News Rivals’ Late-Night Trysts

BooMan, do you and Glenn Reynolds have a similar arrangement?


“As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago,” reports Editor & Publisher, the Washington Post and New York Times “send each other copies of their next day’s front pages every night. The formal sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.”

“It seemed logical, because for years we would always try to get a copy of each other’s papers as soon as they came out,” Downie tells E&P. … […]


In recent years, they have moved to electronic transmissions of the front pages, usually sent between 10:30 and 11 p.m. […]


Associate Editor Robert Kaiser, a former managing editor who has been at the Post since 1963, says his paper at one time even hired a New Yorker to listen to a radio show on WQXR, the Times-owned radio station that previewed the next day’s front-page stories.


“Some retired person we retained for a modest fee to listen and tip us off,” Kaiser says about the era preceding Web sites, e-mail, and faxes. “I believe he lived in a retirement home.”


Sigh, a tailor-made job opp gone for Catnip, Oui, and Sybil — who catch news faster than anybody else I know.