RAINES RECENTLY SPIKED A NYT PIECE ON QUOTE FABRICATION

Starting off with Jayson Blair's personal connection to Raines...the saga gets more interesting:

Raines may be more deeply tainted by the [Jayson Blair] scandal than had immediately been apparent.

News clerk Zuza Glowacka, who reportedly had a romantic relationship with Blair, has left the paper, although it’s unclear if it was voluntary. The 23-year-old has not been at work since Blair left May 1.

Fair or not, that’s led to in-house speculation that she may have helped Blair with his misdeeds. She worked on the photo desk during part of Blair’s tenure and would have had access to pictures of sites that he claimed to be reporting from while he was actually in New York. This friendship with a photo desk employee was not mentioned in the Times story.

...Glowacka’s mother, journalist [and Public Relations specialist] Ewa Zadrzynska, is good friends with Raines’ wife, Krystyna Stachowiak.

The buzz around the newsroom is that Raines may have given Blair second and third chances that other reporters would not have received because of his romance with a family friend.

Reaction within the Times to the case has ranged from anger that editors let Blair continue when they’d known about his sloppiness to suspicion about Glowacka and her relationship with Raines’ family. [bold mine]

Looks like his girlfriend lived with her P.R. specialist mom:

Glowacka's last known address was her parents' Upper West Side apartment where Blair was a regular visitor, neighbors said.

It's interesting that these PR types are swarming all over selected incompetent men working for the NY Times -- especially when they might have a business reason to influence or plant stories. And speaking of that, let's flashback to the New York Post's Page Six on Jan 24, titled Flack Howells Over a Column:

The spiking of a piece about the public relations business has staffers at the New York Times wondering: was the column killed because it attacked a P.R. technique often used by flack Krystyna Stachowiak, fiancee of Times executive editor Howell Raines?

The axed piece by Manhattan publicity executive Jeff Barge blasted his industry as a 'deceptive business' in which newspapers are fed 'quotes that are just plain fabricated by the P.R. people.' It might have cut too close to the bone, because eloquent Stachowiak, 38, has in the past provided newspapers with English-language quotes from her non-English-speaking client, Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski."

It looks like this one cut too close to a main artery. Howard Kurtz had more details:

Times editor Brent Bowers told Barge in an e-mail that Sunday Business Editor Judith Dobrzynski "just now killed the piece. She says it is too self-promotional and didn't like the anecdotes. I totally disagree with her, and argued my case, but she is the boss."

The explanation was odd because most of the "My Job" columns are self-serving, while Barge was trashing his own profession. "I AGREE!!!!" Bowers wrote Barge after he pointed this out. "I made the same argument. That was when her jaw tightened and her face froze in an unfriendly way."

In the spiked column, Barge also boasts of press releases that spurred articles in Business Week and The Washington Post. He now accuses the Times of "a form of censorship" to spare the paper "possible embarrassment."