribers, by the paper’s estimate—who hadn’t yet arranged to get their copies at home. Marty Kenny, a real-estate developer from Hartford, Conn., had The Journal at a sidewalk table at the Caliente Cab Co. Mexican restaurant on Seventh Avenue South. But Mr. Kenny said he’d been forced to make a run to the newsstand that morning, because he hadn’t yet set up weekend delivery.

At an uptown Starbucks on Columbus Avenue, however, investment banker Scott Whitworth was holding his own home-delivered copy. Mr. Whitworth said he welcomed The Journal’s weekend foray.

“Sometimes [ The Journal] plays catch-up with everything that’s happened since Friday,” he said.

Michael Devito, a supervisor for the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, was reading The Journal’s editorial section at the Sony Plaza on West 56th Street. Mr. Devito, 46, said his usual Saturday newspaper diet consisted of the New York Post, but his Journal had been free. “They’re giving out huge stacks of them at Rockefeller,” he said.

How’d he like it? “It’s interesting,” Mr. Devito, 46, said. “They still have their regular editorial section. I like their editorials because they’re right of [the] Senate.”

According to a Journal source, the Weekend Edition rolled off the press without any printing or production snafus. The staff had prepared for the event with a pair of simulated closes earlier in the month. Employees from the weekend paper’s centerpiece lifestyle section, Pursuits—including lame-duck Condé Nast–bound deputy managing editor Joanne Lipman—gathered at the Tribeca lounge Dekk after the editorial close. By 11, they were passing around early copies fresh off the presses.

One night earlier, the Journal had held its public rollout party, on the second floor of the Standard Oil Building in lower Manhattan. Attendees entered the party through a hallway covered with an artificial-turf putting green, while sounds of chirping birds were piped in, à la the Masters, for added atmosphere. Around the corner, a video-golf simulator continued the simulated-leisure-time theme.

In the main party space, servers wearing aprons with the new edition’s motto—“Have a Brilliant Weekend”—doled out miniature hamburgers cooked on electric grills. A bartender poured pints of imported English ale.

At the rear was another room, island-themed, featuring a row of beach chairs. Another nature recording—the peaceful sloshing of waves—battled the raucous beats leaking in from the dance floor.

Dow Jones chairman Peter Kann was across from the burger stand, expressing optimism for the project. “I don’t want to exaggerate,” Mr. Kann said, “but we’re the only company making a commitment to print.”

And speaking of commitment, what about Ms. Lipman’s recently announced plans to jump ship to Condé Nast? Mr. Kann downplayed the impact. “I’m a big fan of Joanne,” he said. “But overall, [Pursuits] has been guided by [ Journal editor] Paul Steiger and a lot of others.”

Mr. Steiger, meanwhile, said that despite the focus on Pursuits and its lifestyle coverage—cue crashing surf!—the new six-day week would be good for the news desks. “We’re not running away from news,” Mr. Steiger said. “Friday is often a heavy news day. A large part of why we’re publishing on Saturday is so we can break more news.”

—G.S.; with additional reporting by Brad Tytel, Erin Coe and Nicole Pesce

New York Times pundit standings, Sept. 13-19

1. Frank Rich, score 25.0 [no rank last week]

2. (tie) Maureen Dowd, 22.0 [rank last week: 1st]

Thomas L. Friedman, 22.0 [4th]

4. Paul Krugman, 12.0 [3rd]

5. John Tierney, 10.0 [6th]

6. David Brooks, 9.5 [7th]

7. Nicholas D. Kristof, 6.5 [5th]

8. Bob Herbert, 2.5 [2nd]

The TimesSelect pay-for-content experiment is underway. And in science-fair terms, the New York Times pundits who published on Sept. 19 are like the tomato plants grown in total darkness. During the last six days of free access, the paper published 13 columns by the Op-Ed columnists—and 12 made the Most E-Mailed list. On the first day of restricted access, it published two pundits’ columns—and neither one made the chart. Sorry, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof!

Even as the pundits’ scores begin to shrivel, though, The Times offers them a bit of cheer. Now that the old system of charging for access to articles more than a week old has been superseded by TimesSelect, the Web site includes a new, third version of the Most E-Mailed list—this one covering the past 30 days. On that one, the pundits occupy 19 of the top 25 slots. Oh, weren’t those the days!

—T.S.