In addition to his work uncovering fabrications, Mr. Moynihan has been a columnist at Tablet, a book reviewer at The Wall Street Journal,  and was the managing editor of Vice.

We can only hope that Mr. Moynihan will eventually get the chance to review Mr. Lehrer's new writing that he mentioned in a Los Angeles Magazine profile.

The email is below:

Dear NewsBeasters,

I’m thrilled to announce that Michael Moynihan is joining The Daily Beast as Cultural News Editor, focusing on the intersection of culture and politics, social issues and business and other key issues, and helping drive the Beast’s coverage of the hot stories of the day. He’ll also review books for the site and write for Newsweek. Michael, best known most recently for exposing the fabrications of New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, has been a columnist for Tablet magazine, a contributing editor to Reason magazine, and a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He was formerly the managing editor of Vice magazine and a resident fellow at the Swedish policy institute Timbro. His writing has appeared in the Wilson Quarterly, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Politico, Los Angeles Times, Utne Reader, Commentary, and numerous other publications.

Michael joins us on Oct. 3. Please join me in welcoming him to The Daily Beast and Newsweek.

Best,

Tina

Ed Johnson

The state of journalism is bad. Of course, Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria—high-profile writers at The New Yorker and Time, respectively—were recently exposed as frauds and plagiarists, but that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. The phone-tapping scandal that nearly imploded NewsCorp’s news division last year? Nope.

In fact, nothing illustrates the distressing state of affairs more clearly than the reaction to Judge William Alsup’s recent order that Google and Oracle turn over the names of the reporters and bloggers whom the two companies had paid for potentially positive coverage supporting their case in a high-stakes copyright lawsuit.

Wait, what reaction? Oh, you didn’t even hear about this?

Don’t worry, you didn’t somehow miss the stunned denunciations from the media elite. You didn’t miss the outraged editorials by the Poynter Institute and Columbia Journalism Review. Because they didn’t happen. Just as Sherlock Holmes gets his clue from the fact that the dog didn’t bark in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the lack of outcry is actually the sound of every insider in journalism tipping his or her hand. Reporters taking bribes from major tech companies in Silicon Valley? Old news!

The corruption is endemic. Take Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch.com, which sold to AOL for $25M in 2010; his bold editorial stand last year caused him to be ousted from the site he started. What was that stand? Simply that he was perfectly justified in simultaneously launching a side business called CrunchFund, which would invest venture capital in the very same startups his immensely powerful blog covered. It would be hard to imagine a clearer conflict of interest, but most of his peers eagerly took his side.

Some, like former TechCrunch editor and tech journalist Sarah Lacy, even followed his lead. This year, she founded PandoDaily, a new technology news blog. Investors include Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon. If those names sound familiar, it’s because they are the owners, founders or funders of the biggest companies in tech—outfits like Facebook, Zappos, PayPal, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Mr. Andreesen is also an investor in the news website Business Insider. (Full disclosure: The Observer Media Group is partially owned by Josh Kushner, a principal in the investment firm Thrive Capital, which funds a number of start-ups.)

What happens when the robber barons once again not only pull the strings of the industry, but also control the press that is supposed to cover it and hold them responsible?

At the end of the day, it’s these guys who are the real “customers” of the news outlets: not all of the readers out there, but the marketers, advertisers and investors to whom journalists are trying to a deliver product—that product being you and your attention.

So while the outcry over small ethical lapses like Mr. Lehrer supposedly “plagiarizing himself” or making up a few quotes sucks up all the oxygen, they are in some sense a distraction from the deeper systemic issues. The media focus on these token misdeeds is a way of convincing the public that the truth still matters—an effort to distract from the truly appalling economics of the news itself. It’s not enough that blogs and fledgling newspapers are putting themselves in an unethical position by taking money from the people they cover. In today’s world of page-view journalism—in which writers are compensated by how many times their posts are viewed—every article is in some sense a conflict of interest.

Think of BleacherReport, a consortium of sports blogs, that was just acquired by Turner Broadcasting for $180 million. BleacherReport, like many blog empires, pays its contributors in part based on page-views. (Meanwhile, some unpaid writers are compensated merely with “exposure.”) In other words, an incentive is created to write articles that get a lot of traffic, not articles that are necessarily “good” or, say, “true.” Intelligent readers are known to disdain the more craven methods sites use to drive traffic—particularly the breed of “entertaining slideshows” that Bleacher trumpets in its slogan—but publishers love the money it brings in from pay-per-impression advertisers. And the reason BleacherReport encourages its writers to chase this sort of page-view growth strategy is that its investors demand it.

This is what I mean when I say every article on these sites has a conflict of interest. The goal isn’t to do worthwhile journalism, it is to profit. BleacherReport, like nearly every site from Gawker to Business Insider to, yes, Observer.com, wants to show hockey-stick growth. Then, should they wish to, they can sell for a profit. Just business, of course. But it warps what they write about and how they write it.

But the media is happy to have readers focus on Mr. Leher and Mr. Zakaria, like they're the real problem.

I’ve been around the underworld of PR long enough to know that multibillion-dollar industries love to focus on isolated incidents as misdirection. It’s always about the rogue trader, the “unpreventable” disaster or the overzealous campaign flack.

The ensuing hand-wringing and self-flagellation generally prevents anyone from bothering to probe any deeper. To go back to the dog analogy, they’ll never bark at institutionalized backroom dealing or insidious incentives, because that’s what they’re comfortable with.

Recently, a writer for the Poynter Institute tried to dismiss some of my criticisms of the online-driven media cycle by asking his readers “Are you interested in hearing about the sausage [being made] from the guy who keeps dropping mouse feces into the grinder?”

Well ... I would hope so. Who better to tell you what's what?

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

Some Blogger, as Forgotten By History.

It's raining me...dia items. Hallelujah. With so much to get through today, rather than act out the pretense that people are ever going to click on media news roundups from a landing page, we're just going to skip the obligatory formalities of teasing anything out and just get right into them. Starting now. 

As such, here are your Wednesday Evening Media Briefs. 

TBD's Fate is Now "D." Hyperlocal DC news site TBD.com—which, by all accounts, was halfway decent until it was shut down—has now been shut down for what's likely the last time. Watching former TBD editor Erik Wemple have to eulogize it at the Washington Post is bittersweet, especially since the kind folks at the Post (namely, Paul Farhi) were once so welcoming of their new competition (then again, Wemple, a fine journalist himself, is employed as he should be). [Washington Post]

Snake Eats Own Tail: Speaking of schadenfreude and Paul Farhi—who ESPN's Tony Kornheiser once called a "duplicitous snake"—today, Paul Farhi is being corrected...for his attempt at putting the paddle to currently embattled Washington Post contributor Fareed Zakaria. Farhi wrote a piece on Monday in which he raked Zakaria over the coals, and accused Zakaria of journalistic malfeasance by way of quoting a source without mentioning that the quote appeared somewhere else years earlier. As Politico's Dylan Byers put it: "Farhi apparently did not consult the passages in question." A few hours later, this correction is printed:

The Post should have examined copies of the books and should not have published the article. We regret the error and apologize to Fareed Zakaria.

Paul Farhi, as far as we can tell, still works at the Washington Post. [Politico]

Jodie Foster, Faithful Daily Beast Reader and Writer. The Daily Beast sure loves itself some big-name contributors. Take, for example, today's essay by Jodie Foster, in which she laments the frenzied celebrity media culture that surrounds people like Kristen Stewart, whose recent breakup with Robert Pattinson has been extensively documented by what Jodie Foster calls the "gladiator sport of celebrity culture." Thankfully, she is writing for a news outlet that would never stoop that low. [The Daily Beast]

Donald Trump Writes Off Evil Hack Blogger, Who Is Now Obviously Irrelevant: It was suggested that—due to some relation among higher-ups—The Observer wouldn't touch this thing involving Loser Salon™'s own news terrorist, pathological liar, and North Korean-born teenage vampire Alex Pareene attacking the good and unsullied name of thrice-over gajillionare and macro-economic powerhouse/pending MacArthur Genius Grant for Money recipient Donald Trump, chairman and CEO of The Trump Corporation LLC, creative mastermind behind NBC's hit television ratings behemoth The Apprentice, a renowned sportsman-cum-environmentalist who cares about the economic state of all Americans just as much as he does the fact that they take their vitamins. For whom anything from a historic neighborhood that once saw the sun to beautiful rural Scottish moorlands that have been untouched for generations to outer space represents nothing but opportunity for monumentally prosperous, important, and occasionally profitable human endeavor? The Donald Trump who bravely dared question the authenticity of a (in all likelihood, treasonous) anti-American American president's birth certificate in the face of the countless experts who contradicted that claim and The President of the United States presenting the birth certificate himself on national television, not just before all of that, but after it, too? The same Donald Trump appearing at this year's Republican National Convention, where they will salivate for him to run for High Office again, but are obviously unworthy of such refined leadership, so they'll have to settle with simply having their minds blown and hearts won over? That Donald Trump? The fact is, a journalist being smashed off the face of the planet by the withering, blistering, face-melting parenthetical wit that is Donald Trump's is, in fact, news, and worthy of being covered. As such: Alex Pareene wrote a bunch of lies and terrible things about Donald Trump, and—as he's already done to Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner and ProPublica's Justin Elliot before him—Donald Trump wrote him out of history. Forever. The entire thing was pretty funny. [Loser Salon™, @RealDonaldTrump, Loser Salon™]

It's Like His Girl Friday Meets The Departed: Speaking of honorable types, the staunch ethicists at the top of News Corp are taking further action to root out any unsavory journalism practices tainting the high standards to which they hold their profession, and sacred strictures by which they abide. They're launching an "Anti-Corruption Review" which, according to Rupert Murdoch himself, "not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing by any particular business unit or its personnel" and called it a "forward-looking review."  [Guardian UK]

More Like 'State of Lame': On that note, here are newspaper films, ranked by popularity via Netflix. [Romenesko]

Daisey and Confused: Former This American Life contributor Mike Daisey thinks tech writers don't do their jobs, and implores them to not just swallow Apple's press lines. He also recognizes that he's had his own journalism problems, but isn't the entire problem that he tried to pass it off as journalism and that he's not in much of a place to speak to journalism ethics to begin with? You decide. Either way, he's right about at least part of this. [Mike Daisey]

Conde Nast Does Not Have a Company-Wide Policy Regarding Jonah Lehrer: Well, he may not work at The New Yorker anymore, but Jonah Lehrer will possibly continue to write for Wired, reported Buzzfeed's Ben Smith. Wired later posted a statement saying they haven't fully made the decision yet, though the outlook isn't so grim. We're not the gambling types, but we will take odds that if it goes through, Lehrer's next Wired piece written post-Lehrergate will be about what it's like to be at the center of an Internet "Snarkstorm" or somesuch business. [Buzzfeed, Wired]

On The Matter of Piers Morgan's Waning Influence. Well...

[@BBCSporf]

No Sweet Home: Finally, to end on a depressing note, this writer's hometown newspaper just laid off five more staffers. Here's hoping they don't go on to become "International Bestsellers" in their next career. [Romenesko]

Tips, scandal, or effusive praise of great American capitalists? Send it right this way.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Long story short, over the last three weeks, widely ballyhooed author, contemporary thinker, and New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer has been questioned for what one reporter suspected were fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan—of all people—in the first chapter of Lehrer's new book. The book, 'Imagine,' has been promoted everywhere from The Colbert Report to The New York Times to Glenn Beck's radio show and beyond. 

On Monday morning, the piece about Lehrer's fabricated and re-contextualized quotes was published. Lehrer has since confessed to having fabricated the quotes, and resigned from his job at The New Yorker. His book was put on indefinite hold by its publisher (also, a Fake Bob Dylan quotes Twitter emerged). 

The guy who started all of this? A Tablet contributor, former VICE editor, and Wall Street Journal freelancer, Michael C. Moynihan. The Observer reached Moynihan by phone this afternoon, and spoke with him about how he got started on this story, whether or not he thinks Lehrer is truly remorseful, and why he's motivated to cover stories like these. Also: What it's like to cause one of the more stunning turn of events in media this year. 

'Must be a pretty crazy day for you. 

Yeah—I sort of expected something like this, but not on this scale.

What's surprising you the most about the reaction? I can't imagine watching it play out from your perspective.

To be honest? It's a horrible, horrible, horrible feeling, and that's not to mitigate in any way what Lehrer did, and what he was guilty of. And what he was trying to do to me, which was to get me to report stuff that wasn't true.

What do you mean by trying to get you to report things that weren't true?

If I trusted him initially, and didn't follow these leads, and decided to write something about this, for instance...

As a Bob Dylan fan...

Yeah, as a Bob Dylan nerd. This quote that you can't find, for instance, comes from an unedited cut. That's not true. He [was] sort of suborning me to write things that aren't true. That said, when I say I feel horrible about it, I spoke to Jonah, and I spoke to him at length, and we had exchanged a lot of emails about this material. I can't help but feel terrible about what's going to happen to him and what's currently happening to his career. In that sense, it's not a great feeling.

I'm not somebody who desires to nail a scalp to the wall. But I was reporting out a story I thought was interesting, and it became a story that was absolutely necessary to report to correct the record in a lot of ways. And he spun me up with a series of lies that he ultimately admitted to, and I have to write that. At the end of the day, when you see a guy who's a promising young journalist—a very talented guy, a very smart guy, and a very good writer—and you see him lose his livelihood, it's not something that makes you jump for joy.

Earlier this afternoon, journalist Jonathan Shainin Tweeted: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice knows that he's actually in the schadenfreude business." I could be wrong, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly malicious about all of this from your side.

No.

But there are definitely those people who have an inherent dislike or bias against these contemporary-thinkers-as-journalist types.  

Oh, I think there's an enormous amount of jealousy to see someone who's 31 years-old, who gives TED Talks [Ed. Jonah Lehrer didn't actually give a TED Talk, but did speak at PopTech] and has a column in the Wall Street Journal, then in Wired, then ascends to the height of The New Yorker and gets that sort of brass ring. That's the schadenfreude that people love to...well, to quote a shitty Morrissey song, to say that "We hate it when our friends become successful." There's something to that. To be totally frank, I periodically write for the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, and that was pretty much the only place I knew Lehrer from. I hadn't read his book. I didn't know what he was [beyond what] people told me: That he was sort of this [Malcolm] Gladwell-type—or this sort of thing that he did—I was unaware of that. I still didn't know too much about him, but I did read this chapter in his book.

To be totally honest, I didn't want to twist the knife. I don't think the material was presented that way. I was not interested in that. But I did—unfortunately—come upon something that had to be reported. To me, there was no schadenfreude there. There was more schaden than freude. I had no real idea [of him]. I came across his stuff more or less when the whole self-plagiarizing scandal kind of came up.

Which you wrote of pretty evenhandedly, quoting someone who compared self-plagiarizing to stealing from one's own refrigerator. 

That was a great journalist friend of mine. And I kind of agree with him! My initial thing was: I had talked to two British journalists about a British writer whose piece I had noticed was in The New Statesman, and pretty much the same one a couple months later in The Telegraph. They said, 'Oh, we do this all the time here, double-dipping is part of the game.' And so I looked at this because I was interested in sorting out that issue. What is the difference ethically between the United Kingdom and here? Why is it acceptable there and frowned up here? Then I saw that Remnick [addressed it], and he was being perfectly reasonable. I was planning on doing a short little piece about that, and then I saw this chapter.

Do you think this would've been less damaging had Lehrer initially been forthright with you, instead of trying to obfuscate the truth? 

Absolutely. But at the end of the day, we're still left with the issue of where did these quotes come from. And this is Dylan. Everything [about him] is reported, every sneeze is analyzed. For fuck's sake, there used to be that guy in the West Village—A.J. Weberman—who used to do Garbology, he used to sift through Dylan's garbage when he lived in the West Village, and they famously had a fistfight on the street about this. It was: Why can't I find these quotes? It was kind of stunning to me. He didn't think I would do my due diligence. Jeff Rosen [Dylan's manager] is a hard guy to get a hold of, but he's not impossible.

The Dylan documentary Don't Look Back is a favorite movie of mine. But had I read Lehrer's piece, I wouldn't have questioned that quote from the movie he extended into fiction. It seemed to track, and I would've shaped my memory of the quote from his book, which was wrong. And that's especially odd.

It is. And the thing you have to ask yourself too, is: Why do that? Does it sharpen the point that much? I don't think it does.

Did you get any insight into the "Why do that?" question from talking to Lehrer? 

A bit. Yeah. I don't think I'm ever going to revisit this, but there's another piece to be written about the way this all unfolded. And again, I feel bad because: There's a reason that when you get caught doing something, and you are grabbed by the police, that the police allow you to have a lawyer present. You're panicking. You start saying things. And then you get in really, really deep. This is not something I did on a whim. I wasn't trying to hurt him. As a matter of fact, when we were talking for so long, I was trying to help him, saying Let's find this stuff. This was a three-week process. I could have taken it and put it up online as it progressed, and let the hive mind look for this stuff, and pinned him down...

But that would've been a little malicious. 

That would've been malicious! And I swear on my life that was not my intention. That's not something I wanted for him or would've wanted to have done to him.

Did he seem genuinely remorseful? 

Yes. He did. He did. You can make the argument that when there's been so much deception, at this point, he's trying to save his own skin, and I don't know what it takes for somebody like this to have a second chance, or if that happens. There's been these things that have sort of preceded this that don't look good either. I really do wish him the best and I really do hope he recovers from this. More than anything, though, by the way, I'm completely fucking mystified as to how somebody who does this sort of thing thinks they're going to go work at The New Yorker. Those fact-checkers are obviously notorious, and that sort of stuff wouldn't be published there. But back to your question, I did think based on our conversations that he is genuinely remorseful.

You've written about these kinds of ethical lapses before, right? There was that post at Reason about plagiarism... 

Yeah. I also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal last year about a book that was published by Knopf that was plagiarized. The amazing thing about that was: It was clear as day, the author never responded, and the book was then published in paperback with no corrections, because he wasn't Jonah Lehrer. It was this guy named Dominic Sandbrook, the British historian. He hosts TV shows for the BBC. He's not a small figure in the United Kingdom, but he is here. It got some pickup, but obviously, things are treated different. Here, because he wasn't a big name, nobody cared.

I really resent people who plagiarize, and I didn't catch Jonah Lehrer plagiarizing. But let me amend that: I resent people who cut corners, because I'm not the fastest writer in the world, and I spend time banging my head against the wall trying to make the words come out in the right way. I don't like people who cheat.

That's the incredible thing. Why do it? If you don't have a source, if you don't have a story, you just say: I don't have the source. I don't have the story. You learn and move on from it. And it's the Internet! They're all gonna get caught, eventually.

Yeah, but they don't think that's gonna happen.

Did this experience with Jonah Lehrer extend any knowledge you have of people who try to get away with these things? 

I can't prove this in any way, but I tend to think [with these kinds of books], the thesis of the chapter is line that everyone works backwards from. It's the Gladwell kind of thing—and no accusations against him, I think he's been very good, and people have wanted to take him down, and he would've been taken down if he was wrong, and I don't think that he has [been taken down]. I actually think he's very good, in fact. But I think those types of books—you know, Have you read this unbelievably clever Tipping Point kind-of-thing? I tend to believe the world doesn't work that way. It's horribly flabby and messy and complicated.

The truth is usually grey and boring. 

Yeah! The truth is grey and boring and to make it less boring sometimes you have to punch things up. I think that's what leads people to do this kind of thing. But I think the straight plagiarism thing—as was the case with Dominic Sandbrook—is a guy who's producing too much. Writing a column, teaching, putting out three books in a year in a half.

I wonder if that's a sense of urgency, or a sense of entitlement? As in: I work so hard, I'm allowed to take liberties with ethics.

I don't know. I'm a guy that went to state school and is at 37 blogging and freelancing. What it's like to be in that pressure cooker situation—being a Rhodes Scholar as Jonah Lehrer was, rising up the ranks so quickly as he did, and getting to that place like The New Yorker and having to perform? His initial performance there was to cannibalize his own material. I think that shows a level of pressure and a level of stress that affects this and guides people's behavior.

Follow Michael C. Moynihan on Twitter here. Do not try to get anything past him.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

(Scott Dvorin)

"I think in the last year I've done, I want to say--it's tough--a few dozen? Thirty to forty would be my guess?"

Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, was on the phone from Los Angeles Monday evening, trying to recall how many paid speeches he had delivered in 2010. Mr. Lehrer, 29, is the author of two books on the brain, is writing a third about creativity and is in high demand on the lecture circuit. Thousand-person convention halls, intimate corporate gatherings--he's done them all. "I remember being at a podiatry conference in Denver for my first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist," he told The Observer.

Foot doctors in the Rockies are paying to hear about a madeleine, and they are paying well. For decades, media critics have scolded journalists who give speeches for outsize sums, deeming it unseemly at best and a conflict of interest at worst. But in an era with fewer watchdogs--and a profession that has had a measure of its righteousness sapped by pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs and bankruptcies--the practice is thriving once again. Scan the rosters of the various speakers' bureaus, and you'll find no shortage of names from The Times, TV news and the monthlies, all eager to hit the Hyatt ballroom and fling spittle over a sea of warmed-over salmon.

Not everyone pockets the money. Some speak gratis or donate their fees to charity, and straight newspaper reporters know better--or should--than to take cash from groups that they cover. But opinion journalists and ideas-y magazine writers are largely free to collect five- and even six-figure checks for a single afternoon's work.

"There are journalists at every price point within the lecture field. You can say anything between $5,000 and $100,000 and up," Bill Leigh, whose Leigh Bureau represents Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Atul Gawande and others, told The Observer last week. "I can assure you that journalists are well represented--and that that is new. That much I can tell you emphatically."

Mr. Leigh recalled, years ago, being unable to even gauge Walter Cronkite's interest in a speaking tour: The CBS anchor's reps assured him that the field's maximum pay did not meet the minimum for the man's time. Today, pretty much everyone has a price; the Washington Speakers Bureau discreetly lists a fee range next to each of its clients, from Luke Russert ($7,501 to $10,000) to John Heilemann ($10,001 to $15,000) to Christiane Amanpour ($40,001 and up).

It's the multiplication factor that really pays. For most writers, an idea is only good for a single article, or a single book--and a single paycheck. But that same idea rendered in speech form can be delivered many, many times. "You can assume that speakers as a rule end up doing between 15 and 50 dates a year," Mr. Leigh said.

Is this a ray of hope for the wily journalist, The Observer asked David Lavin, of Toronto's Lavin Agency? A new way to actually make a career at reporting and writing?

"Viable? It's the world's best-paying part-time job," Mr. Lavin said. He added: "Some people write books just to get on the speaker circuit."

Old model: tour the country to promote your book. New model: write a book to tour the country.

"It's interactive. They both support each other," Mr. Leigh said. "Initially, the speaking promotes the book, and afterwards the book promotes the talks, and then the talks go on keeping the book alive."

"The book doesn't even need to be good. You just need to have written one good book, to get known," said a longtime magazine editor who has worked at several large media companies. "The book is just the loss leader for the speech."

Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson's agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.

A PERUSAL THROUGH the media criticism archives indicates that the practice of writers speaking for money was probably invented shortly after writing itself. "The phenomenon of journalists giving speeches for staggering sums of money continues to dog the profession," Alicia Shepard, now NPR's ombudsman, wrote in the American Journalism Review in 1995, when the top fees were around $35,000. "Welcome to the era of the buckraker," Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic in 1986, coining the term; fees at the time could hit $25,000. Just 21 then, Mr. Weisberg knew a devilish way to tweak power when he saw one, and according to TNR legend, he installed a bell at his cubicle, taped to a photo of notorious yakker Robert Novak, that he would ring whenever a senior staffer snuck out to the podium.

These days, event organizers know to clam up when media reporters come calling about honoraria, as The Observer did this week. But numbers inevitably leak out. New York found Malcolm Gladwell netting $80,000 from a dental suppliers group in 2008, and the next year, Thomas Friedman was busted by the San Francisco Chronicle for taking $75,000 from a government agency, in violation of Times rules. "We have all become lax in complying with the parts of the ethics guidelines that require annual accounting of income from speaking engagements," executive editor Bill Keller wrote the staff in a May 2009 memo that Gawker published. "The rules are vague and need a fresh look," ombudsman Clark Hoyt frowned in the paper that month. (The policies have not been updated since, a Times spokesperson said.)

The lucrative lecture circuit may be the one thing that Mr. Friedman and his longtime antagonist Matt Taibbi have in common. In many thousands of bilious words over the years, Mr. Taibbi has savaged the Times columnist's metaphors, ridiculed his worldview, insulted his mustache and worse. But when the $75,000 mistake happened, and readers inundated Mr. Taibbi with links to the news, eager for a fresh beat-down, he gave his favorite punching bag a pass. He didn't say why.

But the clearest sign of just how unobjectionable the new speaking-fee era is may be this: Last week, the Lavin Agency says, it signed Mr. Taibbi as a client.

THE MONEY IS good. But the speaking circuit is not a glamorous world. "You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you've got like seven hotel keys," Mr. Lehrer said. "It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn't working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago."

The way Mr. Lehrer tells it, joining the circuit just ... happened. When his first book came out, in 2007, he didn't even have representation; corporations simply sought him out themselves. Subsequent books and regular contributions to Wired, The New Yorker and other publications have kept his bio fresh.

"To be totally crass about it, I think I got into this for the revenue side, but I've been surprised in the last year by the other perks," he told The Observer. He can see clear improvement in his writing as he tests out loud what elements of a given story work and learns how to build tension, withhold key information, deliver a punch line. His latest book is stuffed with characters he never would have met if not for his travels. The act of taking gobs of money, though, still feels strange.

"The stage fright, that's something I've acclimated to," Mr. Lehrer said. "But I've never really gotten over the sense of fraudulence that comes with being onstage and, you know, dispensing knowledge and wisdom. That's where I think the feelings of insecurity and self-loathing come in." He corrected himself. "'Self-loathing' is too strong a word. But certainly, it's a strange business. And the enjoyment that comes from all the perks of it--the getting better at storytelling, the revenue, the meeting new people--that's on the ledger against the fact that ..." He made a digression about airport logistics and eating too many Egg McMuffins, and apologized.

"For me," Mr. Lehrer continued, "the toughest part of public speaking is kind of psyching myself up onstage beforehand, to be like, 'Who am I to do this? What could I possibly offer you that will make it worth the price you're paying me to go up here?'"

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm