NY Times' Jayson Blair gave private co-worker info to other media-Boyd

• Some info 'potentially life threatening'

"In his posthumous memoir coming out next week, former NYT managing editor Gerald Boyd reveals that disgraced NYT reporter Jayson Blair "spied on colleagues" and regularly provided inside NYT information to the New York Observer.

• Boyd says that he and then-executive editor Howell Raines discovered, in the wake of Blair's resignation, a "string of emails" between Blair and the Observer's "Off The Record" columnist, Sridhar Pappu, in which Blair regularly helped the reporter with stories on NYT -- for a period of eight months before Blair quit the NYT amid widespread charges of plagiarism and fabrication of stories....

According to Boyd, Blair had begun leaking information to Pappu in August 2002 about

• "staffing decisions, newsroom strategies, and dispute," in reply to Pappu's regular email questions....

Blair had leaked a list to Pappu of all the NYT reporters who had been assigned to the paper's Ira(q) coverage -- "including," Boyd said,

• "names, locations, phone numbers, dates they were to travel, and other comments."

"The information was confidential and competitive," Boyd fumed, "and its release was potentially life-threatening.""...

• "NYT's Gerald Boyd, in Memoir, Reveals that reporter Jayson Blair "Spied on Colleagues" for NY Observer media reporter Sridhar Pappu," by NYTpicker, 1/27/10, via Poynter.org/Romenesko

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