The first to pipe up was Pamela Warr, a promotion associate. Ms. Warr had been helping set up a Hollywood party Details was throwing on March 24, along with Artisan Entertainment to celebrate Oscar and Independent Spirit Award nominations for the studio behind The Blair Witch Project .

For months, Ms. Warr had been calling publicists, lining up Whitney Houston, Milla Jovovich, John Waters, Vince Vaughn and Charlize Theron. "Well," said Ms. Warr, "we have this really big event in L.A. on Friday–"

"No," said Mr. Florio, "you don't. You don't have an event. You don't have a magazine."

Earlier that morning, the entire staff received an e-mail asking that it meet with publisher Linda Mason in the advertising conference room. The editorial staff had never met with her before.

The 65 or so members of the staff filed into the conference room to find Steve Florio at the front of the room. Mark Golin was there, too, standing off in a corner. What the Details staff didn't know, yet, was that just minutes before, Mr. Golin had briefly met with James Truman, Condé Nast's editorial director, and was dismissed .

Mr. Florio, "appropriately somber," as one person in the conference room put it, started out with, "I hate these kinds of meetings." Then, what was happening started to register.

"Looking around the room, people were almost giggling because it was so absurd on a level," said one Details editor. "It's one of these things where it's happening, but you can't quite process that it's happening, so your reaction is to chuckle in this detached way."

After the May issue, Condé Nast would stop publishing Details and the title would be transferred to Fairchild Publications, also owned by Condé Nast's corporate parent, Advance Publications. And, it would become another kind of magazine altogether, one less kindred to the grungy, horny version of Details Mr. Golin had been hired to create and more like W , the giant glossy sister-of- WWD that has become a great success.

Mr. Florio gave a few business reasons for shuttering the title: Details was losing money (as it has for the decade Condé Nast has owned it) and added that paper and postage was going up 20 percent later this year. "He said at that point it didn't seem like a viable business proposition anymore," said one Details editor.

Mr. Florio told staff members they had until Friday, March 24, to tend to the magazine's final affairs and then clear their desks. They would receive three weeks' severance pay for every year they have been with the magazine. Most of the editorial staff was hired after Mr. Golin finally arrived last May. Mr. Florio said the Condé Nast human resources department would do everything it could to place them at other magazines. And he said he would even pitch in himself. He gave out his number and invited staff members to call him for recommendations.

It was significant to some that when it came time to fire the whole Details staff, along with editor Mark Golin whom Condé Nast so proudly raided from Maxim in February 1999, the bearer of bad news was not James Truman, Condé Nast's editorial director, but Mr. Florio, the president and chief executive officer. And as the Details staff spent most of the rest of the day guzzling champagne and Absolut and dancing to Fatboy Slim in Mr. Golin's office, Mr. Truman never dropped by to say goodbye.

After all, Mr. Truman has always had a special relationship with Details . As the first Condé Nast editor of the magazine, Mr. Truman became a star, putting together a hipster young men's magazine and watching circulation increase from 242,278 in 1992 to 481,634 in 1994. That year, he was promoted to editorial director and, even after he got into the corporate suite, Details remained Mr. Truman's pet project. And it was Mr. Truman who called up Mr. Golin early last year after the then- Details editor Michael Caruso boasted in the pages of the New York Post , "My numbers are so good, they are going to be giving me a big fat raise." Mr. Caruso was promptly fired and Mr. Golin was installed in the post.

The official line at 4 Times Square is that it was Mr. Truman's idea to shut down Details as a Condé Nast magazine and restart it at Fairchild Publications, which is also owned by S.I. Newhouse Jr., the head of Advance Publications.

And, in fact, it was injection of Fairchild and its 45-year-old editorial director into the reinvention of Details that threw most Condé Nast employees.

"I'm going to start fresh," said Mr. McCarthy. He rejected comparisons to either of Fairchild's leading consumer titles, W , the upscale, oversize book that grew out of the fashion industry coverage of Women's Wear Daily , and Jane , Jane Pratt's eponymous sequel to Sassy that Fairchild bought from the Walt Disney Company in 1999. " Details will be the third model," Mr. McCarthy said. "It's not going to be W ."

About all that Mr. McCarthy is sure of is that Details will be a men's fashion magazine. Nonetheless, he said, there will be a strong life-style component of his Details . "The days when a pure-play fashion magazine existed are over, even in women's but especially in men's," he said.

Mr. McCarthy doesn't have much interest in the every-guy jocularity that Mark Golin brought to Details .

"I want to get the sophisticated 20-year-old guy reading it," Mr. McCarthy said. "Sophisticated in the sense that he's interested in fashion, and he's interested in the kinds of things we'll write about." Mr. McCarthy said those other things will be all the things that fall under the broad life style heading: clothing, music, movies and homes.

Mr. McCarthy said he thinks his Details should have a circulation of between 400,000 and 600,000. Wherever he expects to find these legions of 20-year-old esthetes, it's not the current readership of the U.S. laddie magazines.

" FHM and Maxim , they're great magazines," Mr. McCarthy said. "Good luck, but that's not what we're interested in."

First things first, Mr. McCarthy needs an editor. At the moment, it doesn't seem he has anyone in mind. "I'm going to cast the net wide," he said. "When a job like this opens, the first thing you get is every name you know. Everybody calls up and there's always two or three names that come up and I'm certainly going to speak to them because I ought to, but I'd also like to cast it a little bit wider to people I don't know or might be unexpected to edit a magazine like this," he said.

As for the rest of the staff, Mr. McCarthy said, "I'm going to go where I always go, which is to the people I work with, and we'll start fresh from that."

Mr. McCarthy said he's also interested in talking to some of the Details editors who will be unemployed as of Friday, March 24. "The top 20 or 15 people, I'm going to see and if they're good and we get along and I think they have great ideas and they want to work here, if all those things come together, I'm going to hire them." He'll have some competition. When the news leaked out on the morning of March 20 that Details was folding, offers started pouring in. Bill Shapiro, the Details executive editor who followed Mr. Golin from Maxim last year, said, "I'm getting calls from every fucking dot-com on the planet."

Soon after Mr. Florio's meeting broke up, the staff adjourned to Mr. Golin's office. They started downing shots of Absolut Mandrin, a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a case of merlot. The advertising department came up with some Amstel Light and a case of Heineken turned up somewhere.

"Out of the woodwork came this amazing stash of booze," said a staff member who partook in the grim bacchanalia.

As they started getting drunk, editors started taking turns sitting at Mr. Golin's desk, wearing his sunglasses. They took Polaroids of each other to commemorate the occasion. Pretty soon, Fatboy Slim was cranking on the stereo and a few people started to dance.

In recent months, there were few signs that Details ' collapse was imminent. Both Albert Kim, entertainment editor, and Kendall Hamilton, a senior features editor, had been hired in December. An art director, Rockwell Harwood, who had left Esquire , was due to start on Monday March 27.

Back in January and February, rumors had been circulating through the Details offices that the magazine was in trouble. At the time, as Details editors understood things, the Condé Nast top brass, including Mr. Florio, Mr. Truman and even Mr. Newhouse, had assured Mr. Golin that he had two years to stop the bleeding at Details , which one insider said had doubled during Mr. Golin's reign.

Earlier this year, according to insiders, the idea of folding Details had been floated, but the plan would have been to put the staff to work coming up with a brand-new title. Mr. Golin "was all for it," said the insider.

What the staff did instead was go to work reposition the magazine. Earlier in March, Mr. Golin and his top six editors spent two days holed up in the Marriott Marquis hotel on Broadway and 45th Street, rethinking the magazine. Editors were planning to travel around the country beginning the week of March 27 conducting focus group sessions on the new ideas.

"Everything would have been anti- Maxim ," said a Details editor, speaking of Mr. Golin's previous magazine. "The field was getting more competitive. GQ had become much more babe-oriented, FHM has just started, so our idea was to come up with a magazine that just had more, more heart, something that offered more to the 24-, 25-year-old guy. Not just babes and beer, issue-oriented stuff, stuff about their life and their work, passions and career."

The big changes were slated for the June issue, the Details home and apartment issue. The May issue had just closed Friday, March 17. "The June issue wouldn't have had a babe on the cover," said the editor. "It would have been something conceptual."

The change would have been just one of many during the tumultuous decade at Details . In the six years since Mr. Truman was moved up to editorial director, four editors have churned through the magazine. With them, Details has been thought of as everything from a possibly gay-oriented men's magazine, to Maxim wannabe to an anti- Maxim steered by the former Maxim editor. Now it's Fairchild's turn. And the odd thing is that Fairchild already had one shot at this category: It formerly ran M , a style magazine for men that developed from the business magazine Manhattan, inc . that Clay Felker brought to Fairchild in the late 1980's.

The first to pipe up was Pamela Warr, a promotion associate. Ms. Warr had been helping set up a Hollywood party Details was throwing on March 24, along with Artisan Entertainment to celebrate Oscar and Independent Spirit Award nominations for the studio behind The Blair Witch Project .

For months, Ms. Warr had been calling publicists, lining up Whitney Houston, Milla Jovovich, John Waters, Vince Vaughn and Charlize Theron. "Well," said Ms. Warr, "we have this really big event in L.A. on Friday–"

"No," said Mr. Florio, "you don't. You don't have an event. You don't have a magazine."

Earlier that morning, the entire staff received an e-mail asking that it meet with publisher Linda Mason in the advertising conference room. The editorial staff had never met with her before.

The 65 or so members of the staff filed into the conference room to find Steve Florio at the front of the room. Mark Golin was there, too, standing off in a corner. What the Details staff didn't know, yet, was that just minutes before, Mr. Golin had briefly met with James Truman, Condé Nast's editorial director, and was dismissed .

Mr. Florio, "appropriately somber," as one person in the conference room put it, started out with, "I hate these kinds of meetings." Then, what was happening started to register.

"Looking around the room, people were almost giggling because it was so absurd on a level," said one Details editor. "It's one of these things where it's happening, but you can't quite process that it's happening, so your reaction is to chuckle in this detached way."

After the May issue, Condé Nast would stop publishing Details and the title would be transferred to Fairchild Publications, also owned by Condé Nast's corporate parent, Advance Publications. And, it would become another kind of magazine altogether, one less kindred to the grungy, horny version of Details Mr. Golin had been hired to create and more like W , the giant glossy sister-of- WWD that has become a great success.

Mr. Florio gave a few business reasons for shuttering the title: Details was losing money (as it has for the decade Condé Nast has owned it) and added that paper and postage was going up 20 percent later this year. "He said at that point it didn't seem like a viable business proposition anymore," said one Details editor.

Mr. Florio told staff members they had until Friday, March 24, to tend to the magazine's final affairs and then clear their desks. They would receive three weeks' severance pay for every year they have been with the magazine. Most of the editorial staff was hired after Mr. Golin finally arrived last May. Mr. Florio said the Condé Nast human resources department would do everything it could to place them at other magazines. And he said he would even pitch in himself. He gave out his number and invited staff members to call him for recommendations.

It was significant to some that when it came time to fire the whole Details staff, along with editor Mark Golin whom Condé Nast so proudly raided from Maxim in February 1999, the bearer of bad news was not James Truman, Condé Nast's editorial director, but Mr. Florio, the president and chief executive officer. And as the Details staff spent most of the rest of the day guzzling champagne and Absolut and dancing to Fatboy Slim in Mr. Golin's office, Mr. Truman never dropped by to say goodbye.

After all, Mr. Truman has always had a special relationship with Details . As the first Condé Nast editor of the magazine, Mr. Truman became a star, putting together a hipster young men's magazine and watching circulation increase from 242,278 in 1992 to 481,634 in 1994. That year, he was promoted to editorial director and, even after he got into the corporate suite, Details remained Mr. Truman's pet project. And it was Mr. Truman who called up Mr. Golin early last year after the then- Details editor Michael Caruso boasted in the pages of the New York Post , "My numbers are so good, they are going to be giving me a big fat raise." Mr. Caruso was promptly fired and Mr. Golin was installed in the post.

The official line at 4 Times Square is that it was Mr. Truman's idea to shut down Details as a Condé Nast magazine and restart it at Fairchild Publications, which is also owned by S.I. Newhouse Jr., the head of Advance Publications.

And, in fact, it was injection of Fairchild and its 45-year-old editorial director into the reinvention of Details that threw most Condé Nast employees.

"I'm going to start fresh," said Mr. McCarthy. He rejected comparisons to either of Fairchild's leading consumer titles, W , the upscale, oversize book that grew out of the fashion industry coverage of Women's Wear Daily , and Jane , Jane Pratt's eponymous sequel to Sassy that Fairchild bought from the Walt Disney Company in 1999. " Details will be the third model," Mr. McCarthy said. "It's not going to be W ."

About all that Mr. McCarthy is sure of is that Details will be a men's fashion magazine. Nonetheless, he said, there will be a strong life-style component of his Details . "The days when a pure-play fashion magazine existed are over, even in women's but especially in men's," he said.

Mr. McCarthy doesn't have much interest in the every-guy jocularity that Mark Golin brought to Details .

"I want to get the sophisticated 20-year-old guy reading it," Mr. McCarthy said. "Sophisticated in the sense that he's interested in fashion, and he's interested in the kinds of things we'll write about." Mr. McCarthy said those other things will be all the things that fall under the broad life style heading: clothing, music, movies and homes.

Mr. McCarthy said he thinks his Details should have a circulation of between 400,000 and 600,000. Wherever he expects to find these legions of 20-year-old esthetes, it's not the current readership of the U.S. laddie magazines.

" FHM and Maxim , they're great magazines," Mr. McCarthy said. "Good luck, but that's not what we're interested in."

First things first, Mr. McCarthy needs an editor. At the moment, it doesn't seem he has anyone in mind. "I'm going to cast the net wide," he said. "When a job like this opens, the first thing you get is every name you know. Everybody calls up and there's always two or three names that come up and I'm certainly going to speak to them because I ought to, but I'd also like to cast it a little bit wider to people I don't know or might be unexpected to edit a magazine like this," he said.

As for the rest of the staff, Mr. McCarthy said, "I'm going to go where I always go, which is to the people I work with, and we'll start fresh from that."

Mr. McCarthy said he's also interested in talking to some of the Details editors who will be unemployed as of Friday, March 24. "The top 20 or 15 people, I'm going to see and if they're good and we get along and I think they have great ideas and they want to work here, if all those things come together, I'm going to hire them." He'll have some competition. When the news leaked out on the morning of March 20 that Details was folding, offers started pouring in. Bill Shapiro, the Details executive editor who followed Mr. Golin from Maxim last year, said, "I'm getting calls from every fucking dot-com on the planet."

Soon after Mr. Florio's meeting broke up, the staff adjourned to Mr. Golin's office. They started downing shots of Absolut Mandrin, a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a case of merlot. The advertising department came up with some Amstel Light and a case of Heineken turned up somewhere.

"Out of the woodwork came this amazing stash of booze," said a staff member who partook in the grim bacchanalia.

As they started getting drunk, editors started taking turns sitting at Mr. Golin's desk, wearing his sunglasses. They took Polaroids of each other to commemorate the occasion. Pretty soon, Fatboy Slim was cranking on the stereo and a few people started to dance.

In recent months, there were few signs that Details ' collapse was imminent. Both Albert Kim, entertainment editor, and Kendall Hamilton, a senior features editor, had been hired in December. An art director, Rockwell Harwood, who had left Esquire , was due to start on Monday March 27.

Back in January and February, rumors had been circulating through the Details offices that the magazine was in trouble. At the time, as Details editors understood things, the Condé Nast top brass, including Mr. Florio, Mr. Truman and even Mr. Newhouse, had assured Mr. Golin that he had two years to stop the bleeding at Details , which one insider said had doubled during Mr. Golin's reign.

Earlier this year, according to insiders, the idea of folding Details had been floated, but the plan would have been to put the staff to work coming up with a brand-new title. Mr. Golin "was all for it," said the insider.

What the staff did instead was go to work reposition the magazine. Earlier in March, Mr. Golin and his top six editors spent two days holed up in the Marriott Marquis hotel on Broadway and 45th Street, rethinking the magazine. Editors were planning to travel around the country beginning the week of March 27 conducting focus group sessions on the new ideas.

"Everything would have been anti- Maxim ," said a Details editor, speaking of Mr. Golin's previous magazine. "The field was getting more competitive. GQ had become much more babe-oriented, FHM has just started, so our idea was to come up with a magazine that just had more, more heart, something that offered more to the 24-, 25-year-old guy. Not just babes and beer, issue-oriented stuff, stuff about their life and their work, passions and career."

The big changes were slated for the June issue, the Details home and apartment issue. The May issue had just closed Friday, March 17. "The June issue wouldn't have had a babe on the cover," said the editor. "It would have been something conceptual."

The change would have been just one of many during the tumultuous decade at Details . In the six years since Mr. Truman was moved up to editorial director, four editors have churned through the magazine. With them, Details has been thought of as everything from a possibly gay-oriented men's magazine, to Maxim wannabe to an anti- Maxim steered by the former Maxim editor. Now it's Fairchild's turn. And the odd thing is that Fairchild already had one shot at this category: It formerly ran M , a style magazine for men that developed from the business magazine Manhattan, inc . that Clay Felker brought to Fairchild in the late 1980's.

"It was Friday, when the magazine closes," said New Yorker literary and fiction editor Bill Buford, who said he'd called several of his friends with the bad news. "We had a story by García Márquez that could have run. It could have been embarrassing. But it didn't check out."

Like all convincing hoaxes, this one was effective partly because it had some grounding in reality: Mr. García Márquez, 72, was admitted to a hospital in Bogotá on June 24, suffering from "general exhaustion syndrome," and had previously been treated for a tumor in his lung.

A woman at Mr. García Márquez's agency in Barcelona confirmed that the writer was still alive and that reports of his death were "just a stupid joke, probably."

Faced with paying for its expensive coverage in Kosovo, The New York Times asked its various departments in mid-May to try to cut back 5 percent on spending for the rest of the year. But according to sources in the photo department, the collateral damage fell especially hard on them: The photo department has been asked to cut back around 20 percent of its budget.

The photo desk is "definitely the hardest hit," said one Times source. The Times is laying off nonunion workers at the photo desk and editors are being "more circumspect" in making photo assignments to freelancers, according to Times sources.

But Times assistant managing editor Allan Siegal said, "The request for budget savings has been no greater for photo than for any other department." He would not go into specific numbers about how much people were asked to save, but noted, "The budget is a very fluid thing here."

The Star wants to move beyond the supermarket checkout line. Right now it's not much different from its sister publication, The National Enquirer . But when American Media chief executive David Pecker gets through with it, it'll be his version of the celebrity-fuzzy holy grail of magazines right now, In Style , or the European fame chronicler, Hello! That's the plan, anyway.

Peter Arnell, who designed Elle when Mr. Pecker ran its parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, is redoing the Star and setting up an ad campaign for the fall to knock home its new image. American Media is also looking for midtown space for the Star , which has its headquarters in Tarrytown, N.Y. The Enquirer 's offices are in Lantana, Fla. A proper New York bureau is going to be set up for it under its new news editor, Barry Levine, who was brought in from the syndicated TV show Extra last month.

Mr. Pecker had talks with the New York Post 's Page Six columnist, Richard Johnson, this past spring about having some role at the new Star , but nothing came of it. "Richard chose to stay at the Post because he's got such a good job," said Ed Hayes, the lawyer who represents Mr. Johnson.

Condé Nast skipper Steve Florio completed his nautically themed Oyster Bay, L.I., home not long ago, and you can examine his taste in the new issue of the Condé Nast magazine House & Garden . Mr. Florio is coyly referred to as "a top executive at a large media company" in the text. Adding to the giggles, the piece tells about how, when planning the house, his wife "went through dozens of magazines (she could!)" to find what she was looking for.

Condé Nast spokesman Maurie Perl confirmed that it was Mr. Florio's house, explaining that, "it's a fairly common practice" to not include the owner's name in the magazine, so that "the focus is on the house and the architect and not on the owners."

The house, described as a "turn-of-the-century shingled cottage with a dramatic foyer, graceful wraparound porches and … views from every window," is situated near those of Richard Aurelio, the retired president of New York 1 News, Charles Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision Systems Corporation, and Charles Wang, the chief executive of Computer Associates International Inc. It's across an inlet from the Seawanhaka Yacht Club, where Mr. Florio is a member.

True to his job as Condé Nast president, Mr. Florio has got the product placement going: Ralph Lauren Home Collection is his designer of choice. Apropos of nothing, a white box marked "Chanel" is pictured on the living room table.

Mr. Schmidt's memo notes that over the last two years, The Times has been approached by a "steady parade of movie producers, agents and studio reps," an industry trend that "reached its most extreme form in the magazine-cum-movie project announced earlier this month between Miramax and Tina Brown."

Mr. Schmidt, who polices conflicts of interest at the paper, wrote to staff members that while " The Times has not embarked on its own search for such synergy," at least 10 separate movies or television shows based on Times stories "are now underway or under negotiation." ( See Rick Bragg's feature on a prison rodeo and a Tim Weiner exposé on the C.I.A.)

With Hollywood increasingly on the prowl for ideas it can cull from newspapers and magazines, the situation can get sticky fast for working journalists. The question is: How can a reporter maintain his or her editorial integrity without the taint of a conflict of interest and still make a little dough on the side? Typically, Mr. Schmidt said in an interview, the paper has split option fees with writers, who also get to keep 100 percent of the "consultation" fees paid by movie studios. However, in his memo, Mr. Schmidt writes that while " The Times acknowledges its staff members should be able to earn legitimate outside income, these consulting agreements can pose tricky ethical questions …" To help negotiate this complicated terrain, he states, the paper is seriously considering bringing in someone "who would represent The Times ' interests-financial, ethical and otherwise-in any discussions or negotiations involving a writer or a writer's agent, and a filmmaker."

To some staff members, management's line has a familiar ring to it. Back in the mid-1980's, the paper took a similar tack when it partnered with Random House Inc. on the publishing house's Times Books imprint. Times writers were required to give the imprint the right of first refusal on book ideas that came out of their work, depriving some reporters of lucrative deals. At the time, reporters accused management of using ethics as a cover for company greed.

Mr. Schmidt told Off the Record that a Times agent would help police ethical disputes and would not act as a facilitator of synergy. "I do not mean to imply by that we're going into the film business," he said. "In some ways, I think you could describe it as an 'anti-agent' … Our concern is the integrity of the newspaper."

Until a new policy is conceived, the current Times policy remains in effect. Reporters and editors may not enter into talks with agents or film executives before a story has been published, and even after publication any contact with movie types has to be sanctioned by Mr. Schmidt's office. Also, staff members must refer interested agents to the Times legal department, "and it will decide whether or not the rights are available," Mr. Schmidt wrote. Finally, staff members must gain approval from management before entering into any "consulting" arrangements with movie executives, "to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest that could arise if staff members were to be seen trading on stories which they are covering."

Times management could face opposition on the plan from the Newspaper Guild, which is protective of the rights of its member reporters. Guild representative William O'Mara said the union had received a copy of Mr. Schmidt's memo. "We are examining it to see if there is a problem," he said. "We're not saying we agree or disagree yet."

If Condé Nast Publications president Steve Florio was hoping to combat Fortune magazine's recent portrayal of him as a compulsive liar, he did little to advance his cause with his recent handling of personnel changes in Condé Nast's corporate communications office. Indeed, it seems that Andrea Kaplan, the Condé Nast communications director who had the unenviable job of trying to convince reporters that Mr. Florio was on the level, quit her job because Mr. Florio wouldn't level with her.

Ms. Kaplan resigned from her post on July 30, just two days after Off the Record called her seeking comment on Mr. Florio's promotion of New Yorker publicist Maurie Perl to director of corporate communications at Condé Nast-a job description that sounded suspiciously like Ms. Kaplan's. Ms. Perl's appointment was news to Ms. Kaplan. According to associates, when Ms. Kaplan inquired about the rumor, she received assurances from Mr. Florio that the report was false. (Ms. Kaplan, whom colleagues said is currently negotiating her severance agreement, declined to comment for this article.) When the news item appeared on July 29, Ms. Kaplan, working off Mr. Florio's assurances, spent the afternoon doing damage control, calling various Manhattan media reporters to tell them that her duties would remain the same.

But a day later, Ms. Kaplan learned firsthand that Mr. Florio's word is not exactly his bond; she was summoned to the Condé Nast human resources department and informed of her demotion and Ms. Perl's new role. The ramifications of the change were apparent simply from the titles conferred on the two women: Ms. Kaplan was a Condé Nast vice president and Ms. Perl was being made a senior vice president. Ms. Kaplan apparently found the slights by her boss too much to bear and resigned later that day.

If he'd been inclined, Mr. Florio could have easily beaten a reporter to the punch in breaking the news to Ms. Kaplan. According to sources at The New Yorker , Mr. Florio first approached Ms. Perl about the post after his boss, the chairman of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr., addressed the New Yorker staff on July 9, only a day after Tina Brown left the magazine for a new venture at Miramax Films. Ms. Perl visited Mr. Florio's office at 350 Madison Avenue later that day, accepted her new post soon after, and subsequently turned down an offer from Ms. Brown for a job at Miramax. In short order, Ms. Perl's new responsibilities became common knowledge at Condé Nast, and Ms. Kaplan's colleagues privately wondered about her fate. Mr. Florio held his tongue, however, and somehow Ms. Kaplan never heard the news.

Condé Nast staff members speculate that Mr. Florio's mistreatment of Ms. Kaplan was retaliation for what he feels was her mishandling of the Fortune article. But even Mr. Florio's defenders at Condé Nast say that no publicist could possibly have spun away Mr. Florio's publicly stated fabrications that he played football for New York University (the school has no football team) or that he served in the military. (Mr. Florio is on vacation and Ms. Perl had no comment.)

Mr. Florio and Mr. Newhouse seem to have hoped that the Fortune article-in which writers Joseph Nocera and Peter Elkind pointed out that under the watch of Mr. Florio and his brother, Tom, The New Yorker had lost $175 million in 13 years, and that "in [Steve] Florio's hands, truth is a fungible commodity"-would simply go away, or at least be dismissed as a hit job by a competing company. But the article seems to have entered New York media lore. Mr. Florio's name rarely shows up in print these days without a mention of the Fortune piece close by. One Condé Nast source said that Mr. Newhouse was the one who had decreed that the company would not respond to the article, a decision that seems to have damaged his deputy. Another Condé Nast executive said that Mr. Florio's options are few. "What's he going to say," said the exec, "'We didn't lose $30 million in one year [at The New Yorker ], we lost $27.5 million'?"

But Mr. Newhouse's declaration didn't prevent Mr. Florio from criticizing the Fortune piece in a peculiar forum-an off-the-record lecture to students in the Radcliffe Publishing Course. In mid-July, Mr. Florio spent about 10 minutes critiquing the article to a group of twentysomethings at one of the Radcliffe seminars. But according to one student at the program, Mr. Florio's performance didn't go over particularly well. "We could understand from his explanation why he was upset," the student told Off the Record. "But we didn't buy it."

The appearance of John McPhee's byline in the current issue of The New Yorker isn't the only evidence that the magazine's new editor David Remnick is trying to bring back writers and editors alienated by his predecessor, Tina Brown. Mr. Remnick recently called writer Ian Frazier to find out if the onetime New Yorker regular might be interested in contributing to the magazine again. According to a source familiar with the conversation, Mr. Frazier, who resides in Montana and currently writes for Outside , The Atlantic Monthly and, from time to time, Allure , told Mr. Remnick that he wasn't interested. (Mr. Frazier declined to comment on the conversation.)

Mr. Frazier was never a big fan of Ms. Brown's New Yorker ; he got fed up and quit in 1995, when word got out that Ms. Brown had retained the comedienne Roseanne Barr as a consulting editor. Mr. Remnick said his approach to Mr. Frazier was "in no way a repudiation of Tina. She wanted very much for Sandy Frazier to be in the magazine." Mr. Remnick told Off the Record that he had put in calls to a number of old New Yorker scribes, and had assignments in the works by such writers as Alec Wilkinson and literary editor Roger Angell, whose outputs diminished substantially under Ms. Brown. He also confirmed that he recently had lunch with former New Yorker editor and current New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath, but he denied speculation that it was an attempt to court Mr. McGrath. Mr. Remnick took strong exception to the notion that he was trying to reheat a soufflé, as the saying goes.

"The idea that there is some sort of restoration going on, that this is a kind of backward-looking editorship, that's preposterous," Mr. Remnick said. "There are some writers who fell out with The New Yorker for some reason or other that I'm interested in talking to. But to think that's the only direction I'm looking in is totally wrong."

The July 20 Off the Record reported that New Yorker senior editor Deborah Garrison attended the meeting in which Tina Brown informed her "inner circle" of her decision to leave the magazine. Ms. Garrison did not attend that meeting.

Also, an item in the July 27 Off the Record may have given some readers the mistaken impression that New York Times media reporter Robin Pogrebin is switching beats in part because her sister, Abigail, took a job at Brill's Content . Ms. Pogrebin's transfer was voluntary and not related to her sister's position at the media magazine.

You can reach Off the Record by e–mail at wstjohn@observer.com.

But the thought that Ms. Brown might even be entertaining the idea of jumping ship apparently left Mr. Florio weak in the knees. On May 21, he took action: He removed his younger brother, Thomas Florio, from his post as president of The New Yorker , and replaced him with House & Garden publisher David Carey. The younger Mr. Florio was made publisher of Condé Nast Traveler , a position he has held before; Mr. Carey was named publisher of The New Yorker .

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ms. Brown has complained to colleagues for over a year that she had unfairly taken the heat for the younger Mr. Florio's poor performance–ad sales under Tom Florio have remained basically flat–and the change of publishers on May 21 was supposed to make her feel appreciated. So why did Ms. Brown have such a long face on when she returned to her West 43rd Street offices that afternoon?

It seems the elder Mr. Florio made an error in the execution of his Campaign to Keep Tina Happy. He appointed Mr. Carey to his new post without consulting Ms. Brown. "To not bring her in on the conversation, you'd think they were trying to make her leave," said one highly placed source at Advance Publications. "It's an antagonistic thing to do."

"She was surprised," said a New Yorker source.

Ms. Brown was not the only one who was surprised; the offer came as a surprise to Mr. Carey as well. On the morning of May 21, Mr. Carey showed up for a meeting with Mr. Florio and Mr. Newhouse about House & Garden 's September issue. "They had not talked about [the New Yorker job] before," he said. Ms. Brown found out that morning as well, sources at The New Yorker said, and that afternoon she met Mr. Carey for 20 minutes over coffee. Although Ms. Brown has reported to colleagues that she was impressed with Mr. Carey, she returned from the meeting wearing a pronounced scowl, her office mates say, a result of the elder Mr. Florio's faux pas.

Ironically, it was Ms. Brown who was the younger Mr. Florio's early champion. He replaced his elder brother at the helm of The New Yorker 's business side in 1994, inheriting a financial disaster. Under Steve Florio, the magazine lost upward of $30 million the first year of Ms. Brown's tenure. Ms. Brown advocated the younger Mr. Florio for the president's job when Steve Florio left to take over as president of Condé Nast.

"Tina thought Tom was a 'young man in a hurry,'" said a colleague of the young Mr. Florio's. Early on, the two were downright chummy; for Tom Florio's 40th birthday, Ms. Brown presented him with a humidor and a birthday card in the form of a personalized New Yorker cover by artist Edward Sorel. Despite flat ad sales, Mr. Florio cut costs, helped implement a money-saving digital layout system and substantially cut losses the magazine endured under his older brother.

"We had a professional working relationship," Mr. Florio said of Ms. Brown. "There are times at every magazine where you have the artist versus the suit. We sometimes disagreed on how to market the magazine, but I get on well with Tina. We talk all the time."

But New Yorker sources said that Tom Florio's business-side operation began to suffer in 1996. Ms. Brown was meeting her generous budgets, but the sales department continued to lag. Mr. Florio endured an unusually high turnover rate among his staff, and frequently had to revise his sales projections downward at midyear. New Yorker sources said Mr. Florio and Ms. Brown fell out at the end of the first quarter in 1997, when, despite a booming ad market, Mr. Florio could only manage modest gains. The relationship between the Florio brothers took a bizarre turn in January 1998 when Steve Florio seemed to undercut his younger brother's reputation in interviews with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times .

Steve Florio's removal of his younger brother from his New Yorker post spurred another round of news stories on the publishing-world fratricide theme, but one detail to emerge from Condé Nast suggests we should all suffer the younger Mr. Florio's fate: Sources at the company said Tom Florio received a $250,000 raise for his move back to Condé Nast Traveler . "I'm not going to comment on my income," Tom Florio said.

The preliminary results are in from "Operation Broken Glass," The New Republic 's effort to assess the veracity of the 41 stories written for the magazine by Stephen Glass. The findings suggest that in his short career, Mr. Glass, who was fired by editor Charles Lane on May 9 for fabricating elements of three stories, may have committed the most far-reaching act of journalistic malfeasance uncovered in recent times.

Sources at The New Republic have said that after going over Mr. Glass' oeuvre and fact-checking it again, editors concluded that roughly a third of the young reporter's pieces for the magazine were wholly fabricated, a third are credible and a third seem to be an embroidery of fact and fiction. "It's much worse than I expected," said one New Republic staff member working on the Glass case.

Sources at the magazine said that for Operation Broken Glass, editors at The New Republic divvied up Mr. Glass' pieces for an initial round of fact-checking, then rotated the pieces for a second phase of scrutiny. Most of the young reporter's dispatches from Capitol Hill have proven to be reliable, but Mr. Glass seems to have resorted to fiction in the majority of the first person "diaries" he wrote for the magazine. Staff members said that while the bodies of his longer reported stories sometimes check out, they are often preceded by grandiose leads sourced only by Mr. Glass' imagination. Staff members said they have a high degree of certainty about most of their findings, but that one Glass trope has caused them trouble: Mr. Glass sourced his more fantastic episodes to unnamed and unverifiable subjects. Some of these portions of Mr. Glass' work will likely be dubbed "presumed to be false," staff members said. Operation Broken Glass has proceeded without input from Mr. Glass himself, who has not been in touch with his former colleagues since his abrupt departure.

Sources at The New Republic said that Mr. Lane's final report on the Glass affair is scheduled for the magazine's June 22 issue, pending the approval of the magazine's attorneys. What form the editor's statement will take is apparently still undecided; staff members said that a comprehensive accounting of all of Mr. Glass' misdeeds might take up an entire issue. And yet the magazine can't afford to shortchange any victims of the young reporter's creativity. Mr. Lane wouldn't confirm the date of the upcoming report. "You can look for a report in our pages on the findings of the investigation," he said.

Other publications are issuing their own findings about Mr. Glass' articles. Adam Meyerson, editor of the Heritage Foundation's journal Policy Review , which published six stories by Mr. Glass, issued a carefully parsed statement: "We are sorry to report, however, that an article written by Glass for the May-June 1997 issue of Policy Review contains quotations that appear to be from fictitious people."

Rolling Stone has been curiously silent about the Glass affair–prompting other editors wrapped up in the mess to speculate that the magazine was angling to retain Mr. Glass after the wave of bad publicity had passed. The magazine's silence has done little to placate those who took hits in the Glass pieces it published. U.S. News & World Report 's editor, James Fallows, told the Off the Record he was demanding some answers about an October 1997 Rolling Stone piece in which Mr. Glass blasted the U.S. News college ranking system.

"I will bet the editors of Rolling Stone any amount of money that the episodes in Glass' [ U.S. News ] piece did not occur," Mr. Fallows said. Lincoln Caplan, U.S. News ' special project editor, recently sent a letter to Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner requesting the magazine recheck the piece and publish the results. Rolling Stone managing editor Robert Love denied any unseemly motives behind the magazine's silence on the Glass affair and said that he is, in fact, conducting an internal investigation. "When reporters have called with specific questions, we have responded with specific answers," Mr. Love said. "If we find something that's egregiously wrong in the re-fact-checking, we'll publish the results in the letters column."

According to friends, Mr. Glass returned to Washington, D.C., for two days during the week of May 18 to take an exam at Georgetown University Law School and to move into a new apartment. These friends also characterize the young writer as "despondent" over the recent revelations. However, Mr. Glass should not abandon all hope just yet. There is, in fact, a publication out there that thinks it could benefit from his particular brand of talent: the New York Press . Russ Smith, editor of the free weekly, author of the publication's Mugger column and, like Mr. Glass, an avowed libertarian, has been trying to track down the writer to offer him a job.

"I'd like to talk to the guy and if he's not a complete nut, I'd like to get him to write," Mr. Smith said. "I think this guy showed a lot of promise … It seems to me that his being sent to the glue factory at 25 seems a little premature."

You can reach Off the Record by e-mail at wstjohn@observer.com.