For the first time in three decades, Mr. Peretz, 68, no longer owns a stake in The New Republic. He was on the phone from Cambridge, Mass., some two hours after the Canadian media conglomerate CanWest Global Communications announced that it was purchasing Mr. Peretz’s 25 percent share and taking full ownership of the 93-year-old political and cultural magazine.

Mr. Peretz’s long search for backers for his pet magazine had ended, not with a partnership but with a buyout. “In this day and age, you would need every decade, perhaps every half-decade, to try and find someone who wants a trophy,” he said of the hunt for investors. “I didn’t want a trophy.”

Financiers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt had bought a reported two-thirds share of the magazine in late 2001. In January 2006, CanWest joined in with a 30 percent minority stake.

That lumpy four-way partnership lasted a little more than a year. Then, on Feb. 23 of this year, Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt sold out to CanWest, making the Canadians the majority owner. The same day, the magazine announced that it would be shifting from a weekly schedule to a biweekly one, accompanied by a drastic redesign.

News reports of that sale said that Mr. Peretz, the editor in chief, was keeping his partial-ownership share. Mr. Peretz said that he was still in negotiations at that time.

Mr. Peretz said the CanWest takeover “makes business sense.”

“They have the technology, the business know-how, which going it alone really doesn’t have,” he said.

Indeed, CanWest has publicly said that it expects to make money off the sometimes-influential-but-never-ad-packed magazine.

“We are facing similar challenges through the newspaper business,” a CanWest spokesperson said. “We believe that publications with strong foundations and solid histories can be successful in a new media environment.”

CanWest and Mr. Peretz said that he will keep his position as editor in chief and will contribute to the magazine—through both the print edition and his pugnacious blog, The Spine. Mr. Peretz said there is no specific guarantee in the sale terms as how long he will stay editor-in-chief.

Mr. Peretz’s most recent hire as editor, Franklin Foer, will be working on the revamped magazine. The first issue in the new format is scheduled to go to press on March 9.

“I’m really grateful for the opportunity to take this institution that I’ve always worshipped, and try to take it very distinctly in a different kind of direction,” Mr. Foer said.

That direction will be a departure from the current Spartan, college-magazine look.

“Drew Friedman has a column in the makeover,” said Mr. Foer. “We’re going to have a lot stand-alone pieces from illustrators, artists. One of my ambitions is to experiment with fine art in the magazine, too.”

“We’re adding new little cuts in the magazine, like those little spoon-size illustrations that The New Yorker has,” Mr. Foer said. “We will have original photography in the first issue.”

Mr. Foer is at the one-year anniversary of taking over the magazine from current editor-at-large Peter Beinart. Mr. Beinart oversaw the last redesign of the magazine, in 2003. That was an update of a major overhaul by design guru Roger Black in 1999, under editor Charles Lane.

For the upcoming redesign, Mr. Foer has been working with the magazine’s art director, Joe Heroun, who works in New York.

“We were able to quickly settle on an aesthetic for the magazine,” said Mr. Foer. “I think a lot of the design elements hearken back to the 1940’s. We were both into the antique New Republic. We wanted a design that paid homage to the old New Republic, but also imported some edgy details.

“If I didn’t just sound too much like a Project Runway cliché,” Mr. Foer added.

Like other editors dealing with the migration to the Web, Mr. Foer said that he began the redesign by asking “What’s worth putting on paper?” and “What are the virtues of paper?”

“I hope that, with our redesign, it’s clear why the articles are appearing on paper and why they are not being written for the Web,” said Mr. Foer.

And the new-old New Republic is not all coming from Truman administration. To go with the slower, fatter paper product, there will also be a Web redesign—including video.

Some familiar elements will remain post-redesign, such as the TRB column—although it will soon be penned by senior editor Jonathan Chait, rather than Mr. Beinart. There will also be an editorial and the Diarist, which takes up the last page.

“I want there always to be a 6,000-word feature every two weeks,” Mr. Foer said.

Mr. Foer said he expects the first redesigned issue to run 68 pages.

Op-Out: Varadarajan Hurdles Journal’s News-Editorial Divide

“Pedro Martinez moved from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Mets,” said Paul Steiger, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “He’s not going to be loyal to the Boston Red Sox.”

Mr. Steiger was turning to the baseball analogy to explain another feat of switching sides: On March 1, Tunku Varadarajan is due to join The Journal’s newsroom as an assistant managing editor, after more than six years in the paper’s staunchly conservative opinion department.

But Mr. Varadarajan’s transfer is something more improbable than a pitcher changing teams. At the legendarily divided Journal, it’s more as if Major League Baseball were to announce that it was hiring Mike and the Mad Dog as umpires.

“He’s not just a guy who writes about the arts,” one Journal staffer said. “He writes opinionated, right-wing columns …. It’s hard to see how the news pages benefit from someone like that.”

The split between the parts of The Journal is both ideological and operational. Under editorial-page editor Paul Gigot, opinion writers freely dispute the facts reported in the rest of the paper, if so inclined. In return, news staffers disavow the contributions from Mr. Gigot’s side.

So while The New York Times regularly has moved staffers, including executive editor Bill Keller, back and forth between news and opinion, The Journal keeps things divided. News writers can move to editorial—Mr. Gigot himself was once a reporter in the Chicago bureau—but almost no one goes the other way.

“The people that move tend to be the ones that share the extreme right-wing views of the editorial page,” a Journal news staffer said. “Once they move, it’s hard to go back to the news side and claim to be unbiased. You’ve already shown your colors.”

An assortment of current and former Journal staffers, with an institutional memory stretching back half a century, could only come up with the names of two other people who’d moved from opinion to news: Lindley H. Clark Jr. and Claudia Rosett.

Mr. Clark left the editorial page in the early 90’s to write an economics column on the news side. Ms. Rosett left the editorial page of The Journal’s Asian edition to become the Moscow bureau chief, then returned to the editorial side in New York.

Frederick Taylor, The Journal’s managing editor in the 70’s, said he could recall no one from editorial joining the news staff in his entire tenure, starting as a copy editor in 1954.

“There certainly had been a wall,” Mr. Taylor said by phone from Charleston, Ore. “It was a matter of policy and belief.”

Mr. Varadarajan, on vacation in Bellport, N.Y., before beginning his new assignment, wrote via e-mail that he was unworried about crossing the wall. “I expect no difficulties on the News side except those associated with my own learning process,” he wrote.

“If we were talking about somebody who is writing vigorously ideological editorials or columns on the ed page, I would think about it some, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out,” Mr. Steiger said. “People are professional. I have lots of people on the news side who have strongly passionate views, but they keep them under control.”

Mr. Varadarajan’s passions are on the record. By most accounts, staffers don’t see him as one of Mr. Gigot’s “true believers,” and Journal sources said there have been rifts between the two. Still, Mr. Varadarajan is a pungent editorialist—“He’s sort of more Tory than the Tories,” one former Journal staffer said.

Among his opinions: New Yorker editor David Remnick “purveys the standard New York Times, New York liberal or New York bien-pensant consensus on everything.” China-courting Rupert Murdoch is “a master practitioner of the corporate kowtow.” On the Fox News Channel’s Journal Editorial Report, he described James Baker as “Jimmy Baker, a man with not a single idealistic bone in his body,” and Russia as “a nuclear-armed fascistic, unitary, imperial state that’s working to frustrate the U.S. interests everywhere.”

Mr. Varadarajan has also written pieces praising British journalists for being “less constrained by the Objectivity Police than their American counterparts” and arguing, on the subject of Columbia’s journalism school, if a “virus were to kill off all our schools of journalism, would America’s newspapers seize up? Of course not.”

Mr. Varadarajan taught a course on national-affairs reporting at Columbia in 2004 and 2005, along with Nicholas Lemann, the journalism school’s dean. “I taught with him those two years, and I didn’t see him as a rigid ideologue,” Mr. Lemann said.

The reading for the course ranged from policy papers by Richard Perle to the works of Thucydides and Augustine. Mr. Varadarajan “knows all that literature in a way that almost nobody in journalism does,” Mr. Lemann said.

An Oxford University law professor in the late 1980’s, Mr. Varadarajan switched careers in the early 90’s, starting as an editorial writer at The Times of London. He then made an early edit-to-news switch, becoming The Times’ bureau chief in Madrid and New York. He joined The Journal in 2000.

“He’s risen to a very high place on the edit-page side,” Mr. Steiger said. “There’s nowhere for him to go there, at least for a while. Paul Gigot’s a relatively young man.”

Mr. Steiger said that he and Mr. Varadarajan had discussed the possibility of bringing him over to news over lunch last year. “He’s certainly someone I’ve had my eye on for some time,” Mr. Steiger said. “I think that what may have triggered it was that someone from outside was interested in him.”

Are others going to follow Mr. Varadarajan’s lead?

“I don’t expect this to be a frequent occurrence, because the skill sets are generally different,” Mr. Steiger said. “But here’s a case of a guy who’s worked both sides of the house, opinion and news, both successfully. It seemed right.”

On Dec. 15, executive editor Bill Keller mentioned a tabloid “prototype” during one of his occasional “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions for the staff, a combination state-of-the-paper address and Q&A free-for-all.

“It’s way too early to talk about it,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail Dec. 18, when asked about the tabloid. “It’s one of many projects that are still in the noodling stage.”

The subject arose during the middle of one of Mr. Keller’s three sessions on Dec. 15, in the paper’s ninth-floor auditorium, with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes in attendance. A staffer asked about local coverage, and Mr. Keller mentioned new or planned electronic products, plus a “possible print product” that would be “aimed at younger readers.”

The noodling about the tabloid, according to a source familiar with the project, has been taking place in a Times committee that first convened this past April to generate ideas about marketing and boosting circulation. After a string of weekly meetings, the group—which includes members from the paper’s editorial and business sides—has settled into a less rigid schedule.

So far, the concepts emerging from the group suggest that Mr. Sulzberger’s “platform-agnostic” approach to packaging content is yielding something more like platform Unitarian Universalism—taking inspiration from whatever tradition is handy. The first of the committee’s ideas to reach the public was Urbanite, a daily e-mail newsletter launched Nov. 3, listing goings-on around the city.

Because a Baltimore-based magazine named Urbanite already existed, on Dec. 15 The Times redubbed the newsletter UrbanEye. A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the company “felt we should create and trademark a name that would be exclusive and distinctive to The Times.”

The tabloid idea hasn’t reached the naming stage, let alone the renaming stage. The source familiar with the project described its condition as more a collection of loose pages than a full prototype. In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Keller said that the new publication could be distributed either inside the paper or on its own.

Whatever form the new project takes, there are plenty of precedents for a broadsheet spinning off a tabloid. The Times itself launched a free publication, MarketPlace Weekly, in June 2005. It was a drab creation—consisting mostly of classified ads and articles taken from the regular paper’s real-estate, jobs and automotive sections—and it got a drab reception. It was killed without fanfare, announced during a Times Company second-quarter conference call this past July.

Other broadsheet dailies have had zippier ambitions for their tabloids in recent years. The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times went head to head in 2002 with youth-targeted titles called RedEye and Red Streak, respectively (Red Streak shut down at the end of 2005). The papers packaged the news in short bits, tuned to their target audience’s expected attention span. The Washington Post did the same with a commuter-targeted tabloid called Express.

There’s always a new way to distribute Sudoku!

But the proposed Times tabloid would not go head to head with amNewYork or Metro on the stairways to the No. 1 train. The idea is for it to be more like a hard-copy relative of UrbanEye than an easy-read news digest. It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings—like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.

The tabloid will need at least another six months to get off the drawing board, the Times source said. Meanwhile, the committee will stay busy with another outlet for the paper’s newly New York–centered ambitions: a Web site that would gather together city-related stories from various parts of the newspaper, such as the metro and culture desks, and integrate them with service features. Movie reviews, for example, could be accompanied by restaurant reviews of eateries near a particular theater.

—Michael Calderone

The Northern Republic: Frostback Conglomerate Raises Stake in Peretz Mag

Canadian media giant CanWest, which currently owns a stake in The New Republic, is expected to increase its share in the magazine, according to TNR sources.

Editor in chief and part owner Martin Peretz said that negotiations are taking place, but declined to get into specifics.

“I think there’s going to be a change in some percentage of ownership,” Mr. Peretz said by phone from Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Peretz said that since The New Republic is a private corporation, he is not obligated to discuss the percentage of each shareholder’s investment.

“There’s certainly no news here,” Mr. Peretz said.

Mr. Peretz, who purchased the magazine in 1974, has a history of dismissing buyout rumors.

“I’m not now in negotiations with anybody,” Mr. Peretz told the Daily News in November 2001. “There is nothing to report and I don’t foresee anything reportable. There’s nothing going on.”

Weeks later, Mr. Peretz sold two-thirds of the magazine to financiers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt.

Mr. Steinhardt and Mr. Hertog, both investors in the right-leaning New York Sun, had their politics placed under a microscope after they bought part of the perpetually rightward-tacking liberal magazine. Mr. Hertog is chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute and a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute; Mr. Steinhardt is a prominent Jewish philanthropist and a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

According to one staffer, the new owners refrained from micromanaging things on the editorial side. The staffer said they hadn’t been seen around the Washington, D.C., headquarters since a 2002 meet-and-greet session ended with an office evacuation, after a smoldering cigarette butt tossed by senior editor Lawrence Kaplan ignited a garbage can.

Asked whether Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt will remain investors in the magazine, Mr. Peretz said, “That’s also not clear.”

The CanWest conglomerate—which publishes titles including Canada’s National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix—joined the growing ownership group in January of 2006. CanWest’s chief executive, Leonard Asper, joined the other three investors on board of directors. Laurence Grafstein, a managing director at Lazard Frères (and former TNR writer himself), became the fifth member of the board, serving as a tiebreaker, according to a TNR staffer.

At the time the deal was made, Mr. Asper told the National Post that his company was especially interested in the magazine’s archives and Web site.

Mr. Asper, Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt didn’t return calls seeking comment. Mr. Grafstein declined to comment.

One TNR staffer predicted that employees would be nervous if a huge corporation like CanWest assumed more control of the magazine, which has historically been run as a small shop.

Regardless of any change in ownership, Mr. Peretz said he would remain as editor in chief.

But there is one change on the table: The magazine could move from a weekly publishing schedule to a biweekly one.

“It’s something that we’ve been talking about for a long time,” said Mr. Peretz of the biweekly schedule. “A decision has not been made.”

When might the negotiations be finalized?

“We are still just talking,” said Mr. Peretz. “And I’m not shitting you.”

—M.C.

After Harvard, What? Miller Leaves 02138 for Wolff Start-Up

“It was my idea of fun,” said former New York magazine editor Caroline Miller, of working as editorial director of 02138.

Ms. Miller put in nine months at the new Harvard Hall–of-mirrors glossy magazine, which is principally bankrolled by Atlantic Media head David Bradley. The second issue came out this week with no editorial-director position on the masthead.

Ms. Miller is now working on developing a news Web site with Vanity Fair media writer Michael Wolff.

“It was not intended to be a long-term arrangement,” said Ms. Miller, who spent two to three days a week in Boston, organizing a team that included several staffers recently out of college. She said the young staff had reminded her of editorial stints at New York and Seventeen.

“It was Bom [Kim’s] idea for a magazine,” she said. “It was my role to put lots of things on the table for him. To create lots of possibilities. To help him bring in a team.”

“We envisioned an editorial-director role in the early stages,” Mr. Kim said, by phone from Korea. Mr. Kim said that 02138 had started with a “very lean team,” but he will be adding editorial staff in the future.

The cover of the new issue features a black-and-white photograph of New York Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and his wife, attorney Silda Wall, eyeing each other lovingly, to illustrate a feature on Harvard “power couples.”

—M.C.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote back. He mentioned his pride in the paper’s six Pulitzers since 1993. He made no promises and chose his language carefully. In closing, he wrote: “As we move ahead, we will remain focused on ensuring the long-term financial health of the Globe so that it can continue to fulfill its journalistic mission.”

That same day, Oct. 19, the Times Company released its third-quarter statement. It reported a 39 percent drop in profits from the same period of 2005. It also said that advertising revenue had dropped—for the first time in 18 quarters.

“Terrible” is how industry analyst Edward Atorino summarized the Times Company’s third-quarter statement. And regarding the state of The Globe in particular? “Dreadful,” he said.

“Plagued by weakness in the national category and the Boston market, New York Times reported anemic newspaper ad revenue growth,” said a Goldman Sachs report, which is dated Oct. 19. The key risks, according to the report, are “weaker then [sic] industry average revenue performance” and “challenges in the ad market, particularly in Boston.”

And so now The Times is trapped between Beacon Hill and Wall Street.

“It’s more than just another business,” said Massachusetts Congressman Stephen F. Lynch, a signatory of the letter. The letter said, in part, that “a troubling pattern of disinvestment, downsizing, outsourcing and cost cutting has emerged” in The Times’ treatment of The Globe.

“All the signs are there that The Times may be disinvesting in The Boston Globe. That usually precedes a sale of some sort,” he said.

The Congressman said he wasn’t trying to score points with The Globe’s editorial or news pages. “There is no risk they might write something nice about me,” he said. Most recently, the editorial pages called him “arrogant” for declining a debate.

Senator Edward Kennedy, another signatory, responded to questions in an e-mail. He wrote that he had signed the letter hoping “to ensure that this vibrant and important paper is not threatened by cuts to staff and resources.”

The day previous to all this, Oct. 18, The Globe’s union rejected management’s latest offer, by a vote of 307 to 223. Management had proposed that potential wage increases be tied to revenue gains, but didn’t include the Web site Boston.com in that.

“Reporters contribute to the Web site,” said Dan Totten, the newspaper guild’s president. “To have their work not recognized is unacceptable and illogical.”

So what will become of The Globe?

The Globe is having its “second bad year in a row,” said Mr. Atorino, of the Benchmark Company. This doesn’t that mean Mr. Sulzberger is “ready to pull the plug yet,” Mr. Atorino said—but he might “tighten the belt.”

And neither the signatories of the letter nor the paper’s union would care for that.

“Well, the primary problem in Boston is the consolidation of department-store chains,” said industry analyst John Morton, of Morton Research Inc. “Retail advertising, which really drives a lot of advertising revenue, has been weak up there.” Mr. Morton said he didn’t think The Globe would be put up for sale.

“It’s almost impossible to buy a major-market newspaper,” he said. “I would doubt very much that the company would unload its properties in New England for any reason.”

On Oct. 12, the company experienced a 4 percent stock increase. It fueled speculation about a leveraged buyout of The Times.

Could Mr. Sulzberger pull such a thing off? “It’s conceivable,” said Mr. Morton. A buyout would mean heavy borrowing. Investors would be paid 25 to 35 percent above market value for their shares in exchange for Sulzberger family control.

“It would relieve the company of the worries of what Wall Street thinks,” he said.

“I don’t think young Arthur is going to turn The New York Times over to outsiders,” said Mr. Atorino.

“I don’t know where the rumors came from,” Mr. Atorino added. “Maybe an investment banker was seen walking out of the building.”

—M.C.

On Oct. 18, New Republic editor Franklin Foer fired associate editor Spencer Ackerman. It was Mr. Foer’s first firing since taking over in February; Mr. Ackerman, in fact, is only the second New Republic staffer to be fired since the Hollywood-worthy fall of fabulist Stephen Glass in 1998.

Before anyone calls up Hayden Christensen this time, the principals need to do some more work on the narrative line. Mr. Foer described the dismissal as a matter of serial “insubordination”; Mr. Ackerman, 26, wrote on a personal blog that it was the result of “irreconcilable ideological differences” with the magazine’s upper editors.

In what Mr. Foer called the “proximate cause,” Mr. Ackerman had been using that personal blog—titled “Too Hot for TNR”—to disparage the magazine.

Again with the Web logs: On Sept. 1, senior editor Lee Siegel was suspended and had his culture blog removed from the magazine’s Web site. Mr. Siegel had been caught posting flattering comments about his own wit and wisdom in the third person under the pseudonym “sprezzatura”—a “sock puppet,” in blog parlance.

Mr. Siegel is still suspended, but he remains on the masthead. Then again, Mr. Siegel hadn’t previously sent Mr. Foer an e-mail offering to “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat, as Mr. Ackerman did during a dispute about whether the magazine should have a blog about the Major League Baseball playoffs.

“The Siegel thing was a first-time offense,” Mr. Foer said. “Ackerman involved repeated offenses.”

Mr. Ackerman said he had clashed with Mr. Foer over various editorial matters. But he said that he had fallen from favor after growing disenchanted with the invasion of Iraq, which he and the magazine had both supported in the beginning.

“I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward,” Mr. Ackerman said. “The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you.”

Mr. Ackerman had been acting out, by his own account: telling a colleague it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” to get fired “for being too left-wing”; declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. And there was the baseball-bat remark, which Mr. Ackerman said was meant as a joke. After chewing him out for that, Mr. Foer agreed to let him edit the baseball blog.

Both agreed that, whatever the politics, Mr. Ackerman’s taste in stories was wonkier and more bureaucratic than Mr. Foer’s.

Still, in 2003, Mr. Foer and Mr. Ackerman had teamed up to write a 6,900-word cover story about Dick Cheney. And in 2005, The New Republic published a cover story by Mr. Ackerman arguing for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, against the magazine’s editorial stance.

“Ideologically, I’m not far from Spencer,” Mr. Foer said. “I’m not a fan of Joe Lieberman. I think the Iraq war has been a monumental catastrophe. I hate George W. Bush. I have no ideological motive for firing the guy.”

Under previous editor Peter Beinart, Mr. Ackerman wrote a blog about the war, called Iraq’d, for the magazine’s Web site for 15 months, ending in the spring of 2005. After that, his blogging was absorbed into the newly launched overall blog, The Plank.

Mr. Ackerman said that his work was more heavily edited in the new blog. With Iraq’d, “I had total freedom,” he said. “With The Plank, I didn’t.”

Too Hot for TNR was created “in a moment of cheekiness” on Oct. 15, Mr. Ackerman said. In order to post a comment on another blog—by fellow twentysomething associate editor Ross Douthat of The Atlantic Monthly—Mr. Ackerman had to register with Blogger. Having registered, he went ahead and began putting up his own material: Under headlines taken from rock lyrics, he offered his thoughts on topics including sports, television and music. And politics: Under the headline “What gives you the right to fuck with our lives” (borrowed from the Montreal-based band Stars), Mr. Ackerman published Defense Department releases about casualties in Iraq.

Mr. Ackerman also wrote that “TNR’s webdesign software, very appropriately, is called Coma.” He also wrote that “all the cool kids hate TNR.”

Two days later, Mr. Foer called a meeting with Mr. Ackerman, told him he’d “shown little interest in changing,” according to Mr. Ackerman, and fired him on the spot. Mr. Ackerman said the discussion of severance ended after he refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement. “I was told I had to be out of the office by 4,” he said.

“Because it’s a personnel matter, I don’t feel comfortable getting into detail about it,” Mr. Foer said. “It was painful for me to do, because I have a long relationship with Spencer and really liked him.”

Mr. Foer said that editor in chief and part owner Martin Peretz, the magazine’s most devoted defender of the war, had no role in Mr. Ackerman’s firing.

“Marty knew nothing about this until hours after the fact,” Mr. Foer said. “To my knowledge, he hasn’t looked at Spencer’s blog.”

“Frank has kept me out of the loop,” Mr. Peretz said. “I think it’s a good thing in general for me not to be involved in the internal, precise operations. I was surprised when I was told that it had happened.”

Mr. Ackerman described Mr. Peretz as a foe of his leftward drift, but said he could not cite any instance in which a piece had been killed for not conforming to the boss’ politics.

“I think he’s a little bit childish,” Mr. Peretz said, speaking of Mr. Ackerman’s online work for the magazine. “He didn’t grow, in my estimation.”

Mr. Peretz said that Mr. Ackerman in a blog post had once referred to someone as a “fool.”

“I said to myself, ‘Where does a 15-year-old come off saying stuff like that?’” Mr. Peretz said.

You mean a 25-year-old? “Whatever,” Mr. Peretz said.

Less than 24 hours after being fired, Mr. Ackerman was hired by The American Prospect as a senior correspondent. Next month, he said, he plans to report from Iraq for The Nation. He is also shopping around a proposal for a book about American Islam and counterterrorism, tentatively titled America, Insh’allah.

Since the summer, it’s been a ghost town around the already-quiet Details offices, following several staff departures.

But now, the magazine is adding to its editorial ranks, hiring Alex Bhattacharji as articles editor. Mr. Bhattacharji replaces Pete Wells, who became editor of the New York Times dining section in September.

Most recently, Mr. Bhattacharji was involved in the creation of Look, a prototype film magazine for Time Inc. Prior to that, he worked at now-shuttered Budget Living as the executive editor, and later editor. He’s also freelanced for Details.

Other editorial staffers have fled since May, taking a variety of positions.

Brian Farnham, former deputy editor, became editor in chief of Time Out New York in April. A previous articles editor, Kevin Gray—along with a rising flood of Manhattan’s media population—headed to Condé Nast Portfolio.

Bart Blasengame, formerly a Details senior writer, is now a radio D.J. in Portland. However, he’s not gone in spirit: Mr. Blasengame—who remains on the masthead as contributing editor—wrote the November 2006 cover story on Lance Armstrong.

And Jeff Gordinier, editor-at-large, still remains at large—on book leave. Currently, Mr. Gordinier is writing a book about Generation X for Viking, based upon a Details essay from April 2006.

—M.C.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote back. He mentioned his pride in the paper’s six Pulitzers since 1993. He made no promises and chose his language carefully. In closing, he wrote: “As we move ahead, we will remain focused on ensuring the long-term financial health of The Globe so that it can continue to fulfill its journalistic mission.”

That same day, Oct. 19, the Times Company released its third-quarter statement. It reported a 39 percent drop in profits from the same period of 2005. It also said that advertising revenue had dropped—for the first time in 18 quarters.

“Terrible” is how industry analyst Edward Atorino summarized the Times Company’s third-quarter statement. And regarding the state of The Globe in particular? “Dreadful,” he said.

“Plagued by weakness in the national category and the Boston market, New York Times reported anemic newspaper ad revenue growth,” said a Goldman Sachs report, which is dated Oct. 19. The key risks, according to the report, are “weaker then [sic] industry average revenue performance” and “challenges in the ad market, particularly in Boston.”

And so now The Times is trapped between Beacon Hill and Wall Street.

“It’s more than just another business,” said Massachusetts Congressman Stephen F. Lynch, a signatory of the letter. The letter said, in part, that “a troubling pattern of disinvestment, downsizing, outsourcing and cost cutting has emerged” in The Times’ treatment of The Globe.

“All the signs are there that The Times may be disinvesting in The Boston Globe. That usually precedes a sale of some sort,” he said.

The Congressman said he wasn’t trying to score points with The Globe’s editorial or news pages. “There is no risk they might write something nice about me,” he said. Most recently, the editorial pages called him “arrogant” for declining a debate.

Senator Edward Kennedy, another signatory, responded to questions in an e-mail. He wrote that he had signed the letter hoping “to ensure that this vibrant and important paper is not threatened by cuts to staff and resources.”

The day previous to all this, Oct. 18, The Globe’s union rejected management’s latest offer, by a vote of 307 to 223. Management had proposed that potential wage increases be tied to revenue gains, but didn’t include the Web site Boston.com in that.

“Reporters contribute to the Web site,” said Dan Totten, the newspaper guild’s president. “To have their work not recognized is unacceptable and illogical.”

So what will become of The Globe?

The Globe is having its “second bad year in a row,” said Mr. Atorino, of the Benchmark Company. This doesn’t that mean Mr. Sulzberger is “ready to pull the plug yet,” Mr. Atorino said—but he might “tighten the belt.”

And neither the signatories of the letter nor the paper’s union would care for that.

“Well, the primary problem in Boston is the consolidation of department-store chains,” said industry analyst John Morton, of Morton Research Inc. “Retail advertising, which really drives a lot of advertising revenue, has been weak up there.” Mr. Morton said he didn’t think The Globe would be put up for sale.

“It’s almost impossible to buy a major-market newspaper,” he said. “I would doubt very much that the company would unload its properties in New England for any reason.”

On Oct. 12, the company experienced a 4 percent stock increase. It fueled speculation about a leveraged buyout of The Times.

Could Mr. Sulzberger pull such a thing off? “It’s conceivable,” said Mr. Morton. A buyout would mean heavy borrowing. Investors would be paid 25 to 35 percent above market value for their shares in exchange for Sulzberger family control.

“It would relieve the company of the worries of what Wall Street thinks,” he said.

“I don’t think young Arthur is going to turn The New York Times over to outsiders,” said Mr. Atorino.

“I don’t know where the rumors came from,” Mr. Atorino added. “Maybe an investment banker was seen walking out of the building.”

On Oct. 18, New Republic editor Franklin Foer fired associate editor Spencer Ackerman. It was Mr. Foer’s first firing since taking over in February; Mr. Ackerman, in fact, is only the second New Republic staffer to be fired since the Hollywood-worthy fall of fabulist Stephen Glass in 1998.

Before anyone calls up Hayden Christensen this time, the principals need to do some more work on the narrative line. Mr. Foer described the dismissal as a matter of serial “insubordination”; Mr. Ackerman, 26, wrote on a personal blog that it was the result of “irreconcilable ideological differences” with the magazine’s upper editors.

In what Mr. Foer called the “proximate cause,” Mr. Ackerman had been using that personal blog—titled “Too Hot for TNR”—to disparage the magazine.

Again with the Web logs: On Sept. 1, senior editor Lee Siegel was suspended and had his culture blog removed from the magazine’s Web site. Mr. Siegel had been caught posting flattering comments about his own wit and wisdom in the third person under the pseudonym “sprezzatura”—a “sock puppet,” in blog parlance.

Mr. Siegel is still suspended, but he remains on the masthead. Then again, Mr. Siegel hadn’t previously sent Mr. Foer an e-mail offering to “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat, as Mr. Ackerman did during a dispute about whether the magazine should have a blog about the Major League Baseball playoffs.

“The Siegel thing was a first-time offense,” Mr. Foer said. “Ackerman involved repeated offenses.”

Mr. Ackerman said he had clashed with Mr. Foer over various editorial matters. But he said that he had fallen from favor after growing disenchanted with the invasion of Iraq, which he and the magazine had both supported in the beginning.

“I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward,” Mr. Ackerman said. “The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you.”

Mr. Ackerman had been acting out, by his own account: telling a colleague it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” to get fired “for being too left-wing”; declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. And there was the baseball-bat remark, which Mr. Ackerman said was meant as a joke. After chewing him out for that, Mr. Foer agreed to let him edit the baseball blog.

Both agreed that, whatever the politics, Mr. Ackerman’s taste in stories was wonkier and more bureaucratic than Mr. Foer’s.

Still, in 2003, Mr. Foer and Mr. Ackerman had teamed up to write a 6,900-word cover story about Dick Cheney. And in 2005, The New Republic published a cover story by Mr. Ackerman arguing for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, against the magazine’s editorial stance.

“Ideologically, I’m not far from Spencer,” Mr. Foer said. “I’m not a fan of Joe Lieberman. I think the Iraq war has been a monumental catastrophe. I hate George W. Bush. I have no ideological motive for firing the guy.”

Under previous editor Peter Beinart, Mr. Ackerman wrote a blog about the war, called Iraq’d, for the magazine’s Web site for 15 months, ending in the spring of 2005. After that, his blogging was absorbed into the newly launched overall blog, The Plank.

Mr. Ackerman said that his work was more heavily edited in the new blog. With Iraq’d, “I had total freedom,” he said. “With The Plank, I didn’t.”

Too Hot for TNR was created “in a moment of cheekiness” on Oct. 15, Mr. Ackerman said. In order to post a comment on another blog—by fellow twentysomething associate editor Ross Douthat of The Atlantic Monthly—Mr. Ackerman had to register with Blogger. Having registered, he went ahead and began putting up his own material: Under headlines taken from rock lyrics, he offered his thoughts on topics including sports, television and music. And politics: Under the headline “What gives you the right to fuck with our lives” (borrowed from the Montreal-based band Stars), Mr. Ackerman published Defense Department releases about casualties in Iraq.

Mr. Ackerman also wrote that “TNR’s webdesign software, very appropriately, is called Coma.” He also wrote that “all the cool kids hate TNR.”

Two days later, Mr. Foer called a meeting with Mr. Ackerman, told him he’d “shown little interest in changing,” according to Mr. Ackerman, and fired him on the spot. Mr. Ackerman said the discussion of severance ended after he refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement. “I was told I had to be out of the office by 4,” he said.

“Because it’s a personnel matter, I don’t feel comfortable getting into detail about it,” Mr. Foer said. “It was painful for me to do, because I have a long relationship with Spencer and really liked him.”

Mr. Foer said that editor in chief and part owner Martin Peretz, the magazine’s most devoted defender of the war, had no role in Mr. Ackerman’s firing.

“Marty knew nothing about this until hours after the fact,” Mr. Foer said. “To my knowledge, he hasn’t looked at Spencer’s blog.”

“Frank has kept me out of the loop,” Mr. Peretz said. “I think it’s a good thing in general for me not to be involved in the internal, precise operations. I was surprised when I was told that it had happened.”

Mr. Ackerman described Mr. Peretz as a foe of his leftward drift, but said he could not cite any instance in which a piece had been killed for not conforming to the boss’ politics.

“I think he’s a little bit childish,” Mr. Peretz said, speaking of Mr. Ackerman’s online work for the magazine. “He didn’t grow, in my estimation.”

Mr. Peretz said that Mr. Ackerman in a blog post had once referred to someone as a “fool.”

“I said to myself, ‘Where does a 15-year-old come off saying stuff like that?’” Mr. Peretz said.

You mean a 25-year-old? “Whatever,” Mr. Peretz said.

Less than 24 hours after being fired, Mr. Ackerman was hired by The American Prospect as a senior correspondent. Next month, he said, he plans to report from Iraq for The Nation. He is also shopping around a proposal for a book about American Islam and counterterrorism, tentatively titled America, Insh’allah.

Since the summer, it’s been a ghost town around the already-quiet Details offices, following several staff departures.

But now, the magazine is adding to its editorial ranks, hiring Alex Bhattacharji as articles editor. Mr. Bhattacharji replaces Pete Wells, who became editor of the New York Times dining section in September.

Most recently, Mr. Bhattacharji was involved in the creation of Look, a prototype film magazine for Time Inc. Prior to that, he worked at now-shuttered Budget Living as the executive editor, and later editor. He’s also freelanced for Details.

Other editorial staffers have fled since May, taking a variety of positions.

Brian Farnham, former deputy editor, became editor in chief of Time Out New York in April. A previous articles editor, Kevin Gray—along with a rising flood of Manhattan’s media population—headed to Condé Nast Portfolio.

Bart Blasengame, formerly a Details senior writer, is now a radio D.J. in Portland. However, he’s not gone in spirit: Mr. Blasengame—who remains on the masthead as contributing editor—wrote the November 2006 cover story on Lance Armstrong.

And Jeff Gordinier, editor-at-large, still remains at large—on book leave. Currently, Mr. Gordinier is writing a book about Generation X for Viking, based upon a Details essay from April 2006.

—M.C.

If I’m in a pugnacious mood, I write,” Martin Peretz said. “If I’m not, I don’t.”

Mr. Peretz, the editor in chief and part owner of The New Republic, was on the phone Aug. 8 from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He had turned off the television to take the call. Mr. Peretz said he’s “embarrassed” to admit how much TV he is watching. Rockets are flying into and out of Israel; the ceaseless disputes about the Middle East have erupted into open warfare.

“Last night, I fell asleep with Cooper Anderson,” Mr. Peretz said, “and the television was on all through the night, so I woke up with Cooper Anderson.” Or Anderson Cooper. The point gets across.

“Like everybody, I have lots of responses to the news,” Mr. Peretz said, “and I’m particularly and easily inspired—or agitated, as the case may be—by news from the Middle East.”

Not long ago, Mr. Peretz would have had to store up his agitation for an essay in the pages of his weekly magazine. The New Republic’s day-to-day operations are in the hands of bright, policy-minded D.C. journalists, with a bright, youngish editor between them and Mr. Peretz. Amid the judicious earnestness, Mr. Peretz’s opinions—bellicose and deeply personal, marked by a Manichean perspective on Israel and baroque, contemptuous diction—have been like cannonballs fired through a debating tournament.

“I tended to write long, and infrequently,” Mr. Peretz recalled.

Then, in October 2005, after several earlier forays into blogging, the staff down in Washington launched The Plank, a central political blog. The primary authors were to be writers Michael Crowley and Jason Zengerle.

But before long, Mr. Peretz had found a congenial medium—one that would be there for him whenever he felt the urge to express himself. “In the beginning, I just dipped my toe,” he said. “I would do one thing and then not go to The Plank for another week or a week and a half.”

Mr. Peretz is now in it up to his scalp. As of lunchtime on Aug. 8, the editor in chief had written more than 20 percent of the Plank’s posts since the month began. In the previous 48 hours alone, he had four posts: lamenting misleading casualty reports, sharing a hypothesis that Muslims have a weaker sense of humor than Jews, denouncing Reuters and Human Rights Watch for “falsehoods,” and relaying news of a fatal rocket barrage.

The elements of the Peretz style are on full display. There is the historical recall: A rocket strike in the “small but exquisite town” of Ma’alot brings a recounting of the Ma’alot massacre of May 15, 1974. There are the lavish, personalized praises of his allies: “Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London … a very wise man”; Ha’aretz’s “reliable and seasoned military analyst, Ze’ev Schiff”; “C. Lowell Harris, the distinguished economist and professor emeritus at Columbia University”; “Margo Howard, who has succeeded her mother (the late Ann Landers) as the most respected advice columnist in the United States” (“We’ve known each other since college,” Mr. Peretz notes in the post, “and we had something of a fling years ago”).

And there is the intemperate tone toward Muslims: Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora is a “forked-tongue” speaker; deployment of Malaysian peacekeeping troops would “increase Hezbollah’s numbers by 10 percent.” And the intemperate tone in general: “I want the U.N. to go to Lagos, where no one would go. Fini! The end of the bullshit, and no more Kofi Annan.”

Mr. Peretz, in other words, writes like a blogger.

And the readers react to him as such. After Mr. Peretz equated Malaysian troops with Hezbollah reinforcements, a reader commented, “Yesterday someone wondered why the posts Mr. Peretz contributes to The Plank are heaped with scorn. This little piece of ordure should serve as a perfect example of why that is.” Two posts later, another reader was defending Mr. Peretz from charges of bigotry, citing anti-Jewish rhetoric from a former Malaysian prime minister.

The original post, including headline, was 37 words long. The debate over it eventually stretched out to 31 comments, making it the second-most-hotly-discussed blog post in the month thus far. No. 1, with 57 comments, was Mr. Peretz’s attack on Human Rights Watch.

The greatest number of responses drawn by any of Mr. Peretz’s employees, by comparison, was 22.

Mr. Peretz said the whole custom of comment-posting was new to him. When he began writing Plank entries, he said, “I think the only blog I’d read was Andrew Sullivan, and I don’t think I’d read any responses to blogs.

“So I was, in the beginning, a little bit stunned. But then, gauging the response, and particularly the hostile response—the hostile responses—I realized that I was making my point.”

Mr. Peretz noted that on Aug. 7, he had published a piece in The Wall Street Journal. In it, he praised Senator Joseph Lieberman as a “muscular” Democrat, saying, “Ned Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true.”

“The only feedback I got immediately was calls from friends,” Mr. Peretz said. “Well, there’s a certain kind of gratification in that, but it’s limited. My friends are my friends, and you want to know how people responded who aren’t my friends.”

On the Web, Mr. Peretz’s non-friends come out and fight. And Mr. Peretz is unafraid to dive back into the combat, posting comments in response to the comments in response to the comments on his original posts. “[T]he government of Malaysia which offered its soldiers to the international force is perfervidly anti-Israel and, yes, perfervidly anti-Jewish,” he wrote, following up on his Malaysia-Hezbollah post. “Maybe these categories are abstractions to some like my self-righteous critics. But they are vivid and real to me.”

“Some of the response is splenetic, and I think the response is instantaneous,” Mr. Peretz said, with relish. “It’s interesting reading people attacking me and then defending me.

“Not the same person,” he added.

Mr. Peretz is also drawn to the battle in the comments section because he knows how to post there. “I don’t know how to post a Plank,” he said. When he writes an item, he sends it to the office, where someone else puts it up.

“So I’m likely to type a talkback if I’m up at 1:30 in the morning and I can’t fall asleep yet,” Mr. Peretz said.

Despite the techie middleman, The Plank is unedited, Mr. Peretz said. “And it shows,” he said.

“Sometimes I look back and I wished someone had fixed this sentence,” Mr. Peretz said. “But the graceless sentence is still there.”

And the sentiments? “I’ve regretted every so often saying something too sharp or putting down another talk-backer,” Mr. Peretz said.

But regret is a short-lived emotion online. And there’s a war on!

“Hezbollah sends a rocket, you punch out a reader,” Mr. Peretz said. “Or a writer.”

Mr. Peretz said he may set up a battlefield all by himself. “I’m actually thinking—just thinking—of taking myself out of The Plank and just doing my own occasional blog,” he said. “I even have a title for it.”

The title?

“The Spine.”

The Spine?

“I think I have a certain set of core beliefs and core commitments, intellectual and moral commitments, and it really is the spine of my writing,” Mr. Peretz said. “So there—you’ve got a tiny scoop.”

When Ruth Reichl took over the editorship of Gourmet magazine in 1999, she had made her name as a critic and a memoirist. Her debut issue featured pieces by Spalding Gray and Pat Conroy, part of a push toward a more literary-minded Gourmet.

“The response from readers was ‘Don’t forget the recipes,’” Ms. Reichl said.

But Ms. Reichl has carved out a place for high-end food writing in Gourmet—or rather, not necessarily in Gourmet. The August 2006 issue is bagged with a separate publication: a 100-page, perfect-bound, 6 3¼4-by-9 literary supplement.

The main issue’s cover features a close-up photo of a raspberry crumble tart, with cover lines promoting “Frozen Strawberry Margarita Pie” and “Spicy Pork Chops,” among other things. The bonus issue presents the Gourmet banner in white, against a white wall, overlooking a table with a bare white rumpled tablecloth and three little glasses of water. One glass has a tiny sprig of white flowers in it.

The contents include a storybook-style meditation on breakfast by Maira Kalman, a piece about Tuscan farro grain by Calvin Trillin, a personal history of bread-baking by Jane Smiley and an essay on Jews and pork-eating by David Rakoff.

Mr. Rakoff’s piece cites a rabbi, Rabbi X, who eats pepperoni pizza for Purim: “Rabbi X has a colleague, also a prominent and respected cleric, who explains himself with, ‘I’ll eat shrimp. No Jew ever died refusing to eat shrimp. But pork, never. Shrimp is trayf, but pork is anti-Semitic.”

“Many of these are not the kinds of stories that you would normally see in an epicurean magazine,” Ms. Reichl said.

Adding to the supplement’s high-lit atmosphere is a near-total absence of display ads. The issue is sponsored by Philips electronics, which is engaged in an anti-advertising advertising campaign—promoting its “simplicity” motto by sponsoring uninterrupted content. Previously, the company bought ad time for an entire 60 Minutes program and eliminated the commercial breaks; in the Gourmet supplement, the only ads are on the back page, one interior full page and a tear-out sheet of Philips-branded bookmarks.

And the supplement omits recipes. Readers who might like to follow up on reading about farro by cooking with it are directed to the magazine’s Web site.

“What you find as an editor is, your readers give you permission to make changes and do things in more interesting and challenging ways,” Ms. Reichl said.

In this case, Ms. Reichl said, the readership’s interests are part of a broader public embrace of kitchen nonfiction. When she published her first food memoir, in 1998, she recalled, “there was no place in bookstores for just writing about food.”

Now, the once-wary Gourmet audience is willing to take its food in the abstract. “We’ve never gotten mail like this on anything we’ve ever done” Ms. Reichl said.

Ms. Reichl said she had expected all along that the audience would come around to her point of view. “I am going to push very hard to make this an annual event,” Ms. Reichl said.

—T.S.

When James Truman decided to move the London-based Modern Painters to New York, it wasn’t just a decision about offices.

Only one editorial staffer would cross the Atlantic with the magazine.

Mr. Truman, the former editorial director of Condé Nast, and now the C.E.O. and managing editor of wealthy bombshell Louise T. Blouin MacBain’s art publications, now has his titles all tucked together in New York. So, on behalf of LTB Media Publications, he has begun to raid for a fresh staff.

“Everything you’ve heard about the James Truman myth is true,” said Domenick Ammirati. “He’s a very intelligent, charismatic guy.”

Mr. Ammirati, a critic and former copy editor for Artforum, was on leave from that magazine for a fellowship in Houston, but was expected to return. Instead, he found himself seduced by Mr. Truman in an Eighth Avenue diner. Over a lunch, they discussed art and “how art can be covered.”

Mr. Ammirati also had phone conversations with Roger Tatley, the magazine’s new editor. He succumbed, and has joined the staff at Modern Painters as a senior editor.

And Claire Barliant, an associate editor at Artforum, began an identically titled position at Modern Painters last week.

“We think we’re smart and have good staff,” said Knight Landesman, a publisher of Artforum, of the little assault. “It’s a big pond. There’s room for a lot of boats.”

The one man to come to America was Mr. Tatley, who formerly held the title of senior editor. The former editor in chief, Karen Wright, will be an editor-at-large, based in London.

Once upon a time, in his Condé Nast days, Mr. Truman created the prototype for a never-realized art magazine. Mr. Truman looked closely then at Modern Painters. He found it “closer to what I was interested in doing than many of the other art magazines,” he said yesterday.

Still, he will give Modern Painters a redesign.

Mr. Truman expected his Condé Nast art magazine to have a six-figure circulation, around 300,000 to 400,000. Modern Painters hovers around 50,000. Some of that gap is understandable in terms of audience. “It was never going to be as insider as Modern Painters,” he said.

Condé Nast, Mr. Truman may have found, isn’t the only supplier of cash and thrills. The launch party for Culture & Travel—the newest title in Ms. MacBain’s stable, which debuts in late September—will be held in her $20 million penthouse at 165 Charles Street, the third of Richard Meier’s glass-sheathed condominiums in the West Village.

—Michael Calderone

In May 2006, Mastheads.org began providing ambitious freelancers with information vital to their profession, like the name of the senior accessories editor at Vogue. Last month, the company began charging for access to the 238 (and counting) mastheads on its site.

Subscriptions to Mastheads.org cost $4 a week, $7 a month or $24 a year—still cheaper than an AvantGuild membership at Mediabistro.

“We got some flak for charging for membership,” Christi Thomas, a freelance editor who works part time for Mastheads.org, wrote via e-mail, “but it was minimal and we got a lot of committed contributors.” (The company avoids phone interviews because employees “don’t want to be misquoted,” Ms. Thomas wrote.)

The site now has more than 5--00 paid members, according to Ms. Thomas. And the content is available for free to the contributors who scan and type out masthead information to add to the site.

“Most of our contributors are youngster editors, interns, freelance writers, or PR people,” wrote Ms. Thomas, via e-mail. “It’s a wide array of people in publishing.”

Mastheads.org was launched by writers and editors who worked primarily at women’s titles. Since then, the Web site has broadened its reach to cover a variety of publications.

And since the Web site rarely rejects masthead contributions, according to Ms. Thomas, the sky’s the limit!

Currently, the company seeks contributors to track a variety of titles that any self-respecting freelancer needs, including Boating, Diabetic Cooking and Playgirl.

“The more mastheads, the merrier,” Ms. Thomas wrote. “It’s sorta like file-sharing for publishing geeks.”

— M.C.

“I’m writing a biography of Condi,” she said.

Amanda Urban, Ms. Bumiller’s agent, was traveling and unavailable for comment.

While the book project is good news for Ms. Bumiller, it has been less so for her husband, Times diplomatic correspondent Steven Weisman. Executive editor Bill Keller has told Mr. Weisman that he must relinquish the State Department beat to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest, since his wife’s book will cover the same subject area.

Mr. Weisman declined to comment on the proceedings.

In a written statement through a Times spokesperson, Mr. Keller explained that the decision was made because “perceptions can be damaging and distracting.”

“It was a judgment call,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Our concern was that while Elisabeth is striving for close access to the Secretary of State, anything Steve writes about her might be suspected of pulling punches. These are two professionals of the highest integrity …. And in this case the perception of a conflict is relatively easy to avoid.”

Outside books have become an increasing source of consternation for The Times. In December, the paper took a drubbing from both the right and left about the relationship between its N.S.A. eavesdropping scoop and reporter James Risen’s book on the topic—a connection that, depending on who was talking, demonstrated either a successful Times plot to promote Mr. Risen’s book or an unsuccessful Times plot to stifle the scoop.

Even more recently, star investigative reporter Don Van Natta Jr. turned down a top editing position in the Washington bureau to write an investigative biography of Hillary Clinton.

In this climate, The Times has tightened its policy for reporters who seek to write independent book projects. Currently, staffers who leave to write books must officially resign their positions and arrange with their supervisors to be rehired when they’re done.

Mr. Weisman has covered the State Department for the past three years, and according to Times sources, he’s in talks to transition to the economic-policy beat. Mr. Weisman is well versed in money issues: In 2002, Simon & Schuster published his book The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln–Teddy Roosevelt–Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America. For that, the marital-beat overlap was less of an issue; Ms. Bumiller was covering the White House at the time, but not the Woodrow Wilson White House.

Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman wouldn’t comment on the beat shuffle. “We haven’t made any announcements about Steve, whether or not he’s changing beats, and I’m not going to comment on internal matters,” Mr. Taubman said.

Some staffers see Mr. Weisman’s departure from the State Department beat as an unfair and overly cautious move by editors.

“They’re getting very tough with everybody,” a Times staffer said. “This is just one more way editors call the shots at The Times.”

—Gabriel Sherman

We showcase editors,” Martin Peretz said. Mr. Peretz, the owner and editor in chief of The New Republic, was on the phone from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Feb. 28, one day after changing the contents of his showcase. Editor Peter Beinart was out; Franklin Foer, 31, was in.

“We showcased Michael Kinsley,” Mr. Peretz said, “we showcased Rick Hertzberg, we showcased Andrew [Sullivan]. We showcased Michael Kelly. This is our destiny. I take that element of our history as a compliment.”

This switch is an amicable one. Later this week, Mr. Foer and Mr. Beinart will swap offices, with Mr. Foer moving three doors down into the editor’s corner office. Mr. Beinart will become an editor at large, while continuing to write the not-quite-voice-of-the-magazine “TRB” column.

At the meeting announcing the change, Mr. Beinart—who had spent much of last year out on book leave—said that if he stayed in his post, there was a danger “he would be mailing it in,” according to one staffer present.

“I was just losing some of my fire in the belly for the job,” Mr. Beinart said in a phone conversation. “The book period was partly an effort to get it out of my system. In a way, it had the opposite effect. I didn’t want to take this place for granted.”

During the book leave, Mr. Beinart talked to Mr. Peretz and co-owner Roger Hertog, expressing a mounting desire to pursue long-form writing instead of editing.

“During Peter’s book leave, we were on autopilot,” one staffer said. “We didn’t have an editor.”

“This is exactly what the magazine needs. It’s been dead lately,” another staffer said.

Shortly after Mr. Beinart returned from leave in January, Mr. Peretz approached Mr. Foer about taking over as editor.

“It was obvious Frank was the choice,” Mr. Peretz said. “His office was the office in which the staff congregated. Certainly, among the younger people on staff, he stood for the journalistic principles and objectives of The New Republic.”

“Frank is the only person who understands the magazine,” one staffer said.

At a magazine obsessed with rooting out error among Democrats, Mr. Foer may bring more of an opposition-party approach. Mr. Foer was instrumental, with Mr. Beinart away, for orchestrating a cover article titled “Welcome to the Hackocracy” and a parody of a travel guide, illustrating Washington’s G.O.P. strongholds.

And speaking of opposition, what about that Iraq War? “I don’t know what Frank thinks precisely about the war,” Mr. Peretz said. “I’m for the war. In certain ways, I’ve always had editors I disagreed with.”

“The broad consensus of the staff is, we’re deeply depressed about the broad course of the war,” Mr. Foer said. “That said, I don’t think the magazine is about to change its foreign-policy instincts.”

So: war abroad, peace on the home front?

“Marty and I, we’re not completely on the same page on every issue, but we have a lot of broad agreement,” Mr. Foer said. “I think there are places where the differences are pretty substantial. But he knows my work over time. I don’t need to pass any litmus test, because he knows me.”

—G.S.

February marked the two-year anniversary of Adam Moss’ arrival at New York magazine. How has New York fared? To find out, Off the Record used New York’s own “Approval Matrix” technology—sampling every third magazine cover of the Moss Era and evaluating its intellectual and moral performance. Our deliberately oversimplified guide to what falls where on our taste hierarchies is below.

—Matt Haber

[Update: In a story for tomorrow's paper, posted on the Web this evening, The New York Times confirms that Foer is replacing Beinart.]

"I'm not going to confirm anything," New Republic owner and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz said by phone this afternoon, as he prepared to catch a flight to Israel. "Call me tomorrow."

Neither Beinart nor Foer returned calls seeking comment.

Beinart has been editor of the weekly since November of 1999. His presence has diminished recently, however. For much of the last year, he was on leave writing The Good Fight, a book based on a 6,000-word meditation on John Kerry's defeat he wrote for TNR in 2004. The book is due out from HarperCollins in June.

Foer has recently been courted by The New York Times, which hoped to hire him to write about the culture of Washington, D.C.

Some New Republic staffers said they were unaware of any pending masthead changes.

"I don't know what's going on," one staffer said. "Beinart is definitely back and 90 percent of where he was before. Before the book, he was committed 24 hours [a day] to TNR. Now it's 20 hours. He's still very committed, but with the understandable coda that he's writing his book."

--Gabriel Sherman

"I think Peter's a very sweet kid," said a former New Republic editor. "He's a smart, sweet kid who's going to get his ass handed to him."

Mr. Peretz, an independently wealthy lecturer at Harvard University who once had Mr. Gore as a prize pupil, described Mr. Beinart as "an exceptionally brilliant person who had both a very secure grasp of the politics present, how it is rooted in history, and how it can affect the future." They met when Mr. Beinart was a Yale undergraduate running the Liberal Party, which was a division of the university's Political Union debating society. Mr. Beinart had been reading The New Republic since he was a high school student in the late 80's, and he invited Mr. Peretz to come give a talk in New Haven. Later on, Mr. Beinart co-founded a magazine at Yale called The Review of Politics , a collegiate New Republic knockoff. Now he gets to run the real one.

The question is whether he's strong enough to stand up to the demands of Mr. Peretz in an election year. A second question is whether he can keep from tussling with the magazine's powerful and intelligent literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, who, together with his Byronic hairdo, runs the back of the magazine as a separate, inviolable fiefdom.

While perhaps having to cede control of the magazine's arts and cultural coverage to Mr. Wieseltier and its political coverage to the owner, Mr. Beinart must somehow do something about the Washington, D.C.-based magazine's circulation, which, in these complacent times, has fallen over the last five years, from 99,500 to 91,800.

Mr. Beinart is one in a long line of New Republic wonder boys–one of many Mr. Peretz has found over the years, from Michael Kinsley, who was 26 when he took over the magazine, to Mr. Sullivan, who was 28. One Wunderkind the magazine wants to forget is the onetime star writer Stephen Glass, who at 25 wrote colorful feature articles for the magazine that should have struck an editor as perhaps too colorful, given that they were fictitious. Ruth Shalit, another hotshot writer who made her name at the magazine, got in trouble for plagiarism.

For now, Mr. Beinart has yet to leave Manhattan, to which he moved last April. He lives just off Amsterdam Avenue. Asked to describe himself in a phone call prior to meeting for drinks, he said, "I look like pretty much everyone else on the Upper West Side, in jeans and a plaid shirt." He proposed going to a place on West 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue called Vermouth, where "some of the people looked a bit hipper than I am. But maybe this would give me chance to try to fit in."

Despite being the same age when he was anointed, Mr. Beinart is hardly the hipster that Mr. Sullivan attempted to be, with his Camille Paglia contributions and famous piece on sofa fabric and an appearance in a Gap advertisement. "I don't think it has a hell of a lot to do with why I was hired," he said.

"It would be damning with faint praise to say that he's not one of Marty's smart young men," said Time columnist Margaret Carlson. (Mr. Beinart has also written for Time .) "But he is, in the tradition of Michael Kinsley." Ms. Carlson isn't his only grown-up fan: National Journal media critic (and ex- New Republic writer) William Powers said: "He's just a pleasure to be around. He doesn't have that arrogance that some people associate with The New Republic –rightly."

Mr. Peretz, who married into the Singer sewing machine fortune, is upfront about his strong hand in the magazine. After all, he's not only the owner–on the masthead, he lists himself as both "editor in chief" and "chairman." Mr. Beinart, like those who have gone before him in Mr. Peretz's revolving door, gets the title of "editor." But what exactly do the young men who have worn this title have in common?

"It has to be someone Marty respects, it has to be a guy, and he has to come from a good university," said Hanna Rosin, a 29-year-old Washington Post reporter who interned with Mr. Beinart at The New Republic and is friends with him. "Given all the requirements, he's the best choice."

Mr. Peretz seemed to have had his eye on Mr. Beinart for some time: "There was a sense that Peter has what the Chinese call the mandate of heaven," he said.

There are those who think that Mr. Peretz was just looking for someone he can control. As one former editor at the magazine put it, "There isn't a fucking person in the world who would take that job." Another person who saw him in action at The New Republic said, "The best thing he's got going for him is his attendance record."

Jonathan Chait, who is 27 and left The New Republic on a writing grant from the New America Foundation, said that there was a "conventional view" of The New Republic that writers and editors employed there "move up too fast, and they become plagiarists and their whole life is a lie. But what people don't remember is that during the golden age, people like Michael Kinsley and Mickey Kaus, they were young, undiscovered talents; they're in their 40's now." He added: "To have something interesting to say about housing policy, you don't have to have spent five years writing police beat at a local newspaper."

At the bar, Mr. Beinart sipped white wine. "The people being, I don't know, annoyed that I'm 28, is the flip side of people getting hyped for being in their 20's," he said. "And both sides of that don't interest me. I've never had the slightest interest in Gen-X stuff. I've always thought it was a big myth, and the allegiances I have, have had a lot more to do with other demographic characteristics than anyone who was just in my age group."

Mr. Beinart's parents are both South African, very liberal and Jewish, he said. They fled the "life-or-death politics" of their homeland while his mother was pregnant with him. His father is a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "One of the sad ironies of South Africa was that the more liberal, better-educated people left because they could," he said. His parents found themselves in a quandary. "They couldn't live with themselves being politically apathetic in South Africa. And couldn't give their whole lives to 'the Struggle'–that's what it was called."

His mother, Doreen Beinart, is today a Cambridge real estate agent who married American Repertory Theater artistic director Robert Brustein in 1996. The Cambridge-based Mr. Brustein is also The New Republic 's longtime drama critic. ("But there were no ties through that," said Mr. Peretz.) Mr. Beinart said he found becoming editor of the magazine that employs his mother's husband "weird," but noted that he had no control over the back of the book.

His father remains more political. "Nowhere but South Africa did Marxism retain its prestige," said Mr. Beinart. So he was a "knee-jerk lefty kid" in his politics until well into college, he said.

The New Republic started to change the views he had inherited.

"I was in a kind of strange subgroup of adolescent. I found The New Republic very exciting," he said. "I think I started reading the magazine when I had no idea how fragile that liberal orthodoxy was. The New Republic was kind of frantically but intelligently throwing that orthodoxy overboard, parts of the left liberal project that were making it completely alien to most Americans and made it impossible for them to win another election."

Mr. Beinart graduated in 1989 from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private day school in Cambridge, with a 3.5 G.P.A. and SATs of 1,450. He went on to Yale, where he had a double major in history and political science. He was chair of the Liberal Party and a columnist for the Yale Herald , specializing in Africa. Friends remember him as becoming increasingly mainstream in his politics while he was there. After graduation, he was a Rhodes Scholar and studied international relations at Oxford. "I spent a lot of time discussing the causes of World War I and World War II," he said. In the summer of 1993, he pulled off an internship at The New Republic .

Mr. Beinart ended up as the 25-year-old managing editor of the magazine in the spring of 1996 when Mr. Sullivan quit. That summer, he co-edited the magazine with David Greenberg until Michael Kelly came in.

Mr. Beinart doesn't write a lot. When he does, he goes into high essay mode. In an Oct. 11 New Republic analysis of Bill Bradley, he argued that the fact the candidate once played basketball in the N.B.A. does not make him more sensitive to the needs of African-Americans. The ending of the piece is pseudo-rousing: "And that is why the argument for human equality must be waged at the level of moral principle, as a commitment that holds irrespective of, or even counter to, personal experience."

"I don't like hit pieces, I don't like puff pieces," said Mr. Beinart. "I don't like pieces that don't have an idea behind it." Of the publishing commodity called buzz, he said he wants "only the right kind of buzz." The Bell Curve , a treatise on race and intelligence which was excerpted in The New Republic under Mr. Sullivan's editorship, certainly generated a lot of buzz. Mr. Beinart said he wouldn't have touched it. "No," he said. "I'm a big fan of Andrew's and an admirer and a friend. I wasn't there. But I suppose I–um–probably wouldn't have."

Mr. Beinart was also careful in addressing the topic of the sometimes cozy relationship between the magazine he will edit and candidate Al Gore. "The magazine is not The New York Times ," said Mr. Beinart. "It's a magazine of affiliations, people we love and people we hate, crusades and obsessions. And that in itself is fine. Not only fine, certainly necessary. But within that, things you believe in, and things and people you don't believe in, do you still do valuable, critical, intellectually honest reporting? We're going to endorse the Democratic nominee. You know, we'd prefer it be Al Gore than Bill Bradley, but we'd endorse Bill Bradley if he becomes the Democratic nominee."