Andrea Mitchell started it.

It was she who told viewers of NBC’s The Nightly News With Brian Williams on Thursday, Nov. 13, that Hillary Clinton “is under consideration to be secretary of state.”

Since then, nobody seems to have known what to think. But that hasn’t ground the Madame Secretary boomlet to a halt—on the contrary, it only accelerated it! Over the past few days, we’ve heard: Hillary is under consideration for the job. She’s been offered the job! She hasn’t been offered the job (which was only news because someone else had said she had).

Last night, we read that she had been offered the job, and not only that, she was going to accept it! More recently, it’s been “unclear,” but her husband is being vetted—that’s the news of the day for Nov.  read more »

In this week’s giddily Obama-centric edition of The New Yorker—you had the illuminated O in “Yorker”; the “ELECTION SPECIAL” tab on the outside cover flap; and more than 35,000 words inside about the election—the longest story in the magazine was assigned to none other than the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. His 12,000-word opus on race and politics included dispatches from two different trips to Chicago and one to New Orleans.

It was filed in the magazine under: “A Reporter at Large.”

“As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically” said Mr.  read more »

The conventional wisdom is that shelter magazines are recession-proof. When people are getting laid off, they’re spending more time at home—and home might as well look nice!

But there’s something different about this downturn.

“You’ll see further fallout,” said Kate Kelly Smith, the publisher of House Beautiful. “There’s just not enough revenue out there to support all these [shelter] titles. We’ve already seen it, and we’ll continue to see it.”

Ms. Smith saw it firsthand at her parent company, Hearst, which on Friday, Nov. 7, folded O at Home, reassigning its editor, Sarah Gray Miller, to another struggling Hearst shelter title, Country Living.  read more »

At first, there was good news at New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s semi-annual State of the Newsroom town hall meeting, the supposed informal name of which has now become official: “Throw Stuff at Bill.”

There would be no job cuts.

But of course, there’s a plenty big trade-off for protecting a staff.

For one, you’ve got to lose your stand-alone Metro and sports sections. It means new projects and some investigative projects are suspended. It also means that you might get “more exotic and garish species of advertisements,” said Mr. Keller.

And: “It will mean, I’m sure, that our hiring is even more selective than before.  read more »

Headlines at radaronline.com on Tuesday, Oct. 28, included: “Jessica Simpson: Major Movie Star, Comrade”; “Vanessa & Zac Back in the U.S”; “Sean Penn’s Gay History Closeted.”

Yowza!

Radar has ever been sold as an heir to Spy: poppy and irreverent and, most of all, smart, as though OK! had gone to college and majored in semiotics. But in the days since the Web site has been acquired by AMI, the proprietors of The National Enquirer, it seems to have dropped a few grades behind.

Maer Roshan, the editor and founder of Radar, who has now watched his magazine fold for a third time, said he would not be involved in the Web site.  read more »

What did Dov Charney do in the financial crisis?

Readers of the November issue of Portfolio, Condé Nast’s lavishly produced business monthly, might well ask the question of their magazine’s cover star this month.

Of course, there wasn’t much time between the dark day when Lehman Brothers went all Cloverfield on American finance and the printer’s deadline for the magazine’s November issue.

But at Portfolio, as at most business magazines, it seems, the mood is less newsroom frenzy than quiet contemplation. And meetings.

“We’ve had more meetings,” said the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman. “And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.  read more »

“Almost nothing has superseded the Olympics as a political priority in China,” wrote Jim Yardley, The Times’ Beijing bureau chief on Aug. 25. “For Chinese leaders, all that effort paid off.”

The same could be said about Mr. Yardley.

After Times executive editor Bill Keller praised the paper’s coverage at the Olympics this year to no end—“stunning” and “dazzling” were two adjectives he used in two different memos—Mr. Yardley is hanging it up, after five years in Beijing.

He walks away with a Pulitzer in international reporting in 2006 and a golden ticket at the paper.

His next assignment: New Delhi.  read more »

Jeffrey Bewkes was looking for something to say to the crowd that had gathered on the 10th floor of the AOL Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle on the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 13, something pithy that would explain the position of big media in the present economic and political climate.

“I didn’t have a quote, but now I got a quote,” the Time Warner president and CEO said from the podium during the kick-off of a two-day symposium here about politics and the media. “I was in the green room and I got this from Graydon Carter: ‘Journalists, like lawyers, thrive on misfortune.  read more »

About a month ago, Vanity Fair deputy editor Doug Stumpf took Michael Lewis out to dinner at his boss Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn. Mr. Stumpf brought along fellow Vanity Fair editor Punch Hutton and contributing editor Bethany McLean to help split the $55 truffled macaroni-and-cheese plates for the table.

Mr. Lewis, who has been (and still is, at press time) on contract with The New York Times Magazine and Portfolio, had been wined and dined by magazine editors before. But this trip to Graydon Carter’s own private-public domain was a first.

And now, Mr. Lewis has given Vanity Fair an oral agreement that he will drop both of those contracts, and he will sign exclusively with them.  read more »

On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 4, several dozen of the past and present staff of The New York Times’ Metro desk made their way out to the increasingly trendy Victorian part of Flatbush, with its leafy streets of big, big houses, in one of which lives their leader, Metro editor Joe Sexton.

Big as the house is, it was packed. Veterans like legendary rewrite man Bob McFadden, former Metro editor and current deputy managing editor Jon Landman, current staples like City Room wunderkind Sewell Chan and newcomers like court reporter John Eligon crossed the pretty porch and the threshold to receive their commemorative buttons.  read more »