These days, though, de Borchgrave is involved in some less praiseworthy pursuits. Alongside his other activities, the veteran newsman is a columnist for the Washington Times, the influential conservative broadsheet, where he once served as editor in chief. And in a handful of columns over the last year he has lifted passages verbatim, or nearly verbatim, from the Internet and other sources, without attribution — a fact the Washington Times’ leadership tried to sweep under the rug, according to insiders at the paper.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple first noticed de Borchgrave’s apparent plagiarism on Wednesday, but there are plenty more examples. Take, for instance, this bit, which ran in de Borchgrave’s May 9 column:

Under the 10-year agreement, U.S. forces would have access to Afghan bases beyond 2014 for training Afghans and hunting al Qaeda….The administration commits to request Congress each year to help pay for Afghanistan’s security forces, whose costs far outstrip Kabul’s budget….

The language closely mirrors a Christian Science Monitor blog post that ran the previous day:

Under the 10-year agreement, U.S. forces would have access to Afghan bases beyond 2014 for training Afghans and hunting Al Qaeda. The US commits to ask Congress annually to help pay for Afghanistan’s security forces, whose cost outstrips the country’s budget.

Another example can be found in de Borchgrave’s April 25 column, “The Global House of Cards”:

It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. Or, if that’s too hard to grasp, one trillion dollars, laid end to end, could make a chain that stretches from Earth to the moon and back — 200 times.

It appears to be drawn almost word for word from a post that appeared on the conservative blog 100777.com in 2003. (Variations have also appeared elsewhere in the blogosphere.):

If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills!…It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

According to four Times officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the paper’s management has known about de Borchgrave’s pilfering for months. Editors in the paper’s Commentary section, where the octogenarian columnist’s work ran until earlier this year, first stumbled on the problem last July, when de Borchgrave wrote a column about Council on Foreign Relations president Richard N. Haass. It included unattributed passages that were drawn almost word for word from Haass’ writing. At this point, the section’s editors decided to give de Borchgrave the benefit of the doubt, in part because of his stature at the paper, and in part because Haass’ words were attributed to him elsewhere in the column. “It was feasible in this situation that he could have accidentally dropped some quote marks,” explains one person familiar with the matter.

Still, they began combing through de Borchgrave’s work for signs of plagiarism. By September, they had turned up another suspect column. Here’s one passage, followed by an excerpt from the online publication Electronic Intifada:

Residents of Khallet Zakariya, located in Area C south of Bethlehem, complained last month to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that Israeli authorities are demolishing their homes and settlers destroying their livelihoods in an effort to force the community to relocate.

***

Residents of Khallet Zakariya, located in Area C south of Bethlehem say Israeli authorities are demolishing their homes and settlers have destroyed their livelihoods in an effort to force the community to relocate.

After this incident, according to two Times officials, the Commentary section editors personally alerted the paper’s president, Tom McDevitt, to the problem. They also confronted de Borchgrave. (De Borchgrave denies his editors ever broached the subject; McDevitt did not respond to calls seeking comment.) Nevertheless, de Borchgrave only grew more brazen. On Jan. 3 of this year, he penned a column on the social media craze. The last two-thirds were made up largely of dubiously attributed quotes and text that had been lifted without attribution. One paragraph was nearly identical to text that had appeared on the website Clickz.com the previous month. Below are the two passages:

Facebook is the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. It reaches 55 percent of the world’s global audience, accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites. That’s one in every seven minutes spent online all over the world (comScore’s 10/11 data indicate).

***

Facebook remains the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. Facebook reached 55 percent of the world’s global audience accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites and one in every seven minutes spent online globally according to comScore’s October 2011 data.

There was also a list of “Top 5 social media tools of 2011,” which was taken almost wholesale from a P.R. company’s website.  Here’s the company’s list:

5. MyNewsDesk.com - This ‘news exchange’ startup out of Stockholm has become one of the most talked about social media tools of 2011 thanks to its robust analytics system and easy-to-use interface. Try it now if you haven’t already.

4. Wanderfly.com - This is a personalised recommendations engine that helps you discover new and exciting experiences based on your budget and interests. And, it integrates with Facebook to bring all of your social preferences together. This is a great example of niche recommendations portal and what Google+ is aiming to achieve on a wider scale.

3. YouTube.com/create - YouTube has been ramping up is creation tools in 2011 and the animation tools located at YouTube.com/create are a great example. GoAnimate is a great example allowing you to make animated videos in less than 10 minutes!

2. AppMakr.com - Talk about doing what it says on the tin! AppMakr helps you make free apps for the iPhone. Seriously cool.

1. BufferApp.com - It is now time to crown our most useful tool of 2011. BufferApp works by scheduling content you find online and adding into your Twitter or Facebook stream. It then publishes the tweets at regular intervals without flooding your followers. Pure genius.

Here’s de Borchgrave’s:

5. MyNewsDesk.com – a “news exchange” startup from Stockholm, Sweden, that advertises, “already one of the most talked about social media tools thanks to its robust analytics system and easy-to-use interface.”

4, Wanderfly.com – “a personalized recommendations engine that helps you discover new and exciting experiences based on your budget and interests. Integrates with Facebook to bring all your social preferences together. Niche recommendations portal is what Google+ is aiming to achieve on a wider scale.”

3. YouTube.com/create – “YouTube has been ramping up its creative tools and the animation tools located at YouTube.com/create are but one example. GoAnimate allows you to make animated videos in less than 10 minutes.”

2. App.Makr.com – “helps you make free apps for the iPhone. Seriously cool.”

1. BufferApp.com – self-described as “the most useful tool of 2011, schedules content found on line and adding into your Twitter or Facebook stream. It then publishes the Tweets at regular intervals without flooding your followers. Pure genius!”

While some of the text is in quotes, the only attribution is a vague “as described online.” Another passage, about tech writer Jason Hiner, lifted verbiage from Hiner’s blog, without attribution. Compare this:

In 2011 I went to a strictly vegan diet, dropped 25 pounds, and was surprised to learn how good normal could feel.

To this:

In 2011, he went on a strictly vegan diet, dropped 25 pounds and was surprised to learn how good normal could feel.

The Commentary section editors killed the piece, though it ran on United Press International, or UPI, an affiliated wire service. Shortly thereafter, de Borchgrave’s column disappeared from the section all together. Times officials with knowledge of the situation say it was banished by the section’s editors. “One mistake, and you might be able to say, ‘OK, this person had a bad day,’” says a Times staffer with knowledge of the matter. “But the plagiarism in this column was so egregious — frankly, it was breathtaking. It just couldn’t continue.” De Borchgrave maintains, on the other hand, that the gap emerged because he was on book leave, though his weekly columns continued to crop up on UPI — a fact that casts doubt on these claims. He also argues that any overlap between his work and other people’s is modest, and that likening it to plagiarism is “preposterous.” “I’ve been writing for 62 years,” he told Salon. “I’ve won a number of international journalism awards. I don’t think it makes much sense to be challenging me after all these years of reporting and writing.”

As it turns out, de Borchgrave’s hiatus from the Times was short-lived. In late March, his column resurfaced in the paper’s A section, which is normally reserved for news. “The decision-makers basically said, ‘We have a plagiarist here. Are we going to do anything about it? Fuck no!’” recalls one official. “We’ll just move him to another section where the editors won’t make such a fuss.’”

Less than a month later, de Borchgrave was yet again found to be cribbing without attribution. According to four Times officials, Brett Decker, the Commentary editor, wrote a sharply worded email to the executive team, including McDevitt and Ed Kelley, the paper’s top editor. It stressed the gravity of the problem and warned that, by keeping de Borchgrave on, management was jeopardizing the reputation of the paper and its journalists. (Kelley did not return calls seeking comment.) Still, nothing changed. De Borchgrave has held onto his job and continued cribbing copy — just last week he penned the piece with language lifted from the Christian Science Monitor. It was that column and another that caught the Post’s attention, but even the embarrassing media coverage hasn’t had much impact. A few hours after the Post piece ran, the Times published yet another de Borchgrave column.

Until recently, you would have had to visit Mouly’s office on the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building to see the rejected covers she keeps pinned to a wall. Now, some of those uninhibited outtakes have been collected in a new book, ”Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See” ($24.95, 128 pages), out now from Abrams. I talked to Mouly about the most incendiary sketches, the difficulty of publishing serious covers over Christmas, and why she heartily recommends listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Barry Blitt's illustration mocking terrorism fears was never used; the reference to Diet Coke and Mentos—a (very) low-level explosive combination—was deemed too obscure.

These early sketches of Blitt's idea, first with a pair of children and then with two businessmen (below), didn't work because they weren't specific enough.

What’s the process of deciding on a cover every week?

I’ve been the art editor for about 19 years, so I’ve been responsible for about 950 different published covers, and the process has been different for each one. But the general outline is that I set up a lineup every season of evergreen covers. So right now I’m talking to artists, soliciting ideas for Mother’s Day or spring or wedding or graduation.

And then there are timely political images or things that seem like the right idea at the right time—it can be a tsunami in Japan, but it can also simply be something that defines a time. Right now, one of the things I’m talking to artists about is the Republicans’ war on women. There’s not a specific moment for this, but it’s a subtext that’s in the air. Recently we did an image around the Republican primaries that involved a dog on top of a car, and that certainly was timely.

When we have something like that, then we are poised to upset the apple cart, and that can be turned around in as little as 24 hours. I’m in a constant conversation since I’m not commissioning or assigning any specific ideas. I’m not calling up artists and saying, “We need you to illustrate the war on women,” or whatever. We seldom have illustrations of cover stories on our covers. So we are dependent. What I’m really looking for are ideas that come from the artists on topics that will give us a sign of the era that we live in and, as a collection of images, will collect a picture of our time.

In the wake of the 1997 assault of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, by white NYPD officers, Harry Bliss sketched then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's paranoid psyche.

When I started, I didn’t know much about the New Yorker. I went to the library, and I looked at the storytelling images of the early days of the New Yorker—Peter Arno, Rea Irvin—and it did paint a portrait of the times, of what urban sophisticates chuckled at and attitudes, prejudices. That’s really not just the subtext but the text. That’s what we’re trying to capture—mannerisms as well as the way people dress and so on. I think you can get a very nuanced portrait of the society in images, because they talk about emotions beyond rationalization. So that’s what I try to orchestrate, but the artists have to come up with their own individual idea, like a little visual story, without being able to use words. And that’s a very specific task. There are not too many other venues for that. So I have to say, “Stop what you’re doing, and sit down at your drawing table, and come up with ideas.”

Christoph Niemann's 2003 sketch played on widespread anti-French sentiments in the U.S. in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

How many sketches do you receive from your regular contributors?

It depends. I don’t have any set way of doing it. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, says that he wants to get a batch of 15 ideas. So he’s more systematic.

He also sets a specific day of the week for the cartoonists to come in person.

And he has minimum requirements. I search around, and I’m in a dialogue. Sometimes people send me one image. And what I say to the artists is, “Don’t edit for what you think will work.” If a sketch is on my wall, it’s not necessarily either accepted or rejected. It’s not like a line, and on the left is all the stuff that got rejected. It’s actually all the building blocks of having the right image at the right time. And many of the images that are published started out in sketches months and sometimes years before they were used—even the timely ones, because we are a weekly magazine, and we can only publish one cover a week. Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist, but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.

In this rejected Barry Blitt sketch from 2002, Osama Bin Laden appraises proposed designs for the World Trade Center site.

What’s the most common reason why a piece may be great on its own but not work as the cover of the magazine?

Logistics. There have been some terrific images, and then we were out with a double issue that week and we couldn’t publish them. Or because the idea came in on a Friday and we had already published our cover. We are a weekly magazine, so the printing process finalizes something that is a constant flux. So I’d say logistics is usually the number one thing that narrows it down. And good taste would be the next one. Because everything needs to be approved by the editor of the magazine, David Remnick, who has final say on everything that gets published. But when I have the artists send stuff to me, I’m not necessarily going to show everything to David. I said to Anita Kunz, “Think of me as your priest. You can tell me all.”

Art Spiegelman reworked Norman Rockwell's painting "Freedom from Want" to highlight anti-Muslim violence in the fall of 2011.

What’s one thing that will never make it past David Remnick?

I don’t think that way. I encourage the artist to be uninhibited, because that is the sine qua non condition to try to make me laugh. And I mentioned in the book, Barry Blitt is really good at being uninhibited. He’s kind of a genius that way. My god, this guy thinks in doodling. There’s no editor in between the idea that he has and the idea that he commits to paper. But that’s a hard job to do—to not fear. It really is difficult to keep that spontaneity of thinking. But that’s because there’s no penalty. He’s not going to embarrass himself. He’s going to make me laugh, and it stays between us. This is similar to comedy writers who lock themselves up in a room. They’ll make a number of really bad-taste jokes, and the sexist and racist stuff is the least of it. They’ll really go off the deep end. And then that will actually unearth something that can be used.

An image like the terrorist fist bump, by Barry Blitt, which we published to such outcry, was talking about the unmentionables, the innuendos. There were a lot of allegations about candidate Obama being a Muslim, and that stuff was insidious because they were not saying it aloud, but they had no compunction. And all that the artist did here is visualize what people were insinuating, and sneaking in through the crack. Think of it as an inoculation, a way to actually use a drop of the poison in a controlled way. It’s very brave on the part of the artist to spend hours listening to Rush Limbaugh, for example—as Barry Blitt has done—because it’s a fascinating portrayal of America. It’s not useful to just say, “He’s a bad fat asshole,” and shield yourself from this, because you’ll only preach to the converted if you’re not listening to what’s being said.

Richard McGuire's waterboarding scene, painted after news came out of torture at Abu Ghraib, was inspired by Old Master paintings of Christ.

Is the fist-bump cover the one that has caused the greatest uproar?

We got a lot of flack in 1996 when we published a cover, also by Barry Blitt, of two sailors kissing in Times Square. And that was a parody of the Eisenstaedt photograph. This is pre-Internet, and people wrote letters to the editors. And in 1994 we broke a long tradition of Eustace Tilly by Rea Irvin being republished in February of every year, and we published an image by Robert Crumb. We got hundreds if not thousands of letters, but they were in the mail. What Barry said was, in 1996, if there had been the Internet, probably there would have been just as much of a reaction. The Internet amplifies the visceral reaction. And one of the ways we know that is, we are the New Yorker, but New York magazine got thousands of emails of people protesting the cover. Because New York, New Yorker—who knows? They just knew there was some cover they didn’t like. Some of them might not even have seen it. The Web allows for two things: for images to spread virally, and also for negative comments.

Anita Kunz’s drawing of Monica Lewinsky with a lollipop—why was that rejected?

We had already run an image on the topic, and we did not anticipate at the time how salacious the discourse was to become. It took us by surprise; we didn’t expect that the New York Times would have the word blow  job on the front page day after day after day after day. Often the artists know—because they actually are paying attention to stuff that’s in the air, they are so often ahead of their time.

Anita Kunz suggested that her sketch of Monica Lewinsky sucking a lollipop, made in 1998 during the White House sex scandal, "could be drawn in crayon, very child-like."

Your husband, Art Spiegelman, drew a picture of Santa Claus urinating in the shape of a Christmas tree. Why didn’t that pass editorial muster?

The editor at the time was Tina Brown, and she loved Art’s images. That’s really what started it all—the Hasidic man kissing a black woman, referencing Crown Heights. That’s the kind of image that she really liked. But Christmas is a difficult period for a magazine editor to do something provocative because somewhere in the back of people’s minds is “It’s a time to be jolly!” I know because around that time, I was actually preparing a cover story, one where we tied in the cover image to the article inside. This was a Mark Danner piece on the massacre in El Mozote, in El Salvador. And to do a cover image on the massacre—it’s like, “But not at Christmas time!” It still did run in December.

But to actually say to the whole wide world that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, that was getting a lot of editors unhappy—that we were willing to demystify Christmas. At the time, there were a lot of longtime New Yorker editors who were not necessarily that thrilled with the attention that the covers were getting. So in general there was a lot of opposition. And for that image, they were saying that it was provocation for the sake of provocation. Now, I actually don’t think so, and Art was very articulate about this and was explaining, “No, this is making a point. It’s not just a pee-pee joke for the sake of, like, ‘Ooh, ooh, isn’t pee-pee funny!’” It had to do with the obscenity of the merchandising around Christmas time. We’re talking about the early ’90s, when there are people homeless in the street—the inequality is contradicted by the over-merchandising Christmas. And then a suggestion was made to him: “Maybe it’s OK if it doesn’t mention the homeless.” And to him, that was really provocation for the sake of it. Later on we ended up publishing a crucified bunny rabbit, but that was Easter, not Christmas.

When The New Yorker passed on this Art Spiegelman sketch from 1993, he and Mouly used it as their Christmas card instead.

As you’ve been putting together the book over the last year or two, have you come across anything that you regretted rejecting?

There’s one of Sarah Palin brushing up on her books, preparing for her candidacy. I held that one for the last minute, because I was hoping and hoping and hoping that she would run. I really believed that we could publish it as a cover of the New Yorker. And when I realized that she prefers tweeting, I thought, well, I really would like to see that image in print. It’s wonderful, and it’s in the book.

Barry Blitt drew candidate Palin brushing up on her political reading.

Before the publication of the book, there was some back and forth with David Remnick about opening the door to that closed room and even discussing these things, because it’s not a very New Yorker-y thing to do. And there are issues with doing it. One could have to do with demystifying, making the process more predictable. But I actually think that it’s so rich and so interesting that it’s actually even more interesting if you have a sense of how the images are thought about, rather than less. It doesn’t explain anything because it still is genius when somebody gets the right idea.

And the other had to do with the fine line between what does get published and what doesn’t, because we publish so many provocative images. It seems to open itself up to second-guessing. But on that front, this will encourage more artists to take more chances, even the artists I’m already working with. I’m seeing it already. They are less afraid about wasting their effort on something that won’t get published. It’s encouraging more people to think more often about The New Yorker cover as a really vital form of communication to a great number of people, available to anybody who can handle a pen on a piece of paper. And that couldn’t make me happier.

Palin, drawn here by John Cuneo, has been a favorite subject of New Yorker artists.

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So, it’s not a real thing. There’s no such law or even any evidence that anyone proposed said law, and even if someone had proposed such a law, there is not even a remote possibility that the Egyptian Parliament would consider it. It’s total bullshit. It’s the Daily Mail overhyping a story Al-Arabiya took from a newspaper opinion column written by a dedicated Hosni Mubarak supporter.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy explained as much yesterday, but the people who highlight specious stories like this don’t actually care about “accuracy”; they are just engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to tar all Muslims as violent radical pervert monsters who are slowly taking over the West.

That is actually not the case, and anyone who’s ever met a Muslim could probably tell you!

It’s important to remember that the structure of the Muslim clergy is, by and large, like that of a number of Protestant Christian sects. Anyone can put out a shingle and declare themselves a preacher. The ones to pay attention to are the ones with large followings, or attachment to major institutions of Islamic learning. The preacher in Morocco is like the preacher in Florida who spent so much time and energy publicizing the burning of Qurans.

This seems like a really staggeringly obvious point — there are mainstream Muslim clerics and nutty fringe ones, just like in Mormonism and Judaism and all forms of Christianity! — but the Islamophobia industry has spent years trying to make sure that Americans by and large don’t understand this.

Number 2: That Obama EPA person said they were going to “crucify” the oil industry. This is a much bigger story (though it is still limited almost entirely to the conservative press) because it was first spread by an actual senator: James Inhofe, the Senate’s worst pilot and best friend of oil and gas. And then it was on Fox, obviously.

And it has now become a regular talking point, that Obama’s EPA is “crucifying” oil companies. (Which is bad because oil companies give us our precious life-giving oil!)

Of course the guy, an administrator named Al Armendariz, was specifically talking about going after companies that broke the law. The idea is that the EPA would punish companies that violated the law, because that is the EPA’s whole deal. (Some people think there shouldn’t be any environmental laws and no EPA, but instead of making that argument, they are instead making the untrue claim, based on words taken out of context, that Obama’s EPA is unfairly punishing all oil companies for no reason.)

It is also sort of weird that everyone thinks it’s a political winner to say Obama is being too tough on oil companies when no one likes oil companies, but what do I know.

For the past year, Drudge has provided the Washington Times with, on average, 46 percent of its monthly traffic. In November of 2011, the Drudge Report sent 4.7 million visitors to the Washington Times website, or 57 percent of all the Times’ traffic that month. By comparison, just 820,000 visitors actually accessed the Times through its homepage that November. (These numbers come from the Times’ internal Google Analytics statistics, which Salon obtained.)

The Drudge Report’s interest in the Washington Times is relatively recent. In November 2010, for example, it sent just 1.5 million readers to the paper’s website, less than a third of the readers it sent one year later. The Drudge Report began linking to the Washington Times with greater frequency in March 2011 — the same month, it so happens, that the Times hired a Drudge Report editor to write a weekly column for the paper.

Joseph Curl, a veteran political journalist and longtime friend of Drudge who had worked for the Drudge Report as an editor since May 2010, joined the Times that month. Curl’s first column coincided with a 30-person hiring spree. And in May 2011 — the last time Drudge referrals to the Times dipped below two million — it became clear that Drudge was employing another Washington Times hire from March 2011, Charlie Hurt, who had quietly left his job as the New York Post’s Washington bureau chief several months earlier. Hurt’s first Times op-ed ran the same week as Curl’s.

Both Curl and Hurt still work for Drudge, though you wouldn’t know it from their Washington Times columnist bios, which do not mention their other work. The jump in Drudge Report links to the Washington Times coincides perfectly with their hires. From April 1, 2011, through March 31, 2012, Drudge referred 39.4 million readers to the Washington Times’ website. In that same period, one year earlier, he referred less than half as many readers, just 19.6 million.

Are Hurt and Curl channeling traffic from one employer to another? And could the Times have hired Hurt and Curl with the expectation that the site would benefit from their jobs at Drudge? Hurt, Curl and Drudge, along with the Washington Times president, Tom McDevitt, all declined to comment. However, as editors at the Drudge Report, a famously small and close-knit shop, it seems unlikely that they are unaware of — or unconnected to — the sudden boom in Washington Times links. Both men have also personally benefited from their dual employment, as the Drudge Report has given their Washington Times’ columns coveted spots on the website’s blogroll. (Such a black box is the Drudge Report editorial apparatus that Curl and Hurt declined to comment on what their specific roles are at Drudge or whether, in fact, they even worked there still. A Washington Times insider says that both, however, continue to work for Drudge.)

Drudge is famous, of course, for his power in conservative circles. He is credited with helping put Mitt Romney over the top in the Republican primary, even coming under attack from Rick Santorum. Like Romney, the Washington Times can also credit much of a recent turnaround to Drudge. While the paper survives, as always, on the largesse of the Moon family, Drudge has helped the paper’s website restore traffic to the levels it enjoyed in the mid-2000s, before the economy and Moon family squabbles gutted the paper and its website. The man who became famous for nearly toppling a president now appears to be using his influence to prop up a right-wing paper.

On the second floor, a conference area, I’m taken aback by a strange little man in a garish baseball cap covered in team logos, his disbelief over a credentialing snafu bordering on delirium. “How am I supposed to do my job without a credential?” he hand-chops to the NCAA media relations people behind the counter. He’s got round wire-frame glasses, a gray unkempt beard and denim shorts reaching past his knees. He works for ESPN, but reminds me of a wacky political convention attendee. I’m here to embed in the stratums of journalistic society mashed together at the Final Four, to discover how the decline of print and rise of digital can be particularly divisive within the hyper-competitive, male-dominated arena of sports media.

When a female staffer determines his credential has already been picked up, he asks, “Who would pick up my credential? How could the NCAA let this happen?” It’s possible somebody from ESPN picked up credentials for his entire crew, they tell him. By the time he’s persuaded to step aside, everyone is in a foul mood. The head staffer tells me I’m not on the parking pass list in a tone like, “Sorry, Charlie.” He’ll have to check with his superior who’s at the Superdome. Won’t have an answer for me ‘til tomorrow. We stare at each other a moment, him in a pretty cool NCAA golf shirt by Nike.

Aboard the media bus to the Superdome, everybody’s male save a young woman who appears just out of college. Or perhaps she’s in college and writing for a student paper. People sit sideways in their seats and chit-chat. The prevailing vibe: Excitement for the basketball vortex ahead — practices, press conferences, games of colossal stakes. They’re beat reporters and columnists with laptop satchels, photographers with unwieldy bags of equipment, and TV cameramen, their equipment loaded in the cargo holds beneath the bus. “Now that U of L made it to the Final Four,” somebody says sardonically, “Matt Jones has to admit Louisville exists.”

Matt Jones is the chief media villain at the Final Four, the creator of a fan website/blog devoted to the University of Kentucky. The misleadingly named Kentuckysportsradio.com gets up to 150,000 unique visitors per day, and, as Jones likes to brag, it looks like it was produced on an Atari. It’s worth a visit for non-Kentucky fans for an advertisement link to Boone’s Butcher Shop, where you’ll find the following grammar: “Boone’s offers custom processing of your beef, hog, lamb, goat, buffalo, wild game and a numerous amount of other animals.”

A cherubic 34-year-old with a Duke law degree, Jones and his KSR writers popularized the slogan “Louisville doesn’t exist.” But Jones is a smart, media-savvy guy, and it’s his relentless criticism of nationally esteemed basketball writers like Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports and Pete Thamel of the New York Times that has earned him outcast status in arena workrooms.

Not that Jones is trying to be one of the guys. At the second and third rounds of the NCAA tournament at the YUM Center in Louisville, he tweeted out to his 46,000 followers that Forde was in the workroom “openly cheering” for teams playing on TV, a “yearly tradition.” This was in reference to the 2010 tournament, when Jones “called out” Forde for allegedly buying a round of drinks after Kentucky lost to West Virginia. Forde has been one of the more outspoken critics of Kentucky’s head coach, John Calipari, the only coach in history to have not one, but two Final Four appearances “vacated” by the NCAA for rules violations. On KSR, Jones and writers, under the guise of journalistic ombudsmen (but acting as what others might call fans with a press pass), regularly accuse Forde of having an agenda to attack Calipari. They claim he mentions Calipari’s checkered past whenever possible in his national articles, and that he yearns to “take down” Calipari through investigative reporting. Basically, they remind Kentucky’s fan base, known as the Big Blue Nation, to hate this writer. The most extreme segment of Kentucky’s fan base is notorious for sending hate mail and, in rare cases, issuing death threats. Forde lives in Louisville and has no geographical buffer. Here at the Final Four, they’ll share a workspace, representing two very different approaches to modern sports journalism.

As the bus navigates the narrow streets near the Superdome, we pass Tulane Medical School and somebody says he should’ve gone for a degree in medicine, not journalism. He’s referring to the decline of print, and people chuckle, grimly. Conversation then turns to Katrina and the displaced people who lived inside the Superdome under wretched conditions. The structure has since been repaired and repainted, a coppery hourglass shape on the river delta.

We’re dropped at a security entrance leading directly into the cement underworld, and everyone follows NCAA-hung placards around to the north end of the dome, where, on either side of the concourse, great reef-like workspaces begin to appear. A media workroom whose rows and rows of tables are equipped with power-strips; a media buffet/beverage area; an interview room with high stage for televised press conferences; a room with curtained booths for individual player interviews; a radio workroom; a photo workroom; a video/audio distribution room; an NCAA media relations office equipped like a Kinko’s; an NCAA operations office full of maps and computers and dudes with earphones who don’t want you in there; a CBS television studio; a CBS green room; a TNT green room; a CBS catering hall.

Going out to the brightly lit arena through a maw in the underworld, there’s the reassuring sound of bouncing balls. The University of Louisville has the court, the first practice of the day, followed by 30 minutes of interview time. The Final Four configuration of this cavernous space includes temporary stands bracketed over the permanent stands in the lower arena, so the seats extend down to the court less steeply, improving sightlines for basketball. The NCAA trucked the stands in, some 17,000 seats, and hung its octagonal scoreboard/video screen array relatively low over the court, to help give the place a college fieldhouse feel. All lit up, the array resembles the alien ship from “Close Encounters.” The maple basketball court, brand-new and buttressed 3 feet off the ground, has the look of a stage.

Media members are casually taking in practice, like ESPN color-man Jimmy Dykes, in an eye-popping zebra-print wind-pullover. Seating assignments, according to NCAA media coordinator David Worlock, depend on circulation and number of unique visitors per month; the bigger your outlet, the better your seat, though I’ll find out this rule doesn’t always apply. There are two rows of press on one side of the court, three on the other.

Eager to learn my assignment, I ask a man seated before a decrepit-looking laptop where I can find The List. He chuckles and tells me that in order to avoid getting complaints, the NCAA doesn’t release The List until tomorrow, about an hour before the first game. “It’s like a State Secret,” he says, removing his carpel tunnel brace.

This is Jerry Palm, who owns a degree in computer science and runs a website called collegeRPI.com. He’s the man who first brought the Rating Percentage Index to the public, in 1993. The RPI factors together a team’s strength of schedule (quality of opposing teams) and performance against those teams. It’s critical to the NCAA tournament because the selection committee uses it as a guide for team selection and seeding. If your favorite team didn’t make the tournament field, it might be because of this man’s area of expertise. Palm’s number-crunching website became so popular, he now crunches them for CBSsports.com. “It’s been a weird life,” he says.

“Why weird?” I ask, trying to discern if his laptop, though cruddy, is actually a supercomputer. His BlackBerry has a cracked screen.

“Who grows up wanting to be the RPI guy?” he laughs.

Palm ran collegeRPI.com for 18 years and found it impossible to get credentialed for the Final Four. In those early years, few websites existed — he was a vanguard user of the Internet, and a college basketball fan. “Now a good third of the people here are writing for some Internet version of a magazine or a newspaper or an Internet-only thing,” he tells me.

“Internet-only things” includes a range of places, from Yahoo Sports, widely considered the gold standard in sports journalism on the Web, to Jayhawkslant.com, part of the Rivals Network, which produces fan-friendly sites focused on individual teams and recruiting. (Rivals was purchased by Yahoo Sports in 2007; terms of the deal were never disclosed, but several sources reported sums up to around $100 million.)

Events like the Final Four are where the friction comes out – between print and online, between fan sites and sites that strive for more journalistic values, between writers who take shots at one another at a comfortable Twitter distance, then find themselves in the same workplace, on the same bus.

“A lot of the old-timers in print are frustrated by the lack of ethics shown by some places [on the Web],” Palm says.  “You follow a coaching search, for example. Guys are so worried about being first to the scoop (which coach is going to take which job), they don’t give a damn if they’re right anymore. I was following the rumors about [Purdue coach] Matt Painter last year, when he was connected to the Missouri opening. I’m a Purdue grad, so it was of great interest. Lots of websites were reporting it a done-deal, but he stayed at Purdue!

“I just think journalistic standards have become lower in sports. Some people don’t ever want to be wrong. My editors at CBSsports.com, they want to be first but they never want to be wrong. It’s the up-and-comers, the guys trying to make a name, who care more about being first than right.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The NCAA allows fans to attend practices the day before the semifinals, and there’s Louisville Cardinal red filling the lower arena seats. Everything looks a little too bright and sharply defined down here, like hi-def in real life. The court’s blond wood is lacquered and reflective, and the players have fluorescent red practice uniforms and orange laces in black shoes. It dawns on me that the ambient sound of the court — bouncing balls and squeaking high-tops — is preternaturally loud, and issuing from above. Later I’ll get confirmation: The court is mic’d for the college fieldhouse feel.

Back in the media workroom, serving myself a barbecue sandwich from the buffet, I spot Gregg Doyel, a columnist for CBSsports.com. A sinewy white guy in his early 40s, he at one time sported a mohawk, but has since shaved his head bald. I approach him at his laptop cautiously; he’s reputed to have boxing skills and a short temper. His writing style is best described as “angry.”

“Conversationally angry,” he says cordially.  “I’m blunt. I try to write like I talk. But I write like I talk mad at you. I have some occasional lose-my-temper moments that my family and friends laugh about, but I’m not that person. I’m a nice guy in real life. I’m that versatile.”

So you cultivate a tough-guy image? I ask.

“To be on the Internet in sports and have readers really like you — my average reader is a college kid or a little older — you need a hipness to you.” Soul patch at the lower lip, he’s wearing bright green Nikes with jeans and a T-shirt. “I don’t know if I’m hip or not, but I can tell you I try to hide how old I am. I have two kids, 16 and 14, and if my readers find out I’ve got older kids, they might tune me out.”

I’m a holding a recorder and wonder what he’s thinking. Then it occurs to me that he’s talking like he writes — blunt statements, outrageous honesty. “I see a lot of sweater vests in here,” I say, surveying the room. People tend to congregate around the buffet, or the table with tournament  materials, which include highly produced media guides from each of the four teams.

“That’s because the people reading those old-timers are my age or older and aren’t gonna switch to the new-fangled Internet for their sports,” says Doyel. “The older newspaper guys are in their own little world.  You see them hanging out in cliques.” The power dynamic between the cliques, however, has changed.

“Four or five years ago, we wanted their cred, but I think we’ve reached a point where we’re taken just as seriously. In both print and Web we’re seeing more mistakes than ever only because we’re more aware of them than ever. It used to be if the paper in Topeka had the wrong coach going to Kansas State, only the people in Topeka knew about it. Now we can all talk about the mistake on Twitter.”

You call each other out?

“Let’s just say our profession is more inclined to have arguments and dust-ups because our egos are so big.  We have some name recognition.  It doesn’t compare to the athletes we cover, but when we get in a room like this one here, and there’s nobody bigger than us around — like LeBron James is not walking though the door to remind us how low we are — we fool ourselves into thinking we’re stars.  You see the egos walk through press rooms, and it’s like, ‘Wow, you really do think you’re Walter Payton.’ But you’re just a writer for the New York Daily News and we all know who I’m talking about. You’re just a columnist!”

What about you all loving sports? That doesn’t help you get along?

“There are a lot of friends in here. People are gonna go out for drinks and to restaurants. But what we all have in common, besides sports, is we all want readers, and because that other guy is really good, he’s a threat to me. It leads to a lot of stupid Twitter wars. I’ve had my share and I’m not having any more.  What happens is, a guy says something bad about me and baits me into a Twitter war, and it’s not even real. He just wants to steal my followers.”

Just then, we’re interrupted by Matt Jones. He’s wearing an untucked button-down, and around his neck is a media credential, through his TV work for CN2, a local cable subsidiary of CBS. He greets Doyel by saying, “I didn’t even know you were comin’!”

It’s a press room joke, I think, one referencing Bill Simmons, who’s such a famous columnist for ESPN, the company allows him to stay home and watch sports in his living room. Or so the joke goes. “Why would I not be here?” asks Doyel. “I’m the man!”

For the first time in the workroom, I feel self-conscious about the company I’m keeping.  If Jones and Doyel are friends, is Doyel media villain No. 2? I like Doyel, and am keeping an open mind about Jones, but I want others to talk to me, like Pat Forde.

After Jones departs, I ask: How much can you criticize teams and coaches and not alienate your readers?  The fan sites are more popular than ever these days.

“I try not to worry about that, but it’s not easy. Fans want to be told what they believe is true. Sports and politics are the exact same, and they’re both depressing. The attitude is, Mitt Romney’s great because all Republicans are great and don’t tell me otherwise. If a Democrat already thinks Obama’s health plan is overreaching, then he or she can accept reading that. But if you take your criticism one step further, then a Democrat won’t listen because you’re obviously a Republican.”

Did it ever occur to you that when your readers are reading you, they should probably be doing something else? Like working?

“Never occurred to me,” he says, with a chuckle, “but I see what you mean. I’m writing for a guy who oughta be in a sales meeting. Which means he’s reading quickly and not paying close attention. Which explains why my hate mail is so stupid.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Louisville coach Rick Pitino is conducting a presser in the adjoining room, and the entire thing is being transcribed in real-time by a service called ASAP Sports. Back out on the court, the Kentucky team is hoisting three-pointers in a happy-go-lucky way — they’re the prohibitive favorite. I sidle up to Seth Davis, a CBS analyst and Sports Illustrated writer, greeting a group of school kids here to watch practice.  The son of Lanny Davis, often seen as a Fox News contributor and a former Bill Clinton advisor, he’s got swarthy good looks, a sharp gray suit with a lavender pocket square. He cheerfully agrees to a walk ‘n’ talk in the concourse.

“At the end of the day, this is fun,” he tells me. “You’re on the road, you’re at the Final Four. We cover scandals, there’s cheating, you want to be a serious journalist. But you’re not embedded with Marines in Afghanistan. You’re hanging out with sports people in different cities. Every year I get to see people like Mark Blaudschun [an old-timer for the Boston Globe]. But I’m kinda looking forward to Tuesday, when this is all over. I’m pretty fried already. Being in New Orleans doesn’t help.”

We’re discussing his journalism background — Davis started in print — when two teenage girls come around the corner. “Hey gorgeous, times two,” he intones flirtatiously, and the girls literally simper.  I assume they’re CBS interns, or perhaps daughters of a coach; they’re so young, it’s innocuous and charming. He returns to talking about the competitive nature of sports journalists.

“Guys want to break things first, and it’s anything. Is LeBron gonna play for Miami? In the blogosphere, they were handicapping who in the media would get that story first. I think it’s pretty juvenile. I’m lucky at SI. We don’t sell ourselves that way. We’re more about the writing and reporting. But I admire guys who do it [get the scoop], guys like Andy Katz [ESPN], Gary Parrish and Jeff Goodman [both of CBSsports.com. They take a lot of competitive pride in it.

“I was having a conversation about this with Chuck Todd [chief White House correspondent and political director of NBC News]. My sense is there’s more competition in sports to be first. Everybody’s trying to get noticed. One way to do that is get the scoop, another is being as loud and obnoxious and mean as you can. How incendiary can you be?”

“Just as in politics,” I say, wondering if he counts Doyel as incendiary.

“It’s a very true parallel.  You gotta go to the polarized extreme. I think people like to be provoked.  There’s a lot of trash-talking in sports, but in politics, I think there’s genuine demonizing. Hey there, hot lady …”

It’s CBS courtside reporter Lesley Visser, whose face has fewer wrinkles than her sideline reporters 30 years her junior. “Can I borrow him for a second?” she asks, giggly to see Davis.

Visser’s been a pioneer for women in sports journalism, the first female NFL analyst on TV, and the only sportscaster in history, male or female, to have worked on broadcast crews for all of the following: the Final Four, NBA Finals, World Series, Triple Crown, Olympics, Super Bowl, World Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Open. Yet as she and Davis chat, she keeps grabbing his arm and touching her hair, like a teenage girl.

“Tomorrow’s a long day,” Davis tells me before being whisked away in a golf cart, young and forever male. “Production meeting, rehearsal, the pre-game show, the games, the post-game show.  And I’m doing some corporate work for Subway. A little lettuce on the side,” he says, winking.

- – - – - – - – - -

Saturday morning at the Marriott brings another parking pass fiasco — the NCAA staffers are at a meeting until 11 a.m., and I’ve arrived at 9 a.m. to see if I’ve been added to the list. Other journalists need to pick up credentials. People are pissed. But it’s easy to calm down in the media hospitality room, known as “Club Hospi.” Popping a couple bite-size pain au chocolats from a nice selection of pastries, I overhear two guys saying they put on sport coats just to make sure they gained admittance to the room — they haven’t gotten their credentials yet. Then I meet Robert Allen, a heavyset man in jean shorts with tool pockets, and a utility vest. He’s disappointed by the buffet, because it lacks breakfast staples like eggs and bacon. Says he runs a satellite truck parked over at the dome. The “morning shot” got canceled, and he won’t work again until Sunday morning. Plans to watch TV in his room all day.

When I arrive at the Superdome, I think I’m getting an early start on interviews despite the parking-pass delay — except the workroom is completely empty.  The first game isn’t until 5 p.m., but I figured people would have work to do beforehand.

Maybe everyone’s hung over.  By 1:30, there are seven people.  On the tables, stacks of media guides have been left as place savers, with notes like, “New York Post, don’t even think about it.”

Later, I walk the circumference of the concourse, timing it on my watch (6:43 at a brisk pace). I pass a SWAT team with a bomb-sniffing dog. TV technicians setting up monitor/camera hutches in surprising places, like right outside the locker-room doors. Caterers carting around food. Open storage areas full of derelict machinery, old metal signs, ladders. Nooks and crannies where crime may have taken place in the days following Katrina.

Around 3 p.m., people begin to filter in and I approach Mark Blaudschun from the Boston Globe, the old-timer Seth Davis mentioned. His dark suit and Massachusetts accent give him the grizzled air of an old-school sports writer. In his 25th year at the paper, this is his 27th Final Four overall.

“The print media at the Final Four has shrunk considerably every year,” he says. “It’s become much more digital and TV oriented. When I first started, the Final Four area for print media was twice this size.  The NCAA says credential requests for print are way down.

“There’s a generational transition going on here. You have the new wave who are tweeting and blogging all the time. They’ll have the little camera going or they’ll talk into their phone. And then you have the old guys who have been around for 25 years, and we’re doing some of the new stuff, basically because we have to. But we still write stories.”

You tweet and blog?

“Yeah, but they don’t ask me to do video streaming.” A satisfied chuckle. “They’re like, OK we’ll leave him alone with that. I’m old-fashioned. The paper is more important than all that other stuff.”

Do print guys get along with Web writers?

“It’s almost like a caste. When you look around, the young guys are sitting together according to print and Internet. Or by geographical areas, like all the New York guys will sit together. It’s cliquey. It’s just natural.

“We’re dinosaurs,” he says of his print colleagues. “Even at the Globe. Boston.com is like watching the tide come in. We’re expected to do more and more instantaneous reporting with less accountability, which bothers me. Because in this age, you can blog something and if it’s wrong it disappears in an hour. In the old days, it was there forever. The standards are different. People are more interested in getting there first, and if they’re wrong, they go, ‘Oh well’ and fix it.

“Listen, I could start a rumor in this room and an hour later it’d be all over the country. ‘Sources close to the source say such and such.’ That’s mind-boggling to me.

“The Globe used to be a destination point.  Now we’re losing guys to ESPN and Yahoo for the job security.”

A little after 3 p.m., the media starts to arrive en masse. Most go directly to the buffet for baked ziti.  I approach one of the few female writers I’ve seen in the workroom, Marlen Garcia, from USA Today.  In dark slacks and a blouse, she has a warm smile, and sits near the buffet where people can easily stop by and say hello. She’s popular.

“So I’m sure you get asked this a lot,” I begin, “but what’s it like working in a male-dominated sports environment? Do you feel inundated by testosterone?”

She chuckles. “Among the coaches, sure. The athletes I find are pretty mellow. There are a lot of women in this business who came before me and laid the groundwork, and I’ll forever be grateful. The old-timers in this business, the men — they’re fabulous. They didn’t treat me any differently when I was a woman at 25 and naive, and now that I’m, uh hum, closer to 39, they still don’t treat me differently. They’re great guys with a lot of insight to pass on.”

And the younger guys?

“I have to say, they can be a little arrogant. I’ll find myself listening to a 20-something dot-commer with a great beat like Notre Dame football, and he’s complaining about how hard his life is. And you wanna say, ‘Look, punk, I started out covering high school sports, and helped put together a sports section for the Chicago Tribune, and would’ve killed for the Notre Dame beat.’

“Some dot.coms, I’ve noticed, get better seats than I do at events. I’ve not seen a fan site get a better seat.  But if I did, we’d have to box.”

What about journalistic credibility. Does print have more?

“It’s a crazy time,” she says. “Everybody’s trying to figure out how to make money. USA Today recently brought on a new president of USA Today Sports, which has been renamed Sports Media Group. We’re under new management completely. We have a new managing editor. Everything is geared more towards online, and we all have to reapply for our jobs. I’ve been at USA Today six years.”

Do you think management wants to look at everybody’s resumes and work history in terms of how suitable they are for online content?

“I think you hit it on the head. I like to write features. I went to Anthony Davis’ high school [a star Kentucky player] and wrote a really in-depth piece about his background. I’m going to find out if there’s a place for that under our new management. ESPN.com has a female reporter, Dana O’Neil, who does long-form human interest stories, so I’m thinking there’s an audience.

“I think I’ve been in a bit of denial about the print industry dying. I studied print journalism in college. Print! I came up at the Chicago Tribune! I said to my husband, ‘I feel like I’m grieving, going through the different stages.’ Denial, then bargaining — can I sell them on these long stories? I like to tell stories, but are they going to be of value? Then anger, oh the anger. Anger has been a big one, especially over the last couple weeks. So much anger. But I think I’m heading closer to acceptance.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Out in the concourse, technicians rush around with cables, pep bands head out to the floor with polished instruments, equipment mangers from UK and U of L race in and out of locker rooms. A cameraman is filming behind-the-scenes, floodlighting the cement hallway.  I see former Georgetown coach John Thompson, now a radio analyst for CBS, and former UNLV player Greg Anthony, a TV analyst.  Ushers are showing VIP guests the way out to the floor.

Before the tipoff, I sit down with Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports. Pre-game, it turns out, is a journalist’s least busy time. In his late 40s or early 50s, he has an athlete’s build and thick salt-and-pepper hair gelled into a kind of sculpted-over part.

“My schedule today is moderately complicated,” he says. “Greg Anthony and I did two videos for Yahoo on the court, and I’ll be writing the overview of both games tonight, spinning forward to the championship game.  I’ll be taking notes during both games, and tweeting like a madman. Then I’ll do three more videos on the court after the game, for use tomorrow and Monday.”

When will you write? I ask facetiously.

He chuckles. “That’s actually one reason I was happy to move to Yahoo [from ESPN]. I actually have less video ‘intrusion’ than at ESPN. Today’s an exception to that.”

Are there stories you couldn’t write at ESPN that you can write at Yahoo?

“There’s a greater embrace of investigative reporting at Yahoo. Yahoo is so unencumbered by ‘other stuff you gotta do,’ they say fine, just drop everything for two weeks and go do this [chase your story]. You don’t see that very much anymore.”

At ESPN, did you feel there were some conflicts of interest, journalistically speaking?

“There are inherent complications there when your company is paying hundreds of millions of dollars in broadcasting rights fees and you’re trying to cover those same entities.”

But now major websites like Yahoo and ESPN.com are considered traditional media.

“Yeah, but if you look at the seating chart for tonight, Yahoo’s on the third row, despite having the largest readership of anybody here.” He laughs. ” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is on the front row, and nothing against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it’s a very fine paper, but our circulation is probably 9 million times what theirs is!”

I’m in front of you too, I tell Forde. I guess that’s why they don’t release The List until right before the game.

“Quite honestly, it’s prestige and ego. ‘Well, I work at this place, so I should be seated better than this and I’m not. There’s a lot of testosterone in this room, for better or worse, because it’s a mostly male-driven enterprise here.”

Forde declined to talk about Jones, but would say there were many more layers of ‘society’ in the media workroom than when he first started covering Final Fours in 1991.

“Absolutely. Now you have guys with flip-cams and it’s like, ‘What happened to you, when did you become a videographer?’ Another big change is the influx of the “fan journalist.’  There are a lot of ‘fan boys’ in this room who didn’t used to be here. But they get credentials now. Some of them aren’t what those of us in traditional media would consider legitimate, but other people do.

“To me, they’re the same as politically biased radio playing to their base. A lot of fans, that’s all they want. Tell me how great my team is all the time, and how bad our rivals are. And anybody who says anything bad about my team is biased, or has an agenda. It’s funny, the attitude of Kentucky fans toward John Calipari is very different now from when he was at Memphis. And the attitude of Louisville fans toward Rick Pitino is very different from when he was at Kentucky.”

Around 4:40 p.m., the workroom starts emptying out. Ushers have us pour our drinks into cups that say Powerade, an NCAA sponsor. It feels like “showtime,” though we have absolutely nothing to do with the production. A camera boom swings overhead, and it’s an absolute cataclysm of sound, drums thundering, student sections shouting at the players as they go through warmups, cheerleaders spelling out team names. Seth Davis has taken up his position on the CBS broadcasting altar amid a palisade of fans in end-zone seating. My seat, even with one of the basketball stanchions, is behind the Kentucky bench.  Sitting in the stands directly behind me is Jay-Z, and just down from him, Ashley Judd. Jerry Palm is taking paparazzi pics with his phone — he got the cracked screen repaired today. Sitting to my left, Time.  To my right, the Kansas City Star.

The game is close, filled with dramatic moments, and sitting press-row is an exercise in restraint. It goes without saying it would be unprofessional to cheer, but I get the feeling I’m supposed to remain impassive even when a player does something athletically amazing. As if I’ve seen it all before. Complicating matters further, should the bench players stand up to cheer, we’re to remain seated, missing the run of play.

But we do have some perks, like personal monitors updating statistics, and Ethernet cables at each seat. The Time guy is checking his Facebook page, and the Kansas City Star looks to be liveblogging and tweeting. The guy on other side of the Time guy has already started writing an article. As best I can tell, he wrote a lead with blank spaces for team names.

During timeouts, media etiquette involves sitting stone-faced as cheerleaders do amazing athletic feats a few feet in front of you. Dance teamers do their thing too, their bodies rock-hard. It’s best to not look, and most of us try not to. During one timeout, I stand up to stretch my legs, and Jerry Palm comes over and says, “You’re not gonna believe this … I’m charging Jay-Z’s phone!” Apparently Jay-Z spotted a compatible charger on press-row, and requested juice.

At halftime, we head backstage to the workroom. People discuss the game, call home to their families, queue up for beverages. Some eat leftover ziti. I overhear two Sports Illustrated interns saying they saw a guy on press-row reading the National Geographic website.

Just before the second half begins, I’m approached by a guy in overflow seating (folding chairs behind press row, reserved for local TV, radio and interns). “Who’s that woman you were interviewing in the media room?” he asks. “She’s from USA Today, right?”

The pearly smile, the black three-button suit, the gregariousness: more sales rep than media. He wants to know Marlen Garcia’s name, and I give it to him, suspicious. His name is Clifford Early, and he works in radio. I’ll learn later that he’s one of the proprietors of a radio start-up that’s just barely getting off the ground.

Everybody assembles outside the victorious Kentucky locker room, waiting for the 10-minute cool-down period to expire, at which point, the doors will open and we’ll all flood inside, and a female reporter will get unintentionally shoved into a red-rope stanchion. The rush? Player interviews at their lockers, second-string guys and walk-ons who aren’t asked to the press room.

At the presser, Kentucky players are jazzed to advance to the championship game Monday night. They joke onstage, whispering funny asides behind cupped hands, and sometimes, when a media member asks a question, a player is caught off guard because he wasn’t paying attention. Hard to think them disrespectful, one game away from a championship, and they’re college kids, after all, three freshmen and two sophomores with a lone senior. It’s just weird, really weird, to see so many intelligent adults dependent on six distracted teenagers to do their job.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Much of the media, both print and Web, will remain at the Superdome until late — the workroom is open ‘til around 4 a.m. At the final buzzer of the Kansas vs. Ohio State game, a Jayhawk victory, fans hurl down seat cushions, hundreds of Final Four-embossed cushions meant to be taken home as souvenirs. It’s a beautiful sight, these raining cushions, and as I’m packing up my laptop, I notice Clifford Early collecting as many off the floor as he can find. He asks if I want one, and I accept, glancing over both shoulders, because maybe it’s poor form to take home fan-jettisoned freebies?

About a half-hour later, in the Superdome parking garage, I run into Clifford again. He’s with a buddy, also dressed in a suit, and they’ve got a clear plastic trash bag full of the cushions. This bag is industrial-size, like the kind used to hold helium balloons, probably procured from the Superdome janitorial staff. A conservative guess would be 40 to 50 cushions. “You want another one?” asks Clifford. “We got plenty.”

“Are those gonna end up on eBay?” I ask, grinning.

“No, no,” says his buddy. He’s balding, heavyset, sweating in the balmy night air. “For friends and family members.” He gives me his card, which says “Dan the Man Leach” from Sports Edge Radio. Clifford’s info is on the flipside. As far as I can tell, they’re at the Final Four to network.

No games on Sunday, but Kansas and Kentucky come to the Superdome to practice and do interviews.  The latter include individual player “breakout” pressers inside curtained areas the size of a small room, with an NCAA moderator assigned to each, and TV cameras in the rear. It feels like being inside a photo booth for 30-40 people. It’s kosher to walk between booths, duck in and duck out. When I see Gregg Doyel, he’s concerned about something he might have said in our interview.

Kansas coach Bill Self and Kentucky’s Calipari get interviewed in the press room at length. Calipari is strangely upbeat and prickly at the same time. When a reporter trips on his words, perhaps out of nervousness, and then trips again, the coach says, “Come on, you’re stutterin’!” It’s meant as a joke, but considering one of his best players, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, has a true stuttering issue, it seems particularly insensitive. Of course coaches razz media all the time, none worse than former Indiana coach Bob Knight, widely considered a bully. On the whole, it’s a far more egotistical, juvenile sort of man, the multimillionaire coach, and the media must hang on his every word. Coaches who comport themselves with basic human decency are hailed “class acts.”

Muffalettas and jambalaya for lunch, our best yet.  After checking with his editor at the New York Times, and perhaps doing a background check on me, Pete Thamel has agreed to chat — but declines to talk about fan sites specifically. (“It doesn’t do me any good,” he says.) He’s 34 with a dark nefarious brow, or maybe it’s an inquisitive sleuth’s brow.

“The Times fancies itself a watchdog,” he says.  “There’s a lot of cheerleading media in college sports, and we certainly don’t partake in that.”

Do you have more freedom at the Times than you did at ESPN the Magazine (his previous employer)?

“There’s more of an appetite to dig in. ESPN the Magazine wasn’t banging down the doors to investigate. It’s a good magazine but also has a lot of puff pieces and glorification of athletes. They try to be hip and edgy, and we don’t try to be hip and edgy, obviously.”

Like they do with Forde, the KSR site accuses Thamel of having an anti-Calipari agenda. When Thamel investigated Kentucky recruit Enes Kanter for amateurism issues — the NCAA ultimately deemed him ineligible to play college ball — Jones thought his article showed questionable reporting practices. Things took a mean edge. When the Times ran a minor correction over a misattributed quote, KSR claimed a minor victory, and dubbed him “Thamel Toe.” An underground online T-shirt store produced “Neuter Thamel” shirts and “Investigate Pete Thamel’s report card” shirts, in reference to Thamel’s investigation into the fishy transcript of Kentucky player Eric Bledsoe.

A few tables away from Thamel, I sit down with Jones.  I tell him what I’m writing, and how surprised I am at the candor I’ve encountered.

He jokes, “If there’s one thing the media likes to talk about more than sports, it’s themselves.”

How does it feel? You’re pretty much the villain here.

“It’s like the JFK quote: ‘Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.’ A lot of them don’t even like that I’m here. I’m an outsider because I didn’t go to journalism school. They like to think of themselves as unbiased reporters, but I think that’s bogus. Everyone has biases.

“It’s the lawyer in me.  I like to face my critics.” He nods in the direction of Thamel. “There’s Pete Thamel from the New York Times. I’d like to talk to him, but he won’t talk to me. He acts like he doesn’t know who I am, but that’s a lie.”

During our interview, Jones and I will discuss his relationship with Forde, how things went so terribly wrong. As he talks, his face reddens from what I take to be embarrassment. He says he wants to patch things up with Forde, and seems to understand that stopping his “gotcha” tweets might be a good place to start. At the same time, he’s not going to stop being an outspoken lightning rod.

“These guys are failed athletes. Who do they hate most? The retired pro-athletes on TV getting paid millions of dollars [as commentators].”

Assuming you’re not getting paid millions, what do they hate about you?

“That I admit my bias. But I criticize Calipari all the time. I’m not a guy who sees things in black and white. Most of them have been doing this so long they’re jaded and not fans anymore. I’ve had a few guys say I’m my own boss [acknowledging his freedom] and that I don’t have to adhere to anyone else’s [journalistic] standards.

“The one thing I have to be careful about is when I report bad news. There was a quarterback who got arrested for marijuana possession, and because I was a lawyer at the time, I heard about it before anyone else. I had it verified to 98 percent, enough to post on the site, but on the 2 percent chance I was wrong, there was no incentive to rush to bad news.”

How does KSR do financially? I ask.

“In two years time we expect to be doing pretty well.” He names numbers he doesn’t want published, and I’m taken aback. The blog currently has two other paid employees, one fulltime, and Jones expects to hire more. “It’ll take some corporate sponsorships. And we need Calipari to stay at Kentucky. It helps when the team is good.”

Is the media ever going to accept you?

“Professors [at Kentucky universities and colleges] will invite me to speak to their classes. I’ve spoken to classes in leadership, sports marketing, business … but never journalism.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Championship Monday unfolds similar to semifinals Saturday, with media arriving at the Superdome later in the day. By 6:45 p.m., TV people are bustling around the concourse for the 8:20 tipoff, and everyone in the workroom looks a little extra primped for the final game of the season. Waiting to take the floor, I meet blogger Adam Zagoria from New York, who has longish flyway hair and a sport jacket of designer drape over an untucked button-down. Zag’s Blog is known ‘round the workroom for its college basketball recruiting scoops and coverage of the Knicks. And Dan Wolken, a recent print media evacuee who bypassed traditional websites for the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s tablet newspaper venture.

As I head onto press row, I pass Clifford Early and Dan the Man Leach sitting overflow.  They’re taking phone pictures, and I say, “You guys look like you’re having a ball!”

“We are!”

Kentucky beats Kansas in a game never much in doubt, a fait accompli. Toward the end, an NCAA staffer comes around with an instruction sheet. We’re advised confetti will drop from the ceiling when the final buzzer sounds (in reality it will explode out of the Close Encounters video array, with several startling concussive bangs), and if we’re not working, we might want to close our laptops to protect our keyboards from the confetti. Among the rules for the trophy presentation and net cutting, interviews are to pause during the playing of the “One Shining Moment” video montage on the arena screens.

Later, out in the concourse, I spot Matt Jones talking on his cellphone, doing a post-game radio call-in show for fans back in Kentucky. He gives me a winning smile and a thumbs up, unabashedly ecstatic about Kentucky’s eighth national championship.

Then it’s back to the Marriott for an NCAA media dinner, scheduled to run until 3 a.m. Everyone is invited — print, mainstream Web, fan sites, blogs, tablet apps.  It’s a celebration, at segregated tables, of a job well done.