Mr. Oreskes, who is currently the editor of the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, has been working in one capacity or another under the Times umbrella for the past 27 years. Before he took his position as executive editor of IHT in 2005, he was the deputy managing editor of The Times for Bill Keller, and an assistant managing editor under Howell Raines before that.

At the AP, he'll become the managing editor of the wire service's U.S. News department, a newly created department there.

Update! AP has confirmed our report with a press release. Here it is:

AP names Michael Oreskes Managing Editor for U.S. NewsThe Associated Press today named Michael Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, to be AP Managing Editor for U.S. News.

In the newly expanded position, Oreskes will oversee all U.S. news from The Associated Press, from state bureaus to national political coverage, for both U.S. and world audiences.

“We’re delighted to have an editor with Michael’s breadth take up this important new position in the AP,’’ said Kathleen Carroll, executive editor. “His experience at every level of coverage, in every format for audiences in the United States and across the globe, makes him uniquely suited for this position.”

Oreskes, 53, has served as executive editor of the International Herald Tribune since 2005. Previously, he was deputy managing editor of The New York Times, supervising television and Internet content. During this period, he won three Emmy awards and a DuPont award for documentary television.

The appointment was announced Thursday by Mike Silverman, senior managing editor, to whom Oreskes will report. He joins AP in July and will be based at AP headquarters in New York.

"With his background as metro editor and statehouse bureau chief, he will be a strong advocate for the strong state reports that make AP unique,” Silverman said. “And with his Washington experience added in, he can help our journalists connect the dots between the federal government and the states and citizens it serves."

Oreskes will oversee the work of AP’s bureaus in the 50 states, which will be reporting up to him through four regional operations being created in 2008 and 2009. He’ll also supervise the work of the Washington bureau, the news service's largest domestic bureau, and AP's national feature, beat and investigative reporters.

Oreskes will be one of four managing editors, joining John Daniszewski, in charge of international coverage; Kristin Gazlay, in charge of business news and training, and Lou Ferrara, in charge of sports, entertainment and a merged multimedia and graphics department.

From 1997 to 2001, Oreskes was Washington bureau chief for the Times, and previously served as metropolitan editor and city editor. He started with the Times in 1981, as a metropolitan correspondent. Before that Oreskes worked for the Daily News in New York City. He is a graduate of City College of New York.

About The AP

The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP.

Mr. Rothman's piece, which was immediately seized upon as a hip, hilarious deconstruction of the Internet economy myth, generated enormous buzz for The New Yorker , a publication unused to such rapt attention from techies and glib twentysomethings. A new comic hero was born.

Well, so much for that .

This week, Mr. Rothman's unbelievable tale was exposed as quite a bit too unbelievable for The New Yorker 's taste. Faced with a growing number of questions about Mr. Rothman's piece and its veracity, the embarrassed magazine quickly distanced itself from "My Fake Job" and its Wunderkind author. In a terse Dec. 11 editors' note, The New Yorker declared it "does not disguise details or mix fact and fiction without informing the reader (not even in a comic piece like this one), and we sincerely regret the error."

So how did it get to this? According to sources at The New Yorker , Mr. Rothman's story came to the magazine's attention in the middle of the summer, e-mailed in the form of a pitch to the magazine's editorial director, Henry Finder, by David McCormick, a literary agent for I.M.G. in New York. Later, Mr. McCormick followed up with a more detailed sketch of the piece, featuring some 2,000 words of notes taken during Mr. Rothman's phony assignment.

Although it was not immediately pegged as such, Mr. Rothman's piece seemed to be a natural–albeit offbeat–fit for The New Yorker' s upcoming "Digital Age" special issue, which Mr. Finder oversaw. The question of whether or not Mr. Rothman had committed an ethical transgression by sneaking into the company in the first place was considered, but sources said the point was declared moot because Mr. Rothman had already completed the piece by the time The New Yorker accepted it. The article, which was generally well-written and grammatically clean, was then submitted to the magazine's fact-checkers.

Confirming the events depicted in "My Fake Job" proved to be a challenge for The New Yorker 's vaunted fact-checking department. Since Mr. Rothman had essentially reported his story through subterfuge, it was nearly impossible to corroborate facts by contacting members of the dot-com company, who were not aware they had been duped. As a result, Mr. Rothman himself was relied upon to confirm the essence of his tale–and that, in the end, would prove to be the piece's undoing.

But when it was first released in mid-November, Mr. Rothman's story was an unadulterated hit. Praised by media critics far and wide, the piece became the subject of endless speculation as readers tried to guess which one of Manhattan's Silicon Alley outfits had been snookered. The cherry on top was a report that Mr. Rothman and his representatives were being flooded with interest from Hollywood about a cinematic adaptation of "My Fake Job."

Mr. Rothman was thrilled about the attention. Having a piece published in The New Yorker represented a career highlight for a precocious writer who had already had his share of pre-30's highlights, from landing a job with the Letterman show at age 21 to becoming, at age 24, the youngest head writer in the show's history. Among his many contributions, Mr. Rothman was the mastermind behind Fresh Step, a faux boy band that had launched, Spinal Tap-style, on the Late Show .

Elsewhere, however, Mr. Rothman's piece wasn't met with such great enthusiasm. Employees in the New York offices of Luminant Worldwide–a Dallas-based e-business firm that helps companies plan their Internet strategies–began to speculate that Mr. Rothman had infiltrated one of their divisions. Certain passages of "My Fake Job" provided tell-tale clues–the description of a lobby, the text printed on a company T-shirt, the page of Moby Dick stuck on an elevator door. Soon accusations about accuracy and guesses about the location of Mr. Rothman's opus began plopping onto online message boards such as vault.com and fuckedcompany.com.

The most significant accusation was that Mr. Rothman wasn't the only Rothman in the building. "I would like to point out one more minor itty-bitty little detail that Mr. Rothman seems to have left out by mistake," read one Nov. 28 posting on vault.com. "His mommy worked there."

By then, questions about Mr. Rothman's piece had begun to filter into The New Yorker 's offices on Times Square. Several days after the initial postings on the Internet, the magazine's editor, David Remnick, began to worry about how fake "My Fake Job" was. He telephoned Mr. Rothman–who was now working in Los Angeles as a writer for a new, still-untitled sitcom by the creators of Freaks and Geeks , developed for Fox by DreamWorks SKG–and asked him if, in fact, his mother had worked at the company he described in the piece. According to Mr. Remnick, Mr. Rothman conceded that yes, mommy worked there.

But that wasn't really what set off the meticulous author of The Devil Problem and Lenin's Tomb . Mr. Remnick recalled: "I asked him, 'If there is anything else in the piece that is problematic, that we need to know … tell me now.'" According to the New Yorker editor, at that point Mr. Rothman said he had changed details and the description of the office to disguise the company.

And there was one more thing: Mr. Rothman admitted he never got that office massage, Mr. Remnick said. Mr. Rothman's account of the massage had been one of the more evocative passages in the piece. "Melissa's hands are rubbing my shoulder blades," he had written. "'You have a lot of tension in your neck and shoulders,' she says …. [As] she navigates her knuckles around my back, I meditate blissfully."

But now pressed, a contrite Mr. Rothman told Mr. Remnick he had, in fact, stood in line for a massage, but actually chickened out at the last minute.

It wasn't Mike Barnicle or "Jimmy's World," but it was enough to push Mr. Remnick to the edge. "What concerned me, above all, was describing something as if it happened and it didn't happen, and that's just no good," Mr. Remnick said. "And the hell of it is there is no excuse for mixing fact and fiction and disguising details without informing the reader, and it doesn't matter if the piece is comic or not."

Efforts to contact Mr. Rothman yesterday in Los Angeles were unsuccessful. Messages left at DreamWorks went unreturned, as did messages left with Mr. McCormick, Mr. Rothman's literary agent.

But Mr. Rothman's manager, Mr. Minor, defended his client and didn't seem to know what to make of all the fuss. "Everything was true. There were massages there … he chose not to have one … why that became an issue, I have no idea," Mr. Minor said.

Added Mr. Minor: "Rodney won't be getting a job at Dateline , but that's not what he was setting out to do."

Meanwhile, executives at Luminant, now convinced they are the company described in "My Fake Job," are mulling their options. The company's executive vice president for corporate development, Richard Scruggs, said his colleagues at Luminant found Mr. Rothman's article amusing at first. But their thoughts quickly turned to the issue of security, and how the author had managed to worm his way into their company without it coming to their attention, he said.

"If he did everything that he said he did in the article, he was trespassing," Mr. Scruggs said. "And there was disappointment that The New Yorker seemed to condone that kind of behavior."

The company is now reviewing its security procedures as a result of the piece, he said. And Mr. Scruggs was unable to confirm whether or not Mr. Rothman's mother had been a Luminant employee, other than to say there had been an employee with the same last name. He was also unable to corroborate a report that Mr. Rothman's mother was no longer with the company.

As for Mr. Rothman and The New Yorker , that dalliance appears to be over. "You know, I would have to think a thousand times before ever accepting a nonfiction piece from someone after something like this," Mr. Remnick said. In other words, Rodney Rothman's once-skyrocketing stock at The New Yorker has been, as they say, de-listed.

After a decade in the media badlands, the Madison, Wis.-based satirical newspaper The Onion is getting ready for the big time.

The Onion is planning to open an office in New York sometime next year. New York distribution of the humor weekly will likely follow, which means that people who have only giggled over The Onion online will be able to pick one up on the street corner along with The Village Voice, New York Press and East Sider . Outside Madison, The Onion is distributed free in Milwaukee, Denver and Chicago.

The Onion 's circumspect publicist (based in New York) said, "They are looking to open a New York office. They are looking into having a New York edition." But staff and sources familiar with The Onion 's plans say the editorial staff is already apartment- hunting in New York City.

Ben Karlin, the head writer for Comedy Central's Daily Show and an Onion alumnus who keeps in touch with the folks in Wisconsin, said, "They're still going to do what they do, just changing geography." Mr. Karlin, who worked at The Onion from 1993 to 1996, eventually left for Los Angeles to try to make it as an entertainment writer.

"I think after going through several cycles of rising profile, it's pretty clear what you can and cannot do based out of Madison, Wis.," Mr. Karlin said. "Other successful ventures out of non-entertainment cities eventually had to come to Los Angeles or New York and have to deal with the industry."

Represented by 3 Arts Entertainment, The Onion has, over the last couple of years, been more aggressive about inking book and movie deals. Two Onion books, Our Dumb Century and The Onion's Finest News Reporting , have both gone on to be best sellers.

Last month, DreamWorks bought the rights to a 700-word fake news story, "Canadian Girlfriend Unsubstantiated"–about a high- school boy who falsely claims to be dating a girl in Canada–as well as a spec script based on the story written by former Onion writer Rich Dahm. In May, DreamWorks also bought the rights to "10th Circle Added to Rapidly Growing Hell" and signed Onion writer Todd Hanson for the script.

Moving along with its ambitious plans to become a player in television news, on Dec. 4 The New York Times announced the appointment of Michael Oreskes, currently the Washington bureau chief, as assistant managing editor responsible for electronic news, a new masthead-level title at the paper.

The creation of the new title and The Times ' plans to focus on producing television programming were reported here last week. In a staff memo announcing the promotion, Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld wrote that Mr. Oreskes would "play the leadership role in the newsroom on our various TV initiatives as well as serve as point man on all our joint undertakings with New York Times Digital. Since one of our basic reasons for getting into television is to prepare for the broadband future, there's an obvious value in having one person constantly targeting our efforts in these two converging spheres."

Washington editor Jill Abramson will replace Mr. Oreskes as bureau chief when he leaves the post in January.

Less than 12 hours into his new role, Mr. Oreskes said he would "be involved in the planning and the launching" of a New York Times nightly newscast on PBS, jointly produced with MacNeil-Lehrer Productions. "We will want to use the newsgathering and newswriting of The New York Times to make the show special," he said. The Times and MacNeil-Lehrer are negotiating with an underwriter to finance the show; an anchor will not be hired until the underwriter is secured. For the record, Mr. Oreskes said, he is not in the running.

Mr. Oreskes said he is working with NYT Television, a production company owned by the New York Times Company that produces Trauma: Life in the E.R. , a documentary series about emergency rooms carried by the Learning Channel, and that will produce Science Times for the National Geographic Channel. "It is … our goal to make them more at home in the newsroom," said Mr. Oreskes, "and make people in the newsroom at home with them, and work them more closely on television that proudly carries the name The New York Times ."

Aside from working on the "Political Points" daily Webcast that is produced by The Times and ABCNews.com, Mr. Oreskes doesn't have much experience in television. "I'm a newspaper guy," he said, adding that his new position is about transforming The New York Times from a newspaper to a multimedia news organization.

"[ Times publisher] Arthur [Sulzberger Jr.] has been very clear about the idea that we have to begin thinking of ourselves not as a newspaper," Mr. Oreskes said, "but a newsgathering and distribution organization that is agnostic about whether we reach our audience through paper or the Internet, or over broadcast or cable television or on the radio.

"Our real core competency is in the gathering and distribution of really high- quality news and information, and what we have to learn to do is achieve the same standards of excellence that we've mastered in the production of a newspaper in the production of television programming."

That statement is a huge shift for The New York Times .

Luckily for Mr. Oreskes, he has plenty of friends in the television world. He said he would be taking tours around the studios of three of the major networks.

For a company that reports on the strengths and weakness of media companies, Inside.com–the all-media Web site that is, according to The New York Times , terrorizing Variety –hasn't been terribly specific about how it plans to make a business out of itself. Public details about Inside.com's business have been scarce. On Nov. 26, Inside.com founder Kurt Andersen told the New York Post that in less than a year of existence, the company has already spent about half of the money they've raised so far. And a while back, Inside chief executive Deanna Brown told The New York Times that the company fell short of its goal to sell 30,000 subscriptions to the site, which are priced at $200 a year.

So the question remains: How is the site going to make it, especially now that Inside has begun publishing a biweekly magazine? Well, at least for the near-future, Inside.com will be surviving the old-fashioned dot-com way: on venture capital. Last month, the company raised an additional $7 million from its original investors, Flatiron Partners and Chase Capital Partners, as well as Goldman, Sachs & Company, Lehman Brothers, Rho Capital Management and The Industry Standard , which is also a business partner on Inside magazine.

Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Flatiron, said that the new money raised by Inside.com was to help pay for the additional costs of publishing a magazine. "There were some investors who wanted to put more money in than the company was prepared to raise at that time, at that price," Mr. Wilson said of the initial round of financing. "Then they made the decision to launch the magazine, and they realized that the expenses associated with the magazine were going to increase the capital requirements of the business and that extra capital would finance the magazine."

Dozens of Internet content companies have gone out of business in recent months–you may have read about them on Inside.com–after being unable to raise new money from investors. Mr. Wilson has seen Flatiron's investments in some content companies flounder lately–Urban Box Office went out of business and TheStreet.com laid off 20 percent of its staff.

Mr. Wilson said that as long as Inside.com continues to meet its business goals, Flatiron will continue to support it with capital. "You can't build a profitable media company overnight," he said. "To get our support … you have to execute. If you start to do what you say you're going to do, then … we'll put in more money to finance it. That's how we're approaching Inside.com."

Yet that certain je ne sais quoi that makes Public Lives a compelling, if avowedly quizzical, must-read Tuesday through Friday lies primarily in the window it provides into The Times ' on-going identity crisis. That and the strange enjoyment media mavens get out of scratching their heads and exclaiming, "Why'd they print that ?"

Mr. Lelyveld attests that he's "extremely happy" with Public Lives, an idea he willed into existence against much institutional resistance, including a bit of reluctance on the part of his Metro editor, Joyce Purnick, who took over the section in the middle of the column's gestation period. "I ran into Ben Bradlee and told him what we were doing," said Mr. Lelyveld. "And I said, we're not going to do gossip. He said, 'Yeah, yeah, that's what we said, too.' And we haven't yet."

To the readers of such curious little stories as the Dec. 15 tale of Miramax Films executive Tina Brown seeing one of her new boss' films, Shakespeare in Love , for the third time, this could be the problem. As Ms. Purnick, the current overseer of Public Lives, explained rather sternly: "Whether it runs on the front page or the editorial page, it has to conform to our standards. The same level of heavy reporting, no reliance on rumor, no floating of half-baked stories."

Which leaves some embarrassed Times editors grousing that what you're left with is "basically a contradiction in terms": a non-gossip gossip column that was designed to stay hip with what the readers want but which, when milled through the institutional intransigence of the paper, ends up more or less canceling itself out.

"There's a lot of things that happen at night," noted one Times man. "We're a staff of middle-aged people who go home at 6:30 after putting the nice paper to bed. The idea was to send people out at night, but it's very hard to find people here to do it." Ultimately, the editor added, it leads to "feeding from handouts from publicists."

The press agents don't mind that at all. "There's nothing I wouldn't give to Public Lives. It's The New York Times !" declared publicist Nadine Johnson. Of course, even if she does give it to them, they don't always print it, which explains why the brunt of Ms. Johnson's juicy bits end up in the New York Post 's Page Six–edited, as it happens, by her husband Richard.

Mr. Lelyveld decided The Times needed a new gossip column about two years ago. The idea was born out of the feeling that with a new stand-alone sports section, it would be harder to sell ads deep in Metro. "There was a feeling that Metro was too much government and crime and politics," said Mr. Lelyveld. Plus, "there was a feeling that we had never made as much of an effort on Chronicle as we ought to."

So, at the start of 1997, Metro writers Bruce Weber and Frank Bruni were dispatched to put together a prototype. "The marching orders were vague," said one person familiar with that incarnation. The project attracted the attention of New York magazine's Intelligencer gossips, who quoted a Times source saying, "A lot of writers at the paper feel it's beneath them." Perhaps with good reason. New York attributed Mr. Weber's on-the-record quotes to Mr. Bruni and had to run a correction.

The whole thing was put in turnaround for a couple months after that. Then in the spring of 1997, it re-emerged, with then-Metro editor Michael Oreskes leading the charge and Times magazine editor Adam Moss advising. "It was an effort to create a really rich Metro section that made you feel like you were dining on all of New York," said Mr. Oreskes, who admits to being a closet reader of People magazine.

To that end, Mr. Oreskes decided it was time to Meet the Gossips. "We were trying to understand what people were doing, what might be right for us to do," he said. "I think we were also giving serious thought to who we wanted to do it." Mr. Oreskes had breakfast or lunch with just about every one of them, including the Daily News ' George Rush and Joanna Molloy, MSNBC's Jeannette Walls, New York 's Beth Landman Keil, The Observer 's Frank DiGiacomo and former Washington Post Reliable Source columnist Lois Romano.

The Times seemed "very trepidatious about the idea of doing any kind of unsubstantiated quotes or sources," said one gossip. "They asked me what I thought of Matt Drudge. I said that The New York Times used unattributed sources all the time on the front page … They're so used to being spoon-fed information they don't know how to do unauthorized news there."

"It was very interesting listening to what they think about that kind of journalism," said Mr. Oreskes of his gossip dates. "Each of them had their own views on how they operated" in terms of "sourcing, standards, pejorative unattributed sources and pejorative tone."

Mr. Rush had breakfast with Mr. Oreskes at the Millennium Hotel that summer. "I think that Michael was running up against some resistance wondering if it belonged in the paper," he said. "He acknowledged that some people feel that The Times couldn't keep up its standards on the column."

"You can't abandon your standards in order to do things like this or it will become an embarrassment," Mr. Oreskes acknowledged.

Faced with these concerns, at least two of the columnists said they told Mr. Oreskes and Mr. Lelyveld that they didn't think The Times could do it. But Mr. Lelyveld wasn't about to be dissuaded. "He didn't like the idea that there was something The Times couldn't do," said one Times editor. "So he persevered."

The problem was, Mr. Oreskes was named Washington bureau chief, so he wouldn't be there to help Mr. Lelyveld with the birth. "I would have liked to have seen it though," he said. But that was left to his successor, Ms. Purnick. Shortly thereafter, according to Times sources, the project stalled. Again.

Ms. Purnick cops to being only a "casual reader of gossip." "I don't have a lot of patience for it," she said. "I used to work for the New York Post –even after [Rupert] Murdoch was there. I know what goes into Page Six. Plus, a lot of the people that gossip columns write about I don't much care for."

The pro-gossip crew had to regroup. The column eventually debuted with a rotating staff of three profilers–Metro feature reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, Joyce Wadler and David Firestone (who is leaving this month to join the Atlanta bureau)–and James Barron, a career-long Times man who had worked for the Styles section, on item duty. "It made sense to hire someone who had worked at The Times for a while and knew our ethic," said Ms. Purnick. (Mr. Barron did not return calls for an interview.)

However laudable that ethic, Public Lives' launch on Jan. 6, 1998, was not necessarily auspicious. There was a kids-say-the-darndest-things item on local labor leader Victor Gotbaum's 5-year-old granddaughter's eventual plans for higher office; the dual defection of Mark Golin and Catherine Romano from Cosmopolitan to Maxim (complete with a meticulous, two-sentence explanation of the chess term "castling," which Mr. Golin had used to describe their move); and a vague item about Felix Rohatyn's wife, Elizabeth, being "back in New York for medical reasons."

P.R. types were soon flocking to the column. On June 11, Bulldog Reporter , a newsletter for flacks, gushed: "If your client plays a role in a major news event but is too far behind the scenes to be the focus of a story, you won't find a better placement opportunity than on The New York Times ' Public Lives Page."

A year on, the city's gossips leaven their envy of The Times with contempt for the page. "I have to force myself to read it," said one. "I haven't really felt scooped that many times," said another. Neal Travis has described it as "insipid" in his Post column and Mr. Rush noted, "Even The Times is doing these flack-generated items that you'd think was beneath them."

It's not all bad. Mr. Barron gets some help from those reporters on staff who stumble upon stories when they do go out, and the column has been the site for several small news breaks. But in the end, it doesn't seem that different from the old Chronicle column. (Indeed, when asked about the difference between the two, Nadine Brozan, who wrote Chronicle for six years and now is on the religion beat, told Off the Record, "If you get the answer to that, I'd love to know it.")

However, it has its fans. "I think it's terrific," said publicist Bobby Zarem. "Everybody in the world mentions seeing it. It's widely read and important." And even inside the paper there's a feeling that the mini-profiles are a success–so much so that the format is going to be expanded to the National section on Mondays (without the frill of small items).

Still, for all the wry placements in the column, publicists don't seem to have much respect for it. "There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it," said one. "They can't capture the hyperbole of an event," said another. "They're more interested in the boldfaced names."

According to the calculations made in the Observer 500 list, an interesting selection of boldfaced names popped up in Public Lives: such non-notable celebrities as WABC anchor Bill Beutel, Steve Kroft, Dominick Dunne, Nina Griscom and Plácido Domingo made Public Lives' Top 10 list this year. Also popular: Robert De Niro, Rosie O'Donnell, Donald Trump and Nancy Reagan.

And so it's come to this. Publicists disrespect it by using it as a dumping ground, Times reporters and editors are hamstrung in their ability to report gossip by the paper's own ethical standards, and readers with enquiring minds are left to cock an eyebrow and periodically snort. Still, the powers that be don't seem to mind. As one Times source put it, "The expectations were low, so everyone thinks it's a smashing success."

Which isn't such a surprise when you consider how the column is perceived by its own custodian, Ms. Purnick. "The whole celebrity culture eludes me, so why should I read about it?" she states. "There. I've given you the perfect New York Times response."

When she arrives as editor of The Hollywood Reporter on Jan. 18, Anita Busch will finally be in a position to wreak revenge on her ex-employer, Variety . Ms. Busch left Variety in high dudgeon in September 1997 after a dispute with editor Peter Bart over a correction he ran regarding one of her stories. The thing is, she used to work at the Reporter , too, and loudly quit there to jump to Variety three years before in a dispute with another reporter. And in September, she loudly quit Entertainment Weekly after yet another editorial dispute.

Ms. Busch is regarded as one of the most dogged and skilled reporters on the film business beat, but by all accounts she is not an easygoing woman. "It wasn't the right fit for either of us at Entertainment Weekly ," she said. (James Seymore, EW 's managing editor, wouldn't comment.) "The way I was trained, my experience is in breaking news … It's great to be back in the breaking news business."

Her dislike for Mr. Bart, her former boss at Variety , is well known in the industry, as is her feeling that he plays favorites in the business and goes soft on people. "Peter likes to break stories, but if you're writing about Sony today, then you have to talk to them again next week," explained Dan Cox, Variety 's film editor. "It's not that we're sucking up to them." Mr. Cox added that newly heated competition with The Reporter would probably reduce Variety 's ability to hold certain items, like news of a pending deal, in exchange for an exclusive. Mr. Bart tried to remain diplomatic. "It'll be good, hopefully, to have some competition," he said. "I wish her the best. She's a good reporter." But he's perfectly capable of casting aspersions on her departure from Variety . "Whether she quit or was asked to leave, being a gentleman I won't comment on that," he said.

Ms. Busch's fiery reputation precedes her, of course. "Manage other people?" asked one Tinseltown journalist who has worked with her, "She can't manage herself." In anticipation of her arrival, Hollywood Reporter publisher and editor in chief Robert Dowling reorganized the staff so that there was a layer of management upon which she can stand and conceptualize. "I've always wanted her back here," he said.