And that’s just from the publishers. This is the first business in the history of capitalism where the owners are trying to terrify themselves out of business. Newspapers. Ohhh … the kids don’t read ’em. Ohhh … the Internet. Ohhh … shit.

So in a year of panic in the newspaper business, the crisis of the press came to this: The most inspiring media hero this year was the guy who quit.

Well, he didn’t quite quit. Dean Baquet spit into the eye of the hurricane. In September, the editor of the Los Angeles Times let it be known that he would not be making any new cuts in his newsroom budget, even if the owners at the Chicago Tribune Company asked. He then gave a speech on Oct. 26 to Associated Press managing editors in New Orleans about an “irrational era of cost-cutting.” He said that editors should “put up a little bit more of a fight than we have put up in the past.” He told editors, “Don’t be shy about making the public-service argument.” And he said, “We need to be a feistier bunch.”

By Nov. 7, he had resigned “under pressure.” Mr. Baquet—a handsome 50-year-old man with a little bit of a middle-age potbelly—was walking out of his office at the Los Angeles Times on Election Day, climbing up on a desk and giving his teary staff a Braveheart goodbye. Some thought it had ended a distressing chapter in journalism—the Chicago Tribune Company’s latest news-icide. As editor, Mr. Baquet had battled his bosses at the Tribune Company—as had his predecessor as editor, good gray John Carroll—over their endless demands for budget cuts. First it was private, kind of, or at least as private as Jennifer Aniston’s domestic grief. Then it was public.

Now that battle, between man and media corporation, is done. “I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as public versus private,” Mr. Baquet said to The New York Observer Dec. 19. “It’s does the owner understand that a newspaper is not just a business?”

Mr. Baquet is no longer editor of the Los Angeles Times, although the fantasy around the former Chandlerite newsroom is that he’ll be back! As Dean the Dream, working for DreamWorks executive and Dreamgirls producer David Geffen. Or there will be the restoration of the bronzed, surfing Chandler family. For the moment, he is the martyred press guy of a bloody business. The new editor will make the cuts Mr. Baquet refused to, or he’ll either walk the plank or bat third for the Cubs.

But in the greater struggle over the purpose and value of newspapering, Mr. Baquet made his point. The danger facing the news industry is not defeat. The danger facing the news industry is surrender. Newspaper people have learned to be good boys and girls, trying to prove they’re really good business people like the power moguls they cover. But that’s not their business. They are there partly for their bosses, but first for their readers. Mr. Baquet remembered that. That’s called courage.

Sometimes a little courage costs you and there’s no cutting.

In September, when the news of Mr. Baquet’s standoff with Tribune got out, his predecessor John Carroll, told The Observer that the real fear was of “cutting and cutting and not knowing precisely how far you’re willing to go.”

How far is the newspaper industry willing to cut itself? The conventional wisdom among conventional media-business types in the print-journalism business is that print journalism is a wasteful, foolish, antique business. Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s giant media forecast showed that readers are spending 7.3 days a year reading newspapers, down from 8.4 days in 2000, and 8.1 days on the Web, up from 4.3. Big deal? Yes. But those numbers tell you less than you’d think: What is the quality of that time? How much of the information is distilled down to the Internet? And not to be like this, but: What is the metaphysical value of the print page in the life of the American?

But marketers say that readers and advertisers are fleeing to the Web. And in reaction, newspapers are carving away at themselves: at staff, at ambition, at physical size. This year, 2007, will be the year that even The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal join in the self-mutilation, trimming back their beautiful broadsheet sails to proportions that are trimmer, handier, friendlier. Cheaper.

Remember radio? Television was supposed to have killed it. Remember the movies? Likewise. Newspapers are getting chipped and chopped away not because the public is being lured away by moving pictures or virtual-reality headsets, but supposedly because the demand for the written word is booming. There has never been a greater hunger for information than there is at the moment. The media business is anything but a dinosaur; it’s a hungry monster.

But a paradox is a paradox only if you think about it. And the hive-mind of the industry has not been thinking—it’s been reacting. Money-making newspapers still make a lot of money by most business standards. But newspaper companies take that as a signal that they ought to squeeze as much foie gras as possible out of their properties before they starve the ink-stained goose to death.

Mr. Baquet had gone west to the Los Angeles Times—from the safety and respectability of The New York Times, where he had been national editor—because he had a more optimistic view of what newspapers could do. He believed there was room in this country for more than the great newspaper on which he had trained. As managing editor under Mr. Carroll, and then as editor, Mr. Baquet saw the L.A. Times rise up and roil his old bosses—in hiring, in breaking news and in Pulitzer Prizes. In a field where authority easily breeds resentment, he became Lancelot to his staff.

To stay a hero, Mr. Baquet had to ride into the sunset—always a problem in Los Angeles, where it means the Pacific Ocean. He refused to manage the Tribunization of the L.A. Times—take a look at what they did to the Baltimore Sun!—and certainly not when a new owner might make it possible to manage its revival.

The New York Times would like him back. Executive editor Bill Keller has taken him to lunch; managing editor Jill Abramson has been lobbying him. Mr. Baquet may have to listen—when he staked his job on his showdown with Tribune, it was no idle bet. He had no fallback in place. Last time a high-profile daily editor bucked a bad owner, Pete Hamill ended up editing in Mexico.

By defying the company, Mr. Baquet turned a fiscal cry over budget targets into a public emergency about journalism leadership. If the Tribune Company could not be happy with Dean Baquet running a paper—a money-making paper—then perhaps the Tribune Company was the one that needed to get out. Dean Baquet may not be a martyr, but his ordeal inspired an unrest that spread through other Tribune properties. In Los Angeles and Baltimore, would-be buyers began making offers to free Tribune of the terrible burden of journalism.

“I got tons of mail from editors at newspapers, reporters at newspapers,” Mr. Baquet told The Observer. “They were glad to see this debate”

Now David Geffen has reportedly put $2 billion on the table in a bid for the Los Angeles Times, with other billionaires following with stacks of cash. If the right owner comes through—and comes through fast enough—there ought to be no problem in rehiring the right editor.

Dean Baquet! You are The New York Observer’s Fourth Annual Media Mensch of the Year, for the year 2006. We congratulate you and thank you. There is a $100 cash award. If you pick it up, you would be the first. But it might show those guys you are a new breed of media executive.

Painted directly on a wide, curved wall with marker and acrylic, Double Down was installed by conceptual artist Matthew Ritchie some four years ago in an otherwise-refined office environment, all gleaming, caramel-colored marble floors and raw-silk-covered walls. At first glance, it looks like the chaotic scribbling of a mad scientist, with arrows pointing in different directions.

In fact, the paint was barely dry when M&A lawyer and art-committee chairman Paul Schnell started receiving e-mails from some very unhappy lawyers.

“There was almost an uprising,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the Soho gallerist and art dealer who is advising the firm on its art acquisitions, in an interview.

Mr. Ritchie was summoned to 4 Times Square and, as part of a tour of the new collection, led an intense discussion about the piece with about 20 lawyers, who Mr. Deitch believes were more startled by the format of the work than its content.

Double Down, a lawyer will learn if he or she reads the card hanging next to the installation, examines the Big Bang notion of the creation of the world; the title is a reference to the low odds on that great prehistoric event that is theoretically the basis of the known universe.

But four years later, artworks like this are scarcely out of place here; the commissioning of adventurous and abstract work in the offices of a firm like Skadden scarcely raises an eyebrow.

And what’s more, said Mr. Schnell, whose committee purchased the work, “Ritchie’s work has probably increased tenfold in value.”

It’s another sign of the changing culture of the elite law firm. Over the last 30 years, many of the city’s leading firms have been ditching the Oriental rugs and grandfather clocks and dewy partner portraits and hunting prints in favor of cutting-edge photography and Abstract Expressionist prints.

Checks are being written by law firms to people like Russell Crotty, a Los Angeles artist and amateur astronomer whose ballpoint-pen-etched globe hangs near a window on the same floor as the Ritchie piece at Skadden; and Linda Besemer, a painter who works on vinyl and presents her work slung over what some lawyers call (presumably to the artist’s dismay) a “towel rack.”

The reciprocal arrangement between the city’s top law firms and its most cutting-edge galleries is not as strange as it may look on the surface.

“Contemporary art was sort of anti-establishment, anti-corporate,” said Mr. Schnell, who is vice president of the board of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. “Really, in the last five or 10 years, it’s been embraced by the corporate world as a way to brand yourself and convey certain things about yourself. It’s really a dramatic change.”

In some cases, the object is not just to update the firm’s identity, but to do so in a way that cashes in on the booming contemporary-art market.

“They are generally more concerned about the prices of the pieces than the integrity of the work,” noted Elizabeth Burke at Clementine Gallery, who has sold to consultants buying on behalf of law firms.

But the cultural cachet also helps when it comes to recruiting; beyond purchasing significant works, many firms offer tours of Chelsea art galleries and studios for summer associates, eager to temper the summer revelry with some substance (and to dispel the perception that the firm is an old boys’ club).

Arthur Fleischer is an expert on the topic of art at law firms. A legend in legal circles for his sage M&A counsel, which he has proffered from the offices of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson since 1958, Mr. Fleischer is also the dean of law-firm art collectors. He gives tours of the Fried Frank collection to groups from Aperture, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as to summer and first-year associates.

On a recent afternoon, he wore a conservative three-piece pinstripe suit as he offered concise and informed assessments of his firm’s collection in a deadpan baritone. (“That’s Lise Sarfati,” he said. She’s “a young lady photographer.”) It doesn’t take much imagination to picture him with his feet up on a chair, chomping a cigar.

In the late 1970’s, Fried Frank moved from 120 Broadway to its current space at 1 New York Plaza. An art committee worked with gallery owners Brooke Alexander and Paula Cooper—acquiring paintings by Elizabeth Murray and Al Held, among others, prints by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg and Terry Winters, as well as drawings and prints by Frank Stella.

(The firm has made at least one sale from that era: a “fabulous”—Mr. Alexander’s word—untitled large abstract Gerhard Richter painting from the 1980’s. Mr. Fleischer said it was too valuable to keep around.)

“There was a committee; then I became the committee,” Mr. Fleischer said.

“I remember once when we showed them a Robert Mangold monochrome brick-red painting. They said, ‘It looks kind of empty to me,’ and we said, ‘That’s kind of the point,’” recalled Mr. Alexander.

“It taught me how to be relatively articulate in the face of a lot of questions that were not necessarily friendly,” he added.

Maybe that’s because some of his early purchases were—for an institution as august as a major law firm—radical.

“I think that one of their concerns was that whatever they had on their walls would not disgrace them in front of their clients. More than once they said, ‘What are people going to think?’ I said to them, ‘They’re going to think that you know more about this than they do.’ That seemed to mollify them a bit.”

Since the late 1990’s, mirroring trends in art-buying, Mr. Fleischer has turned his attention to photography. Strolling through the halls, he reels off the names, histories and contexts of the photographers whose work he’s acquired—more than 500 pieces purchased from her, estimated his current gallerist, Yancey Richardson. The firm employs a permanent curator.

Many of the artists represented are famous—Robert Frank, Thomas Demand, William Eggleston, Kiki Smith, André Kertézs, Thomas Struth—and the firm’s collections are appreciating rapidly as a result. But there are also works by young prodigies like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hellen van Meene, Doug Aitken and Vik Muñoz, which will increase the value of the firm’s collection even more in the present art boom.

Mr. Fleischer pointed out a work by Collier Schorr, a photo of two boy wrestlers in a hold.

“This is like a Caravaggio painting—the way she’s using the light and the dark,” he said expertly. “It’s very strong.”

No More ‘Damn Hunting Prints’

A review of spending on branding and business development a few years ago at London-based firm Clifford Chance concluded that the firm spent too much on Knicks and Rangers tickets.

“We decided to reallocate some of our money to find some other way to build a brand,” said John Carroll, a white-collar defense lawyer who was managing partner for the United States at the time.

So the firm went so far as to make itself the “presenting sponsor” of the Armory Show of contemporary art.

After all, a Knicks ticket isn’t worth much after the buzzer sounds. But a lively abstract screen print by Beatriz Milhazes, who represented Brazil in the 2003 Venice Biennale, is another thing entirely.

“I mean, it was a really Old World space with English hunting prints—horrible stuff, embarrassing,” said Mr. Carroll with a smile, breaking an oatmeal cookie into bits at one of the firm’s sleek conference rooms. “If you walked through our space two years ago, you would have thought, ‘Don’t these people have any self-respect? Don’t people care?’

“I was insistent that we weren’t going to bring the damn English hunting prints over with us,” he added.

The firm’s offices are slick and pristine, with white-and-gray Calacatta marble counters and conference tables, like something out of Match Point. The reception area features James Hyde’s dramatic List, a glass box containing curved plastic sheets painted in oil and acrylic.

“In this work, Hyde disrupts our idea of a painting,” reads the note accompanying the work.

Also popular, said one of the firm’s advisors, Dinaburg Arts executive director Susan Reynolds, is a piece by British painter Simon Aldridge. He paints a highly pixilated image of a car, drawn from a video game, using the style and tools of the Old Masters—oil paint and varnish—and presents it on a formal linen canvas.

“I think people really saw it as something based on media, something that is really current, something that really attaches itself to what people are looking at and thinking about right now,” said Ms. Reynolds.

That is, themselves! At least when they look at A Robe Called Paul Weiss, a multicolored Jim Dine painting on the 32nd floor of the clubby New York headquarters of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

It’s said that the robes in this series were meant as a self-portrait of the artist, but they have also been read as portraits of the many “invisible men” who wear them.

Appropriately, it’s among the many pieces of art submitted as payment for work done by retired M&A partner Neale Albert and others over the past 35 years.

Photographers Annie Leibovitz, Joel Sternfeld, Todd Eberle, Lee Friedlander and Irving Penn also qualified for this special arrangement.

“We don’t do it that much anymore. This was 20 years ago,” Mr. Albert lamented on a recent tour of the firm’s collection.

His preppy striped tie and hiking shoes seemed to convey perfectly his double life as a corporate lawyer and a “serious amateur” photographer.

“They couldn’t afford to hire Paul Weiss; they couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. Now we have about 700 vintage photographs that would be impossible to buy now,” he said about some of his (formerly) starving artist clients.

The art committee at Skadden has arguably taken swashbuckling art-dealing furthest into the 21st century. Since moving to Times Square, they have embarked on a program to obtain art that is humorous and whimsical.

In a small meeting room are two pieces by the Korean-American artist Do Ho Suh, who printed hundreds of yearbook photos so small that they appear to be an abstract pattern. “It’s a great conceptual concept,” Mr. Deitch commented, “the individual in the collective, which is a much bigger theme in Asian countries with greater population density.” Another is a series by Mark Bennett of fictional apartment layouts for TV sitcoms such as The Jeffersons. “Increasingly, pop culture is a subject for high art, and this is a good example of it,” Mr. Deitch announced.

“It’s always interesting,” said one corporate associate rushing down the hall in a double-breasted blazer. “I always have a lot of questions.”

Ten floors above that provocative wall painting, a reception area features an installation by the self-taught artist Chris Johanson. A wooden “river” curves out from a wall, and three half-size people cut out of wood are hanging above the upholstered club chairs, levitating. Reviewing Mr. Johanson’s work in The New York Times, Roberta Smith interpreted these figures as “suggesting that the truly enlightened travel under their own steam.”

“There’s something about this that speaks to the experience of young, overworked lawyers,” remarked Mr. Schnell. “Younger lawyers at this firm love this piece, and a lot of the older lawyers do not like it. It’s a real generational thing. I think people, they’re coming out, they’re having a hard, stressful week, and I think they almost identify with the sentiments.”

The crowd numbered more than a hundred. Two hundred? It sprawled uncountably out of view, around an angle of the newsroom: columnists and top editors and copy editors all mingling, upbeat and merry. The L.A. Times celebrates birthdays, but not like this; at the edges, it was impossible to hear Mr. Baquet’s remarks, let alone hope for a piece of cake.

“It was sort of a cream-filled cake with my picture on it, which was very nice,” Mr. Baquet said.

The crowd sang “Happy Birthday” with gusto. “It was a very moving scene,” Mr. Baquet said. “I felt very close to my newsroom.”

Did he make a wish? “I made a wish,” he said, “and I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

One week before the party, Mr. Baquet had startled the newsroom—and his bosses at the Tribune Company, and the entire newspaper industry—by expressing his wishes. He told Times reporter James Rainey, for a Sept. 14 story, that he had a “difference of opinion” with Tribune about whether the paper should keep cutting costs. In late August, Tribune had asked for a list of more cuts, and Mr. Baquet had said no, first privately and then out in the open, on the record, in the pages of his own newspaper.

Even more startling was the fact that Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson, a Tribune-bred executive, was siding with Mr. Baquet. Mr. Johnson told Mr. Rainey that “newspapers can’t cut their way into the future.”

Since then, Mr. Baquet has declined to repeat or amplify his comments. (The L.A. Times account remains the definitive one.) But they have reverberated, and loudly, rattling the Tribune chain to its foundations.

“At some point,” Mr. Baquet told The Observer in August of 2005, after his appointment as editor had been announced, “newspaper companies are going to have to debate what the right profit targets are.”

Now the debate is on. On Sept. 18, Rinker Buck, a page-one writer at the Tribune-owned Hartford Courant, posted a 3,000-word open letter to his publisher on the Romenesko media-news site, taking Mr. Baquet’s refusal as a starting point and listing specific financial failings of Tribune, totaling $1.2 billion in waste. Mr. Buck demanded to know his own paper’s operating margins. “How much cash are we shipping, on a monthly and yearly basis, to Chicago?” he wrote.

Some 400 Los Angeles Times staffers signed a petition to Tribune management backing Mr. Baquet and Mr. Johnson.

“I think that the Tribune, like a lot of companies that own newspapers, has to ask itself the question: Does it really want to own newspapers?” said Times reporter Joe Mathews. “I suspect at some level, the answer is no.”

On Sept. 26, Tribune C.E.O. Dennis FitzSimons faced an angry Baltimore Sun staff at a company town-hall meeting at Baltimore’s Center Stage. Afterward, The Sun’s Newspaper Guild chapter gave Mr. FitzSimons a letter of protest signed by 100 members, saying they “stand with our colleagues at the Los Angeles Times.”

In The Chicago Tribune’s own coverage, veiled financial figures were suddenly out in the open: The Los Angeles Times was cited as making a 20 percent annual profit.

Who will collect that margin in years to come? In the middle of all the debate, Tribune announced that it was looking for ways to restructure the company. There are nearly as many possible outcomes as there are analysts to hypothesize about them: Tribune could keep its papers and spin off its broadcast properties; it could spin off its smaller papers and keep the big-city ones, it could go private; it could suffer a leveraged buyout. It could rebuild around its malcontent West Coast trophy property or sell it off to a private owner—one of the local billionaires who’ve come courting Tribune. (Employees, one Times staffer said, are going back to an unflattering biography of David Geffen and “underlining all the parts that make him look human.”)

“Once the company’s in play, a lot of different things can happen,” said John Carroll, Mr. Baquet’s predecessor as editor.

Mr. Carroll’s resignation in 2005—his own act of rebellion against the cost-cutting—may have strengthened Mr. Baquet’s hand.

“If Dean and Jeff left,” Mr. Carroll said, “it could raise the question of whether there’s going to have to be a new editor and publisher annually at the L.A. Times.”

And Mr. Baquet has the leverage that comes with his own talents. He came to the Times in 2000 because there was more room for advancement there than at The New York Times, where he was trapped below the Howell Raines administration, in the layer of might-have-a-future-someday editors. Had Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made a few different decisions—better decisions, by some lights—along the way, Mr. Baquet might be running The New York Times even now.

Where The New York Times relies on institutional preeminence, the Los Angeles Times is as good as its best people. Mr. Baquet raises that mark—as long as he can hold out.

Since the news went public, Mr. Baquet has seemed publicly serene. Mr. Carroll said he talks to Mr. Baquet about three times a week.

“In some ways, it’s better to know where you stand,” Mr. Carroll said, “even if it’s a hard stance to take, than to be cutting and cutting and not knowing precisely how far you’re willing to go.”

“Dean obviously has clarity in his own mind,” Mr. Carroll said, “and that’s a good thing to have.”

Hewlitt-Packar’d! Snooped-On Reporters Ponder Ethics, Lawsuits

Spied-upon New York Times reporter John Markoff didn’t write about Hewlett-Packard in the first two weeks after the H-P journalist-spying story broke. But on Sept. 22, Mr. Markoff received a “contributed reporting” credit for a story co-bylined by Damon Darlin and Matt Richtel.

“The Times has decreed that I will not have bylines on this story,” said Mr. Markoff.

On Sept. 26, the C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard, Mark Hurd, gave his first lengthy interview on the journalist-spying scandal that has plagued his company. He gave that interview to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek. “Until news began breaking early this month,” Mr. Burrows wrote, “that Hewlett Packard (HPQ) had spied on its board members and others to find the source of boardroom leaks …. ”

Mr. Burrows was one of those “others.”

So Mr. Markoff is not the only technology reporter in this precarious situation. He just may be more accustomed to the entanglement.

Mr. Markoff grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., where Hewlett-Packard “was the company of my company town,” he said, and also attended school with William Hewlett Jr. Now-former C.E.O. Patricia Dunn gave the eulogy at his uncle’s funeral in 2004.

Journalistic neutrality is a challenge to come by in the H-P case. Targeted reporters and their employers must work through antagonistic, possibly litigious, relationships between the company and the publications, while still getting the story covered.

“We have, and will continue to disclose that [Peter Burrows] was a target of HP’s leak investigation whenever he writes about the company,” wrote BusinessWeek editor in chief Stephen Adler, in a statement e-mailed to The Observer on Sept. 26.

However, when Mr. Burrow’s interview with Mr. Hurd was published later that day, there was no disclosure.

At News.com, the Web site produced by CNet Networks, the three journalists targeted—Dawn Kawamoto, Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit—are not permitted to cover the Hewlett-Packard story. “This was an editorial decision which I agree with,” said Ms. Kawamoto.

However, they can serve as sources.

“As victims, we get information from investigators,” said Ms. Kawamoto. And since her colleagues are aware of this, she said, “they’ll whip out their notepad and come to my desk.”

At The Wall Street Journal, two reporters—Pui-Wing Tam and George Anders—were targeted by Hewlett-Packard. Now, one of them is permitted to cover the story.

“Both reporters can cover H-P generally,” wrote Robert Christie, a Dow Jones spokesman, via e-mail. “Ms. Tam isn’t engaged in reporting on the H-P surveillance story because she appears to have been one of the principal targets of that investigation. We have seen no evidence to date that shows Mr. Anders to have been a target, and so we would have no reason to keep him off the story.”

Mr. Christie’s statement seemed to contradict a Sept. 22 first-person account by Elizabeth Corcoran, Mr. Anders’ wife, which was published on Forbes.com. “We entered the story,” Ms. Corcoran wrote, “when a beleaguered sounding HP spokesman called us at home one evening to tell us about the probe and apologize for the fact that investigators hired by HP decided to snoop through our phone records.”

On Sept. 14, Mr. Anders received an e-mail from Michael Moeller, an H-P spokesman, urging him to call. Later that evening, Mr. Moeller—who was also a victim of pretexting—informed Mr. Anders that he was targeted.

“H-P told Anders that he had been pretexted,” said Mr. Christie, clarifying the Journal statement by phone, “but we have not seen any written evidence of it.”

“We checked my home landline records and cell-phone records, and in both cases, we didn’t find any signs that someone had hacked into them,” said Mr. Anders.

While the reporters are or are not reporting, presumably many of them are consulting with lawyers. And what is a pretexted reporter to do?

One could follow Ralph Nader’s example. Mr. Nader was assailed by General Motors in the mid-60’s. “They had the private detectives; they trailed me around the country, here in Washington, going to Capitol Hill,” Mr. Nader said by phone. “They had young damsels trying to seduce me in supermarkets, cookie-counter places. They interviewed people going back to my law-school classmates under the pretext that they were doing a pre-employment scan. But they wouldn’t say who the employer was.”

He sued the company for intrusion and won a settlement of $425,000.

When he read about the Hewlett-Packard scandal in The Times, Mr. Nader’s legal mind quickly went to work. “It’s a potential privacy suit, tort suit, invasion of privacy,” he said.

Mr. Markoff of The Times said that he, for one, will not be suing Hewlett-Packard. “The less I have to do with litigation, the better,” he said.

Ms. Kawamoto declined to comment on whether she would sue Hewlett-Packard.

“We are still monitoring the situation closely and will be determining in the future what steps need to be taken,” said Roger Myers, outside counsel for CNet and its reporters.

According to one lawyer familiar with aspects of the investigation, the current focus of the journalists and their employers is on protecting their records from being accessed by various governmental entities—California Attorney General Bill Lockyer among them—looking into Hewlett-Packard’s conduct.

But after that, lawyers may find that California, where Hewlett-Packard and most of the reporters investigated are based, is even more protective of an individual’s privacy than New York, which was Mr. Nader’s venue.

In the past, “courts have protected [reporters’ records] from subpoena, but because they weren’t being subpoenaed straight on, because they were being obtained in this surreptitious manner, they got no protection at all,” said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.–based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said, “I think the right way to say this is that journalists in California would be able to pursue privacy claims against Hewlett-Packard.”

Traditional invasion-of-privacy claims require the information to have been disseminated or published, which it wasn’t, at least beyond the company. The claim that would probably apply is the so-called “intrusion into seclusion” charge, accusing Hewlett-Packard of prying into private life. The reporter’s lawyer has to persuade a jury that what Hewlett-Packard did was “highly offensive to a reasonable person.”

Not everyone thinks the reporters will have a strong case. “Intrusion means generally if you surreptitiously spy on someone, if you wiretap them, if you take a telescope and look inside their window—these kinds of viewings of private or intimate information,” explained Slade Metcalf, a media attorney. “That would generally sustain a claim for intrusion, but you don’t have that here,” in the case of the inappropriately accessed phone records. The physical trailing is another matter, he said.

Reporters are more commonly the ones accused of invading privacy—but they often have the First Amendment on their side. “It’s a really interesting inversion here. Hewlett-Packard has no First Amendment right on its side, and the journalists have a heightened privacy interest,” said Mr. Rotenberg. (Newspaper people are intimately familiar with the intertwinement between wiretapping and reporting. Mr. Rotenberg lamented the fact that the House Energy and Commerce Committee put off hearings on the N.S.A. wiretapping program to address the Hewlett-Packard investigation.)

“The First Amendment is designed to protect all of us against, and only against, the government,” said another prominent media lawyer, Floyd Abrams. “The whole theory of it is that government misbehaves, abuses power, and has an army and police to lock people up and deprive them of their liberties; the press vis-à-vis a private corporation has the same rights as anyone else does.”

In any event, reporters are not the only ones affected by issues of neutrality. Then there’s Bill Keller, the Times executive editor.

On Sept. 20, The Times ran an editorial entitled “Outsourcing Ethics,” which lambasted Hewlett-Packard’s “sleazy investigation,” and singled out Ms. Dunn, in particular, for her participation in the investigation.

Later that night, in San Francisco, Ms. Dunn was inducted into the Hall of Fame for the Bay Area Council, a local business and public-policy organization. Retired Chevron chief executive George Keller, Bill Keller’s father, was also selected for the hall.

So the younger Mr. Keller gave the keynote speech at the $500-a-plate dinner. Steak with asparagus was served, and the swing band Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers played.

“The general thing that Bill Keller talked about was liberty versus security—when they decide to publish things and when they decide not to publish things,” said John Grubb, a spokesperson for the Bay Area Council.

Reporters were kept at bay.

“I was basically clothes-lined,” said one reporter. “I was grabbed by a smiling P.R. woman. She said, ‘We are not letting you in.’”

There was also a Q&A. Mr. Keller took two questions. The Hewlett-Packard scandal, which would lead to Ms. Dunn’s resignation fewer than 48 hours after the gala, did not come up.

—Michael Calderone and Anna Schneider-Mayerson

In the days following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the city of Los Angeles was subject to a blackout, an Al Qaeda terrorist threat, and the announcement by our action-hero governor that he’s running for re-election—even as he vetoed a bill legalizing gay marriage, plummeted to a 36 percent approval rating in the polls, and incurred the wrath of the teachers’ and police unions, which ran an endless (and highly effective) series of TV commercials criticizing him for taking the kind of special-interest money he once proclaimed he was “too rich” to take.

In a series of not-altogether-unrelated events, the price of gasoline reached $3.69 a gallon; supplies of bottled water and D batteries dried up on local supermarket shelves; the four-hour live news coverage of the crippled JetBlue landing was a wholesome change from the usual four-hour live news coverage of high-speed car chases; and Warren Beatty resumed his decades-old flirtation with the press about his political aspirations, by attacking that self-same celebrity governor and accusing him of being more interested in public relations than the public welfare.

And in the executive suites of Hollywood, just when they thought they’d survived this miserable summer at the box office, a memo began circulating that surely gave the movie moguls pause: A national survey of young adults—the primary moviegoing audience—found that they don’t like seeing movies in theaters. They prefer to watch them at home, surrounded by friends, where they can eat, talk on the phone and talk back at the screen. (Yes! The same way movie moguls watch movies!) But the larger concern here is whether this harbingers a real sociological change in moviegoing habits—the direct evolutionary result of all those DVD and big-screen-TV sales.

Such is life these days in Los Angeles: Home to movie stars and earthquakes—the city where it’s always Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Tomorrow or Apocalypse Whenever.

In other mediacentric news, there’s been much talk out here about David Geffen allegedly trying to buy the Los Angeles Times. (I’ll let you insert your own Hollywood-mogul-buys-newspaper joke here. But I’ll suggest the first: Will Geffen take a possessory credit? Will it henceforth be billed as The Los Angeles Times: Un Journal du David Geffen?) And, at the same time, there’s been much speculation about an upcoming article by The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, reportedly focusing on the paper’s management changes, its new editor and its continuing, precipitous slide in circulation.

Personally, I admire Mr. Auletta. He’s sort of the current Grand Pooh-Bah of media reportage. And I’d never expect him to produce the kind of “hot-tub journalism” that afflicts so many others who parachute in out here: focusing on the desperate, the depraved, the latest iteration of the dry cleaner who would be film mogul. That said, however, I’m more than a little curious to see if he’ll reach the same conclusion that so many locals have drawn: that by chasing The New York Times—trying to be a “national newspaper”—the L.A. Times has lost its way.

Allow me to explain.

Every morning at 5:30 a.m., I’m awakened by the thwack of newspapers being delivered to the block where I’m living in L.A. It’s in a neighborhood called Hancock Park—roughly the equivalent of Bronxville, or Carnegie Hill in Manhattan—where the residents are mainly doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, with a smattering of show-business trash. Yet of the 20 homes on this block, while four get The New York Times, only three receive the L.A. paper. That’s right: In an upscale, Democrat-voting neighborhood, where every home should get the local paper, the vast majority of them don’t.

When John Carroll stepped down as the editor of the L.A. Times, he boasted about his Pulitzers, complained about the budget cuts demanded by his paper’s corporate parent (the Tribune Company, in Chicago,) and blamed the circulation woes on (among other things) national “Do Not Call” telephone lists. More recently, in a discussion of corporate newspaper ownership, Mr. Carroll groused to NPR’s David Folkenflik that “these papers are like cards in a deck: You shuffle them, you deal them, you fold them, and the meaning of them as an institution in the community seems to have been lost.”

Yet, ironically, that seemed to be precisely the kind of generic McPaper that Mr. Carroll was editing here. He renamed the Metro section “California,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that while L.A., San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento may exist in the same state, they certainly don’t share the same state of mind. He presided over a book-review section that was arcane and impenetrable. (I know it’s anecdotal, but I used to look at it thinking, “If I’m not reading this, who in hell is?”) He ran a weekly column about life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that, while well-written, seemed 20 years out of date. Nobody moans that you can’t get a decent bagel out here any more; the Brooklyn Dodgers have been here for half a century. It’s not that Angelenos don’t care about New York, but one had to ask: What value does any of this provide for our readers? What does it have to do with life in L.A.?

And then there was Carroll’s hiring of Michael Kinsley to oversee the editorial pages: a guy who didn’t live here and never moved here full-time. His remake of the weekend opinion section premiered without a single article about Los Angeles; he trivialized the editorial function by referring to it as the “Opinion Manufacturing Division”—seemingly unaware that in L.A., where election ballots run 40 pages long, the L.A. Times serves a vital, and serious, purpose in the community: People walk into the voting booth carrying the L.A. Times’ editorial page. But you’d have to live here, and vote here, to know that.

In short, the paper felt as if it was edited for Bill Keller and the Pulitzer committee rather than my neighbors.

If there was one thing that clarified my thinking here, it was my discovery of LAObserved.com, a Web site run by a former Times editor and writer, Kevin Roderick. In just a few postings a day, he gets to the flesh and blood of the city—the intrigue, the personalities, the who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why. Not just Hollywood, but the City Council, the neighborhoods, the arts and architecture. It makes you feel as if you’re part of L.A., in the way the L.A. Times doesn’t.

In truth, there are terrific writers at the L.A. Times, in the Calendar, sports and business sections—along with columnists Dan Neil on cars and Steve Lopez in the Jimmy Breslin–Pete Hamill role. And with each passing day, the paper actually seems to be getting better under the new editor, Dean Baquet—even if you still wouldn’t know, as a reader, about things like the continuing migration of the jewelry business from 47th Street in Manhattan to downtown L.A., or that L.A. may now well be the world’s second largest Korean city after Seoul. (Memo to the L.A. Times assignment desk: Somewhere south of Wilshire Boulevard, in Koreatown, there’s a kingpin who runs the joint. Whether he’s in the mold of Donald Trump, or John Gotti, I’m not sure. But I’m certain he exists. Find him. Write about him.)

There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Baquet’s stated goal of making the L.A. Times “the best newspaper in the country.” But first, he’s got to make it the best newspaper in L.A.

In the days following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the city of Los Angeles was subject to a blackout, an Al Qaeda terrorist threat, and the announcement by our action-hero governor that he’s running for re-election—even as he vetoed a bill legalizing gay marriage, plummeted to a 36 percent approval rating in the polls, and incurred the wrath of the teachers’ and police unions, which ran an endless (and highly effective) series of TV commercials criticizing him for taking the kind of special-interest money he once proclaimed he was “too rich” to take.

In a series of not-altogether-unrelated events, the price of gasoline reached $3.69 a gallon; supplies of bottled water and D batteries dried up on local supermarket shelves; the four-hour live news coverage of the crippled JetBlue landing was a wholesome change from the usual four-hour live news coverage of high-speed car chases; and Warren Beatty resumed his decades-old flirtation with the press about his political aspirations, by attacking that self-same celebrity governor and accusing him of being more interested in public relations than the public welfare.

And in the executive suites of Hollywood, just when they thought they’d survived this miserable summer at the box office, a memo began circulating that surely gave the movie moguls pause: A national survey of young adults—the primary moviegoing audience—found that they don’t like seeing movies in theaters. They prefer to watch them at home, surrounded by friends, where they can eat, talk on the phone and talk back at the screen. (Yes! The same way movie moguls watch movies!) But the larger concern here is whether this harbingers a real sociological change in moviegoing habits—the direct evolutionary result of all those DVD and big-screen-TV sales.

Such is life these days in Los Angeles: Home to movie stars and earthquakes—the city where it’s always Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Tomorrow or Apocalypse Whenever.

In other mediacentric news, there’s been much talk out here about David Geffen allegedly trying to buy the Los Angeles Times. (I’ll let you insert your own Hollywood-mogul-buys-newspaper joke here. But I’ll suggest the first: Will Geffen take a possessory credit? Will it henceforth be billed as The Los Angeles Times: Un Journal du David Geffen?) And, at the same time, there’s been much speculation about an upcoming article by The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, reportedly focusing on the paper’s management changes, its new editor and its continuing, precipitous slide in circulation.

Personally, I admire Mr. Auletta. He’s sort of the current Grand Pooh-Bah of media reportage. And I’d never expect him to produce the kind of “hot-tub journalism” that afflicts so many others who parachute in out here: focusing on the desperate, the depraved, the latest iteration of the dry cleaner who would be film mogul. That said, however, I’m more than a little curious to see if he’ll reach the same conclusion that so many locals have drawn: that by chasing The New York Times—trying to be a “national newspaper”—the L.A. Times has lost its way.

Allow me to explain.

Every morning at 5:30 a.m., I’m awakened by the thwack of newspapers being delivered to the block where I’m living in L.A. It’s in a neighborhood called Hancock Park—roughly the equivalent of Bronxville, or Carnegie Hill in Manhattan—where the residents are mainly doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, with a smattering of show-business trash. Yet of the 20 homes on this block, while four get The New York Times, only three receive the L.A. paper. That’s right: In an upscale, Democrat-voting neighborhood, where every home should get the local paper, the vast majority of them don’t.

When John Carroll stepped down as the editor of the L.A. Times, he boasted about his Pulitzers, complained about the budget cuts demanded by his paper’s corporate parent (the Tribune Company, in Chicago,) and blamed the circulation woes on (among other things) national “Do Not Call” telephone lists. More recently, in a discussion of corporate newspaper ownership, Mr. Carroll groused to NPR’s David Folkenflik that “these papers are like cards in a deck: You shuffle them, you deal them, you fold them, and the meaning of them as an institution in the community seems to have been lost.”

Yet, ironically, that seemed to be precisely the kind of generic McPaper that Mr. Carroll was editing here. He renamed the Metro section “California,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that while L.A., San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento may exist in the same state, they certainly don’t share the same state of mind. He presided over a book-review section that was arcane and impenetrable. (I know it’s anecdotal, but I used to look at it thinking, “If I’m not reading this, who in hell is?”) He ran a weekly column about life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that, while well-written, seemed 20 years out of date. Nobody moans that you can’t get a decent bagel out here any more; the Brooklyn Dodgers have been here for half a century. It’s not that Angelenos don’t care about New York, but one had to ask: What value does any of this provide for our readers? What does it have to do with life in L.A.?

And then there was Carroll’s hiring of Michael Kinsley to oversee the editorial pages: a guy who didn’t live here and never moved here full-time. His remake of the weekend opinion section premiered without a single article about Los Angeles; he trivialized the editorial function by referring to it as the “Opinion Manufacturing Division”—seemingly unaware that in L.A., where election ballots run 40 pages long, the L.A. Times serves a vital, and serious, purpose in the community: People walk into the voting booth carrying the L.A. Times’ editorial page. But you’d have to live here, and vote here, to know that.

In short, the paper felt as if it was edited for Bill Keller and the Pulitzer committee rather than my neighbors.

If there was one thing that clarified my thinking here, it was my discovery of LAObserved.com, a Web site run by a former Times editor and writer, Kevin Roderick. In just a few postings a day, he gets to the flesh and blood of the city—the intrigue, the personalities, the who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why. Not just Hollywood, but the City Council, the neighborhoods, the arts and architecture. It makes you feel as if you’re part of L.A., in the way the L.A. Times doesn’t.

In truth, there are terrific writers at the L.A. Times, in the Calendar, sports and business sections—along with columnists Dan Neil on cars and Steve Lopez in the Jimmy Breslin–Pete Hamill role. And with each passing day, the paper actually seems to be getting better under the new editor, Dean Baquet—even if you still wouldn’t know, as a reader, about things like the continuing migration of the jewelry business from 47th Street in Manhattan to downtown L.A., or that L.A. may now well be the world’s second largest Korean city after Seoul. (Memo to the L.A. Times assignment desk: Somewhere south of Wilshire Boulevard, in Koreatown, there’s a kingpin who runs the joint. Whether he’s in the mold of Donald Trump, or John Gotti, I’m not sure. But I’m certain he exists. Find him. Write about him.)

There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Baquet’s stated goal of making the L.A. Times “the best newspaper in the country.” But first, he’s got to make it the best newspaper in L.A.

Mr. Baquet was sitting in his office on the edge of the Los Angeles Times newsroom on July 25, discussing his pending promotion to editor. Five years after the onetime New York Times national editor hopped off the slow-moving career escalator on West 43rd Street to grab a managing-editor slot on the West Coast, he is about to become, at age 48, the top editor at a top-tier newspaper.

And with that job comes budget duty. Last week, Mr. Baquet’s current boss, John Carroll, abruptly announced that he was quitting. Mr. Carroll had achieved striking results in his tenure out west: raiding The New York Times for talent, building a 10-to-three edge over the Paper of Record in the number of Pulitzers awarded over the past three years.

But the Tribune Company, the paper’s owner, wanted to see more success on the profit margin, not the prize margin. Declaring that he was tired of cost-cutting, Mr. Carroll decided to turn over the paper—and the editorial hacksaw—to Mr. Baquet.

“The truth is,” Mr. Baquet said, “the great secret is, over the five years that John and I have run the paper, we have cut a lot, and I think the paper is better—not because of the cutting …. I always want to choke the budget guys who say cutting makes you better, ’cause that’s utter bullshit. I just mean a lot of what we did at the paper was not about cutting—it was about emphasizing coverage, it was about making judgments about where we need to put reporters, it was about making the paper more aggressive.”

The job is also, Mr. Baquet had said a few minutes before, about establishing the identity of the Los Angeles Times—“trying to get a firmer handle on what makes us different from the other three or four great American newspapers, or half a dozen, whatever the list is that we compete against.”

That shifting estimate—does it have three peer papers? four? six?—neatly captures the L.A. Times’ position: It is the Big Four paper that can’t quite bring itself to say it’s a Big Four paper, the most recently arrived and precariously placed member of the ruling class. It’s hard to imagine The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal hedging its standing—to say nothing of The New York Times.

But the L.A. Times is a conscious, and self-conscious, imitator of the established Eastern papers. “The L.A. Times has been a great newspaper for a relatively short period of time,” Mr. Baquet said. “If you count it as the Otis Chandler era, that’s 30 or 40 years. That’s not a lot of time.”

“I think Dean and John have been seriously worried over the past couple of years that they would essentially drop out of the major leagues,” said New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, Mr. Baquet’s old friend and frequent rival. Budget cuts have claimed a 10th of the newsroom staff, and last year the paper gave up its national edition. In its July 26 edition, The New York Times reported that Mr. Carroll’s other prize hire, editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley, plans to take a reduced role with the company.

And after an early exodus of New York Times staffers to Mr. Carroll’s newsroom, Mr. Keller noted, “the flow has been almost entirely one-way”—back East—including “three or four of the best people that we added to our culture staff.”

Yet Mr. Baquet is sticking it out, despite reports in his own paper that the Tribune’s tight-fisted ways had tempted him to accompany Mr. Carroll out the door. In a banker-like (or Bradlee-esque) blue-and-white striped shirt with a plain red tie, his feet propped up on the desk, he made the case for his current paper, through thick and thin—perhaps even more so through thick and thin.

“No newspaper in America has been through more turmoil than the L.A. Times over the last—except maybe The Wall Street Journal—over the last 10 years, if you think about it,” Mr. Baquet said. “I mean, sure, The New York Times had its Jayson Blair scandal, but look at what this paper has been through. It’s the most resilient newspaper in America. It went from, you know, the great halcyon days of Otis Chandler, to Mark Willes, to the Staples scandal, to having The New York Times and other papers raid its best talent. I mean, when I was at The New York Times, I was surrounded by ex–L.A. Times people.”

And the paper had gone, Mr. Baquet added, from being the flagship of the Times Mirror Company to being a subordinate property of the Tribune, halfway across the country—“which does something to your sense of self as a newspaper.”

He continued: “And it’s been through layoffs—not just our layoffs last year, but there were big layoffs during the Willes era. And it just keeps bouncing back.”

So Mr. Baquet’s take on the state of his paper is a sunny one—literally so: “It’s not a laid-back newspaper. I think that’s one of the myths that people on the East Coast have about the West Coast. People on the West Coast work really hard too. They just have nicer houses to go home to at night, and the weather’s nice.”

Is that the recruiting pitch? Enjoy the sunshine and learn from the corporate suffering? How does Mr. Baquet make the sale?

The paper’s headquarters is a world away from Times Square—in downtown Los Angeles, with its strangely vacant sidewalks and their assiduous, one-on-one panhandlers. It sits down the hill from the city’s new Gehry concert hall; bird-of-paradise flowers bloom outside the cafeteria windows.

The city’s lively parts and attractions are distributed the opposite way from New York’s—scattered outward, like meteorite ejecta, from a desolate core. “It’s just a great, lush, beautiful place to live,” Mr. Baquet said. “Get out of downtown and walk around the ocean and go take a look.”

Last week, Mr. Keller said to The Washington Post that Mr. Baquet had been “telling recruits there’s something in the New York water that makes your penis fall off.”

“Our public-relations staff was passing around smelling salts,” Mr. Keller said. The emasculation theme, he said, dates back to when Mr. Baquet was national editor and he was foreign editor, and he tried to recruit one of Mr. Baquet’s writers to the Nairobi bureau.

“Dean started that joke,” Mr. Keller said.

But it was Mr. Keller who uttered it on the record, in all its Freudian glory—not just last week, but, as Gawker pointed out, when he spoke to The Observer about Mr. Baquet’s departure in 2000. Young editors destined for New York Times stardom, like Mr. Baquet, were not supposed to abandon The Times, with its carefully calibrated system of limited rewards for limited opportunities. And they certainly weren’t supposed to prosper so publicly after bailing out.

Mr. Baquet himself was more circumspect about the penis talk. “That’s a running inside joke,” Mr. Baquet said. “I’ll tell him, I’ll use anything it takes. You know—I’ll use the water.

“It’s true,” he added.

Quickly, he got back to the subject: “No—you know, my pitch is, if you come to the L.A. Times, you can have a lot more impact. That if you are an editor or a reporter at the L.A. Times, it’s a paper that’s growing, that’s experimenting, that’s trying to do different things, and a really good writer can come in here and just have more impact from the first day out.

“I don’t have anything bad to say about The New York Times,” Mr. Baquet continued. “I think it’s a great newspaper. But it’s built. And because it’s built, it’s harder to just do different things. I mean, I can walk out now and by tomorrow create an investigative team on metro. It’s harder to do that at The New York Times.

Isn’t that a bit like the pitch that applied in Mr. Baquet’s own case?

“Yeah,” Mr. Baquet said. “Yeah. Yeah, without question …. I love The New York Times—I never thought I’d leave The New York Times when I was there. But for me it was, you know, come to a place … where you could really sort of do hard-hitting stuff, where you could change things pretty quickly.”

Through his glass office wall, Mr. Baquet spotted Mr. Carroll passing and waved him in. “I’m trashing my predecessor,” he told Mr. Carroll cheerfully. “I’m using the Howell Raines …. I’m trying to raise the metabolism and I want to fix all the screw-ups.”

At The New York Times, turmoil can’t help but have an opera buffa quality: Should a Howell Raines take a tumble, there’s a Bill Keller waiting in the ranks of patient, dutiful editors to step in and take the helm. If the Los Angeles Times gets chopped beyond endurance, there’s no clear limit to how bad things could get.

But the important thing, Mr. Baquet said, is that newspapering is not a losing proposition. “It’s too bad that the conversation about newspapers has been dominated by people who say we’re dying, because I’m not sure that’s true,” he said. “ … I ran into a neighbor—stop me if I’m running on here—I ran into a neighbor this weekend who was congratulating me on becoming the editor, but said, ‘You gotta—it’s going to be really tough turning around the profit situation of the paper.’

“And I said, I told him what the profit margin of newspapers was these days, and his jaw dropped. Because we’re being treated like we’re basket cases …. We make tons of money. All big newspapers—not all, but most big newspapers—make tons of money.”

The trouble is with companies that are making 10 or 15 percent profits each year and want to make 20 or 30 percent.

“At some point,” Mr. Baquet said, “newspaper companies are going to have to debate what the right profit targets are.”

Till then, though, the L.A. Times can’t rise above the general demands of the industry. That gives the paper’s resilience a larger significance, Mr. Baquet argued. Of the big four papers, he said, “we’re the only one that is not controlled by a family. And that puts tremendous pressure on us. So in a lot of ways, our future says a lot about the future of newspapers.”

That is, the paper is a business, trying to survive on business terms alone. “We don’t have Arthur [Sulzberger Jr.] or Donald Graham protecting us for reasons that are not just financial,” Mr. Baquet said. “I mean, those guys have to respond to the market, but those guys have other reasons to protect the quality of their [newspapers]. We don’t have that kind of protection. We have to be that kind of protection for ourselves.”

That goes for personnel, too. By the act of staying and taking charge, Mr. Baquet is setting a tone for the paper. When The New York Times comes raiding, the Los Angeles Times will defend itself. Despite obvious “rising anxiety” in the Los Angeles newsroom, Mr. Keller said, “There have been a couple of occasions when we’ve gone after people at the L.A. Times and Dean has counterpunched and held on to them.”

“I never saw it as an L.A. Times–versus–New York Times raiding operation,” Mr. Baquet said. “I just saw it as going after talent. And to be frank, there’s an argument that I’d rather get talent from papers other than The New York Times right now, anyway …. They’re probably ahead most recently, but I wasn’t—I’m not going to keep score. I mean, I don’t think we’ve made a better hire than Ellen Barry [from The Boston Globe], or David Zucchino from The Philadelphia Inquirer or Charlie Ornstein from The Dallas Morning News.”

But will the plundering go the other way, just for self-defense? “I’d like us to look with equal hunger at each other’s staffs,” Mr. Baquet said. “And I’d like to dine as often as they do, if anything, just to protect myself. But that’s all.”

“I never thought after finishing at Arts and Leisure I would have continued a relentless climb up The Times’ hierarchy,” Jodi Kantor said. “I knew I wanted to report. Reporting for The Times had always been something that was attractive to me, and I hoped I would be able to do it.”

Ms. Kantor was speaking by phone July 25, a day before she would finish her final close as editor of The New York Times’ Arts and Leisure section. Earlier that day, she had assembled boxes to pack up her office—decorated with her low black chair and long gray couch—for her new destination: a cubicle in the Times’ third-floor newsroom.

Former Times editor Howell Raines had plucked her to helm the section at the tender age of 27, after she’d served for two years as editor at Slate’s New York office. Three days before her interview with The Observer, recently appointed culture editor Sam Sifton wrote a memo to the staff telling them that Ms. Kantor would be stepping down from the section.

Ms. Kantor’s final day in the department will be July 29, after which she will begin a reporting position on The Times’ “The Way We Live Now” beat, joining reporters Amy Harmon and John Leland on the pop-sociology beat inaugurated by former Times culture czar Adam Moss.

According to a source familiar with the proceedings, The Times has offered deputy Arts and Leisure editor Ariel Kaminer the job, but Ms. Kaminer is still considering other opportunities at the paper.

Ms. Kaminer declined to comment on the offer.

The way things go at The Times, it’s hardly surprising that a young editor, brought in at a high level to bring freshness and energy, would have to start at the company boot camp before moving up the ranks or into another department. (What would all those Times lifers, those Arthur Gelb types who started as copyboys, say?!?) So her enlistment in the reporting corps is hardly a surprise.

But Ms. Kantor dismissed the suggestion she was pressured to follow a well-trodden Times path of racking up bylines before returning to West 43rd Street as an editor.

“I just [don’t] want to give you, or anyone else, the impression that there’s still some sort of mandatory Times career checklist, or that anyone here has lectured me what I have to do next,” Ms. Kantor wrote in an e-mail. “Because things here seem freer and more flexible than they’ve ever been. My colleagues have even stopped making bat mitzvah jokes. I think.”

Mazel tov!

Ms. Kantor said she had been considering the decision to don a reporter’s hat for much of the past year, and had been quietly meeting with editors around the paper discussing a possible fit. Staffers inside the culture department said Ms. Kantor had let her reporting and writing ambitions be known in the department.

In May, managing editor Jill Abramson told Ms. Kantor she could join the paper’s “Way We Live Now” beat, Ms. Kantor said, and she accepted.

Mr. Kantor said she originally planned to leave Arts and Leisure in December before going on maternity leave, but she took Ms. Abramson up on her early offer. Part of her decision to become a reporter, Ms. Kantor said, was influenced by her looming motherhood.

“At Arts and Leisure, not only do you get home at 11:00 or midnight, but I couldn’t imagine never seeing my child or dragging my poor kid to all those events,” she said, adding: “I don’t think Broadway patrons would appreciate my baby crying in the middle of a dramatic climax.”

Ms. Kantor said her move was not the result of internal politics, rather, part of her personal development as a journalist.

“This is about wanting a different life as a journalist, and a different life at the paper,” Ms. Kantor said.

—Gabriel Sherman

In January, former Condé Nast editorial director James Truman debriefed The New York Times on his resignation of the post. The company’s decision to veto his plans to edit a fine-arts magazine, he told the newspaper, had been “a huge disappointment.”

Now, Domino, Condé Nast’s home shopper, is adding an art feature to its monthly line-up.

The four-page entry, appearing in September’s issue, informs readers “What You Need to Know to Start Shopping for Prints,” and includes such service primers as “understanding the market.” Prints from such artists as Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden at multiple price points appear against a stark white background.

But if Mr. Truman’s had conceived an homage to the world of fine art, Domino editor in chief Deborah Needleman’s concept is—well, different.

“Art is another form of shopping,” Ms. Needleman said by phone July 25. “It’s not like buying a toaster oven, but it’s not that different, either.”

Ms. Needleman said that her magazine’s monthly arts coverage will aim to “demystify” art in the same way the magazine makes home decorating simple.

“I feel like the art world tries to maintain this mystique,” she said. “It’s particularly apparent when you go into a Chelsea gallery and there’s this big lie they’re propagating, like they’re pretending they’re not selling stuff. They make you feel bad for just looking. Those gallerinas are there, but I don’t know what they’re there for.”

Ms. Needleman said her decision to increase arts coverage had no connection to Mr. Truman’s failed efforts to launch an arts magazine at Condé Nast.

“I think people are interested in art, I think it’s a worthy topic. James was around when I was doing this. I was well aware there was that magazine percolating. We never talked about that magazine, it was a non-issue,” she said.

Next month, Ms. Needleman said, Domino is doing a feature on custom-made animal portraits; silhouettes featured start at $25, and at the high end, painted portraits for $200.

—G.S.

New York Times pundit standings, July 19-25

1. Frank Rich, score 24.0

[rank last week: 1st]

2. Paul Krugman, 18.5 [4th]

3. (tie) Maureen Dowd, 13.0

[no rank]

Thomas L. Friedman, 13.0 [3rd]

5. David Brooks, 8.5 [tie—6th]

6. Bob Herbert, 8.0 [5th]

7. (tie) Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0

[tie—6th]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—6th]

Maureen Dowd makes a special Sunday appearance to write an obituary for her mother—and promptly reappears near the top of the standings. Watch out, fellows: Book leave is over soon.

—T.S.

That put The Times in the same weight class as the Blade of Toledo, Ohio, or The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y. The journalistic center of gravity had shifted some 2,500 miles-to the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times , where editor John Carroll and his managing editor, ex– New York Times national editor Dean Baquet, had nabbed five Pulitzers.

The West Coast Times magnanimously noted that the East Coast Times had won the Public Service award-the most highly regarded of the Pulitzers-in the first sentence of its own Pulitzer story. And Mr. Carroll was gracious in victory.

"We don't have any illusions about dominating any conversations, but we want to be part of the national conversation," he said.

But the five-prize performance-which raised The Los Angeles Times ' two-year Pulitzer haul to eight-was all about dominance. It was the second-biggest tally in Pulitzer history, and the biggest ever by a paper that hadn't witnessed a terrorist attack on its doorstep.

The Angelenos won on their home turf (for brush-fire coverage), they won nationally (for Wal-Mart coverage) and they won overseas (for photos from Liberia). They won on the news side and on the editorial side. And in the final triumph of the Southern California lifestyle, an architecture critic from the paper lost in the final round of the "distinguished criticism" competition-beaten out by the paper's car columnist.

"He was made for L.A.," Mr. Carroll said.

Still, the New Yorkers are finding good news of their own in the Pulitzer results. True, when the Times delegation treks up to Columbia's Low Library in May, it will only have that one prize to pick up. But Public Service winners David Barstow and Lowell Bergman will be making their second trip to the auditorium.

Back in January, the two were part of a team picking up a duPont-Columbia broadcast-journalism award-for the same project that led to the Pulitzer. Their investigation of safety violations at the McWane sewer-pipe company was part of a multimedia partnership between The Times , PBS's Frontline and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, which raked in Polk, Goldsmith and IRE awards for the televised part of its output.

The combined TV, newsprint and Web work on the McWane investigation is a model for the kind of "platform-agnostic" work that publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has been pushing, in a broader effort to make The Times a 21st-century media colossus.

"I'm a print reporter through and through," Mr. Barstow said. But in working with TV producer David Rummel, he says, he discovered that video could convey things that eluded newsprint. "You could judge [interview subjects]," he said, "see how they looked and sounded."

The ability of different media to bring out different parts of the story, Mr. Barstow said, helped give the whole project legs. "This was not necessarily a subject that was screaming out to be covered in 2002 and 2003," he said.

So while The L.A. Times collects its laurels as the newspaper of today, Mr. Sulzberger is burnishing his credentials as the newspaperman of tomorrow.

"It's very cool that way," he added.

Some of the television and Internet aspects of the project got waylaid by Pulitzer procedure, as it turned out. The Times originally nominated the project in both the public-service and investigative categories. The former category allows bulkier submission packets, with up to 20 items; investigative entries are half that size.

But it was the leaner investigative presentation, Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said, that was passed along to the Pulitzer board. The board then decided to move that entry into the public-service competition. The original entry, with testimony about the Web work and the TV documentary, never made the cut.

Still, The Times is confident that the message got through. "Pulitzers are wonderful and we love them, but they tend to look back," Mr. Sulzberger said.

"In this case, in this particular Pulitzer, I think this one was looking forward."

In the current issue of Philadelphia Magazine , 23-year-old Sasha Issenberg accuses David Brooks of being sloppy and glib with his facts. For instance, Mr. Issenberg notes, the cheerfully righty pundit did an extended riff in The Atlantic Monthly in 2001 describing how he tried and tried, without success, to find a meal for more than $20 in Franklin County, Penn.

Brooks' point was to illustrate the difference between Bush's down-home America and Gore's hoity-toity America-but in fact, Mr. Issenberg reports, the Bush-voting residents of Franklin County have abundant opportunities to drop a double sawbuck on dinner.

Opinion is split about whether Mr. Issenberg's revelations are a damning exposé or mere nitpicking. Fans of Mr. Brooks chalk the irregularities up to comic license. "We don't intend to review Brooks' wonderful piece," Atlantic spokesperson Julia Rothwax declared. Mr. Brooks said he hasn't gotten around to reading the Philadelphia piece yet.

The demand for Mr. Brooks' rim-shot sociology is as strong as ever. This past Sunday, The New York Times Magazine ran a meditation on sprawl excerpted from his upcoming On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense . "[T]here are no people so conformist as those who fault the supposed conformity of the suburbs," Mr. Brooks mused. "They regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade."

Speaking of regurgitating critiques, here's Mr. Brooks in The Weekly Standard , in 2002: "There is no group in America more conformist than the people who rail against suburbanites for being conformist-they always make the same critiques, decade after decade."

Given that the Times piece is an excerpt from a book, and the book draws from Mr. Brooks' earlier writings, the recycled bon mot doesn't count as self-plagiarism. Still, Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati says he's not thrilled by the overlap. "But of course I don't read everything he writes for every place," Mr. Marzorati said.

Then there's Mr. Brooks on Trader Joe's groceries, where "all the snack food is especially designed for kids who come home from school screaming, 'Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!'"

That ought to have rung a bell. Eleven months ago, Mr. Brooks wrote that Trader Joe's "stocks baked pea-pod chips and Veggie Booty with kale, for kids who come home from school screaming, 'Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colon-rectal cancer!'"

And that one was in The Times Magazine .

"That's our bad," Mr. Marzorati said. "We should have caught that."

"I was sort of aware that I'd drawn on some of the work I'd done," Mr. Brooks said.

The pea-pod chips in question, which can also be found at Asian groceries under the name Saya Snow Pea Crisps, have a crisp, faintly oily mouth feel, not unlike that of Andy Capp's Hot Fries. Half their calories come from fat. Overall, their nutritional profile aligns fairly closely with that of Fritos.

"They wouldn't be what a nutrition-minded consumer should be searching for," said Dr. Stephen Havas, a professor of epidemiology, preventive medicine and medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Mr. Brooks confessed that he hasn't actually tried the snack. "I usually get the Veggie Booty with kale," he said.

Novelist and American Scholar Nicholson Baker wrote Off the Record to explain that not everybody who writes for American Scholar is paid $500 per contribution. He notes that he, and others who write on a regular schedule, are paid $1,000.