By Kat Stoeffel 3/07/12 9:07am

Subaltern

CQCX Rosen Tapia Libii

Copy Cats: The Secret Art Cabal Inside The New York Times

There’s an early scene in CQ/CX—a new off-Broadway play about The New York Times that does not pretend any character’s resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental—in which the guy based on Jayson Blair encounters a veteran editor at the paper’s favored watering hole.

“Started as a copy boy 43 years ago in March,” the old-timer brags as he fetches Jayson a Glenlivet. “Only job I ever had.”

Mistaking Jayson for a news clerk—one rung above the copy boy—the editor can hardly believe such a young man had written all those page one stories. (For good reason, it turned out.)

“Used to take years to get a byline,” he remarks. “Now they hand them out like candy.”

Well, maybe not that easy. But cultural changes at The Times over the past 20 years mean the newsroom grunts probably aren’t angling for bylines, anyway. Job openings dwindled with the economy, hiring scrutiny ramped up (thanks, Jayson), and the career track that gave the Times copy boy job its retroactive glamour (Arthur Gelb, Gay Talese and Robert Rosenthal all did stints) ceased to exist. Read More

By Steve Kornacki 6/30/09 9:22pm

Palin Wasn’t Just Being a Diva

From Todd S. Purdum’s new Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin:

When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin Read More

By Staff 3/10/06 2:47pm

[em]New York Times[/em] Raids [em]L.A. Times[/em] for Mazzetti

The New York Times plugged one of the holes in its Washington bureau this week by hiring Pentagon reporter Mark Mazzetti away from the Los Angeles Times.

“It was an agonizing decision because this place is fantastic, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity,” Mazzetti, 31, said by phone March 10.

Mazzetti had Read More

By Richard Brookhiser 6/13/05 12:00am

Avoiding Nostalgia In a Dangerous World

Say what you will about Richard Nixon, he doesn’t disappoint, even from the grave.

When the story broke identifying W. Mark Felt, the former assistant director of the F.B.I., as Deep Throat, the papers ran this clip from the Watergate tapes, in which Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, discussed the matter:

Read More

By NYO Staff 9/11/00 12:00am

The Trashy L.A. Times man: Todd Purdum

What do you get when you combine a reporter for the country’s most powerful newspaper with a city known more for glitz and glamour than substance and civility? In the case of Todd Purdum, the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times, you get a man whose professional courtesies have clearly taken a Read More