Stewart Pinkerton, said to have been pushed out the door in a coup this past spring, was asked whether he's shopping a book about how his ex-boss Steve Forbes is feuding with Forbes' brothers over the direction of their family media empire. Pinkerton certainly didn't deny that, telling Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovici,

"I've been working on a book project for the last year, but I'm not at liberty to discuss what it's about."

In other words, Pinkerton can't comment on whether his big secret book project is about the big secret at his former employer, but he wants to make sure you know he is working on a big book, which is secret so... probably, right? Connect the dots. (Bercovici lists some other people who hypothetically could have written this tell-all book, but of course they didn't, since Pinkerton did.)

(Pic via Forbes)

Perhaps not, if only because Lyle (née Eric) has been more successful in his overshares. His brother uploads videos of scary knife play and intimate moments to the video website he started, while Lyle runs naked through a forest in a Sigur Rós video, according to New York's The Cut. And we haven't heard anything about Lyle turning up topless at business mixers.

Then again, in Lyle's line of work, that would actually be appropriate. When you're prancing about for the likes of Burberry and Lanvin, you're moving beyond fameballing and toward outright stardom. Big brother could probably learn something from his example.

This is the Veep's nephew, Jamie Biden, who went to Georgetown and majored in internation relations, of course, but then he moved to New York and started a band! Wait, sorry, then he got a law degree at Fordham and then he started a band! (Is it rockist of us to miss the days when, if a band was going to have college degrees, they'd at least be art degrees?)

This band, "Bloody Social," has not so much as signed with even an indie label, but you can get their songs on the MySpace, and the iTunes, and the singer, who is not a Biden, played a "Rock the Vote" gig, at the inauguration.

Joe's daughter, Ashley, is a coke-snorting party girl, but at least she has a job. She is a coke-snorting social worker! Also there is Beau, who is the Attorney General of Delaware, and Hunter, who is an evil lobbyist. He probably has hundreds more nephews and nieces doing unsavory or savory professional things, because it is an Irish-Catholic family, but who cares about them.

Joe Biden's Gnarly Nephew Rocks to the Rhythm of a Different Strummer [NYO]
[Photo: Patrick McMullan]

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., family steward to the financially-troubled paper, has written an embarrassing paean to its benefactor Slim. At least he had the good grace to publish it elsewhere, in Time magazine. Can you smell the butter?

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Carlos Slim... It was obvious from the moment we met that he was a true Times loyalist... Carlos, a very shrewd businessman... has funded extensive public-health education programs and... helped thousands of students throughout Latin America...

Carlos knows very well how much one person with courage, determination and vision can achieve.

Sulzberger just finished examining 30 different online-news business models in hopes of making more money from nytimes.com. The publisher is well aware of how challenging it is to turn a profit online. So perhaps he should not be blamed for seizing the opportunity to exploit his real talent: Pleasing the rich and powerful people who own his company, through flattery and every other means.

Sulzberger is hardly alone: many in the traditional media find it easier to court new sugar daddies than to implement deeper forms of change. The Times scion is, however, the most conspicuous — and so, in many ways, the saddest.

Took him long enough. The pair married in December 2007, with Page (net worth $18.6 billion) planting a kiss on his bride on Richard Branson's exclusive Necker Island. Co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, have already popped out a billionaire baby boy. We wonder: Will the Pages go with a squad of Stanford-trained nannies, or take their child to Google's gold-plated childcare?

We've never quite understood how it's totally okay that Les Moonves is the CEO of CBS and his wife is the star of one of the network's flagship properties. What if her ratings sucked? Hello, conflict of interest! But we're grateful, because this kind of power couple is invariably nutty. Take Chen's anecdote about sniffing her husband's wine at dinner. Chen and Moonves are acknowledged grape groupies: Witness the portrait of themselves that hangs in their living room.

(Clip by our video intern Nicole Keller)

It's hard to imagine the Black Hawk Down author getting as much milage from a few interviews as he did just fact-checking Sulzberger's TV appearances and office furniture, not to mention the quotes and anecdotes he elicited from (mostly) anonymous coworkers past and present.

Highlights, setting aside the well-known anecdotes and failures Bowden retreads, follow, category by category.

Sulzberger clinging to factually incorrect information

Keep in mind: This guy is the publisher and family steward of the New York Times.

• The linchpin of Sulzberger's business strategy is a factually incorrect family story. The publisher enthusiastically described on the Charlie Rose Show a decision by his grandfather to expand the space for news during World War II. Bowden: "This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers... [the grandfather] increased space for ads and decreased space for news."
  
• Sulzberger framed a purported Winston Churchill quote in his office, from a speech during World War II: "Never never never give up." Bowden: "What Churchill actually said was 'Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty-never give in,' and he added an important qualifier: '-except to convictions of honour and good sense.'"

They really don't like Sulzberger in the executive suite:

• Bowden: "Even the mid-level talent around Arthur does not regard him as a peer, much less a suitable leader. He is accepted, of course. The family does own the newspaper..."
  
• The business side, said one former associate, "saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists."
  
• Former Times staffer: "He has no rays." Bowden: "Rays, as in the lines cartoonists draw around a character to suggest radiance, or power... [the] deficit is a standard insider lament about Arthur."

It's not much better in the newsroom:

• Sulzberger likes to talk about his oh-so-hardscrabble days as a newspaper reporter/Times heir apparent. Former Times executive: "He'll just do it as a throwaway-‘When I was a reporter.' I will say this to him one day: Don't say that... Do you think it's giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less."
  
• The provincial publisher was once confused by a question about a story in that day's "Post," meaning Washington Post. He supposedly replied, "I only read the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post." Page Six trumps Watergate, apparently.

• It was already known Sulzberger declined to invest in Google. It turns out he also passed on a potentially hugely lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, to embed affiliate links in the online Times Book Review. Former CFO Diane Baker: "They said, We can't do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser."
  
• Sulzberger's use of the term "platform agnostic" to describe publishing news both online and in print is nonsensical. Tom Rosenstiel of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Agnostics are people who don't-who aren't sure what they believe in. That's the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first... you need to change the culture of a news organization and decide that the Internet is the primary new thing."

Just ouch:

• Damning praise from longtime Sulzberger "friend" Steve Rattner, the former Times reporter turned investment maven turned Obama auto bailout adviser: "In everything he does, he means well." (Emphasis added.)

[Vanity Fair]

Plath gassed herself at home in 1963, after sealing Nicholas and his sister Freida Hughes off in the room next door. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had recently left her for Assia Wevill, another poet's wife, and Plath was struggling to make ends meet amid a harsh winter. Writes the Times of London in its excellent obituary:

Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In March 1969, six years after Plath's death, Wevill gassed herself and her four-year-old daughter in a suicide apparently modeled on Plath's.

Nicholas Hughes has recently left his post at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks to make pottery in his home studio. The evolutionary ecologist had been battling depression "for some time," according to his sister Freida Hughes. From her statement:

His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.

If the grisly deaths of Plath and Wevill sparked questions about the propensity of poets toward suicide, Nicholas Hughes' death highlights the ongoing debate over how genetics and suicide might be linked; the expert quoted by the Times emphasized the importance of "what's happening in the here and now" over any biological factors.

Hughes reached the age of 47 and became a professor, having clearly found at least some of the emotional shelter his mother wished on him. She wrote of him in Nick and the Candlestick, "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn."

[Times of London]

(Image via)

Ev and Sara being Twitter's First Family, they've been teasing the news out on the microblogging service. We're curious: When Morishige referred to Williams's "Christmas present" in a tweet last week, did she mean a bit of procreation? Do the math: She wrote that she "ordered it" in early December, and the baby's due in August.

Anderson, a San Franciscan who has been described as "a whirlwind of American bonhomie in a linen suit," is the younger Murdoch's chief flack for News Corp's European and Asian divisions, and right now his chief job is to burnish his boss' reputation and make him seem a fit replacement for the beloved Peter Chernin, who stepped down last month as News Corp. president.

And if he succeeds—a likely outcome given the apparent unwillingness of Murdoch's sister and chief rival, Elizabeth, to give up her successful TV production company—he will almost certainly cross the pond to become News Corp.'s chief flack. Gary Ginsberg, the current holder of that title—is a Chernin loyalist who was already in a rocky political position after bearing the brunt of the blame for Rupert's cooperation with Michael Wolff's feather-ruffling book.

Anderson and Murdoch met when Anderson was working in Asia for the global PR shop Ogilvy, handling the account of British cable firm BSkyB, which Murdoch then ran. According to the British PR trade journal Campaign, the two worked together for four years and fast became "best friends." In 2005, Murdoch convinced Anderson to jump ship after fifteen years at Ogilvy and work for BSkyB; when Murdoch moved into News Corp proper to run Europe and Asia, Anderson followed suit.

Anderson specializes in the sort of political maneuvering that Rupert loves. After he hired British political consultant Tim Allan to manage BSkyB's relationship with Parliament, a leaked 2006 leaked memo from Allan to Anderson revealed their plans to curry favors with legislators and reporters by hosting them at seminars and dinners, as well as the proposed construction of a database to keep track of all BSkyB's contacts with government officials. Should Murdoch prevail, Anderson's approach ought to translate well to the States.

Also, he is a former Nevada state tennis champ.

While there is some speculation that Murdoch isn't ready to formally take the reins as his daddy's deputy and News Corp may temporarily install a seat-warmer while he preps, it's clear that business reporters will likely be spending a lot of phone time with Anderson in the coming months.

Arthur writes under the byline "A.G. Sulzberger," going by his initials, as is the style in certain parts of the journalism world (New York). Perusing a list of his stories so far, we see:

—Most of them are entries on the City Room blog, as you would expect.
—A large percentage of his stories are co-bylines shared with either Jennifer 8 Lee or Sewell Chan, the two stars of the Metro desk.

So he's learning from the best that the Times has to offer! We look forward to following the young man's progress as he grows into a full-blown metro reporter, then is eventually allowed to write fake trend pieces, and finally takes over the company. These are the three steps to success, AG.
[Pic: Willamette Week's Flickr. Email us and let us know how you like it over there, dude!]

Chernin's contract expires in June, and he has a clause that allows him to become a well-paid producer on movies for the Fox studio he currently oversees. (The company now confirms his exit, as well as his plans to start a production company.) A convenient out for an untenable situation: Murdoch has always made it clear that he wanted to put one of his children in charge.

Why settle things now, with June some months away? It might have something to do with a story in today's New York Times questioning Murdoch's devotion to the newspaper business. News Corp.'s print holdings have weighed down results even as Chernin's Hollywood empire have steadily produced cash. It's not too difficult to read the story as an argument for why the Chernin (profitable) half of News Corp. is being dragged down by the Murdoch (sentimental) part.

Also, pointing out the dodgy performance of News Corp.'s newspapers is a veiled dig at the current dynastic frontrunner, James Murdoch. The 35-year-old executive oversees News Corp's businesses in Asia and Europe, including a large collection of newspapers, where he's been cutting costs in the name of "editorial efficiency."

Could the elder Murdoch have taken offense? If a squabble over the story was a factor, it can't have been the only one. But in a family business, work is always personal. And no media company inspires speculation about palace intrigue like News Corp.

Just a few months ago, the NYT Co's dividend was 23 cents per share. In November it was cut to six cents. And if you think about it, the reason it got cut that time is only more of a reason now:

"Today's decision provides the company with additional financial flexibility given the current economic environment and the uncertain business outlook," said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman, in a statement. "We expect the suspension of the dividend, coupled with our other actions, will help us decrease debt and improve the liquidity of the company, a difficult but prudent measure in this operating environment."

It's economically sound for the cash-strapped company, although it won't make the stockholders incredibly happy. Especially the Sulzberger family members who were living the easy life off that dividend money. Now their company actually has to make money in order for them to make money! Joe Hagan wrote in New York last fall:

Sulzberger and CEO Janet Robinson raised the dividend by an extraordinary 31 percent last year-even as the stock price declined. Of the $132 million a year the paper gives to shareholders, about $25 million of it now goes directly into the coffers of the Ochs-Sulzberger trusts.

That's all gone, and the company needs every penny it saves to pay down debt. Henry Blodget points out that a share of NYT stock is now cheaper than a Sunday copy of the paper. Time for the young Sulzbergers to get to work. At least one of them has a job. For now. [AP]

Newsom, a Democrat, has declared himself a candidate for California's governor seat, a wide-open race taking place next year, since term limits are keeping Arnold Schwarzenegger from running again. A rising star in the Democratic party, Newsom has hurt himself with gaffes both personal and political.

He and his first wife, Fox News TV host kimberly Guilfoyle, divorced in 2006. While going through the divorce, Newsom had an affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his campaign manager, Alex Tourk. The divorce and affair ruined Newsom's Camelot-by-the-Bay image.

His wedding last year to Siebel, a cousin of wealthy software entrepreneur Tom Siebel, was a step towards restoring his tattered image. (Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin ferried guests in their private jet to the wedding site on a Montana ranch.)

But then came Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage, a cause Newsom has championed since he defied state law in 2004 by issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (including the author of this post). At a rally, Newsom declared that gay marriage was coming to California "whether you like it or not," a sound bite Prop 8 supporters aired endlessly in TV commercials and was cited in many election post-mortems as a factor in the passage of Prop 8.

With memories of his messy personal life still fresh, and his main cause defeated in the last state election, Newsom's push for the governor's seat looked like it was off to a rocky start. In the Democratic primary, he faces California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former Governor Moonbeam.

But political observers say Brown may strike potential voters as too old. With Newsom's wife expecting a child in the fall, he will have the perfect family-man campaign prop. What better way for a claimant to the throne to seem young and vital than to have his very own heir?

Update: The mayor's office has confirmed that the Newsoms are expecting. Spokesman Nathan Ballard said:

We are pleased to confirm that Mayor Gavin Newsom and First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom are starting a family. The Mayor and the First Lady are thrilled to be embarking on this adventure together, and they appreciate your good wishes.

Guess who wasn't expecting this? Gavin's dad and Jennifer's mom, both of whom told the San Francisco Examiner that their children hadn't let them in on the secret.

(Photos by Getty Images)

After leaving a reporting job at the Portland Oregonian to move to New York, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger has been set up with a job at the Times' website. He'll be writing and reporting for the City Room blog, part of the paper's impressive Metro desk, writes the New York Observer's John Koblin. He's sitting next to Jennifer 8. Lee and a bunch of editors.

His colleagues are thus far impressed. "When I looked at his clips, I said ‘Oooh! This guy ain’t bad!'" one anonymously told Koblin. "Eager to please and humble," said another. Those are pretty good reviews for a writer presumed to owe his job, in large part, to his father, grooming him to perhaps take over the paper. In the wake of the Times' first-ever mass layoffs a few months ago, one might have forgiven Sulzberger's newsroom compatriots a dose of resentment for the nepotism.

For all his professional good fortune, relative to other ink-stained wretches, Sulzberger is in a tough spot, relative to past Times scions. Amid a scramble for cash and falling revenues at the paper, there's persistent talk of its failure. As unlikely as that might seem, it's a scenario being taken far more seriously than it would have been just a few years ago, to say nothing of a few decades ago.

Then there is the separation of his parents, announced less than a year ago, and the rumors about his dad. Just as dinner-party speculation about Pinch Sulzberger and Caroline Kennedy settled down, gossip about his purported three-year relationship with a woman named Helen Ward hit the tabloids. That sort of chatter cannot be easy on Arthur Gregg Sulzberger's mother Gail, with whom Arthur Gregg is said to be close. Even before the gossip, Gail was reported (again by New York's sources) to be "really hurt" and "taken aback" by the split.

It won't be easy, in all likelihood, for Arthur Gregg to work for his father while trying to provide some comfort to his mother. But if he can navigate that near-term challenge, he at least has a shot at getting the Times past all the threats it faces in the long term.

Page Six is reporting that Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s girlfriend is Helen Ward of Aspen, Colorado, who he met on a trip to Peru "about a year ago." Sulzberger didn't announce his separation from his wife until four months or so after meeting Ward, but transferred an apartment to his wife's name prior to that, so it's entirely possible but not entirely clear that he was separated from his wife at the time his relationship with Ward started.

For what it's worth, Ward's husband is said by a Page Six source to be "crazy bitter" right now.

The Times won't comment on Ward. But a spokesman did give the Post a full-throated rebuttal to the speculation about an affair between Sulzberger and Caroline Kennedy:

"Mr. Sulzberger is not and never has been romantically involved with Ms. Kennedy."

Page Six goes on to say that since Sulzberger has a girlfriend, there's no way he could have slept with Caroline Kennedy. Because, presumably, Sulzberger's lover of the moment, who he's been seeing for an indeterminate amount of time, precludes him from having slept with someone else in the recent past.

And because boyfriends, like husbands, do not sleep around. As the Post's gossip columnists know particularly well.

(Top photo of Helen Ward from an Apsen, Co. dinner of the Aspen Institute, an organization that has collaborated, along with CEO Walter Isaacson, on several projects with the Aspen Science Center, led by Ward's husband Kevin.)

Caroline Kennedy told associates her decision was related to uncle Ted's illness, according to the Times, which sounded at first, to us and others, like an implausible excuse. Ted Kennedy's brain tumor has been a serious concern since the summer, well before Caroline was in contention for Hillary Clinton's senate seat.

But then came the evidence that Ted Kennedy and his associates were fighting Caroline's decision. After the New York Post, Times and the Associated Press reported Caroline was withdrawing her name from Gov. David Paterson's consideration, indignant denials emerged from Washington, DC, where uncle Ted is the go-to source for all things Kennedy.

NBC News' David Gregory, of the DC bureau's Meet the Press, called into Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show to say he'd heard the rumors were false. And the Washington Post quoted "Kennedy family confidants angrily dismissing" the reports. Even AP backtracked, clarifying that after "wavering briefly," Kennedy had "renewed her determination Wednesday to win appointment to the U.S. Senate seat once held by her slain uncle, Bobby Kennedy."

Things didn't turn out that way. But the back and forth between New York and DC media was easy to mistake for a surrogate to a tug-of-war between Caroline Kennedy and her uncle.

If Caroline Kennedy purportedly told friends she quit over concerns for her uncle's health, Ted seems to have not wanted her to yield to those worries.

And yet he couldn't stop her. She was deeply anxious. And why shouldn't she be? Were Ted Kennedy to soon die, she would will be left to govern without him.

That scenario seemed more likely Kennedy's seizure at Barack Obama's inauguration. When the senator spoke at the Democratic National Convention, he said he wanted to pass the torch to Barack Obama and "a new generation of Americans." The ailing senator made it, but the inaugural incident would have raised the question, particularly among those who love him most, of whether, having done so, he was preparing to say goodbye.

Ted Kennedy would not be content merely to see Obama as president. What of the Kennedy family legacy? What of his own — his initiatives, his allies, his staff? The dream of an eternal Kennedy dynasty is a lot to place on the shoulders of a basically apolitical woman with just a couple of years of government leadership under her belt, inside a municipal bureaucracy at that. And yet Caroline is the best-qualified remaining member of the clan to keep the family name continuously present in the senate — and far preferable to Andrew Cuomo, whose messy divorce from Kerry Kennedy was laced with accusations of infidelity and did not endear him to Ted.

The senator, one might reasonably surmise, must have pushed Caroline hard, right up to the end. But this was one affair he could not put in order.

Valleywag has just learned the name of the first heir to the Google fortune, who was born in late December. But domain records suggest his parents may already be planning young Benji's career on the Web. (Either that, or some mischievous sort privy to the family's secrets snapped up the kid's name as a website address.) On Friday, benjibrin.com got registered using a private-domains service to hide the customer name.

For modern parents, registering a baby's name is relatively normal, a trend USA Today deemed mainstream two years ago. Thank goodness for that. If Benji Brin's baby shower, where his parents and guests dressed up in diapers and footie pajamas, is any indication, he's in for a weird if wealthy life.

(Photoillustration of Benji Brin's likely appearance, based on his parents, via MakeMeBabies.com)

Page and his wife Lucy Southworth, the model-pretty, Stanford Ph.D.-smart scion of a family connected to the Bushes, threw the party for Brin and Wojcicki in a San Francisco warehouse space a couple of months ago, we're told. The dress code: baby clothes. Guests wore adult diapers, footie pajamas, and other infantile getups.

Most guests, that is: Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's sexaholic mayor, refused to play dressup. "Dignity," he explained. We suspect that a team of Googlers, at this very moment, may be working to eradicate dignity as an obstacle to their goal of organizing the world's information.

(Oh, and that sighting of Brin at a maternity ward last month? A bit too early, but Wojcicki did have their child a few weeks later. We know all kinds of things about this baby, thanks to Wojcicki's oversharing on Oprah — likely to be lactose intolerant, unlikely to have blue eyes, high risk of Parkinson's — but not its name. Anyone care to fill us in?)