This NYT story looks at Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz -- who reports, columnizes, blogs, writes books and hosts Reliable Sources for CNN.

How does a guy with his fingers in so many pies keep his ethical ducks in a row?

Some excerpts:

In the last few years, with the rise of blogs and a rich supply of scandals at news organizations, including The New York Times, the media have come under intense scrutiny. And many news outlets have turned a critical eye on themselves - a tricky matter rife with conflict that raises the question of whether anyone can report fully and fairly on his or her own employer, particularly for public consumption.

Few have lived in the cross-hairs of these conflicts more visibly than Mr. Kurtz, who has owned the media beat at The Post since 1990 and been host of "Reliable Sources" since 1998.

He draws salaries from two of the most important media companies in the country: CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, and The Post, which is owned by The Washington Post Company. Such arrangements do not violate Post policy. In fact, The Post has quite liberal rules regarding extracurricular work by its reporters and editors. ...

"It's very odd to look at," said Jack Shafer, media critic for Slate.com. "This is the duck-billed platypus of journalism, an egg-laying mammal with fur - it's just something very bizarre."

Mr. Downie (Leonard, executive editor of the Washington Post) said in an interview that he was comfortable with Mr. Kurtz's dual roles because they were disclosed in a tag line in The Post and on the screen on CNN. ...

Since he began covering the news media at The Post, he has used his bully pulpit at the expense of his employers. In 1992, he questioned whether The Post's seven-part series on former Vice President Dan Quayle (part of it written by Mr. Woodward) had been too soft. Last year, Mr. Kurtz undertook an examination of his paper's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. And he pointed to his coverage of Mr. Woodward last week, with uniformly negative reaction from critics, as the latest evidence "that I don't pull punches even when the most famous member of the staff is involved."

"I think it adds to The Post's credibility that I'm given the leeway to report and write on the paper as I see fit," Mr. Kurtz said.

Mr. Downie suggested that Mr. Kurtz might have sometimes crossed the line by letting his own opinions creep into the paper or on CNN, something that violates Post rules for reporters.

"We try to hold him to analysis and not pure personal opinion," Mr. Downie said. "If we think he's slid over the line, we can edit it out, and on TV we can remind him. But it has to be managed, and we manage it by looking over his shoulder." ...

Critics generally agree that Mr. Kurtz has reported aggressively on The Post, and while some say he has been softer on CNN, he has not spared the network when it becomes newsworthy.

He was the first of the mainstream print reporters, for example, to write about Eason Jordan, a former CNN news chief, who was forced to quit after bloggers stirred up a ruckus over comments he made about American soldiers' killing journalists in Iraq.

"I haven't seen a piece in which he's in the tank for CNN," Mr. Shafer said. "But he obviously knows a lot more about the inner workings of CNN than anybody else covering the television news business, and I don't think his coverage reflects that."

Eric Wemple, editor of Washington's City Paper, an alternative weekly, said that Mr. Kurtz's reporting was "fair, fair, fair." If Mr. Kurtz had a bias, Mr. Wemple said, "it's to move on too quickly to the next story."

"What drives him is volume and scoops, not attitude, not edge," Mr. Wemple said. "It's just volume and clips and ubiquity. He is a franchise."