The NYT looks at Liz Smith, long the doyenne of celebrity gossip, and finds her admitting she's not nasty enough to get her gig in today's media climate.

An excerpt:

In an interview last week, Ms. Smith admitted that the gossip industry has become so pervasive and ruthless that it is difficult to break through with a distinctive voice.

"You can go to so many places now to get the down and dirty, I don't even try," she said. "It's really hard now to get a scoop. With the whole world writing gossip, where is the place for the professional gossip?"

Ms. Smith, who started her career as a columnist at The Daily News in New York in 1976, is now 82 and continues to pump out six columns a week. She has just signed another two-year contract with The New York Post and is in negotiations for another contract with Newsday. Her new book, "Dishing," comes out next month.

Ms. Smith said she was initially reluctant to take the job at The Daily News because, as she told her editors at the time, she thought gossip was dead.

Gossip-writing was a no-go for a time, after the industry collapsed in scandal in the late 1950's. But it got a second wind in the early 1970's with the introduction of People magazine, and now it is flourishing.

But Ms. Smith, who said she believed she was the highest-paid newspaper gossip columnist in the country - she was estimated to be making $1 million in 1998 - said she doubted she would be hired as a new gossip writer today.

Col Allan, editor in chief of The New York Post, agreed that Ms. Smith would have a hard time in today's world.

"It's rare for a successful columnist not to have a mean streak and she doesn't have a mean streak," he said. "These days it would be difficult to carve out a position for yourself without that, partly because people look for it."