"Matt Cooper joins NJG. Happy not to be competing against him any more," wrote the National Journal's new editor in chief Ron Fournier on Twitter this morning.

Mr. Cooper echoed these sentiments in the release. "[Editorial director] Ron Brownstein and Ron Fournier aren't just old friends," he said. "They're the best of the best journalists. I'm so happy to be working with them rather than competing against them.

Until two weeks ago, Mr. Cooper was working for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on a book about the group's findings from the economic collapse. Mike Allen wrote this morning that Mr. Cooper is a "veteran of every magazine you ever wanted to write for," inlcuding Time, Portfolio, Washington Monthly, Newsweek, The New Republic and Talking Points Memo. He has worked for a David Bradley property before as a correspondent for The Atlantic online.

Mr. Cooper does impersonations. He was called to the stand during the Scooter Libby trial in 2007 to discuss an interview with Karl Rove. He's used to this:

Ms. Miller—the redoubtable, doubtable New York Times scoop artist—was on the phone Monday afternoon, giving an interview on her way to get an interview. The quick-change routine is well practiced by now: from reporter to news object and back again.

But even Ms. Miller sounded a bit breathless from her latest adventures. On Oct. 7, federal judge Thomas Hogan had found her in contempt of court for refusing to discuss her confidential sources and ordered her to jail for up to 18 months—then freed her on bond pending an appeal. The next morning, it was front-page news in her own paper; two days after that, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and chief executive Russell Lewis commandeered the top of the Sunday Op-Ed page for a booming defense of Ms. Miller and, in the bargain, the freedom of the press.

“Her crime was doing her job as the founders of this nation intended,” they wrote.

In the middle of it all, on Saturday, Ms. Miller had a page-one piece of her own, a joint byline with Eric Lipton on an article about the Iraqi oil-for-food program. Her aim, Ms. Miller said, had been to “try and get a front-page story in my paper, to show people that I’m going to continue writing.”

The prospect of martyrdom seemed to have left Ms. Miller in high spirits, if not exactly glad ones; her end of the conversation was peppered with incredulous laughter. “I’ve been kind of amazed at the outpouring of support from other journalists,” she said.

Ms. Miller is in the varied collection of reporters entangled with the grand jury investigating who leaked of the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press. The leaked information was published not by Ms. Miller, but by conservative columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times, as the Bush administration attempted to (depending on who’s telling the story) rebut, intimidate or smear Ms. Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who’d criticized the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.

Till now, the W.M.D. question has done nothing to burnish Ms. Miller’s journalistic credentials. On Oct. 3, The Times ran yet another piece revising its prewar coverage of Iraq’s mass-destructive capabilities. Following the lead of The Washington Post—which had broken the same news 14 months earlier—The Times meticulously demonstrated how the Bush administration had tilted evidence so that captured aluminum tubes, meant as Iraqi artillery rocket parts, could be passed off as nuclear centrifuge components.

And if The Times was more than a year late reacting to The Post, it was more than two years late reacting to itself. Far down, the Oct. 3 piece offered an implicit confession of institutional and reportorial failure: “[O]n Sept. 8 [2002], the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program …. The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.”

The Times didn’t name the authors of the original piece, but they were Ms. Miller and Michael R. Gordon.

Yet by Monday, there was no more thought of the suspicious tubes—nor MET Team Alpha, the baseball-cap-wearing mystery scientist, or the rest of Ms. Miller’s dubious or anonymous portfolio. Ms. Miller was no longer the Belle of Babylon, the volunteer page of the Iraqi National Congress, Miss Bad Intelligence Rising herself. She was Judy again.

That was how the op-ed from Mr. Sulzberger, her old colleague at the Washington bureau, referred to her: “Judy Miller”—not “Judith.” Sending Judy Miller to jail, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Lewis argued, will threaten the press’ “ability to gather and receive information in confidence from those who would face reprisals from bringing important information about our government into the light of day.”

Ms. Miller said she was heartened by the brass’ public declaration of solidarity. “It’s less lonely,” she said, “but it makes me wonder what happens when this happens to someone who doesn’t have the power and the influence and the money of The New York Times behind them.”

Had something like this happened earlier in her career, when she wrote for the less formidable likes of The Progressive magazine, Ms. Miller said, “a lawsuit would have turned me towards being a real-estate broker.” (“Of course, I would have been richer,” she added.)

Even with the stand-up-for-the-little-man rhetoric, though, there is a certain Nazis-marching-through-Skokie tone to the present case. Ms. Miller is not going to the mat for some helpless whistleblower; she’s defending the right of high officials to try to anonymously sic The New York Times on a subordinate who bucked them. Mr. Wilson signed his own name to his criticisms, and it was the confidential sources who allegedly sought reprisal.

“For some group of people, that would be called whistleblowing,” Mr. Sulzberger said on the phone Tuesday evening—for instance, he said, people who thought Mr. Wilson’s complaints about the administration (aired in a Times op-ed) hadn’t shared all the relevant facts.

“I’m not suggesting that you have to agree every time with whether that person should have given out that information,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Floyd Abrams, Ms. Miller’s lawyer, offered a similar view. “The law can’t distinguish between good leaks and bad,” Mr. Abrams said. Mr. Abrams is also representing Time magazine’s Matt Cooper, who will be facing Judge Hogan today in his own contempt hearing in the Plame affair. Mr. Cooper appears almost certain to share Ms. Miller’s fate, in which case Mr. Abrams said their appeals will be lumped together in the Court of Appeals. If they lose, both could be in jail by Thanksgiving.

It could make a reality-TV show, Ms. Miller suggested brightly: “Matt and me and Martha.”

Unlike imprisoned journalist Ms. Stewart, neither Ms. Miller nor Mr. Cooper has been convicted of anything. Their confinement is meant to coerce them into telling the grand jury about their sources. So they would be held till the grand jury is finished—or 18 months, whichever comes first, Mr. Abrams said.

“I’ve only had one other client who was sent away,” Mr. Abrams said. That was The Times’ Myron Farber, jailed for refusing to provide evidence during a New Jersey murder trial in 1978 and held till the trial was over. “He was there for 40 days,” Mr. Abrams said. “I used to bring him donuts on Sundays.”

Now he may see two more clients behind bars—despite the reporters’ markedly different approaches to handling the Plame leak. Mr. Cooper, presented with the top-down whistleblowing, wrote an article denouncing the leakers. “I wrote the first piece saying that there was an effort to smear Joe Wilson,” Mr. Cooper said. “I shouldn’t have to go to jail for that. I shouldn’t have to go to jail for doing my job.”

But Ms. Miller can top that: She never wrote anything about Ms. Plame at all.

“Judy Miller being threatened with jail for having gotten information for a story she never wrote and we never ran is illogical to me, and dangerous,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Would Times editors who might have known of Ms. Miller’s reporting also be eligible for a subpoena? Mr. Sulzberger said he didn’t know whether her work had even entered the editorial process, and didn’t care to explore the implications. “I think one person in jail is enough for The New York Times,” he said.

And Ms. Miller said that the differences in individual reporters’ actions are beside the point. “The last thing I want to do is start dividing journalists,” she said. “ … This is not the time to start saying, ‘Why me and not him?’”

Ms. Miller did, however, note one division between herself and other subpoenaed journalists. Some reporters, including Mr. Cooper, agreed to testify about one particular source, Vice Presidential chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, after Mr. Libby waived his confidentiality agreement with them.

Despite Mr. Libby’s apparent enthusiasm to put his remarks on the record, Ms. Miller described the waivers as a “pernicious” concept. “I do not consider these waivers voluntary,” she said.

Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Miller both argued that the case shows the need for a federal shield law, establishing legal protection for reporter-source agreements akin to that for lawyers and clients, or priests and parishioners.

“It’s not about Judy Miller,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “It’s bigger than that.”

“This is really all about the readers,” Ms. Miller said. “This is all about the public—the public’s right to know.”

Even so, a lot of it is about Judy Miller. “Keep those cards and letters coming,” Ms. Miller said.

And while the legal encroachment on anonymous sources may threaten one of Ms. Miller’s favorite reporting tools, it hasn’t cut into her ability to report. “Quite the opposite,” she said. The current case, she said, proves her commitment to her methods: “I’m willing to go to jail to protect my sources,” she said.

It also gives her a rebuttal to any “snotty” Millerologists, who’ve tried tracking the way her bylines seem to rise and fall in frequency along with the tide of W.M.D.-themed editors’ notes and follow-up stories.

“For all those people who wonder what happened to Judy Miller,” Ms. Miller said, “what happened to Judy Miller was she got involved in something called the American legal process.”

Neither Mr. Luskin nor Ms. Novak had expected to see news of those conversations in print. According to a source familiar with the matter, their talks had been off the record.

According to the source, Mr. Luskin told Mr. Fitzgerald to talk to Ms. Novak, signing a waiver. “The waiver that was executed was in a form that was similar to one that was used by Fitzgerald with other reporters—a waiver for the limited purpose of responding to questions from the special counsel,” the source said.

In other words, it was similar to waivers agreed to by Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler, whose sources on the Valerie Plame Wilson affair remain unknown. The Post’s Bob Woodward has also declined to publicly identify his own source.

Time’s account of the conversations between Mr. Luskin and Ms. Novak arrived on newsstands Nov. 28. On Dec. 2, The New York Times reported on the substance of one conversation, writing that Mr. Luskin had learned from Ms. Novak that his client, Mr. Rove, might have spoken with Time’s Matt Cooper about Ms. Wilson.

That fact was significant because, at the time, Mr. Rove may not yet have told Mr. Fitzgerald about this conversation, and because Mr. Cooper was under pressure to reveal his source. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 3 that Mr. Luskin was using this conversation with Ms. Novak as a tool in his defense strategy, though exactly how (or if) this detail helps Mr. Rove remains murky.

So did Time magazine burn Mr. Luskin? Or did he waive his confidentiality when he came clean to Mr. Fitzgerald?

According to a person familiar with Time’s thinking, the feeling at the magazine was that any kind of understanding between Mr. Luskin and Ms. Novak was made moot when Mr. Luskin came forward to Mr. Fitzgerald. By approaching the special prosecutor and saying that he had learned of his client’s conversation with Mr. Cooper from Ms. Novak, he had turned the tables, making Ms. Novak the source. So who were they to protect?

Both Mr. Luskin and Time managing editor Jim Kelly declined to comment. Ms. Novak didn’t return calls.

“They were concerned that it would be perceived that she was doing Rove or Luskin a favor and not doing her job,” said one source. “What they are doing this week is trying to even the score.” Or pre-empt getting scooped.

According to one source, Ms. Novak was not in the loop on the decision to publish her source’s name. “Time management independently made a decision … without consulting her,” the source said.

Time’s response contrasted to that of The New York Times, where attempts to keep the identity of Judith Miller’s source secret—even after reporters had learned it from outside sources—were a source of tension within the newsroom.

In the paper’s 5,800-word attempt to come clean, managing editor Jill Abramson defended the decision, saying that if Ms. Miller were willing to go to jail to protect her source, it would have been “unconscionable then to out her source in the pages of the paper.” Ms. Novak is complying with Mr. Fitzgerald’s inquiry.

Another issue raised by the details that have emerged about the Novak-Luskin conversation is the propriety of Ms. Novak telling or even hinting to Mr. Luskin about her colleague’s “double-super-secret background” conversation.

“[Ms. Novak] was feeling [that Mr. Luskin] was giving a line of spin. He was trying to spin her and said it wasn’t true,” a person with knowledge of Ms. Novak’s conversation said, commenting on the reporter’s off-the-record chat.

Mr. Kelly told The Washington Post: “There’s no way that Viveca Novak knowingly, wittingly gave up a confidential source to Robert Luskin.”

This latest tidbit shot Mr. Luskin’s client’s legal travails into the news again, something that can’t make the Rove defense team happy. Time’s tangled history with Mr. Luskin dates back to the last-minute negotiations over the waiver that Mr. Rove gave Mr. Cooper to testify.

Mr. Cooper’s lawyer said he only felt free to seek a waiver after reading a comment by Mr. Luskin in The Wall Street Journal, in which Mr. Luskin said: “If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it’s not Karl he’s protecting.”

After the two sides agreed to a personalized waiver, Mr. Luskin still harbored animosity toward Mr. Cooper for painting his client as dragging his feet. It “does not look so good,” he told The Washington Post. “[I]t just looks to me like there was less a desire to protect a source.”

Miller, having reached the end of her long standoff with the Times, was preparing for tonight's previously-scheduled appearance on a panel at the Media Law Resource Center's annual dinner, along with Time reporter Matt Cooper.

"I'm really very satisfied with the agreement. I will always miss the Times, but now it was time to move on," Miller said.

"I plan to take a little time off, the time I was supposed to take before this 40-day nightmare began."

Miller said the agreement was reached today, after the Times relented and agreed to her request that she be allowed to publish a piece in the paper rebutting her critics. The piece will run tomorrow.

In announcing Miller's departure, executive editor Bill Keller also released a note he'd sent Miller, which softened the edges of some of his most pointed public statements about her conduct.

"They agreed to run an article and you know Bill graciously clarified his remarks and set the record straight," Miller said. "And that's what I wanted. I had been very upset by his choice of language, and I'm delighted to see that he clarified his remarks."

--Gabriel Sherman

The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Times’ youth corps to practice a little disobedience of its own. Her message, said a staffer who attended, was: “Don’t roll over to your editors. We’re the future of the paper.”

“Not to start World War III with editors,” Ms. Abramson said on the phone this week, “but I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices.”

So, at a buffet luncheon of sushi, tandoori chicken and curried cauliflower in the paper’s 11th-floor dining room, Ms. Abramson admonished the junior set to resist the paper’s “stentorian voice.”

“Jill encouraged us to be rebellious in our writing,” the staffer said. “She told us we should fight back. If we want to do something risqué that editors clean up, we should push back.”

The designated Wild Ones consisted of 16 staffers under the age of 30. Besides Mr. Luo and Ms. Lee, the group included business writers Andrew Ross Sorkin and Eric Dash, metro reporters Sewell Chan and Nicholas Confessore, arts reporter Lola Ogunnaike and Boldface Names scribe—and occasional cartoonist—Campbell Robertson.

Ms. Abramson said the meeting with the young Timespersons was part of a larger effort to get sharper prose into the pages. “It’s a feeling in general that I have,” she said. “I’m talking about writing with style and some edge, and constantly looking for the most interesting way to frame stories.”

The clash between writerly ambitions and editorial caution is an eternal one at The Times. Ms. Abramson herself experienced it shortly after joining the paper’s Washington bureau in 1997, she said.

For a 1,600-word front-page piece on the scandals plaguing then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Ms. Abramson—fresh from The Wall Street Journal—ventured to write a narrative lead, she recalled. An editor in the bureau threatened to turn it into a straight-news one.

“I pressed to keep it the way it was,” Ms. Abramson said. “I pushed back, and it mostly stayed the way I wrote it.” (“In the fall of 1962, Bruce Babbitt met Paul Eckstein,” the final version began. “They were first-year students at Harvard Law School …. ”)

“I got a good reaction from people in the bureau,” she said. “It was a different kind of piece.”

Cultivating that spirit of rebellion is likewise an institutional tradition around The Times.

“In my day,” former managing editor Arthur Gelb said, “the backbone of The Times was the voice of the young reporter. I always believed young reporters were the strength of the paper. Older reporters helped out the younger ones. It was a cycle. But that cycle broke down, to my regret.

“Without the young reporters’ voice in the paper, we lose a great deal,” Mr. Gelb continued. “We lose a freshness.”

Freshness was what Ms. Abramson and Mr. Berke were seeking at the lunch meeting. (Executive editor Bill Keller had planned to attend, but had to cancel to be in court with Ms. Miller.) Among the youth-oriented topics on the agenda was the question of whether The Times should consider abandoning the use of formal honorifics throughout the paper. Currently, only the sports pages and The Times Magazine omit the titles.

“I raised that,” Mr. Berke said. “I was just curious if younger people thought it was stodgy and old-fashioned.”

The verdict of the new generation: No, sir!

“Most people in the room,” Mr. Berke said, “thought it was a unique element in the paper.”

The editors also consulted with the youngsters on the subject of the paper’s pop-culture coverage—a wedge issue in the Howell Raines era, when Britney Spears infamously landed on the front page. “What we don’t want to do is Britney,” Ms. Abramson assured them at one point, according to a staffer.

One staffer took the occasion to contrast The Times’ coverage of the recent Live 8 concerts with The Washington Post’s. Next to The Times’ package of dispatches from pop-music critics Kelefa Sanneh in Philadelphia and Jon Pareles in London, The Post’s 2,000-word feature account of the Philadelphia show “had more flavor,” that staffer opined, according to another person at the lunch.

At another point, Ms. Abramson invited the writers to send her their drafts, “at the risk of being inundated”—another longstanding practice at The Times.

“Certainly I don’t interfere with the normal editing of the paper,” Ms. Abramson said. “Nor do I want the reporters to say to their line editors, ‘Well, Jill likes it, and she says I don’t have to listen to you!’”

In March—a year into the Valerie Plame leak case, but three months before it reached fever pitch—Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sat down in an Italian restaurant to help Roll Call columnist Mary Ann Akers write some jokes.

Ms. Akers was performing a stand-up routine later that night at the National Press Club, in a memorial event in honor of Hunter S. Thompson that Mr. Cooper was emceeing.

“I said I wanted to make reference to the C.I.A. leak investigation and the prosecutor’s threat to throw him in the slammer,” Ms. Akers recounted in an e-mail. “He said, ‘Sure, since I’m not allowed to talk about it, you can.’”

So Mr. Cooper helped her put together her gags—“like the champ that he is,” Ms. Akers wrote. She welcomed the input—after all, Mr. Cooper had been in the comedy game for eight years, doing stand-up at various clubs in New York and Washington, D.C., when he wasn’t covering the White House for Newsweek and Time.

To date, Mr. Cooper has performed between 40 and 50 gigs in the course of his moonlighting career, according to political columnist/part-time comic Walter Shapiro. Mr. Shapiro was the one who “discovered” Mr. Cooper the Comedian, landing him his first public appearance at the Gotham Comedy Club’s Boomer Humor night after seeing him give a toast at the Washington Monthly Annual Dinner.

Mr. Cooper’s bread and butter came from political jokes, and his impressions of Bill Clinton and Al Gore were famous among professional comedians and the Washington press corps alike.

“I remember how he talked about Clinton and Gore, and he was comparing their personalities to two kids experimenting with pot,” said political satirist Richard Siegel. “He said that Gore was the real uptight one—you know, ‘Mom’s gonna catch us, I know she’s gonna catch us,’ and Clinton was like, ‘Oh, c’mon, let’s listen to another album.’”

After that first gig at Gotham, Mr. Cooper started taking his comedy very seriously. He’d come up to New York to perform whenever he was asked—which was often—even if he had to be in the newsroom the next morning. Often, according to Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Cooper would hop on midnight buses back to the capital after evening shows in New York.

“Matt is much more of a New York–funny guy than a Washington-funny guy,” Mr. Shapiro said.

Video of the 2004 “Washington’s Funniest Celebrity” contest shows Mr. Cooper drawing hardly any laughs with a five-minute routine on John Kerry’s stiffness, John Edwards’ resemblance to John Denver (“You’re a multimillion-dollar trial lawyer—get a decent haircut!”) and Martha Stewart.

At one point on the tape, after a riff about Dick Cheney and W.M.D. lands with a thud, Mr. Cooper looks down and raises his eyebrows in apology: “O.K.—you know, it’s Wednesday night, you don’t get the good comics on Wednesday night. That’s the thing. You have to go on Saturday nights. You get the better comics on Saturday nights.”

“Seriously, that’s not emblematic!” Mr. Shapiro said. “Washington humor is how many times you can mention Tom DeLay in the same sentence. New York is a little more knowing, a little less self-important.”

Indeed, 2004 was not Mr. Cooper at his best. He had won the same contest six years earlier with a perfect score, beating out the likes of Norman Ornstein for top honors. (In an unfortunate footnote to his victory, Mr. Cooper was accused of anti-Muslim sentiment by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee for making “choking sounds as he tried to pronounce an Arabic name” during his set.)

Despite that history, Ms. Akers took his advice at the National Press Club, writing a joke into her set about his potential prison sentence.

“He thought I should do something in my routine on the gay outing campaign that surrounded the ’04 elections,” she recalled. Having covered the scandal for Roll Call, Ms. Akers knew she wanted to use a bit about former Congressman Ed Schrock, a Virginia Beach conservative who was outed during his re-election campaign, and Mr. Cooper apparently thought that would be a good opportunity to drop a riff about his own legal problems.

“My joke ended with something like, ‘Hey, did you know Ed Schrock still works on Capitol Hill?’“ Ms. Akers wrote in her e-mail. “‘Yes, true story. He does. He’s an attendant in the men’s room.’ Then I said, ‘Hey, speaking of man-on-man love, let’s talk about Matt Cooper.’”

According to Tim Howe, who has produced several gigs featuring Mr. Cooper, the embattled Time reporter stayed in the back of the room, pacing back and forth and listening intently as Ms. Akers performed. “Cooper knew the whole routine!” he said. “I could see him mouthing the words. And then when a joke hit, he just pumped his arm in the air.”

As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s attack sharpened in the following months, the jokes stopped coming—and Mr. Cooper hasn’t performed a comedy routine since the Hunter Thompson event. Mr. Cooper declined to comment about his past or future comedy career.

“I hope he comes back; he’s a talented guy,” says Chris Mazzilli, owner of the Gotham Comedy Club. “I’m sure he’d have quite a following now.”

—Leon Neyfakh

New York magazine “Naked City” columnist Amy Sohn faces certain obstacles to writing about sex in its varieties: She’s now a stable thirtysomething, married and breeding and working for Adam Moss. But Ms. Sohn knows the perfect friend to consult for insights into the sticky dating-and-mating scene—a randy, twentysomething sex columnist for the New York Press by the name of Amy Sohn.

Selected leads from recent “Naked City” columns:

July 25, 2005: “A few years ago, I started seeing a man twice my age.”

June 20, 2005: “When I graduated from college and moved back to New York, it hit me that since I had not met the love of my life at school, I would have to find him in the Real World, a place that seemed terrifyingly dangerous and immense.”

Feb. 14, 2005: “I was riding home from a party in a cab with a narcissistic boyfriend when he said, ‘I’m a little bit upset with you.’”

Nov. 22, 2004: “A month before I met the man I eventually married, I was seeing a guy I’ll call Flake.”

Aug. 16, 2004: “A couple of years ago, I met a guy at my local bar, and as soon as I beat him at eight-ball, he said he liked my eyes.”

May 10, 2004: “A few years ago, I dated the ex of a friend.”

—Tom Scocca

New York Times pundit standings, July 12-18

1. Frank Rich, score 24.0 [rank last week: 1st]

2. Sarah Vowell, 15.0 [5th]

3. Thomas L. Friedman, 13.0 [2nd]

4. Paul Krugman, 12.5 [6th]

5. Bob Herbert, 0.5 [3rd]

6. (tie) David Brooks, 0.0 [no rank] Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [7th] John Tierney, 0.0 [4th]

Temp columnist Sarah Vowell channeled her inner Alsop this week, offering a piece titled “The Speech the President Should Give.” So much for ladies being too shy and retiring to play the op-ed game! Or to prosper at it: Ms. Vowell placed both of her columns in the week’s Most E-Mailed list—two more than Bob Herbert, David Brooks, Nicholas D. Kristof and John Tierney put together.

—T.S.

What it said, according to one staffer who was present, was that in the wake of Mr. Pearlstine's agreement six days earlier to supply prosecutors with reporter Matthew Cooper's notes and e-mails, “the source wondered how they could deal with Time magazine again.”

Mr. Pearlstine, in the midst of a tense and angry two-hour meeting, didn't display any shock. “Norm wasn't startled,” the staffer said. “He said he knew this was the consequence of his decision.”

Elsewhere in Washington, D.C., that day, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was being pummeled by another roomful of irate reporters. Newsweek had just reported that one of Mr. Cooper's e-mails confirmed that Presidential advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove had leaked the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the media—a notion that Mr. McClellan, Mr. Rove and the President had all previously denied.

Two months before, Newsweek was the embattled party, denounced by the White House after it printed an anonymously sourced and incorrect item about Koran desecration at the government's prison facility in Guantánamo Bay. Now, reporter Michael Isikoff—who'd been behind the disastrous Koran item—had gotten the scoop on Mr. Cooper's e-mail, and Newsweek was leading the charge.

“With time, we'd break another story and remind people of the kind of journalism we do,” Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said, recalling the Koran debacle. “That's what we've done here.”

Now Mr. Pearlstine is the one whose magazine's reputation needs shoring up. His decision to give up Mr. Cooper's confidential sources in the Plame case—even as The New York Times' Judith Miller headed to jail to protect hers—has raised voices inside and outside Time denouncing him as a media turncoat, a lawyer-minded boss who put corporate interest and legalisms ahead of journalistic principle.

“I don't think Norm should have been surprised with the reaction,” Mr. Whitaker said. “The issue of confidential sources—at the end of the day, it's an all-or-nothing proposition. If you start making exceptions, then how are sources who have sensitive information going to think you wouldn't make an exception in their case? Whatever the legal arguments are, as a practical matter it's been made clear by his reporters that he's made their life more difficult.”

And the reporters have been letting Mr. Pearlstine know it. Last Wednesday, after Mr. Cooper's final contempt hearing—in which, having reportedly concluded that Mr. Rove had released him from their confidentiality agreement, Mr. Cooper agreed to testify before the grand jury—managing editor Jim Kelly met with the bureau to take the temperature of the staff.

"I realized that Norm and [editorial director] John [Huey] should be here,” Mr. Kelly said. “It's important that Norm and John hear and understand the consternation and anger that at least some of these folks felt in how the decision was made.”

So that brought Mr. Pearlstine, Mr. Huey, Mr. Kelly and Time news director Howard Chua-Eoan to 12th Street NW in the District, to a sixth-floor conference room stocked with sandwiches, Cobb salad and cookies delivered from the Corner Bakery.

At the meeting, first reported in the July 12 Wall Street Journal, Mr. Pearlstine opened with brief remarks. The staff then peppered the boss with pointed questions—and, at times, open displays of vitriol.

"We were told not to hold back, and we didn't,” a staffer present at the meeting said. “We made it very clear to Norm, when he would put on his lawyer's hat, we would put on our journalist's hat.”

Staffers told Mr. Pearlstine that his decision to stop fighting the legal system was “a mistake” and “problematic,” according to a person familiar with events at the meeting. They also asked Mr. Pearlstine to once again explain why he hadn't pursued a strategy of civil disobedience, the position embraced by Ms. Miller and Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Mr. Pearlstine replied that Time had run out of options. He stressed the unique set of circumstances that had led to his decision. As a named party to the case—unlike The Times—the magazine had to obey the law, he said.

Mr. Pearlstine described the decision as a watershed moment in a time of increasing pressure on journalistic freedoms.

The rules of journalism have changed, he told the staff, according to a witness. Time, he said, was the first casualty in an escalating campaign to constrain journalism organizations. The message, the source said, was that “we're in a different game here.” No reporter, Mr. Pearlstine noted, had been subpoenaed in the course of reporting on Watergate.

Mr. Cooper was present for 90 minutes of the two-hour meeting, according to one person in the room. At one point, Mr. Cooper said that he respected Mr. Pearlstine's decision, but disagreed with it—sentiments he has expressed in multiple public statements.

"I reiterated,” Mr. Cooper said when reached by phone July 12, “that I thought the decision, though honorably made, was a mistake.”

At one point, Mr. Pearlstine—trying to find common ground—spun a series of different scenarios, asking the staff under which ones they would support unmasking a confidential source to the authorities. What if, for instance, the source had committed a crime by disclosing some information?

The staff rejected them all, according to a witness; nothing justified breaking a reporter-source agreement of confidentiality.

“Once you offer a source background, you have to go all the way,” said a Time staffer who was at the meeting, explaining the exchange. “There is no degree. They were surprised how truly absolute we think that agreement is.”

“Everybody felt better for having the confrontation,” the Time staffer continued, “but we're all feeling this is going to be a long process.”

The brass and the staff found one point of solidarity in their reaction to David Carr's July 11 New York Times column—in which, writing about Mr. Pearlstine, he labeled Time “a lifestyle bible that often leaves the more ambitious stories to others.”

Citing a recent cover on interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay and a piece on suicide bombers, the Time staff took that as a low blow.

“It's patently absurd,” Mr. Kelly said of the column. “Life is short; I'm not going to waste a lot of anger with this. It's particularly absurd coming after our Gitmo cover …. If I'm running a lifestyle bible, then I should be fired.”

Mr. Cooper's lawyer, Richard A. Sauber, also took issue with a July 11 piece in The Times by Adam Liptak, “For Time Reporter, Decision to Testify Came After Frenzied Last-Minute Calls,” which described the negotiations behind Mr. Cooper's reprieve.

"I thought it was inaccurate and misleading,” Mr. Sauber said by phone on July 12. “They made it sound as if Matt Cooper was running around looking for a way out. There was no frenzy. There were two phone calls.”

For Time's management, the damage control didn't stop with the July 11 meeting. Following the lunchtime discussion, Mr. Pearlstine and his fellow top editors boarded a Metroliner back to Manhattan. At 7:30 p.m., they convened with other editors at the Palm on West 50th Street to discuss the magazine's policy options going forward. They agreed that standards on anonymous sourcing, and policies about e-mail, need to be revised.

On July 13, Mr. Huey is scheduled to address Time's Los Angeles bureau.

With Time now taking its turn in the woodshed, Newsweek can relate to its rival's woes. “I've been there,” Mr. Isikoff said. “It wasn't pleasant.”

Mr. Isikoff acknowledged that to some extent, the memory of his discredited report lingered as he pursued the story that Mr. Rove had been Mr. Cooper's source.

“I'd be lying to be saying the shadow of that wasn't operating on some levels there,” he said. “That said, clearly, when you're writing about the deputy White House chief of staff—and arguably the most powerful man in the White House—you have to be extra careful. But we'd handle this exactly the same way if the Koran incident didn't occur. We'd be careful.”

It remains unclear how Newsweek got Mr. Cooper's internal e-mails—whether from Time or from special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's previously leak-proof office.

"We don't know who the e-mails were forwarded to,” Time's Mr. Kelly said. “We don't know how many people are in possession of them. I'm not shocked or surprised that what we handed over 10 days ago has been leaked.”

--Rebecca Dana

New York Times pundit standings, July 4-11:

1. Frank Rich, score 23.0 [rank last week: 1st]

2. Thomas L. Friedman, 12.5 [2nd]

3. Bob Herbert, 8.0 [5th]

4. John Tierney, 7.0 [tie-7th]

5. Sarah Vowell, 5.0 [no rank]

6. Paul Krugman, 2.0 [4th]

7. Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [3rd]

There goes the shutout! John Tierney, the Don Drysdale of not getting his op-eds e-mailed, breaks his string of consecutive scoreless columns with a July 5 piece that returned to his geographic and ideological roots. Arguing from the example of his old Pittsburgh home, the contrarian-libertarian pundit made his case that the worst way to renew an urban area is through urban-renewal projects. For once, New York Times readers were buying it—or at least forwarding it to their friends.

—T.S.

Now Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has made things even more impenetrable with this week's revelation that Time's Matthew Cooper, in an e-mail to his bureau chief, characterized a conversation with Karl Rove as having been on "double super secret background." Too short to be a double Dutch riff, too rhythmic to be anything else--what does this newest addition to the technical lexicon mean? Experts weigh in:

"I've heard of background and deep background, which usually means no quotations of any kind. I've never heard of double super secret background, but it sounds like a good name for an overpriced ice cream cone."
--David Sanger, senior White House correspondent, New York Times

"I think it means that Rove didn't want to be identified. I don't know whether Karl Rove used those words or if those were the words Matt Cooper used in his e-mail to Mike Duffy, but it's not a generally used term to describe a conversation."
--Dan Balz, national political correspondent, Washington Post

"Matt Cooper is an extremely funny person (he does a stand-up comedy routine in New York and Washington), so I think he's probably making fun of the Washington press culture, though I guess he also probably wanted to stress that the recipient of his e-mail make sure to guard the identity of his source, and a lot of good THAT did."
--Adam Nagourney, national political reporter, New York Times

"Sounds like 'double secret probation' from Animal House."
--Dana Milbank, Washington Post

"The proper answer is that 'double super secret background' is 'background' with hot fudge sauce, nuts, sprinkles and a hidden microphone. In short, it's a made-up term by someone who's too into the hugger-mugger of the whole thing. I can't imagine using it without a horselaugh."
--James Traub, regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine

"I've never heard that term before."
--A longtime New York Times journalist, speaking on background only.

--Leon Neyfakh