by Jonathan Z. Larsen
Jonathan Z. Larsen is a former editor of New Times and The Village Voice.

There was recently a delightful exchange in New York magazine between that magazine's media columnist, Michael Wolff, and Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time magazine, that seems at once totally innocuous and enormously revealing. Isaacson is trying to explain to Wolff why he is leading his magazine away from gravitas and into the mosh pit of news-you-can-use and news-to-amuse, where more and more publications are now pressed together cheek by jowl.

Isaacson: "We used to have great access to great events and report them with Lippmannesque certitude. Now our goal is to tell stories that connect with the way we live. We want to know about the debates happening around the dinner table rather than around the Senate committee tables."

Wolff: "Walter, I am not sure anyone sits around the dinner table anymore."

Isaacson: "Hmmmm. The water cooler, then."

Media reporters are caught up in the same cultural miasma. In many respects, their jobs have become exponentially harder. In a bygone era, the press writers for Time and Newsweek, hiding behind anonymity, regularly commented on the content of newspapers and magazines. And the late Ed Diamond, writing in New York magazine, reported in turn on the Time-Newsweek wars -- which cover story was more compelling, more timely, more successful on the newsstand. But the worth of the content itself -- newspaper and magazine articles, television documentaries and newscasts, who broke which stories -- no longer seems to be the central focus of media reporters. Time and Newsweek have dropped their regular press columns. More and more, the "business" of journalism has captured the attention of these reporters every bit as much as it has the attention of Wall Street and multinational corporations. And the content itself has gotten so flaccid in this age of sex and celebritude that what is there to say after you have said: Yuck!

How are media reporters faring in this bewildering environment? In an attempt to find out, cjr picked the beat reporters for four of the country's leading dailies -- The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe -- as well as the media columnists for The New Yorker and New York magazine, and reviewed their work over the last year and a half. (In the case of The New Yorker, which runs media pieces only occasionally, a longer time frame was needed.)

KEN AULETTA. It can be argued that no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as Auletta. To be sure, he has had enormous advantages. In 1992, shortly after she took over as editor of The New Yorker, Tina Brown invited Auletta to write a column called Annals of Communications. With almost unlimited space to work with, a generous travel budget, and, one presumes, total freedom of subject, Auletta, a courtly journalist of the old school, has delivered the goods. His writing from 1992 through 1996 was thematic enough to be pulled together into a book entitled The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway.

From the outset, Auletta understood that the new concentration of power, pursued under the banner of synergy, augured ill for journalism. As early as 1995 he wrote: "What is already apparent is that synergy is rarely journalism's friend. The business assumptions behind the word -- cost savings, a 'team culture,' the 'leverage' of size, the desire to boost profit margins -- can be a menace to the business of reporting."

Auletta was among the first to suggest that the tremendous coalescing of power, further strengthened by a plethora of cross-ownerships and collaborations, represented nothing less than an American keiretsu, the Japanese word for a multi-industry cartel. In 1997 Auletta predicted that the existing handful of giant media companies would spin "ever bigger webs -- webs to cover all of communications, from owning ideas, through owning the factories that manufacture the ideas as products, to owning the means of distributing those products, and on to owning their afterlife." Thus he had neatly anticipated the further consolidations to come: of Viacom and CBS, of AOL and Time Warner.

And finally, when Michael Kinsley, a highly respected print journalist and editor, quit his job in late 1995 as the liberal voice on CNN's Crossfire to start up an Internet magazine for Microsoft, Auletta was one of the very few to recognize that this was no mid-life crisis, no single aberration, but rather signaled that the flight to the Internet had officially begun.

For much of 1998 and 1999, Auletta covered the antitrust trial of Microsoft. His article, the longest published so far under David Remnick's reign, ran in August 1998, and necessarily left readers in suspense. The trial was then and still is far from over. Stay tuned to the pages of The New Yorker for the outcome of the first major attack on keiretsu.

MARK JURKOWITZ. Compared to magazine writers like Auletta, media reporters for the large daily newspapers face considerable constraints: ever-tighter deadlines and ever-tighter budgets, not to mention the traditional constraints of space and style. They risk getting so bogged down in media "day" stories (promotions, firings, quarterly earnings reports, Pulitzer nominations), not to mention covering crises in their own papers, that they cannot shake free to report the larger media context to their readers.

No one has had a harder time of it in this regard than the Globe's Jurkowitz who became a media writer in September 1997, after a stint as ombudsman. For much of 1998 he found himself reporting on a huge media story developing under his very nose, in the Globe's own newsroom. Within the space of two months, the Globe's editor, Matt Storin, had asked for the resignations of two of his best columnists, Patricia Smith, a stylish writer and published poet who had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize just months before, and Mike Barnicle, Boston's much-beloved answer to Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill. Smith had confessed to total fabrications. Barnicle had been charged with lifting jokes from a George Carlin book and plagiarizing material from an A. J. Leibling biography of Louisiana politician Earl Long. Worse, the stories became linked, because Smith, who is black, was fired first, even though suspicions had existed for years, but had never been addressed, about Barnicle, who is white. Charges of racism and sexual discrimination wafted around the Globe for months. Nothing "New Media" about that.

For the better part of five months, Jurkowitz had to walk this tightrope, running the risk of enraging his editors on the one hand or his colleagues in the newsroom on the other. His stories were routinely bested by his competitors. The crisis ended just in time for Jurkowitz to lift his nose out of the muck and report on the larger world. Here he fared somewhat better. No doubt stunned by the foibles of his own colleagues, Jurkowitz was ready to cut Clinton more slack than the majority of journalists. "The real question," Jurkowitz posed, "is when in this voyeuristic media culture do we finally say, 'no más'?" A few months later, Jurkowitz delivered an equally thoughtful treatise on the declining popularity of traditional media, in particular newspapers like his own and television newscasts. He cited several causes, among them fewer compelling local issues and characters and the multiplying outlets for news itself. Oddly, he does not mention the "no más" factor, which poll after poll suggested was widely shared among the readership. Wistfully, Jurkowitz concludes: "So where have all the faithful readers of newspapers and watchers of the TV newscasts gone? To sleep, to cyberspace, to cable TV, or perhaps they're just stuck in Boston traffic."

HOWARD KURTZ. Kurtz has become a ubiquitous figure on national television talk shows, affecting a doleful, slightly pompous attitude. It is a relief, then, to discover that the real Howard Kurtz --the print version -- is witty, informed, and entertaining. Comparing the various stacks of reprints for seven media reporters, he is hands down the most prolific. By himself, he fills a Media Notes column for the Post that is certainly as good as that which runs in The New York Times, which has two reporters contributing. He brings something to the table on every media event he covers. When the Smith/ Barnicle fiasco happened, Kurtz traveled to Boston and informed his readers that the Barnicle of legend -- a poor Irish kid championing the urban Irish of South Boston -- had now become a "well-heeled television star" living in the exclusive suburb of Lincoln and driving "his black BMW into town to report his tales of inner-city crime and pathos." (Imagine Jurkowitz writing that!) This was an important missing perspective, because it helped explain how a star like Barnicle had lost the support both of his own editors and many of his colleagues in the newsroom.

Last summer, Kurtz joined the George W. Bush campaign trail in Iowa, both part of, and ruefully commenting on, "the media beast" that was now loose on the land. "The beast lumbers from story to story, trampling everything in its path. It gorges itself on the O.J. story, on the Monica story, on the Kosovo story, at least until readers lose interest. The beast is now voraciously hunting for its next meal, and George W. is looking exceedingly juicy . . . ."

DAVID SHAW. Mark Willes, the c.e.o. of the Times Mirror Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, once remarked that in his efforts to build the newspaper's circulation and profit margins, he and his paper ran the risk "of being remembered as the crash dummies of American journalism." And watching Willes's every move as he drove his experimental newspaper model faster and faster was David Shaw, who early on seemed to predict the outcome in a 17,000-word series in the spring of 1998 called "Breaching the Wall: A Revolution in American Newspapers." After the crash last fall, it was left to Shaw to collect DNA samples and draw the chalk marks at the crime scene (see Shaw's own account on page 27).

Yet between Shaw's two-parter on the late lamented "wall" in journalism and his reconstruction of the "crash," there was an odd assortment of major projects that seemed somehow off point. In August '98 he delivered another two-parter, this one called "Scoop: the Rush to Be First." It was an attempt to address the dangers attending the new twenty-four-hour news cycle, but one suspects his conclusion -- go a little slower and be more careful -- received, at best, a Yes, Mother, from working stiffs who have Matt Drudge (or their own version of Mark Willes) breathing down their necks. David Shaw, an old pro with virtual tenure, can go slowly and carefully. But how many others can do so?

Then last year, in the months leading up to the Staples saga, there were two pieces that attempted to expand the purview of media criticism itself: a 13,000-word opus on Robert Parker, wine guru and columnist, and a long disquisition on film criticism. The wine series was excellent, and, one suspects, on a subject as resonant with Shaw's readers as anything he has written in years. But is Robert Parker really a journalist? Is it possible that Shaw himself, at this point in his life, would rather be criticizing movies and sniffing wine?

FELICITY BARRINGER. It was Barringer's story on October 26, 1999, that really called national attention to the Los Angeles Times's Staple Center disaster, although Barringer herself reports that the story was broken in New Times Los Angeles.

In August 1998 Barringer traveled to Boston to cover the Barnicle fiasco, and encapsulated as no one else had the bravado with which Barnicle had fought his just punishment. Barnicle, she reported, "remains enough of a figure to have turned a painful exercise in journalistic discipline into a personal referendum, one more swaggering scene in the long-running Boston drama of Us versus Them."

Barringer also delivered one of the most thoughtful pieces on Tina Brown's Talk magazine. Writing with Geraldine Fabrikant, she focused on the claims of "synergy" between the magazine and movie properties, quoting Nieman curator Bill Kovach as saying: "If the stated purpose of this is to develop entertainment packages, that's not what journalism is. Journalists survey the world to inform the citizen, not with the idea of creating a property to entertain the citizen."

Finally, in an article on the fallout from the case of Richard Jewell, the man falsely charged by the media for the 1996 Olympic bombing episode, Barringer suggested that the saga shows "how news coverage, started in a particular direction, can become a journalistic juggernaut, hard to turn, harder to reverse."

ALEX KUCZYNSKI. Kuczynski, who was trained at the New York Observer, a paper with true brio, has a knack for getting wonderful quotes from her subjects. Using the funeral of Willie Morris, the legendary editor of Harper's magazine as a jumping-off point, she delivers a disquisition on the magazine business, quoting Norman Mailer ("They're glitz bags") and Michael Herr ("You don't know where television ends and print begins anymore. It's all one sort of horrible media stew . . .").

She pays a visit to Jann Wenner, on the eve of his taking Us magazine weekly in a head-to-head confrontation with People, and finds him looking at the Time Warner building and saying: "There it is. The evil empire." Wenner shares with Kuczynski one of the planned stories for the launch: "Ten Ways a Celebrity Can Wear A Sarong" (seriously). Of all the people reporting on the sale of The Atlantic Monthly by Mort Zuckerman, only Kuczynski gathered in the essential detail: Zuckerman made the announcement to the staff by speakerphone. She quotes one staffer as saying, it "was a truly postmodern experience."

Kuczynski's most controversial piece to date has been on Tina Brown's Talk magazine. She begins: "After four issues, Tina Brown's Talk magazine is no longer the talk of the town." Then she renders an accounting: "Of 22 articles in the first four issues written by people in the film industry or about people or characters in the film industry, 11 featured people recently or currently affiliated with Miramax or Disney Projects" (Disney owns Miramax and Miramax is the majority owner of Talk). Brown subsequently objected that though these people may have had business with Miramax, they were not owned by the studio. But that seemed a quibble. Kuczynski had arrived.

MICHAEL WOLFF. Perhaps one of the greatest strengths a contemporary media critic can have is a working knowledge of the changes taking place in the industry. And few people are better positioned than Wolff, who once tried to start up an Internet company and wrote a book -- Burn Rate -- about his failure.

A wonderful stylist, Wolff tosses off memorable lines in almost every column. Describing Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, at a panel discussion, he describes her as "some silent film star who suddenly, horrifyingly, speaks."

And finally, on the old media confronting the new media, he writes: "Each and every one of these people have fear in their eyes -- fear that they are too late, that the world has passed them by, that in the equity decade all they will have is a salary, in the entrepreneurial decade all they will have been is employees."

But Wolff can also be serious. Anticipating Clinton's near-escape of impeachment, he wrote in September 1998: "the dependence of the media business on sexually oriented content has grown so steadily these past thirty years that it has created the very climate in which Starr could issue such a report -- the same matter-of-fact climate that will, end of the day, allow us to forgive Bill Clinton."

In taking on The New York Times Book Review, which he finds boring beyond belief, Wolff writes: "What's happened here? Hello? You're not even trying." Even The New York Times's celebrated R. W. Apple comes in for a shot. Wolff writes that Apple, who had been covering the impeachment proceedings under the rubric In the Chamber, "Is not, and never has been, in the chamber during the trial."

Perhaps Wolff's funniest column concerned that most unfunny of men, Steven Brill, the founder and former editor-in-chief of Brill's Content. Not long after the publication of Wolff's memoir of his failed Internet start-up, Wolff discovers that he is being investigated by a young reporter for Brill's magazine. Indeed, the young reporter suggests that it would be in Wolff's best interest if he would turn over all his book notes. Wolff not only demurs but turns the tables on Brill and writes about the experience. He claims that Brill wants to become nothing less than the "independent prosecutor of information." Wolff suggests that such an idea could be quite valuable, "sort of Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval. We in the Brill Labs have tested this nonfiction product and find that its sourcing methods and general probity conform to our standards." In other words, Wolff is conjecturing that Brill's real intent is a pure money-play on the World Wide Web. At first, one assumes Wolff is making a good joke at Brill's expense. But he presses on. He suggests that Brill could "partner" with others to provide the editorial "brand" on the vast streams of content running through the global network. This is a joke, right?

And yet, in early February, Brill had formed several partnerships with the very industry players whom he intends to cover, among them CBS, NBC, Primedia. The proposed Web site, reported Kuczynski in The New York Times, "will allow consumers to search across categories for subject matter and allow them to rely on guidance from experts, said Steven Brill, chairman of Brill Media Holdings and the editor of Brill's Content. For example, Clay Felker, a former editor of New York magazine, will offer his opinion on which magazines are worth reading, and which not." We in the Brill Labs have tested this nonfiction product and find that its sourcing methods and general probity conform to our standards." As we were saying, Michael Wolff is a media critic who truly has his finger on the new Internet Zeitgeist.

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