Donald Bartlett and James Steele, cut loose by Time Inc. because they cost too much, have found a home at Vanity Fair.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

The two have accepted an offer from Graydon Carter, the editor, to sign a multiyear contract, agreeing to write two articles a year. Both will have the title of contributing editor at the glossy monthly.

Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele, who linked their careers 35 years ago at The Philadelphia Inquirer, then moved on together to Time Inc., are among the most durable reporting teams in journalistic history. Their lengthy, in-depth investigations have won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards.

When Time decided that it could no longer afford to keep them, they found themselves facing an already-constricted job market that seemed limited even further to them because of their long-form journalism, which incubates for months if not years, and because of their ages.

Mr. Barlett, 70, and Mr. Steele, 63, said that nonetheless, several opportunities presented themselves. They said they snapped up Mr. Carter’s offer because he was “passionate” about their kind of work and promised them the kind of space to which they had become accustomed (their articles in Time sometimes ran to 10,000 words).

Mr. Carter said that a pair like Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele “doesn’t come around very often.”

There was this catty line to end the very brief article by Katherine Q. Seelye:

Here are a couple of questions for the magazine’s new sleuths: Why did those advertisers leave? And will more investigative reporting bring them back?

Seelye noted that while circulation at the very glossy mag was up, ad pages were down 15 per cent compared to the first half of 2005.

The investigative duo first came to my attention in the early 1990s when they penned a massive series called America: What Went Wrong?

Steve Lovelady at CJR Daily penned this note to them: Once Were Giants. To be fair, the duo have their conservative detractors too.