When Charles Edward Russell sat as city editor for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the middle of the 1890s, a lustrous staff of reporters knew him as "Iron-faced Charlie." But he crowned himself the "city room caliph" when recalling it as "the best job I ever had." Russell went even further in one of his several autobiographies: "After a newspaper experience of more than 25 years that had at one end the post of deputy assistant mailing clerk and at the other the post of publisher, I can place my hand upon my heart and declare that the best job on earth is that of the city editor of a New York daily." He brushed off as trivial his other titles--publisher, managing editor, editorial writer--and declared the city editor "the real captain of the ship, the only person in the establishment that has any real power, and the...