Michael Wolff was talking to lefty media blogger Rory O'Connor at the bar.

We asked him if he'd been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement for Newser.

He laughed. "Never! No NDAs, never," he said. "That's the rule of the road."

So there might very well be a tell-all in his future. Rory laughed and said, "It's inevitable!"

Wolff agreed: "Inevitable."

"It could be called, "I can't believe those idiots gave me money to do it all again!" Rory said.

We asked Wolff about the algorithm that is Newser's kind of main claim to fame. Users can move an indicator on a continuum that runs from hard to soft news. "I have no idea how it works," Wolff said. "The tech guys explained it to me but I zoned out halfway through. Go ask that guy," he said pointing into a web of white-haired bespectacled men. "The one with white hair and the glasses."

Later, Caroline Miller was lingering by the door, ready to escape. Man, why didn't she get an NDA out of Wolff? "Because I'm feckless!" she said. Nice.

"Michael doesn't even have a contract," she said. "This whole thing is all on a handshake."

So what exactly does Wolff do for Newser? Here's what he does not do: "He's not allowed to talk to anyone on the inside," Miller said. "He's not allowed to manage anybody. What he discovered a long time ago about himself is that he likes to fire people. He has the ideas but I make them happen."

So he has ideas. And did he bring the money? No. "It's all Pat's money anyway!" That would be Patrick Spain, the CEO of HighBeam and soon to be the main character of a really harsh book about how the internet sucks.

• Dean Baquet wins the coveted Observer Media Mensch of the Year award. This follows hot on the heels of a bunch of other bullshit made-up media awards by organizations you've barely heard of, and comes a day in advance of our naming Chris Mohney's right testicle Gawker's Blog Ball of the Year. [NYO]
  
• Bryan Keefer, semi-erstwhile Voice editor Erik Wemple: doucherati. [Wonkette]
  
• "Time Inc. axed 27 mid-level and junior employees from its consumer marketing department." We're having a hard time coming up with less interesting media news. [AdAge]
  
• CNN's Jon Klein, entire viewing public, not fans of old ladies. [Jossip]
  
• Caroline Miller, whose tenure at New York we would have been much kinder about had we known that she'd be succeeded by Adam Moss, working on a "news Web site" with noted asshat Michael Wolff. [NYO]

• If you really care about deputy editors at the NYT's Editorial page, feel free to click on this link. [NYT]
  
• Website exclusive: Bloggers unattractive. [Radar]
  
• "Instead of living up to the high mandate of its own editorial policy, Time responded with a non-choice, awarding the Person of the Year to an abstraction. By giving the award to "You," it effectively gave the award to no one. In dong so, it has insulted its readers with the assumption that they are too vain and gullible to know the difference." Hahaha, they said "dong." [CJR]
  
• Speaking of Time, Managing Editor Richard Stengel justifies Jon Friedman's existence: "If you're not making some percentage of the people unhappy, you're not making an interesting choice." [Marketwatch]
  
• Speaking of Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel, that's one scary-looking dude. [Kausfiles]
  
• Correction of the Day: "A chart on Sunday comparing biographical and personal points about Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, two like-minded New York leaders with a warm relationship who could find themselves at odds once Mr. Spitzer is sworn in, misidentified one of Mr. Bloomberg's favorite foods. It is saltines, not sardines." [NYT]