In the past week, we’ve learned that the paper’s Styles editor, national editor and assistant managing editor were all getting new jobs at the paper. Two of those three editors were moving into reporting positions—reversing the career track normally taken at big news organizations. This comes only a few months after the paper’s culture editor became the paper’s restaurant critic, yet another writing job. So what’s the big idea? Times executive editor Bill Keller has gone to great lengths to argue that these changes do not indicate that his editors are being banished to Siberia.

In the memo announcing that Suzanne Daley would be leaving her job of heading up the paper’s national coverage to take on a “special assignment” reporting on Europe, he said, “I have no doubt she will return to important editing roles. She is too good at it to be away for long.” When he announced Mr. Sifton as the new food writer, he said, “For the record, it is our expectation that this will not be the end of Sam’s career as an editor/manager/entrepreneur/mentor.” And this week when he announced that Trip Gabriel would be leaving as Styles editor to write education enterprise pieces, he said, “We unleash Trip into reporting with the understanding that this is not a departure from editing, but a detour.”

(Also: When Bill Keller announced that Rick Berke, the paper’s assistant managing editor, would leave the masthead to take over the national desk, he said, “And I expect we haven’t seen the last of him on the masthead.” And! And! When Jon Landman left the digital editing role at The Times to replace Mr. Sifton as culture editor, he said, “Jon will not be extracting himself from the Web, not by a long shot.”)

O.K., Bill, we get the point!

Several Times sources said the flurry of changes reflects the fact that a hiring freeze and a lame job market prevented any real movement at the paper. They see the changes as a wake-up call for these individuals, and for the paper.

Mr. Keller said as much, too. “Journalists are disposed to a kind of A.D.D., a restless curiosity,” he said in an email to Off the Record. “While there are, of course, writers who happily specialize for most of a career, one great lure of this work is that you can move from subject to subject, from reporting to editing and back again. So, think of it as pushing the ‘refresh’ button.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Here's a memo that Bill Keller just sent out:

To the Staff:
Continuing the theme of "If it ain't broke, fix it anyway:"
Any successful venture is the work of many hands, but the credit for the efflorescence of Sunday Styles and its fashion sibling, Thursday Styles, belongs above all to Trip Gabriel. In an extraordinary twelve-year run at Styles, as overseer, reinventor, creative spark and quality-keeper, Trip has kept those sections fresh and vigorous. That's no little feat, putting out 100-plus sections a year that explore the realms of fashion, lifestyle, nightlife, recreation, celebrity and just plain fun, and to do it with sophistication and rigorous journalistic standards. He has assembled an extremely talented writing collective -- including the best team of fashion writers in the business. In the process, Trip and his colleagues have deepened The Times's hold on New York City by making us reliable, entertaining chroniclers of how we live and what we aspire to in this capital of style.
For a while now, Trip has talked about returning to his first love, reporting. Connoiseurs of fine feature writing will recall the byline. He broke into The Times in 1986 as a freelancer, and soon became one of those names you looked for in the Sunday Magazine and elsewhere -- at first writing vivid accounts of such sports as rock-climbing and the America's Cup, then delivering incisive profiles of figures as diverse as the painter David Hockney, the superagent Mort Janklow, the disgraced senator Bob Packwood and the runner Carl Lewis. For his next act, Trip will plunge into the world of education, a topic of passionate interest to Times readers, one that animates as many dinner-table conversations as health care and real estate. He will be working on a series of education-related projects with Glenn Kramon, the AME for Enterprise.
We unleash Trip into reporting with the understanding that this is not a departure from editing, but a detour. Anyone with Trip's gift for leading consistently smart and original coverage will not be gone from editing for long.
To follow this unusually hard act, we have chosen another gifted editor, Stuart Emmrich. Stuart took over the Travel section in 2004 with a mandate to redesign the coverage to compete with a growing coterie of travel magazines. To say the least, he rose to the challenge, adjusting the mix of vicarious pleasure and service, of luxury and budget travel, of favorite haunts and off-the-map exotica, all without diminishing the section's tradition of great writing and eye-catching photography. He has, in addition, been invaluable in pushing our travel coverage onto the Web.
When he took that assignment, we noted that he combines a newspaper pedigree with a magazine sensibility. He helped launch SmartMoney, and worked at magazines dealing with law, business and parenting. Prior to Travel, he took the Escapes section and transformed it from something of a hodgepodge into a coherent, entertaining guide to weekend getaways. Stuart is a demanding editor, but one people like to work for. We think he is the ideal candidate to step up to the larger undertaking of running the Styles franchise.
These moves take effect at the end of the month.
This leaves us in search of a new Travel editor. Consider that job posted.
Best,
Bill

A group of investors including Mr. Black intends to spend up to $15 million to launch a new daily newspaper expected to appear sometime early next year, a source familiar with the venture told Off the Record. The paper, likely to be called The New York Sun , will be edited by former Forward editor in chief Seth Lipsky along with his protégé, Ira Stoll, the editor of Smartertimes.com, a Web site known for its critiques of The New York Times .

For more than a year, Mr. Stoll has been promising that Smartertimes.com would one day lead to the creation of "a new newspaper that would offer an alternative to the dominant daily." The Sun , which will appear five days a week, is expected to cover city news but also embody the same neoconservative values that shaped Mr. Stoll's attacks on The Times as well as The Forward under Mr. Lipsky, sources said.

Neither Mr. Lipsky nor Mr. Stoll would comment for this story. But an outline of the paper emerged from others involved in its genesis, including people who have been approached about working for the publication. There have been other clues: Starting in October, classified ads began running on Smartertimes.com in search of a business executive to run a new newspaper's advertising and circulation effort ("Compensation in the low six-figures") as well as editorial staff ("Willing to work long hours in an entrepreneurial, start-up environment"). In early November, Mr. Lipsky registered several Internet addresses, including newyorksun.com and nysun.com. And on Nov. 7, he applied for a trademark of the title The New York Sun .

Backing the new paper, sources said, is a group of nine or 10 investors that includes Mr. Black-chairman and chief executive of Hollinger International Inc.-as well as Michael Steinhardt, a former hedge-fund manager and prominent Democratic Party donor, who up until mid-2000 owned half of The Forward but is still the paper's vice chairman. Since Mr. Lipsky was pushed out as editor in chief at The Forward , he and Mr. Steinhardt have maintained close contact, sources said. In the ideological battle between Mr. Lipsky and The Forward 's board of directors-Mr. Lipsky's neoconservative leanings did not sit well with the more liberal board-Mr. Steinhardt offered to buy the other half of the Jewish weekly in order to keep Mr. Lipsky at the helm. Rebuffed by the board, Mr. Lipsky ultimately left the paper in April 2000, and Mr. Stoll, who had been managing editor, followed later that summer.

Reached at his home, Mr. Steinhardt confirmed that he had invested in the daily-to-be but declined to discuss other participants.

"Seth is a terrific editor with great skills and great history," Mr. Steinhardt said, "and some of the investors were drawn to him and his sidekick, Ira Stoll."

Mr. Steinhardt said that when he last heard, the paper was to launch in January. He also took issue with the "conservative" label.

"I don't know if I'd call it 'conservative,'" Mr. Steinhardt said when asked of the paper's political bent. "I myself am not a conservative, but some of the other investors are."

As for Mr. Black, neither he nor Hollinger officials returned repeated requests for comment. Mr. Black has made previous attempts to acquire a New York publication, including attempts to buy the Daily News as well as The Observer .

In launching The Sun , Mr. Lipsky and Mr. Stoll will return an old name to New York newsstands. The New York Sun was the first successful penny-press daily after its birth in 1833, appealing to a working-class readership with lurid crime reporting and pro-union, pro-immigrant views. Today, its most famous moment is the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter, which ran in 1897. The Sun finally folded in 1950.

New York Press editor in chief and C.E.O. Russ Smith, who has pined for a conservative alternative to The Times in his weekly Mugger column, relished the debut of The Sun. "I think it's a great idea, and I'd like to write for it," Mr. Smith said. But while he said he thought there was a large audience for a Times alternative, Mr. Smith added that it's a tough time to launch a newspaper: "One would have to be skeptical of a start-up daily newspaper's success."

-Gabriel Snyder and Sridhar Pappu

You may not have noticed, but the Sunday Styles section, that appetizer of the Sunday New York Times people turn to first before plowing into the thick coverage of war and terrorism, is no longer an exclusive New York City pleasure. As of Sept. 30, the section has been now included in the national edition of The New York Times , which on Sunday has a circulation of about 800,000 outside the New York metropolitan area.

The national launch of Sunday Styles, long discussed, came at an awkward time for the section. There was, of course, Sept. 11, and before that, a new executive editor, Howell Raines, who took over on Sept. 5. There have also been some staff departures, complicating the heavy lifting of putting out a weekly section. And then, of course, there's the $64,000 question: How do you change a city-oriented section if you're writing for a national audience?

Trip Gabriel, who edits Sunday Styles and the fashion section, said there has been an internal debate on that point. And much to the relief of people who fear reading about a night out at the Nashville Swine Ball, Mr. Gabriel comes down on the side of trying to maintain the section's roots.

"I think that to the extent we were a trend section, a lot of trends start in New York, or they start in L.A., and I think we continue to cover them," Mr. Gabriel said. "We're not going to give equal weight to Seattle, Minneapolis and St. Louis just because we're now distributed in all those places."

Mr. Gabriel's boss, Barbara Graustark-who, as head of the Times style department, oversees Sunday Styles, House & Home, Dining In/Dining Out, as well as the fashion pages-said it's possible to write stories that appeal to both New York and the heartland. As examples, she pointed to a recent story about traveling home for the holidays and an assessment of ABC's broadcast of the Victoria's Secret fashion show. The section's challenge, she said, is "trying to take stories that are as relevant to a national audience as a New York audience."

Though the section has been national for about two months now, the editors said it's still trying to feel its way. Originally, the plan was to do a soft launch in September and then do a more public rejiggering in January. There had also been talk about giving the section more columns to fill, but at last word from Ms. Graustark, that isn't going to happen.

Meanwhile, world events have dictated that the style folks mostly figure out things themselves. Said one Times staffer, "It's my impression that [assistant managing editor] Andy Rosenthal and [managing editor] Gerald Boyd are all-hands-on-deck with the war effort, and the back of the book is largely unsupervised."

But Mr. Gabriel denied being orphaned. "In no sense are we suffering from the neglect of the executive editor or any members of the masthead," he said. "We're a pretty autonomous section in a fairly autonomous department. I don't think it's fair to say it's not on [Mr. Raines'] mind-he has a lot on his mind."

Said Ms. Graustark: "I can only imagine how busy Howell and Gerald are. I have not heard from them what the section should be doing …. I am sure I would hear from them if they didn't think the section was doing what it should be"

But as it moves to a larger audience, the Sunday Styles section is also being assembled by fewer people. At the end of the summer, the section lost its deputy editor, Ilene Rosenzweig, and staff reporter Rick Marin. Alex Kuczynski, who had been a media reporter on the business desk, moved over to the section, but the deputy editor position-the person who does most of the line editing-remains unfilled, though Ms. Rosenzweig still comes in one day a week to help with assignments. For a while, former Harper's Bazaar beauty director Christine Shea was coming in several days a week, but that was only a temporary stint. Said a Times source: "They don't really have the manpower to put out the section without breaking everyone's back."

But help is on the way. Ms. Graustark said the section is actually looking to hire another writer. "This addition to the staff is really a relief," she said.

In the meantime, Kate Betts, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar , could always pitch in. She wrote a story in the Oct. 28 issue about wartime style icons.

Mr. Gabriel said Ms. Betts will be contributing some more stories for Styles. "I expect her byline will appear in the section again soon," he said. "She's got a busy life these days, but she's got such great skills as a journalist and a depth of authority on fashion that it's a treat to have her writing for us."

-G.S.

Last week, this column detailed a brouhaha between the Web site Free Williamsburg and The Village Voice . The former had accused The Voice , in its Nov. 13 issue, of ripping off a story it had done in September on the music scene in that bastion of coolness. Their case? The Voice profiled the same clubs, quoted from the Free Williamsburg piece without attribution and used the same awful headline: "A Scene Grows in Brooklyn."

Now it appears that someone may actually be the beneficiary of this: Grant Moser, the writer who penned the original piece for Free Williamsburg. According to Mr. Moser, he left a message with The Voice last Monday saying he should write for them, and he soon heard back from music editor Chuck Eddy saying yes, he should. After sending in a couple of ideas, Mr. Moser said last Thursday The Voice sent one of their own for him to pursue.

"Is it everything I wanted?" Mr. Moser said. "No. But in life, you don't always get everything you want."

Mr. Eddy said there wasn't any penance going on here, because there was no sin to repent for.

"He called and I e-mailed him back," Mr. Eddy said. "It's conceivable that he might write something for us. But I wouldn't call it a make-good."

-S.P.