Shortly after 6:15 p.m. last night, the New York Times posted an article to their website, meant for the next day's edition of the paper. The article was titled "Woman at the Center of Governor's Downfall" and it held the secret to a mystery everyone had been wondering about all week: Who was the mysterious woman with whom New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had trysted in Washington D.C. earlier this month? The NYT had the answer: it was Ashley Alexandra Dupre, née Ashley Youmans and aka "Kristen" of Emperor's Club fame — and it was as huge a scoop as the paper had had in, well, three days.
The article was in the paper's "N.Y./Region" section — usually not the section boasting the articles zooming up the Most Emailed List or generating hours of cable news punditry — that is, until the past three days. For the past three days, everything has been different, ever since the mid-afternoon scoop went up on the NYT website revealing that crusading straight-arrow former prosecutor and attorney general Spitzer had been linked to a just-busted high-end prostitution ring. That pushed even the epic struggle between Clinton and Obama off the top of the news agenda as Topic A became discussing What Was He Thinking, Why He Did It, Would He be Prosecuted and What Other "Spitzer" Puns Can We Make? When he finally resigned yesterday just before noon, it was a scene out reminiscent of Paris Hilton on the way to jail, with a crush of photographers outside the Spitzer's uptown building and sky-cams tracking the car as it crawled through midtown traffic en route to the big moment. When it came, it lasted around two and a half minutes — that's all it takes, apparently, to do a number of things leading up to the end of one's political career.
It was a story that rocked the headlines from coast to coast (and in Europe too, so, sorry, Alan Dershowitz) — and it belonged to local media.
The New York Observer's John Koblin had a great blow-by-blow of how the "Cinderella section" of the NYT newsroom got the scoop, starting with a tip to reporter William K. Rashbaum that led to almost everyone on Joe Sexton's Metro desk being mobilized to cover the story, including Albany bureau chief Danny Hakim, who co-bylined the initial story with Rashbaum. Today the NYT published its own tick-tock of how events unfolded on Spitzer's end, from when he first got wind that he'd been found out (possibly Friday, definitely Sunday) to through to his resignation, Silda Spitzer by his side. Once again, the story was in the N.Y./Region section.
Meanwhile, the original article on Ashley/Kristen has been retitled "For an Aspiring Singer, a Harsher Spotlight" and is doing a brisk business moving up the Most Emailed List. Ashley Alexandra Dupre also has her very own Times Topics page. The N.Y./Region homepage, meanwhile, is all-Spitzer, all the time — the entire Most-Emailed List is taken up with Spitz stories, and both #1 and #2 are occupied by the retitled Kristen/Dupre story (#3 is the tick-tock rundown). Even NY1 is getting in on the action ("Neighbors Speak Out On Woman In Spitzer's Tryst"). Meanwhile, suddenly the steady stream of familiar faces opining on cable have been supplanted by the less-common faces of local reporters called in to provide insight from their years on the beat.
So is this the biggest story to come out of Albany in, like, ever? ETP asked New York Daily News reporter Elizabeth Benjamin, who covers local and state politics and writes the "Daily Politics" blog, exactly that. "Yes, this is the biggest scandal to hit Albany since...well, since the FBI investigation of Joe Bruno's outside business interests, and that just hit two Decembers ago, and it's not nearly as explosive," Benjamin wrote over email, pointing out that Bruno was still in office. "Plus you've got the sex aspect, which is just so unbelievable and weird and downright gross, but also something everyone in the public can understand. You know, it's not stealing, it's sex! Who can't relate?"
Benjamin, who like all the local beat reporters rammed into high gear on this story as soon as it broke (in between writing stories — and taking her own turn on MSNBC — her news round-ups have been rather epic), said the Albany press corps had by and large been taken completely by surprise, saying "none of us saw it coming," and dismissed the "Monday morning quarterbacking stuff":
Maybe he had an anger management problem, and maybe we all could see him going down somehow. But this? A sex addiction with hookers? If someone saw that coming, then they are psychic. Even his wife was blindsided.
(NB: One person is claiming those so-called "psychic" powers today: New York Post Albany reporter/lifer Frederic U. Dicker, who today writes "I KNEW HE WAS A FRAUD & A HYPOCRITE FROM THE DAY HE SWAGGERED INTO CAPITOL," writing "I saw many signs early on that Eliot Spitzer was to politics what Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry was to religion - a consummate hypocrite - but few, if any, of his governmental colleagues (and even fewer members of the largely fawning press corps) appeared able to see it as well." Funnily, this does not dovetail with the New York Observer's glowing profile of Dicker from January 2005 by then-Observer staffer Ben Smith, who said that Dicker had "emerged as one of Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's key boosters as Mr. Spitzer prepares to run for Governor in 2006." Wow, those plays sure look clear on Monday morning!)
In the frenzy of national election coverage, at a time when so many top reporters are off on planes and buses and in convention halls in other states, this was a local story that blew up in New York's front yard and it's one that will be rippling out for news cycles to come. For that, the home team outlets have earned a well-deserved pat on the back — for themselves and for their colleagues, particularly for those N.Y./Region folks who started the ball rolling. "It always hurts to have some other news outlet break a story," said Benjamin, "but they have a ton of resources, and they are the Times...people leak to them all the time.
"My philosophy on this is: Better them than the New York Post."