Off the Record

The all-aboard call has finally sounded for the Culture Express train at The New York Times. The long-scheduled reform of the paper's cultural coverage had been pushed back twice: first in the violent derailment of the Howell Raines administration, then-just as the departure board started clacking again-by the departure of chief engineer Adam Moss to take over New York magazine.

But on April 23, executive editor Bill Keller, managing editor Jill Abramson and culture editor Steven Erlanger convened the culture staff in The Times' ninth-floor auditorium to announce that the changes were coming-for real, at last, and fairly soon. Abdicated Times culture czar Mr. Moss, it turns out, will have two major infrastructure projects underway at once this summer: While he goes about his new task of remaking New York, The Times will be following his old blueprint (penned with Mr. Erlanger and associate editor Frank Rich) for rebuilding its culture desk.

Under that proposal-pending approval from the business side-the paper will be adding staff, restructuring the various arts departments and otherwise preparing, come autumn, to deliver more and faster arts criticism and news. Given that publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has already publicly declared that the cultural revolution is coming in September, sources involved in the editorial planning said they expect the abacus-wranglers to go along.

At the April 23 meeting, after opening remarks from Mr. Keller and Mr. Rich, staffers witnessed slide shows by Mr. Erlanger, Arts & Leisure editor Jodi Kantor and Weekend editor Myra Forsberg suggesting what a week's worth of revised culture report might look like: brighter and with new fonts-but also, and more importantly, roomier.

"It looked magazine-ish," said a writer who was at the presentation. "More points of entry, more smaller sections …. In a weird way, it looked sensible."

Cosmetics, said a culture-department staffer involved in the planning, are not the central issue: "The main proposals have to do with later deadlines, more space, more staff and a reorganization of the way the department edits things," the staffer said.

The current culture report at The Times is produced by an assortment of separate editorial operations, founded at various times for various reasons. Hence the daily book reviews and the weekly Book Review; the Weekend movie reviews and the movie stories that appear over the weekend; the Saturday Arts & Ideas and the Sunday Arts & Leisure.

"It grew over time," the staffer involved in the planning said. "Nobody ever designed it."

So, like Amtrak-which has spent years stopping in New Haven to change locomotives from electric to diesel-The Times proposes to come up with one operating standard. The redundant administrations will be replaced by a team of new editors, each handling a particular subject-wherever it may appear in the paper. Movie critics and Hollywood reporters, for instance, would answer to a single movie editor; dance or theater coverage would likewise go through a dedicated desk. The independent-beyond-independence Book Review will probably hold its ground, but may cooperate more with the day-to-day writing about books.

The cadre of specialists will likely come in part from the ranks of current arts editors, supplemented by new hires. Newsrooms instinctively look askance at restructuring plans, but the message of the meeting was that, with an infusion of new space and resources, everybody should be a winner.

That doesn't, however, mean that everything will survive. Saturday's Arts & Ideas section, for instance, is officially marked for elimination. It's not because the masthead doesn't like Arts & Ideas, staffers involved in the planning said, but because it likes it too well to see it stuck on one day of the week. The word "ghetto" cropped up more than once.

"No one can understand why it needs to just run on Saturday," said one.

Hence the writers will keep writing stories about arts and ideas, and editor Patricia Cohen will keep editing them. They'll just be doing it from a seven-day high-rise apartment.

The plan also calls for seven-days-a-week coverage of breaking news on the arts and culture fronts. Under the present arrangement, if a culture story breaks after 5:15 p.m. on a weekday-when the arts section is supposed to have left the building-it gets stuffed in wherever it can fit: on a page of municipal news, if necessary. On May 3, for instance, Sharon Waxman's coverage of screenwriters' negotiations with Hollywood studios (an event transacted on Pacific time) ended up running in national-desk space on page 18.

The new proposal calls for the creation of arts-specific space in the breaking-news sections, in which stories will be edited by culture editors and copyedited by the culture copy desk.

The culture sections proper, however, will probably keep their overall place in line. Revolution or none, the Weekend section will have to come off the presses before, say, the Mets results or the news from Iraq.

"Some parts of the daily paper have to get printed early," said a source involved in the planning, "and the arts section has been one of them."

After the passing last year of Boston Globe football writer and NBC personality Will McDonough, The Globe told of an incident from late in his career: On a celebrity-studded luxury cruise, Sports Illustrated's Leigh Montville had fallen into conversation with Mr. McDonough about how lucky a sportswriter was to be able to glimpse the lives such people led. "We sure have it good," Mr. Montville reportedly said.

"We?" Mr. McDonough replied in The Globe's account. "I meant you. I am one of these people."

Mr. McDonough, being dead, was not at the White House Correspondents' Dinner May 1, nor at the Bloomberg-sponsored party that followed. Who was? It was hard to keep track. The list of attendees in the dinner program began with "Abdul, Paula," and before getting halfway down the first page had touched on "Abramson, Jill," "Affleck, Ben," "Aiken, Clay" and "Aldrin, Buzz." Everybody's been on some kind of rocket ship sometime.

At the door of the Bloomberg event, a three-tiered social system prevailed: When early arrivals announced their press affiliations, the bouncers asked if they were guests or reporters. The higher-ranking guests went to a rope line guarded by clipboard-bearing, ID-checking staff; lowly working reporters went straight to the V.I.P. entrance-where they could wait to intercept the incoming top-shelf celebrities.

The scrutiny of mid-level guests came on the heels of a story in The New York Times two days before by Washington-scene scribe Jennifer 8. Lee, in which she described how a cheeky young District type had gotten into a previous party by passing himself off as a Supreme Court justice. To report on the world, alas, is to change it; this year, cheeky young District types found their bluffs deflected by the clipboards.

Rumor had it that one resourceful reporter-from The Globe-had strolled in by holding Drew Barrymore's umbrella for her. But most of the guests got through the door on their official merits, whatever those may have been.

Late-stage party enervation, then, set in early. The majority of guests had started with late-afternoon drinks and then sat through the whole dinner-itself delayed, they reported, by a stack-up at the security check and a brief break in the rain, which had allowed stir-crazy participants to linger on the patios and ignore the signals that cocktail time was ending. Reporters can hardly get a Presidential press conference more than once a year, but at least they could keep the ruthlessly punctual Commander in Chief at dinner past his bedtime.

With that victory notched in their cummerbunds, the press had nothing to do but enjoy Bloomberg's impeccable hospitality. The site this year was in the former Field School, remade into a single-family mansion for last year's National Symphony Orchestra show house but still untenanted. The staff wore black, with no logos of any catering company or security firm. Packs of transparent playing cards and sets of clear dominos were scattered around, as if left behind by invisible occupants; even the billiard balls, on a blue felt table, were see-through.

The only identity was that of Bloomberg-on a video kiosk, on free silver umbrellas, even on the toasters in the kitchen-and of the assorted guests, with their assorted degrees of fame. Mr. Aiken stood in the glow of a Bloomberg monitor; a few yards away, Wayne Newton descended the steps, his hair improbably tall and clifflike. A whiff of Branson, Mo., drifted on the air-if Mr. Aiken should be so lucky.

Who is famous anymore? Who isn't famous? Matt Drudge held court at the edge of the side porch, where the house gave into the cavernous main party tent. Mr. Affleck held court in a corner of an auxiliary patio, in the open air with eager smokers crowding around him. Mr. Affleck's last three movies have lost something north of $55 million combined, but these are the days of deficit spending.

Off the foyer-the size of a parlor-Sean Astin tried to ease his way into a conversation involving Chris Matthews. The cable shout-show host glanced blankly at the billion-dollar-gate movie star and resumed his monologue. Mr. Astin moved on. He'd enjoyed the dinner, he said when asked; he was thrilled to see it in person after years of watching it on C-SPAN.

Gradually, through the night, the hors d'oeuvres changed in emphasis, from mini-burgers to sherbet-on-a-stick to, finally, bacon strips and finger sandwiches made from waffles. The crowd thinned.

At the north end of the tent, Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles, a Pulitzer-winner in his previous job at the Buffalo News, stood talking with Ms. Lee and marveling at the stiffness of the partygoers. He dipped his knees in a sort of tai chi dance maneuver, slowly lowering and raising his lanky frame, trying to single-handedly impress the force of motion on the gathering.