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Gossip About Gossip

Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 15, 1998, at 5:20 PM ET

Here's a bit of Washington gossip you're unlikely to read in the Washington Post's "Reliable Source" column tomorrow: Annie Groer and Ann Gerhart, who have been writing the gossip column for three and a half years, are giving it up. The Post hasn't announced a successor, but Style writer Lloyd Grove has been asked to consider taking over the slot. "We did not want to do this into perpetuity," says Gerhart, who says she'd like to be redeployed as a Style feature writer. Style editor David Von Drehle says that Grove is "one possibility" to take over the column "but we're just at the very, very beginning of conversations about it."

Chatterbox thinks the column's been pretty good under Groer and Gerhart, but recognizes the value of term limits for gossip columnists. (Would that the principle were applied to the Post's op-ed columns.) After much prayerful deliberation, Chatterbox has decided to throw his delegates to Grove, who's a deftly nasty writer, and to forget about a Grove profile of Chatterbox's former boss James Fallows that was almost criminally stupid and unfair. Chatterbox does not keep grudges! But Chatterbox also lacks anything that even vaguely resembles influence in the corridors of power at the Washington Post....

--Timothy Noah

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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