While much of the reaction to new NYO publishing correspondent Leon Neyfakh's piece on the spinning of James Frey's book deal aimed at reiterating that not everybody was hot for the manuscript, a reader approached me with an interesting suggestion: "The Observer story has all sorts of speculations about why the WSJ got the scoop," she asks, "but fails to mention the pink elephant in the newsroom: Namely, that HarperCollins is owned by one Rupert Murdoch, the Journal's new daddy-to-be. Whether this was a factor or not, the Observer should have thought to address it, don't you agree?"

It's a good question; well, two good questions, really. I don't have any blanket answers as to how press reports that feature the Journal and other divisions of News Corp. should underline that synergy, although I'm reasonably certain that WSJ reporters will do a better job of acknowledging the corporate ties themselves than, say, Page Six has ever managed. (In fact, Jeffrey Trachtenberg's account of the deal states "HarperCollins is owned by News Corp., which has agreed to buy Dow Jones & Co. for more than $5 billion.") Which brings us to the question of whether the addition of the Journal to Murdoch's portfolio had anything to do with that paper getting the Frey story ahead of the Times—which honestly never occurred to me until this email showed up, and it doesn't compute even now. After all, most of the stories we're hearing in the press are about how Murdoch is busy trying to get the Journal staff not to hate his guts; they're hardly going to be in a frame of mind to play synergyball with the rest of News Corp., right?

(On a side note, my apologies for including the Journal among the outlets that I beat to the story last week: I was so busy trying to pin down the rumor, then get somebody on the phone after the press release, that I didn't see Trachtenberg's article until much later, and assumed by the dateline that it was written that evening along with everyone else's accounts. Still, only 23 minutes behind!)