In a profile of the 32-year-old Too Big to Fail author, New York's Gabriel Sherman reports that, in order to fend off repeated poaching attempts from competitors (Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter says Sorkin has a "standing offer"), the Times has bumped Sorkin up to management to circumvent union pay rules and entered into an extraordinary deal in which Sorkin gets "a bonus that is based, in part, on the financial performance of the various DealBook properties." It makes him, Sherman says, one of the highest-paid staffers at the Times.

So the newspaper that told its staff to take a 5% paycut in order to avoid layoffs, and then announced that it plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs anyway, is paying out a quarter of a million dollars and performance bonuses to one of its youngest stars. Sherman doesn't have details of the arrangement—we e-mailed Sorkin last week about it after Sherman previewed that news in a blog post on Friday, and haven't heard back—but it sounds an awful lot like a pageview bonus to us. Which is an ugly practice that distorts news judgment and induces reporters to chase down attention-grabbing and salacious gossip rather than substantive information and is the province of unscrupulous blogs that are killing journalism. And also the New York Times, apparently.

Sorkin's privileged place at the struggling paper enrages his detractors, who call him a callow deal junkie and shill for his Wall Street sources. The publication of Too Big to Fail rustled some of those leaves in the newsroom, but until now, it's consisted exclusively of anonymous sniping. But Sherman got Tim O'Brien, the editor of the Times' Sunday business section—who oversaw Sorkin's column before it was moved to Tuesdays—to grouse on the record about what he regards as Sorkin's sloppy reporting:

"When Andrew had a Sunday business column and he'd drop a thinly reported or loosely written piece on the desk at the last minute on Friday night," O'Brien explained, "it made us concerned about our production schedule and, occasionally, about the credibility of our page. So, yeah, there were frequent tugs-of-war with him."

It's one thing for Times staffers to bitch about one another on background. But to have a senior editor openly questioning the credibility of one of the paper's biggest names is about as close to open rebellion as it gets. We've got to wonder if O'Brien has already decided to take a buyout, because it's clear where the Times' leadership stands: Executive editor Bill Keller told Sherman that Sorkin is a "classic beat reporter" who "develops real inside sources" and has become "essential reading."

A point of personal privilege: Sorkin told New York that Gawker "misquoted" him in an earlier item on claims from some at the Times that he ripped off the reporting of his colleagues Don Van Natta Jr. and Gretchen Morgenson for his book. Van Natta and Morgenson had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's call logs, as well as an ethics waiver Paulson received from the White House allowing him to work directly with his former employer Goldman Sachs. Both documents figure prominently in Sorkin's promotional push for Too Big to Fail, and some at the Times claimed that Sorkin had learned of their existence from the Times and piggybacked on the paper's reporting. Sorkin told Sherman that we misquoted him when we reported that he'd told us that he first FOIA'd the logs and the waiver in June; in fact, Sorkin says, he'd only FOIA'd the logs at that time. Here's what happened: Sorkin told us he'd FOIA'd the logs and—according to our notes of the conversation—"all the ethics documents" in June. We took that to mean the ethics waiver. Sorkin has since explained to us that it did not—he used FOIA in June to try to obtain the logs and the original ethics letter that Paulson wrote when he joined Treasury pledging not to work on Goldman Sachs issues, but not the waiver that later relieved Paulson of that obligation.

Sherman also used FOIA to verify Sorkin's claims, and found that he did indeed file a request in June for the logs. It's unclear whether he also requested the ethics letter, as he has claimed to us. We've requested the same documents, but haven't received them from the Treasury Department yet.

UPDATE: A Times source called to point out that Sorkin isn't alone. Several Times reporters and columnists are treated as management, the source says, and are therefore eligible for performance bonuses—although it's unclear how their performance is assessed or whether anyone other than Sorkin earns bonuses tied to the financial performance of their editorial product. Astonishingly, the source says that the Times paid out bonuses last year, despite the fact that its performance has been dismal.

The 28-year-old publisher and the 32-year-old reporter and author of Too Big to Fail talked as recently as last month about the top editor job at the Observer, Gabriel Sherman reports. But Sorkin demurred, and some Observer staffers speculate that talks may have stalled because Sorkin wanted an equity stake in the paper. Kushner settled on former Portfolio editor Kyle Pope, who must be feeling really good right about now, yesterday.

Oddly and without elaboration, Sherman mentions that one reason Sorkin might not have been interested was his "unusual incentive arrangements with the Times." Huh? What's that all about, then?

Another reason Sorkin might not have taken the job is that he would no longer be able to call New York Times editors to ask them for access to documents that he would later use as "source documents" in his book.

While we're on the subject of the Observer, the paper is flogging an Observer Living panel—that would be Kushner's real estate events venture—later this month featuring none other than Ivanka Trump. Come meet the publisher's wife! Placed next to a story on the hiring of Pope, it's starting to look like the New York Observer is a newspaper about the New York Observer.

Update: Presented without comment, this quote from Kushner, reported in a new book about the Observer and flagged by the Awl:

One time there was a reporter working somewhere else, whose stuff I liked, and I said, 'Peter, we should look at hiring him.' And Peter said, 'I would, but he violates the one principle I have: Against the hiring of assholes.'

Another update: A source in the Observer camp objected to our original headline that said Sorkin was Kushner's "first choice" for the gig. Sorkin, this person says, was one of three finalists for the salmon paper's top job along with Pope and Dan Colaruso, a former business editor at the New York Post who along with Pope also worked at Portfolio as its web editor and did a brief stint as the managing editor of Silicon Alley Insider after Condé Nast shuttered the business magazine.

The 32-year-old Sorkin, the paper's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, is quickly becoming one of the paper's most visible personalities. In the Times' byzantine network of loyalties and alliances, this makes Sorkin a divisive figure: Some old-guard investigators regard him as a callow and inexperienced note-taker for powerful interests. "He's the classic definition of an access reporter who wouldn't know a document if it hit him in the face," says one Times staffer. "He goes to drinks with these guys, they give him tips, and he puts them in the paper. He's a deal junkie." For evidence of his coziness with the people he covers, look no further than the book party for Too Big to Fail—hosted by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter—which was attended by a seemingly endless roster of the Wall Street barons he's nominally charged with holding to account, from JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon to Morgan Stanley's John Mack.

He's also a rising star, and is said to be a favorite of business editor Larry Ingrassia's for his tireless reporting and excellent sources among Manhattan's privileged financial elite (cf. the aforementioned book party). With his assiduously maintained public profile—Sorkin is an easy booking on cable news shows—and role as editor of the Times' popular Dealbook blog, he is a face, for better or worse, of the future at a flagging and exhausted newspaper.

So it's not entirely surprising that knives were drawn by some of Sorkin's more experienced and established competitors and colleagues in response to slights, real and perceived, in Too Big to Fail. CNBC's Charlie Gasparino got the ball rolling earlier this month by calling Sorkin "incredibly stupid and sloppy"—and having his lawyer write Sorkin's publisher an angry letter—after Sorkin quoted Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein calling Gasparino a "rumormonger." A Goldman representative later disputed that quote.

Too Big to Fail is expected to debut at No. 4 on the Times' best-seller list next week. The rancor it has caused within the Times newsroom is no doubt a function in part of Sorkin's success, favor with top editors, and visibility at a time when 100 editorial positions are in the process of being eliminated. It's also a reaction against the notion that an upstart reporter who has made his name by greasing wealthy sources for access is presenting himself as a hard-nosed investigator—especially because Sorkin asked his paper's more experienced reporters for copies of the "secret" documents that he's now holding up as key sources for his 600-page tome just two weeks before it went to press.

As Keith Kelly first reported in the New York Post on Tuesday, some of Sorkin's Times colleagues are incensed at Too Big to Fail, Sorkin's best-selling new bailout narrative, accusing Sorkin of piggybacking on the reporting of his Times colleagues Don Van Natta and Gretchen Morgenson without giving adequate credit.

The allegations are being taken seriously in the building: The Post's Kelly reported that "senior editors" are investigating the matter, and we've learned that those senior editors are none other than executive editor Bill Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson. We also hear that public editor Clark Hoyt is looking into examining the matter.

At issue are two documents that Sorkin posted on his web site as "source documents" for the book, cited prominently in his endnotes, and has repeatedly claimed as vital parts of his reporting during his publicity tour: A September 17, 2008 ethics waiver that Paulson received from the White House allowing him to work closely with Goldman Sachs in managing the financial crisis, and Paulson's call logs from 2008. Here's Sorkin on CNBC flogging them:

The Paulson waiver is described on his site as "Paulson's Secret Waiver," and Sorkin excitedly recounted how he discovered it to Charlie Rose last week: "I will always remember one of the sources for the book said to me, 'Do you know about the waiver?' And I said, 'What waiver? What are you talking about?' He said, 'The Paulson waiver on Wednesday.'"

That sort of "plugging" is inciting apoplexy among Sorkin's antagonists at the Times. "He's making these central to what the book supposedly discovered," one Times staffer says.

That's because both documents were central to an August 9, 2009 investigative story by the Times' Van Natta and Morgenson detailing Paulson's handling of the crisis and his entanglement with his former employer Goldman Sachs. Van Natta and Morgenson obtained them via the Freedom of Information Act in July. The idea of FOIAing call logs of a cabinet secretary isn't exactly a brainstorm—it's a routine way of figuring out what's going on inside the federal bureaucracy. And the existence of the waiver was revealed by Paulson himself in congressional testimony on July 16, 2009. Neither document was a state secret, but Van Natta and Morgenson got hold of them and were the first to write about them in the Times in August. Both documents figure prominently in Too Big to Fail and its publicity campaign, but Sorkin's book makes no mention of Van Natta and Morgenson's story.

Sorkin says he FOIA'd both documents on his own, independently of Van Natta and Morgenson's reporting, and that he will include an endnote crediting their story with revealing them first in the book's next printing. And there's a pretty good reason that the story wasn't credited in the book: By August 9, when the story appeared, Sorkin's book was in the very final stages of editing. Even if he could have inserted a credit to the Times for first unearthing the documents, it would have involved a last-minute change to a massive project. We can understand how it would slip by.

But the issue over credit is in part a proxy for what really has some Times staffers ticked off: Sorkin called Times Sunday business editor Tim O'Brien on July 27—after he'd filed his draft of the 600-page book and two weeks before it went to the printer—and asked him for copies of the Paulson call logs. In other words, Sorkin was asking the Times for help on his homework at the last possible minute. And sources at the Times say some in the newsroom, including Van Natta, suspect Sorkin learned about the Paulson waiver during that conversation—he was, Sorkin's detractors say, "pickpocketing" the Time's reporting for his book. O'Brien didn't give up the logs, and Sorkin says he obtained both the logs and the waiver via FOIA—with an extremely rapid turnaround—after that conversation with O'Brien. "We never spoke about any details of what story the paper was pursuing," Sorkin says, "nor did we discuss Paulson's waiver."

Whether he came up with the idea of getting the waiver and the logs on his own, or tried to grab them from the Times once he learned about them—and there's no evidence for the latter accusation—it's clear that Sorkin didn't lay hands on what he calls the "source documents" for Too Big to Fail until he was in the process of fact-checking the book that he'd already written. In the introduction to his endnotes, Sorkin writes that "I tried to rely as often as possible on the written record" and that "Henry Paulson's...calendars helped provide key dates and times." How can that be if he didn't actually have that written record until after he finished the book?

Sorkin says he had the information in Paulson's call logs, he just didn't have the actual logs themselves. He'd been allowed to view them and take notes, he says, over the course of 10 months he spent reporting on the book. "My sources made me privy to various documents and information in people's calenders, including Hank Paulson's," he says. Same thing with the waiver. He first learned of it from a source in June of 2009, he says—before Paulson referred to it in congressional testimony—and had been shown a copy in the course of his reporting. He just wasn't allowed to take it home. So his last-minute rush to get them, he says, was a good-faith effort to fact-check the information he'd already reported.

Sorkin says he had previously filed FOIA requests for the logs and the waiver, but they had been denied. When he heard through his reporting that Treasury was releasing the logs, he called to ask for them. The Treasury said they'd already given them to the Times, and that he could either get them from the paper or file a new request. So he called Ingrassia, who told him to ask O'Brien. "When I reached Tim," Sorkin says, "he said there was no way for me to get them given my time constraint to have the fact-checking complete within days." So Sorkin filed his own last-minute request and got the documents in time to check some facts in the book against them, insert a photograph of Paulson's waiver, and put them up on the book's web site.

Sorkin, however, says everything has been smoothed over. "This has all been resolved," he says. He also provided a statement from Ingrassia praising his book as a "reporting tour de force":

We're all very proud of Andrew Ross Sorkin and his new book, Too Big To Fail. Throughout the financial crisis, Andrew worked closely and tirelessly with the Times team of colleagues to provide the paper's readers with exclusive news and insight about this historic event. His book is a reporting tour de force about the financial meltdown and contains a wealth of original material and undisclosed details about what transpired. As attested by 40 pages of end notes and acknowledgments, it also generously credits Times colleagues and journalists at other publications for things they reported about the crisis. And as Andrew has already said, he intends to include yet another citation in future editions to an article about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson by his colleagues Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta.

The grand irony of this flap is that much of it would have been rendered moot had the Times simply done what Sorkin did so effortlessly: Put the documents at issue online. Had Van Natta and Morgenson's story been accompanied by images of Paulson's call logs and waiver, it probably never would have occurred to Sorkin to claim ownership over them in his publicity campaign for the book. But that's another Timesworld disconnect between the youthful web-focused culture and the old-school diggers—after Van Natta and Morgenson spent months working to get access to the documents, they apparently didn't think to push their editors to share the originals with their readers. Others did: Talking Points Memo got hold of the waiver on August 10, the day after the Times story, and put it up in their document collection without much fanfare. And you can read Paulson's call logs—"actually see inside what Treasury was doing," as Sorkin put it on CNBC—on the Department of Treasury's web site.

The background noise of all Times politics these days is no doubt are the apprehensions in the newsroom and the resentments a 32-year-old star reporter might spawn with a book deal, fancy Vanity Fair-hosted parties and frequent TV gigs while others contemplate whether to take the latest buyout offer or risk getting killed in the next round of massive layoffs at the tanking newspaper. But these sort of feuds pre-date the implosion of the news business and the crux of the issue is this:

Part of Sorkin's book focuses on an ethics waiver that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson received allowing him to work closely with Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein to bail the investment bank out. Sorkin posted a copy of the waiver, which he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, to his web site.

According to Kelly, some Timespersons are exercised because Sorkin failed to credit his colleagues Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta, Jr., with breaking the story of the waiver in August, long before the book came out—and "some wondered if Sorkin used his star reporter status to get a peek at work compiled by his colleagues."

The peeking allegation seems to be based on the fact that Sorkin finished the book around the time that Morgenson and Van Natta broke the story of the waiver, so Sorkin must have somehow gotten a look at it ahead of time, right? It's apparently serious enough, Kelly says, that senior editors at the Times are investigating the matter.

Not necessarily. Paulson referred to the waiver in testimony before Congress in mid-July, so its existence was no secret prior to the Times story on it. Sorkin told Kelly that he'd gotten a copy of the waiver through FOIA by "late July," when he filed the chapters of his book that dealt with it. Sorkin could conceivably have learned of the waiver from Paulson's testimony and gotten it via FOIA within two weeks, though that would be an extraordinarily fast turnaround. Or perhaps he learned of it earlier through his own reporting and FOIA'd it then. In any case, Sorkin says he got the waiver through his own FOIA request, and that he had it before the Times story came out.

Which is presumably why he didn't see fit to credit his newspaper for the story. But he's being very magnanimous about that, and offering to revise it in future editions. "I have spoken to Don and told him I'd be happy to include a citation in the 40 pages of end notes as a courtesy in the next printing," Sorkin told Kelly. Which we think is Timesspeak for "fuck you, Don."

For all his bluster, Gasparino can be a bit thin-skinned. His primary beef with Sorkin is over this passage from Too Big to Fail, in which Sorkin quotes Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's thoughts on Gasparino's reporting:

While the 53-year-old Goldman C.E.O. kept a television in his office, he was so disgusted with what he believed was CNBC's Charlie Gasparino's "rumor-mongering" that he had turned it off in protest. "That's not my thing," he told [Morgan Stanley CEO John] Mack. "I don't do TV."

Do not call Charlie Gasparino a rumor-monger, or quote someone else doing so. He doesn't like it! Especially when it appears not to be true: According to Business Insider, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman confirmed the anecdote about Blankfein turning off CNBC, but said "'rumor-mongering' is not a direct quote."

Gasparino was so broken up about the alleged misquote that he had his lawyer send letters to Sorkin's publisher Viking and to Vanity Fair, which reprinted the anecdote in an excerpt this month, demanding corrections. When we heard that Sorkin was going to be on Gasparino's turf twice today, we gave him a call to see what he thought about that.

"I don't own the network," he said. "But if he repeats what he said about me in his book on the air, there's going to be a big problem. Blankfein didn't say it. I like Andrew a lot, but I did tell him that I thought he was incredibly stupid and sloppy. He never even called me. I said, 'Why didn't you mention this rumor-mongering thing?'" On top of Blankfein's apparent walk-back on the quote, Gasparino is angry that Sorkin didn't depart from the book's narrative to investigate precisely what rumors Blankfein was allegedly accusing him of mongering: "What did I say that merits that description?"

"When I first saw that quote, I doubted it was real," Gasparino says. "It makes me wonder if the rest of the book is real."

And wonder he does: Gasparino is also keyed about this passage, in which Mack calls GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt at the height of the meltdown last year to complain about CNBC:

Mack believed negative speculation was purposely being spread by his rivals and repeated uncritically on CNBC. He was so furious with what he believed was "bullshit coverage" that he called to complain to Jeff Immelt.

For some reason, Gasparino thinks Sorkin is implying that the "bullshit coverage" remark was directed at him. "It made it sound like Mack was complaining about me," Gasparino says. "Mack himself point blank told me he wasn't talking about me—it was someone else at CNBC." OK then.

Thirdly, Gasparino disputes a quote that Sorkin attributes to hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller in response to a request from Goldman Sachs's Gary Cohn that Druckenmiller re-invest some of his money in the firm to help keep up appearances:

Druckenmiller, however, was unmoved. "I don't really give a shit-it's my money!" he shot back. Unlike most hedge funds, Druckenmiller's consisted primarily of his own money. "It's my livelihood," he said. "I've got to protect myself, and I don't really give a shit what you have to say."

"I got the same quote," Gasparino says. "I didn't use it in my book. Druckenmiller told me that he didn't say it. 'What he said I said—I didn't say.' He said that Sorkin called him and asked him if he had a conversation with Gary Cohn, but that he didn't run the quote by him."

The "my book" Gasparino is referring to is The Sellout, a book that, like Sorkin's, tells the story of the crash and the bailout. And, like Sorkin's, it has been heavily promoted on CNBC—Gasparino's hits on the network have lately been preceded by the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey to herald the tome's arrival. Unlike Sorkin's book, however, The Sellout won't hit stands until November 3. Sorkin's book came out today, and is already ranked No. 13 on Amazon. So we can understand why Gasparino might be a little bit peeved.

"The only thing I can think of is that he was jamming to get the book done," Gasparino says, "and he didn't dot all his I's and cross his T's." Well, that's one way to describe a competitor getting his book into stores two weeks before yours. "My advice to Andrew next time is, quote them right. Especially when it comes to quoting them about me." UPDATE: Gasparino called to make the fair point that he didn't get beaten in a footrace—the books' respective publication schedules were laid out long ago.

Sorkin didn't return e-mails seeking comment. Druckenmiller did not immediately return a phone call.

"I think they saw that the world was about to fall off it's axis" Sorkin told Charlie Rose last night, when asked why AIG was bailed out. The amount of time to make decisions to try and pull markets from the edge of economic armageddon was less than hours, it was mere moments. Conversations in hallways between meetings that would attempt to pull a careening market from falling off a cliff. They couldn't possibly have time to weigh the consequences of their actions. They were simply in triage mode. Crack the chest of the American economic system, resuscitate, and worry about fixing the broken ribcage later.

Shotgun marriages for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were sought after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Lehman accused JP Morgan of freezing $17 billion in cash and securities that belonged to the embattled firm on the night before it's failure.

A year and a half later there is not a single regulation on the books. Nothing has been done to prevent the same crooks from robbing the store, leaving markets in the same vulnerable position it was before the collapse. Sorkin describes how financial behemoths are "answering to the shareholder, not the community, and that is a huge issue. What's right for the community might not be right for the shareholder." Self regulation is still simply voluntary, and our government naive enough to think they won't try it again.

Guess what, they already are. Sorkin breaks the bad news "Many of those toxic assets are still on the market, and they're bidding them up even higher." Wonderful.

Sorkin describes "a great scene where Ben Bernake and Hank Paulson go into the White House, and President Bush tells them, at some point you're going to have to tell me how this happened."

We're still waiting.

Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic: Bruni already got the chance to talk up his own kiddie bulimia in the NYT mag. Just the beginning! He'll be talking about it on Nightline on August 19. Sample transcript quote:

[Nightline]: You were 8 years old on the Atkins Diet?

Bruni: Yeah… the Atkins Diet came out in hardcover when I was 8, if I have my arithmetic correct. ‘Cause I remember mom bought it in hardcover so this was serious stuff and I remember leafing through it and learning about ketones and ketosis and you know, having no idea what that meant, I was 8 years old, but I thought, ooo that's profound stuff. If I can get into this ketosis thing I'll be home free. I'll be skinny.

Bruni is now the Food Critic With Food Issues.

Jill Abramson, managing editor: Not just managing editor for news; managing editor for puppies, too! She is the Serious News Lady With a Smooshy Marshmallow Puppy Center.

Alex Kuczynski, former shopping columnist: Rich Botox Lady Who Will Talk About Same, Endlessly.

David Carr, media critic: The Marlboro Man of Media. With a heart of gold!

Jennifer 8 Lee, metro reporter: Hard-Working Internet Addict Who Loves Chinese Food.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Dealbook columnist: Wunderkind Who Could Totally Be a Rich I-Banker But Isn't Yet. The next Steven Rattner?

All The Opinion Columnists: Suave Expert on [Made Up Topic] But a Snazzier Writer Than Usual! Also, too rich!

And of course, the one future Self-Brand we'd like to see speaks for itself:

AG Sulzberger: Baller.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Wall Street Journal is developing a culture section focused on New York City—which could be rolled out next year—in accordance with Rupert Murdoch's belief that the New York Times' culture coverage is "lightweight." New, more literal 'Culture Wars!' tag here, TK.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Sure, the Michael Jackson memorial was a huge media clusterfuck covered live on every network. But it also meant two hours of ad-free time for them in the middle of the day! Not to worry: "representatives from the TV outlets that covered the event said the loss of two hours of daytime inventory was a decidedly minor concern." The average network would have only sold three ad during that time anyhow, all of them for Snuggies.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.And in a continuation of the 'Hobo New York Times' meme we just made up this week, but which is also very real: wunderkind NYT deal reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin is not in attendance at the Sun Valley media mogulfest meeting this year. Usually he's there blogging up a storm. Sorkin told Peter Kafka that he's too busy finishing his book to go out there, but an alternate theory espoused by us is that he's been forced to take a second job handing out fliers, because of Hobo New York Times.

Today in sunny newspaper industry news: 18 layoffs at the Albany Times-Union, ill-fated newspaper magazine-insert 'RiseUp' is more than $6 million in debt, and execs of the bankrupt Journal Register Co. will get more than $1 million in bonuses for pulling the company out of bankruptcy by laying people off, and other fun things.

Key warnings from the the guidelines, from standards editor Craig Whitney:

Be careful not to write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times —­ don't editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department. Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill — whether it's text, photographs, or video. That includes things you recommend on TimesPeople or articles you post to Facebook and Digg, content you share with friends on MySpace, and articles you recommend through TimesPeople. It can also include things posted by outside parties to your Facebook page, so keep an eye on what appears there. Just remember that we are always under scrutiny by magnifying glass and that the possibilities of digital distortion are virtually unlimited, so always ask yourself, could this be deliberately misconstrued or misunderstood by somebody who wants to make me look bad?

He's talking about us! Although we wish everyone well. We hear that the paper may be cracking down on Twitter use by staffers soon. So now's the time to look at some the NYT's most prolific Tweeters! Not surprisingly, most of them are prolific reporters, as well, and just can't stop writing things, every minute of every day. It's truly amazing.

Superhuman metro reporter Sewell Chan's Twitter page is uniformly innocuous.


Dealbook wonder boy Andrew Ross Sorkin's is livelier, but still disappointingly uncontroversial. Lots of live-tweeting and extra Dealbook-like commentary.


Young media obsessive Brian Stelter is an outrageous link-Tweeting machine. Truly incredible. Not too controversial, though. You work too much, Brian!


Magical trend specialist/ metro lord Jennifer 8. Lee hears the WSJ may be clamping down on Twitter! She also reveals that the NYT newsroom is patrolled by drunken thieves!



Finally, King of All Media David Carr is wild with the Twitter! He Twitters whatever he wants! Maybe enough to give Craig Whitney palpitations? It's all so charming, though! He has a big personality! Fight the power!


So overall there's not much that we would find scandalous there (more drunk Twittering from the whorehouse, people, thx), but probably enough to make Craig Whitney want to tell people to be quiet. Keep an eye out for a sudden NYT clampdown on newsroom Twittering. Then everything can get back to boring again.
[Disclosure: I'm Facebook friends with Carr and Stelter, hopelessly compromising my objectivity.]

Most defenders of the $165 million in taxpayer funded bonuses to AIG executives argue that a contract is a contract is a contract, and that to simply tear up existing bonus agreements because the U.S. has pumped $170 billion into the company would be unfair. But that one doesn't hold much water for the rabble sharpening their guillotine blades, and it's gotten so bad that one AIG executive told the Washington Post that the "mob effect" is "putting people's lives in danger."

So Sorkin goes deeper:

A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it. A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave - the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to - they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.'s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it. So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats, if only to prevent them from turning against the company.

In other words, they have us by the balls, AIG is a Doomsday Machine, and its executives are monacled villains in some mountain redoubt ready to set it off. Except: These people are some of the most staggeringly incompetent financial executives in the history of money. Sorkin seems to think they're evil capitalist geniuses whose cunning knows no bounds. If that were true, they probably would have just made AIG a successful business, no?

But also, Sorkin says, they deserve the money because their jobs really suck:

"The jobs are terrible," said Robert M. Sedgwick, an executive compensation lawyer at Morrison Cohen who represents a number of employees of banks that have taken government money. "You have to read about yourself in the paper every day. These people are leaving as soon as they can."

Yes, the consequences of their failure have brought such condemnation and public ridicule that it's only fair to reward them for that very failure.

And look out, Sorkin says: The AIG execs are hot properties, ready to jump ship if they don't get their payout.

Let them leave, you say. Where would they go, given the troubles in the financial industry? But the fact is, the real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work - against taxpayers' interests.

It may very well be true that "the real moneymakers" always land on their feet, and could conceivably jump ship and destroy their former employer, thereby necessitating more bailouts. Good thing, then, that nobody working for AIG has any clue how make any fucking money.

[Photo, of Irish rioters not (yet) AIG offices, by Harry Crews]

You'll recall how cocky Nocera, of the Times, was drinking with Bethany McLean of his former employer Fortune when the two decided they could END all other financial writing with the definitive opus on the panic of '08 (Nocera: "It will be a book for the ages"). Selling the title for north of $1 million didn't diminish the writers' swagger one bit. Times hotshot Andrew Ross Sorkin also scored a big book deal about the financial meltdown, worth $700,000.

But his Madoff book looks much more Hollywood-friendly. Hell, why do you think Variety broke the book-deal news?

Madoff's is a relatively straightforward tale of institutional capitalist greed (Madoff was Nasdaq chairman and friends with the right people), lax government oversight and mass deception. It servers as a kind easy shorthand for the entire, complicated financial meltdown.

Nocera, McLean and Sorkin's tales about the collapse of the investment banks, in contrast, involves abstract concepts like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, mortgage securitization, leverage ratios, overnight lending agreements, the Treausury, Fed, foreign investors and not one but several indistinguishable (to the public) i-banks at the center of it all. We'd buy a book about all that, and see the movie, but it's not going to fly off the DVD shelf at Wal-Mart.

Behar's story will make a great movie after it's published by Random House. What's more, he's kind of a badass, investigating Scientology for the cover of Time in the early 1990s, uncovering the famed FBI Phoenix Memo warning in advance of the 9/11 attacks and detailing Donald Rumsfeld's ties to North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Business journalism hasn't looked this sexy in a long time. You have to hand it to recent Wall Street Journal-buyer Rupert Murdoch: He timed this one well.

UPDATE: Andrew Kirtzman of WCBS and NY1 has a contract with HarperCollins.

UPDATE 2: Keith Kelly has more on the Kirtzman deal, including the advance: $250K.

Aren't troubled economic times usually marked by a flight to escapist entertainment, like James Bond films or cable shows about gangsters? And don't the best-selling business books tend to be bought by people looking to turn a profit, like say from the insights and life of Warren Buffett, now hitting shelves after the writer was already paid a $7 million advance? The number of freelance speculators tends to fall dramatically during a downturn. And if there's a miraculous economic recovery, no one's going to want to read about the bad old days.

The economic panic has been well timed, at least, for ink-stained wretches able to take some more profits before the slow-motion meltdown in their own industry is complete. The winners, per the Observer:

• Cocky Joe Nocera of the Times and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair (formerly Fortune) got the $1 million advance they dreamed of over wine, plus "a few bits" more. And they're going to take their merry time, publishing sometime in 2010.
• Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times (pictured) — who called out those nasty rumors about trouble at Lehman Brothers not three months ago — topped both Nocera and McLean, individually, with his $700,000 advance for an insidery "Woodward-style" account of the panic.
• Roger Lowenstein of the Times magazine, will focus on the week Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, AIG took a federal bailout and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson must craft and execute the bailout in a way that persuades Wall Street and the global financial system that they will be saved while protecting the American taxpayers’ $700 billion investment.

The Times' finance reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, writes frequently from the perspective of business executives and could hardly be called a populist. But his own Tuesday column on the bailout is scathing, going much further than the editorial:

The hypocrisy is thick... the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy...

There is nothing in the bill that will prevent these problems from happening again...

The sickest part is that Wall Street is lining up at the trough for a piece of the action, lobbying to run some of the $700 billion fund — and take huge fees — for their own mess.

The Wall Street Journal held its fire Tuesday after a lengthy editorial Monday recapping the many alleged ways government intervention has screwed up the economy — and stopping short of applying this lesson the biggest intervention yet.

It took a British paper, the Financial Times, to speak baldly. Like the Times, the paper went after the lax oversight in Paulson's legislation, which literally said his decisions "are non-reviewable... by any court of law or administrative agency." But the paper's editorial also went after the meat of the plan itself, saying it "had deep inherent flaws" in how it will determine prices and concluding with a call for a more powerful "alternative option quite soon."

Paulson is pressuring Congress to accept extraordinary amounts of debt extraordinarily quickly. America's newspapers, or what's left of them, should at least be keeping up. (Or maybe everyone would feel more comfortable leaving the analysis in James Cramer's trusty hands?)

And this morning it was worth watching the money network for rare footage of the laissez fairest of all making such uncharacteristic proclamations as: financial stocks shouldn't trade higher than six or seven times earnings, Alan Greenspan was a fuckup, no one has any clue what the hell is going to happen and the whole thing was the inevitable result of a trillion ton stockpile of hubris. Rare real (and real tired) talk from Bush's old plutocrat tax slasher Larry Lindsey, former Salomon Brothers chief and Liar's Poker excessophile John Gutfreund and market-friendly finance journalists like CNBC's David Faber and the Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin when you click the video.

Oh also some people wanted to blame CNBC for Bear Stearns' implosion but it is clear from their coverage today that CNBC would never do such a thing on purpose.

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

You wouldn't know it from reading Sorkin's column, which coddles Rattner while filleting his nemesis, but the cuckolded husband, Tommi Cosgrove, alleges much more than a simple affair on the part of Rattner and his wife

Sorkin omits most of Cosgrove's allegations from his column even though the banker himself told the Times, "everyone has heard... the damage is done." It's worth noting that Rattner tells Sorkin "most everything Mr. Cosgrove claims is either untrue or a gross exaggeration," but no details are provided.

Here's the smear "everyone has heard:"

Steve Ratner, of 11 Madison Avenue New York, and business partner of Donald Trump, friend of Bloomberg and rich kid has paid my wife $500,000.00 to leave me.

He further promised a Ferrari, house and more cash.

He met my wife when she was working as a high class escort in London through Bella's escort services, where he finds all his girlfriends and where all his rich mates shop.

He has had me followed, investigated and threatened and continues to send text messages bragging about his victory.

This guy couldn’t get laid if he was good looking, but uses his money to get what he wants

There are photos, emails, letters and even photos taken in Kirsty Alley's house in LA.

Rich People, they think they can buy anything. This guy’s favourite movies are "Pretty Woman" and "Indecent Proposal", jeez what an idiot.

I warned you MR. RATNER, I would not let this rest. I am coming for you big time.

To be featured on FACEBOOK & MYSPACE very soon

Also featured in the book, "the coffin maker", a true story.

Mr. Ratner keeps getting my posts removed as he is very embarrassed to have to admit to buying his girlfriends and having to pay for sex, but if you met him, you would understand why.............

Mr. Ratner - the story doesn’t end until i say so. have a nice life. Everyone will know Steve Ratner pays for sex and stole my wife with $500,000.00 and a car.

Even as his column bemoans the negative impact of these allegations on Rattner, Sorkin omits them in their particulars. He mentions only a nebulous "affair," doesn't press Rattner for a detailed denial of the other allegations and paints Rattner as a repentant, reformed husband and father. "This ought to be a story that, while painful, remained private," Sorkin scolds.

Cosgrove, meanwhile, is repeatedly implied, without any real evidence, to be mentally imbalanced, a liar or both:

To be honest, it’s hard to read Mr. Cosgrove’s florid account without concluding that he has, at a minimum, a vivid imagination. In one of my conversations with him, he alleged that he had “threats on my life by underworld associates;” that he was living in his car for a while; and that Mr. Rattner had been willing to pay him, through his ex-wife, $70,000 to disappear.

...Asked whether he was happy that Mr. Rattner resigned from his job, Mr. Cosgrove, reached on his mobile telephone Monday, said, “He should have thought about that before he did what he did to me.” Moments later, Mr. Cosgrove claimed he didn’t even know Mr. Rattner, which didn’t exactly heighten confidence in his accusations.

Sure, it's hard to trust a guy who, rather randomly, invokes Kirstie Ally in the sad saga of his wife's cheating, and then spams that story onto news websites, compounding his own humiliation. And it would be prudent to assume most of Cosgrove's wild allegations are false without evidence to the contrary.

But that doesn't mean the Times has license to paint Rattner as an all-but-innocent victim, swallowing his claim that he was literally "helpless against the destruction that can be wrought by aggressive campaigns on the Internet" and asserting in the headline that "On Wall St., Reputation Is Fragile," as though executives in other industries would somehow be left unscathed by tawdry escort-wife-stealing smears spammed to friends and associates via email and blog comments.

As a high-powered Wall Street executive, Rattner surely had the financial resources to mount a libel suit, as complicated as one might be across international lines, against Cosgrove.

But Rattner also could have fought back swiftly online, calling out lies while acknowledging those accusations that were true. A new website can be had for free at blogger.com or wordpress.com. The real cost would have been the pain of admitting to whatever actual, real wrongdoing he committed against his family and possibly others. That must be a brutally painful thing to do, particularly when the private lives of others remain just that. But it is far from a "helpless" situation.

Perhaps Sorkin slanted his story the way he did because he sensed his own role in this drama. His column, in the end, is what made Cosgrove's revenge complete, humiliating Rattner not in the sewers of the internet but from a distinguished platform on his home turf. And no amount of disdain can undo that.

[Times]

(Photo via TheDeal.com)

31-year-old Sorkin, part of a new generation of Times reporters, has been permitted opinion before. "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Let's take another example: Alessandra Stanley's front page indictment of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's troublesome pastor. Stanley’s review called Wright “the compelling but slightly wacky uncle who unsettles strangers but really just craves attention... [Wright] doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice."

Sorkin's slam on Ballmer is a sign of a livelier Gray Lady. The challenge from web news sites, the threat of layoffs—and now competition from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal—have lifted the metabolism of the newspaper in a way that the exhortations of earlier executive editors never could. An intelligent or provocative slant is one way that a newspaper can differentiate its story from the thousand other rehashes of the same information. British hyper-competitive newspapers have made an art of such spin; as America's media becomes more competitive, outlets are following Fleet Street's example.

It's not only the news pages that are livelier. The Times' City Room blog led the pack in covering the sudden death of movie star Heath Ledger: they were quick with the breaking news, information from the scene and background on the Dark Knight actor's bouts of depression. During the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the paper's website broke the first pictures of the governor's call-girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupré. And the newspaper's opinion writers like Frank Rich have led a devastating intellectual charge against George Bush and the Republican administration.

So what's the problem? All this messy modernity compromises the Times' prissy self-image. The newspaper's proprietors and editors are obviously moderate liberals, and the conservative columnists are either watered-down or compromised, as token as the useless liberals allowed to whine on Fox News—but the Times can't acknowledge that it's partisan. On the web, the Times has opted for speed and sensation, passing on a false detail that Ledger's apartment was owned by Mary-Kate Olsen—but the newspaper still maintains it applies the same standards of accuracy as in print. (It's still scarred by the fabrications of Jayson Blair, five years ago.)

Most painful of all to behold is the editors' contorted defense of an outmoded notion of objectivity. Here's the summary, it's fine for opinion to be expressed on the opinion pages, and in columns on the news pages, but only so long as those columns are written by designated columnists and not by multitasking reporters, who are only allowed to express "points of view" and not opinions, as if there were any way to distinguish between the two.

The mandate of columnists in the news pages “is fundamentally analytical,” executive editor Bill Keller told the paper's public editor. “They may have a point of view on an issue, but they are not partisan or ideological. They don’t endorse candidates. They don’t prescribe outcomes. ... They are free to express opinions of a certain type that grow out of a particular expertise and a body of reporting.” His deputy, Jill Abramson, was equally opaque when defending Alessandra Stanley's put-down of the attention-craving Reverend Wright. On May 4, in another column by the public editor, Abramson was quoted saying, “She had a lot of interesting things to say that didn’t go over the news-opinion divide." (So how interesting would one have to be to go over that line?)

You know what? Screw the news-opinion divide. When the Times was still pure, reporters would simply trot out some tame expert to give the story the slant they planned; it's less convoluted—and wordy—for writers like Sorkin and Stanley simply to express their own views. Readers can get raw information from wire services and press releases; the only value the Times can add is time-saving summarization—and attitude.

The Times is the closet-case of newspapers. Everybody knows that the political bent is liberal; that the newspaper's reporters have opinions; and that they're hungry for a juicy story, even if the rush to publish can introduce mistakes. None of these are crimes; they only become embarrassments because of the paper's official position. Bill Keller needs simply to come to terms with the nature of modern newspapers. He and his colleagues will feel so much lighter if they do.

Now, we don't actually believe that Sorkin's a serious candidate for the managing editor role. At 31, Sorkin is less than half the age that Steiger was when he retired from the position last year; Brauchli himself was deemed young for the job when he took over from Steiger at the age of 46. And Sorkin, though credited for the success of the Times' Deal Book finance email newsletter, has little experience as a manager. Steiger may have been misheard; or simply caught up in the swirl of ill-informed gossip that has gripped the Journal since Brauchli's defenestration.

But Robert Thomson, the former editor of Murdoch's London Times before the Australian media mogul dropped him in as publisher of the Journal, has indeed reached out to Sorkin, for some undefined role. (Thomson is pictured here, above Sorkin.)

Here's why Sorkin is actually more plausible a candidate than he looks. First, in the highly competitive UK, where Thomson has spent most of his newspaper career, editors tend to assume responsibility much earlier in their careers. Thomson's successor at the London Times, James Harding, was just 38 years old. Piers Morgan, now reduced to American trash television, was just 28 when made editor of Murdoch's News of the World.

Second, Sorkin has a powerful reputation for breaking business scoops. With excellent contacts among the acquisition advisers who dole out deal stories, Sorkin has pretty much singlehandedly made the New York Times a force on the crucial M&A beat. The Journal no longer has the monopoly it once possessed over day-before news of big deals. One measure of Sorkin's value as a scoop-getter: he's among the most highly paid reporters at the Times, earning about $200,000 per annum.

Finally, the Times reporter, having spent so much time in the company of bankers and executives, has much more understanding of business dictates managers than his peers. Sorkin was one of the reporters most supportive of Murdoch's bold bid for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company. While Sorkin's articles in the Times rehearsed the traditional criticisms of the tycoon's record as a proprietor, he concluded: "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Murdoch may well return the sentiment.

We've argued before that the Journal, like many other sclerotic American newspaper organizations, might benefit from a generational change. But it is not as if the newspaper has nurtured that many young editors. If Robert Thomson is determined to raise the metabolism of the Journal, to use Howell Raines' expression, he may be forced to bring in talent from outside. And that will be even more depressing for career Journal editors than last week's putsch. It is galling to report to someone younger; or to an outsider; a manager who has both those characteristics would be positively unbearable.