Neal Boulton is the upstanding one here, see? He was forced, forced by his conscience, to tell Keith Kelly that he had no choice but to quit his job as editor of Men's Fitness, in moral protest, when the magazine got Tiger Woods to be on its cover in exchange for covering up news of his dirty, sexxxy affairs.

"We were going to [do a quid pro quo with] America's favorite sports star, just to get his name on the cover of a magazine," said Boulton. "That was too much for me. That's when I high-tailed it out of there."

David Pecker, CEO of AMI [which owns both the National Enquirer and Men's Fitness], denies this and calls Boulton a "disgruntled former employee." The truth is, there are no winners here, ladies and gentlemen. None.

[Disclosure: Neal Boulton once commissioned a freelance article from me and then never paid me for it so I am biased against him.]

A tipster forwards us this email that went out to Ashley Madison members this week. We're guessing the same impulses that would cause someone to conduct their extracurricular fucking in their own home would also cause them to want to speak to the Paper of Record about it.

From: Ashley Madison
Date: Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 2:46 PM
Subject: Anonymous Interview with The New York Times

Dear [Ashley Madison customer],

Have you had an extra-marital affair and secretly brought your lover into your home? Or have you been cheated on by your spouse in your own home?

If you answered yes to either of the above, The New York Times would like to anonymously interview you for a story they're writing on affairs within your own home.

The interview would be over the phone and if desired, your identity would be kept completely confidential.

If you meet the above criteria, please let us know if you are interested with a paragraph explaining your situation.

Regards,

Keri Lincoln
Public Relations Specialist
AshleyMadison.com

As applicants to appear on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C., Tareq and Michaele Salahi had signed a contract with the network limiting their television appearances. And according to a booker at a rival network, an NBC staffer has admitted that Bravo prevented the Salahis from giving their initial exclusive interview to anyone other than NBC News, which is under the same NBC Universal corporate umbrella as Bravo.

"They had a Bravo contract before the state dinner," the NBCer said, according to our source. "Bravo just held them to it," comparing the situation to what the TLC network did with John and Kate Gosselin after that pair became front-page news.

Bravo's contract with Real Housewives of New Jersey participants has been posted online, and the relevant portion of that contract—which we'd imagine would be quite similar to what the Salahis signed—is here:

In addition to obligating participants to make themselves "reasonably available" to market the show, it prevents them from appearing on any "unscripted, reality-based programs" without Bravo's written consent. If the Salahis signed a contract like this, Bravo could have prevented them from giving their exclusive to anyone other than Today.

The Salahis had been scheduled to break their silence on CNN's Larry King Live last night, but the appearance was "rescheduled" without explanation. ABC News and CBS News were also pursuing the Salahis, and the Associated Press has reported that the couple was demanding "a payment in the mid-six figures range" in exchange for access.

It's an open secret that morning news shows will pay money to land interviews — they are just very clever about it, never cutting a check directly for an interview. The spurned rival saluted former Today honcho and present NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker's creativity in securing the biggest get of, well, the month so far.

Still, Lauer insisted this morning that NBC News hadn't paid the Salahis:

Matt Lauer: Based on some of the things that have been reported over the last 48 or 72 hours I feel the need to say this and ask this : are you appearing here today in any way because of any financial deal that you have made with this network? Are we paying you for this appearance in any way?

Michaele: No you're not.

Tareq: No, absolutely not.

Michaele: And at no time, Matt, have we ever even talked about doing that with anyone.

It depends on what "this network" means. Did they have a financial deal with NBC? No. Did they have one with Bravo? Absolutely.

"I'm OK losing," said a rival booker, "but to watch Matt Lauer say 'we didn't pay them'" when NBC News' corporate sister Bravo used its contract to force them to Today was too much. Not to mention that the Salahis will be paid, handsomely, when they are inevitably selected for the final cast of Real Housewives, which they almost certainly will be.

UPDATE: Cameron Blanchard, a Bravo spokeswoman, says "it's categorically false" that Bravo played a role in the booking: "Bravo was not involved at all." When we asked Blanchard whether Bravo had, as the Real Housewives of New Jersey agreement seems to indicate, a contractual right to determine which television programs the Salahis appear on, she said "we don't comment on the contents of contracts." Then, commenting on the contents of the contract, Blanchard added that "every contract is different, and to imply that the Salahis signed something like the Real Housewives on New Jersey contract is not accurate."

SECOND UPDATE: NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp says, "Bravo was not involved. This was a separate situation. While I can't speak for the Salahis, the fact that they chose to appear on the number one morning news show should not seem odd." Asked if Bravo had a contractual right to sign off on the Salahis' television appearances, she said, "You would have to ask Bravo about the contract." When we asked Kapp why the Salahis would initially decide to appear on CNN's Larry King Live instead of the "number one morning news show," she said, "They chose to, and then they changed their minds, and you'd have to ask them why they did."

Finke posted embedded video of a small portion of Winfrey's remarks at 9:45 a.m. California time, roughly an hour and forty-five minutes after Winfrey announced on her show that she was calling it quits after next season. She also posted a much fuller transcript of Winfrey's speech. Winfrey's show doesn't air until 3 p.m. in Los Angeles, so where did she get it?

From the Chicago Tribune, which posted the transcript at 10:19 a.m. Central time, or just 20 minutes after Winfrey's announcement. How do we know? Because, a tipster points out, the transcript Finke posted features the same bracketed commentary—"[Her voice grows thick with emotion]"—and typographical irregularities, like double quotes within double quotes. Finke didn't cite the Tribune or—more important—link back to the paper's Watcher blog, which actually did the transcribing. She just copied and pasted without attribution.

Of course, Winfrey's words aren't proprietary to the Tribune. She said them on television. But someone actually did sit down and replayed the speech over and over while actually typing out what Winfrey said. A link wouldn't kill you, Nikki.

Saturday Update: Finke has emailed to explain that she had no idea where the transcript came from before she posted it on her blog, which she says is a somewhat regular occurence. And somewhat bizarrely she accused the Tribune's Watcher blog of lifting it from some other source. She has still not given The Watcher a credit or link. Here is her email:

I actually wound up receiving it several times in my email from a bunch of different emailers. (Again, how do we know it was ONLY the Tribune's?) I did my best to authenticate it. Yes, every so often I get something from another publication sent to me without any labeling. And when I put it up, the writer or company tells me and I credit them unless they want me to take it down. Happens most often with photos.
But I actually credit a LOT (whereas Variety and the LA Times rarely do...)
This was really a cheap shot by John.

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

On March 10, 2008, the New York Times broke the story of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's hooker habit, and cable news went insane. One of the gratifying things we found in the 1,300 pages of e-mail correspondence between Spitzer's flacks and reporters (which we obtained under New York's public records law) was that some reporters who were booked as talking heads actually made an effort to know what they were talking about before they went on TV. Of course, it's hard to get too much information at the last minute — which is one reason no one on cable television knows what they are talking about — and often the natural impulse of reporters is to check in with a flack for guidance.

The day after the Spitzer news broke, as speculation over his future was at a fever pitch, Financial Times reporter Brooke Masters, who wrote a book in 2006 about Spitzer's rise to power, was booked to appear on CNN. She sent a frantic e-mail to Spitzer's communications director Christine Anderson ten minutes before she was scheduled to go on, asking, "what tone should I take when asked if he will resign?" She signed off with, "Help."

Anderson responded that no announcement would be coming that day, but that Masters' "tone should probably be that the options aren't good." On CNN that night, in a taped segment for Anderson Cooper 360, Masters said, "Unless he can completely reinvent himself, his old method of dealing with the world and his old attraction as a politician is gone."

When we let Masters know that we were publishing the exchange, she wrote in an e-mail that "I knew I was going to be asked what Mr Spitzer would do, and I am a reporter not a pundit so I was trying to gather the facts." Which we commend her for. Still, it's worth remembering the next time you see a reporter analyzing a story on cable somewhere, that — at least for the ones who did their homework — the facts, and the tone, sometimes come unattributed and off the record from people who are paid to manage reporters.

Another reporter who checked in with Anderson before going on TV was them-Time magazine deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius, who now edits the Harvard Business Review. Oddly, Ignatius — who had covered and profiled Spitzer for Time — was booked on ABC News and NBC News as a supporter of Spitzer's, to balance out the detractors offering gleeful quotes on his self-immolation.

On March 10, a few hours after the story broke, Ignatius e-mailed Spitzer's chief of staff Marlene Turner asking if he could speak to Spitzer or anyone else in his office about the governor's state of mind before going on ABC News's World News Tonight. Turner referred him to Anderson. World News didn't use any of Ignatius' tape, but the next day, NBC Nightly News invited him to speak as "someone who knows and likes Eliot," and he asked Anderson for access to Spitzer or anybody else who might know his thinking. Anderson responded that she'd be happy to talk to him.

That night, Ignatius was identified on a Nightly News segment as a Spitzer "supporter," and he told correspondent Mike Taibbi that "it's going to be very, very, very difficult for him to stay in office."

Ignatius and Masters were right to find out as much as they could before being presented to television audiences as informed analysts (or in Ignatius' case, a partisan). But it's interesting, to us at least, to see laid bare the role that flacks can play behind the scenes in managing the tone and direction of talking-head coverage during a PR disaster.

Plouffe was the author of the founding statement of anti-Politico-ism, as reported in a December New York Times Magazine story:

"If Politico and Halperin say we're winning, we're losing," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, "I saw someone on cable say this. . . ."

Oh how that lifted our hearts and gave us solace! We've often returned to it late at night when our thoughts are troubled by Tea Parties and death panels, and we fall asleep with the sounds of Plouffe's soothing, measured voice whispering in our ear that it's all going to be OK—that the shouting and the cynical, empty-headed analysis and the superficial horse race obsession and the bullshit stories all amount to little more than sound and fury. He proved that you can win by ignoring it.

But it's still a useful sound, and a pliant fury! Because Plouffe dropped one of the biggest "I saw someone on cable say this..." Drudge-bait stories of the primary into Politico's lap—he was responsible for saddling John Edwards with the $400 haircut story via a tip to Ben Smith:

Obama's campaign had a particularly capable opposition research shop, a source of tips to many reporters, not all of them on policy. And Plouffe, in passing, outs the campaign as the source of a brief item I did in April 2007 off an Edwards campaign expenditure — probably driving as much traffic, chatter and grief as anything that short I've ever written.

"We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did," Plouffe writes a bit self-servingly, "but there were times we indulged — it was our researchers who found John Edwards's infamous $400 hair cut expenditures."

So you can't win by ignoring Politico. You have to pretend to ignore them while you service them with material that makes your opponents look like the shallow self-obsessed divas that they are. There are no heroes.

As soon as the New York Times broke the news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's habit of patronizing high-end call girls on the afternoon of March 10, 2008, his communications director Christine Anderson pretty much knew she was out of a gig. But along with managing the media frenzy surrounding Spitzer, she also had a new boss, Gov. David Paterson, who almost immediately stirred up his own press storm by disclosing past affairs and drug use.

But before all that happened, Anderson was getting buried with requests for Spitzer. Among the first out of the gate was Matthew Zimmerman, Matt Lauer's booker at the Today show. He didn't land the exclusive Spitzer interview everyone was clamoring for—that went to CNN's Fareed Zakaria a year later—but in the course of pursuing the get, Zimmerman casually mentioned to Anderson that he'd be more than happy to help her find work at NBC News. He also turned up his nose at a shot at Paterson just hours before news broke of Paterson's past infidelities, at which point Zimmerman immediately did a 180 and begged for an interview with Paterson. Because governors are boring unless they're fucking people they shouldn't be fucking.

Read on to see how the exchange unfolded in e-mails, which we obtained by filing a public records for correspondence between the press and Spitzer's communications office during the crisis.

This is Zimmerman's first e-mail seeking the interview that every news producer wanted, just a few hours after the Spitzer story broke. It has the standard expression of sympathy common to television bookers ("I'm sorry to be reaching out to you in such circumstances") but reminds Anderson that he's not your run of the mill news lackey: "I am Matt Lauer's producer at NBC." Anderson politely brushed him off with a terse "will get back to you as soon as I can," which considering the circumstances could be a way of saying don't hold your breath.

Two days later, Zimmerman and Lauer decided to up their efforts and go the direct route. Lauer had written "a personal note" to Spitzer, and Zimmerman wanted to know if he should it "walk it over" to Anderson's office or leave it with his Spitzer's doorman. Anderson says, "Feel free."

Five days later, on March 17, Spitzer's resignation became effective and Paterson was elevated from lieutenant governor to become the first African American governor of New York. Zimmerman circled back to thank Anderson for "all her help" during the crisis of the previous week, and to let her know that he's thinking about her. Anderson wrote back to say she heard Today was interested in talking to the first African American governor of New York, and she seemed to be willing to entertain the idea. How about it? At this point, though, Paterson was, in national news terms, the previously unknown politician who had replaced the celebrity governor who had been accused of sleeping with a hooker. Zimmerman's response to the offer is underwhelming and puzzling: "Believe it or not, I think it might have been related to the weather for Gov. Paterson... I'll check with Missy Dunlop who would be handling that request." The weather?

We're not sure what Zimmerman's "weather" comment referred to, but it could have been to this request of March 15 from another producer for Paterson to appear on the weekend edition of Today to talk to Lester Holt about the crane collapse that had killed seven people in Manhattan that day. Weather, cranes—both involve things falling from the sky, right? In any event, Zimmerman didn't exactly jump at the chance to book Paterson for Lauer, and Dunlop's request was for Weekend Today, which has a different staff. The Spitzer story had sex, scandal—the things people want to see Matt Lauer talking about at 7 o'clock in the morning. Paterson was kind of boring.

And Today has shown that it can be picky about the governors it books. We know they spurned an interview with some another lame boring governor who would become newsworthy because of scandal just a few hours later. Back in December 2008, Today had booked Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on what turned out to be the morning of his arrest by FBI agents. But they bumped him at the last minute in order to make room for a segment flogging the announcement of Jay Leno's 10 p.m. show.

But back to the conversation Anderson and Zimmerman were having on March 17. Once Anderson told Zimmerman that she wouldn't be sticking around the governor's office, Zimmerman—who seemed to be aware that Anderson once worked as a producer for Good Morning America—thoughtfully offered to help her secure a new job: "If you ever want to get back into tv (and not ABC!) let me know and i can see about openings here."

Gosh, that was nice of him, wasn't it? Then, in the very next sentence after he offered to help her get a job, he got back to business, letting Anderson know that he'd been in touch with a flack at Sard Verbinnen & Co., the PR shop that Spitzer's law firm hired to handle media requests, and expressing doubt about his chances. But Anderson promised to keep Zimmerman "apraised" of Spitzer's thinking, and thanked him for the "kind offer."

Was it a generous and human thing to do for Zimmerman to offer to keep his ears open on the job front? Yes, it was. Was he also trying to get Anderson to help him secure access to Spitzer at the same time? Yes, he was. Both things are true, and the casualness with which he made the offer speaks volumes about the relationships between flacks and—oh, who are we kidding? It's Today.

Anderson's quip about how dealing with a hooker disclosure is nothing compared to working for Shelley Ross, the legendarily horrible producer who was her boss at GMA, gave them a chance to gossip together. Zimmerman joked about how awesome it must be for Spitzer that former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey's one-time aide recently claimed that he'd engaged in threeways with McGreevey and his wife. There would be more news to take the pressure off Spitzer in just a few hours....

...when the Daily News story detailing Paterson's past marital troubles hit the web that night. All of a sudden, Zimmerman was much more keen on having Matt Lauer talk to the first African American governor of New York on the Today show, because he had screwed state employees in the past. Anderson hadn't even seen the story yet, so Zimmerman sent it to her.

Anderson promptly forwarded it along to political consultants Ryan Toohey and Jeff Pollock to brainstorm how to spin it. Hilarity ensues: "Unreal." "Ideas?"

Neither Spitzer nor Paterson ended up appearing on Today during the height of the scandal, and Anderson wound up getting a job as vice president of communications at the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm. But eventually Today got their man: Spitzer sat down with Lauer this past April as part of his public image rehab campaign and told the nation that there were "no excuses" for his behavior.

Zimmerman didn't respond to requests for comment, and Anderson declined to comment.

A spot on the microblogging service's Suggested User List of accounts for new users has helped Daniel Brusilovsky reach just under 120,000 followers. He's also been officially "Verified" by Twitter Inc., lest someone impersonate the powerful 16-year-old. His influence at the microblogging startup apparently runs deep: he's meeting with Twitter's COO, right now.

At TechCrunch, he's a writer who dabbles in events and business development. He's also the young face of video-casting service Qik and CEO of his own TeensInTech.com. Oh, and he advises at least two other companies.

Brusilovsky's quick ascent contains lessons for the more aged and less accomplished:

• Don't fit in? Perfect! Brusilovsky was "the only one who needed his parents to pick him up from" a tech conference last year, according to GigaOM. The intervening year has only brought more mainstream success, like joining TechCrunch in June and getting the Twitter stamp of approval.
• Form a community of similar misfits. TeensInTech is a site for young people as terrifyingly ambitious and energetic as Brusilovsky. They're coming for us all. Soon.
• "Don't give up." That one's from Brusilovsky. And we do not question Brusilovsky.

Let's just hope this promising kid finishes school and goes on to college. Just because Bill Gates, the founders of Google, the founders of Twitter and the founder of Oracle all dropped out of school doesn't mean it pays, kid.

(Pic by Andrew Mager)

On March 10, 2008, few people on the planet had more difficult jobs than Christine Anderson and Errol Cockfield. They were the communications director and press secretary, respectively, for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and at roughly 1:07 p.m. on that afternoon, the Times went live with a story documenting their boss' entanglement as "Client No. 9" in a federal investigation of a high-end prostitution ring. We were curious what the inside of a PR meltdown looks like, so—following in the footsteps of The State's investigation into the media's efforts to land an exclusive interview with Mark Sanford while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail—we used New York's open records law to obtain e-mail traffic between Anderson, Cockfield, and the dozens of reporters barraging them with inquiries in the days following the Spitzer revelations.

The e-mails total 1,300 pages, and we're still reading through the stack of paper. Any other interesting finds will be going up in subsequent posts. But what we've seen so far has been surprising: You'd think that, with blood in the water, the traditional coziness that develops between official flacks and the beat reporters who have to talk to them every day would break down into some kind of last-man-standing slugfest. But in the Spitzer case, the opposite happened. The revelations upended the worlds of both reporter and flack alike, and the uncertainty, long hours, and breakneck pace of the scandal actually seemed to throw them together as they worked toward what seems, if you read the e-mail exchanges, like a common goal of getting the news out and behind them.

Which makes sense on a human level. But sometimes good reporting—especially of the government watchdog variety—requires an inhuman suspension of compassion. The infractions documented in these e-mails are misdemeanors, but—in addition to being an unvarnished peek inside the media machinery—they're indicative of the creeping social and professional alliances that inevitably develop between PR handlers and their overworked, easily manipulated charges in the press corps. And they give the lie to the myth of the vigilant watchdog press that keeps the government on its toes. Next time you hear New York Times editor Bill Keller claim that newspapers are uniquely situated to do the "hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work [of] quality journalism," remember that his reporter broke the story of Spitzer's dalliances with prostitutes. But also remember the time his reporter e-mailed Gov. Paterson's flack to request permission to call Paterson's former mistress.

This first installment documents the shocking amount of control that Keller's Times allowed Anderson, a former Good Morning America producer and PR veteran of the Clinton White House, to exercise over his paper's coverage. After bringing Anderson's world down around her head by breaking the story, Times reporters previewed portions of their stories with her before publication, asked for her permission before contacting sources, and let her tell them how to characterize its reporting in the paper.

We'll begin at the beginning: On March 9, 2008, Anderson had not yet been informed of Spitzer's transgressions. Which makes this e-mail exchange with Times reporter Danny Hakim, who broke the story along with William K. Rashbaum, almost painfully poignant in retrospect.

Clueless, Anderson tried to sniff out what Hakim was up to, apparently to no avail (Spitzer himself broke the news to his staff early the next morning):

Hakim and Rashbaum's story went live the next day at roughly 2:08 p.m., using the Drudge Report Archives' timeline as a chronological guide. At 1:34 p.m., Hakim was still working his scoop, and e-mailed Anderson to make sure he had a detail right about how Spitzer broke the news to his staff. The subject line was, "can i do this?", and the message body appears to be the actual text Hakim planned to write—in other words, he appears to have been previewing his copy for the woman charged with managing Spitzer's image crisis, and seeking her signoff.

Anderson had a minor quibble with the facts—there was no single meeting at which Spitzer made the announcement—but she objected to the idea of repeating the phrase "ensnared in a prostitution ring," and asked Hakim to simply say Spitzer told his staff about "the matter."

The original Times story has been repeatedly updated, but the current version renders that detail thusly: "The governor informed his top aides Sunday night and this morning of his involvement."

Two days later, Spitzer announced his resignation, and the media scrum's attention turned to then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson. Paterson had his own press aides, but Anderson stayed on while Spitzer was still nominally in office and managed the coverage of the transition. On March 14, Times reporter Jeremy Peters was working on a profile of Paterson's chief of staff, Charles O'Byrne. He interviewed O'Byrne for the story, apparently working under an agreement that any quotes had to be cleared through Anderson.

Anderson replied that none of the quotes could be used, and recommended some of O'Byrne's friends for Peters to call for (presumably positive) quotes, a fairly routine practice.

Peters didn't push back. He simply asked Anderson how best to characterize O'Byrne's refusal to be quoted. "Say he declined to be interviewed?" asked Peters. Of course, O'Byrne didn't decline to be interviewed—he just declined to be quoted, a distinction that Anderson caught:

It's a bizarre world where flacks are more vigilant than reporters when it comes to trying not to mislead readers. The exchange continued, with Peters trying to gather competitive intelligence from Anderson and Anderson trying to make sure Peters spoke to the sources she wanted him to speak to.

Peters' O'Byrne profile eventually ran on March 20, including a proviso that "Mr. O'Byrne would not comment for this article" and several positive quotes from Ethan Geto and Eric Schneiderman, another source recommended by Anderson.

The PR disaster didn't end with Spitzer's resignation: Just days after Paterson ascended to the governor's office, the New York Daily News reported that both Paterson and his wife had engaged in multiple infidelities. The question of the hour on the afternoon of March 18 was the identity of the governor's office employee mentioned in the Daily News story as one of the new governor's ex-flames. Hakim knew who it was, but the Times would never stoop to delve into someone's private life so tastelessly. Unless the Daily News does it, in which case, yeah, maybe they would. So Hakim checked in with Anderson to find out if some filthy tabloid was getting ready to be first out the gate with Kirton's name, in which case he'd try to beat them.
Worried, Hakim sheepishly—"again, if others are calling her"—asks Anderson for permission to make the call.
Astonishingly, Anderson gives him the go-ahead, and provides him with her phone numbers.

Kirton's name came out a few hours later online. The Times never ended up mentioning her name, because only filthy tabloids do that.

For a sense of the differential treatment that flacks dole out to reporters, have a look at how Anderson responded to Daily News political correspondent Celeste Katz's request for confirmation about Kirton after the name came out—Anderson confirmed it off the record, but offered no contact info unbidden. Perhaps Katz should have asked for permission to call Kirton.

Newsday's Melissa Mansfield made the same request of Anderson's deputy Errol Cockfield, and got even colder treatment:

Mansfield didn't mind the brush-off, and responded with the same sort of sheepish, we-don't-do-gossip ass-covering that Hakim employed:

LOL, indeed. This is just from our first read of the batch of e-mails. There's much more to come. We contacted Hakim and Peters for their responses, but neither reporter agreed to comment for the record.

UPDATE: Diane McNulty, a New York Times spokeswoman, responded in an e-mail to Poynter's Jim Romenesko:

Any suggestion that the Times went too easy on the Spitzer administration seems a bit absurd in this context.

Our goal, always, is to get the facts right. Dealing with sources responsibly and professionally serves that goal, and that is what our reporters did in this case.

Here's how it works: Schmidt is an angel investor in Giiv, a Web service for sending gifts via cell phone that recently raised $2.3 million. Schmidt invested his money through TomorrowVentures LLC, a venture capital fund of which Court Coursey is managing director. Court Coursey is a 36-year old entrepreneur, investor — and "dear friend" to Bohner, according to her website.

None of which is to say Schmidt is back with video producer Bohner; there's no telling when he committed the money (his investment was announced in July), whether he met Coursey through Bohner or vice versa, or whether it's all one big coincidence. But connecting the dots is certainly fun. Let us know if you have more clues.

(Pic via)

The U.S. military has long struggled to meet its recruiting goals, but not this year! All branches — Army, Navy, et al — have pulled in more than enough new soldiers. And they have the recession to thank.

Yes, with work scant across the nation, desperate men and women are increasingly turning to the armed services to help makes ends meet. And, despite the economic woes settling in elsewhere, the armed services are making it worth their while — more so than usual:

[Deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy Bill Carr] credited hefty enlistment bonuses for the military's success, saying 40 percent of recruits received an average bonus of $14,000, compared with $12,000 on average in 2008. The size of the bonus varied by service, with the Army, which has the toughest mission, offering more.

Not only are these funds bringing in more troops — 103% more than annual goals — the recruits are generally more educated and, therefore, more valuable to the army, not like the convicts and high school drop outs on which the military has come to rely. So, it sounds like everyone wins: the armed services and the soldiers. So why do we feel so dirty about the whole thing?

We know the bonuses help the soldiers and their families, but consider the other dough being pumped into the recruitment process:

Carr said the Defense Department spent about $10,000 on advertising, marketing, recruiters and other budget items per recruit, with the Army spending more than double that, at $22,000.

"The unemployment . . . left us with more dollars per recruit than proved to be minimally necessary," he said.

All this only puts into more stark relief how much money our government's spending to identify, target and sell wars to struggling Americans. Realizing that people need help, the government's simply sweetening the proverbial honey pot.

Considering that Iraq and Afghanistan have no definite end — the latter of which will likely get worse — the fact that about 20% of military families file for bankruptcy as the result of medical bills and 29% of homeless people are veterans, these economic incentives smell like short-term bribes offered to those in need. But, that's the price — and cost — of war.

Emergency rooms across the land saw a 73% increase in head trauma-related visits in the days following Richardson's death. But, since normal people aren't as important as celebrities, only about 3% of those visits were of a serious matter.

Like all fads, however, this one passed: within two weeks the number of ER-flybys went back to the pre-Richardson death levels.

Joe Pompeo reports that Tar is "on hold," or maybe just dead. After only two issues! What is the magazine business coming to when concerted celebunepotism can't bring in the big buck$$$??

Alexandra Kerry (daughter of John) and John Mailer (son of Norman) were recruited as staff editors, as was Zoe Wolff, former features director at Domino.

They even had crap in there from Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst and Julian Schnabel and Ryan McGinley and Kate Moss! Perhaps the trouble was that people saw this mag and wondered, "Why does this themeless mish-mash of buzzy names exist, seriously?" Oh, wait: "'tar' is an anagram of art, the distillation of organic matter, sticky stuff we pave roads and secure roots with—a foundation."

They had a coherent philosophy. The problem here was you, the public. Thanks a lot. Alexandra Kerry just wanted to change the world.