“That was my favorite,” Jayson Blair said. It was the morning of Monday, May 19, and the disgraced former New York Times reporter was curled in a butterfly chair in his sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment. He was eating a bagel and talking about one of his many fabricated stories—his March 27 account, datelined Palestine, W.Va., of Pvt. Jessica Lynch’s family’s reaction to their daughter’s liberation in Iraq.
 

At 10:31 a.m. on June 5, staffers at The New York Times received an e-mail announcing a 10:30 a.m. meeting in the main part of the news room, near the national desk where the Pulitzer Prize winners are usually announced.

“I think their life is so hard,” said Amy Astley as she sat talking about the young people-the actors and actresses, the models and rock stars-who fill the pages of her magazine, Teen Vogue.

In February of 1999, when News Corp. Rupert Murdoch put his cherub-cheeked 27-year-old son Lachlan in charge of the corporation’s U.S. publishing interests, the New York Post was troubled.

John Huey, the graying 54-year-old Georgian air-guitaring editorial director of Time Inc., who scares the living crap out of much of the population of 1271 Sixth Avenue these days, was hungry.

After we’re through,” Joe Quesada said, “you’re going to be Spider- sick ! We’re going to have people puking Spider-Man. ”
 

“Magazine editors are the new rock stars,” said David Zinczenko, the dreamy, hazel-eyed editor in chief of Men’s Health as he sat in a taxicab early on the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 27. “It’s about time people start recognizing us as the smart, funny guys that we are. And we smell better, too.”