The Times is out with a 2,800-word Style profile of Doug Dowie, the newsman-turned-PR exec who is the central figure in the ethics questions about Fleishman-Hillard and its deals with City Hall. His background highlights (ex-Marine, UPI, Daily News managing editor, gruff to underlings, power friend of Jim Hahn) are familiar by now. But Tina Daunt writes that since being sent home on paid leave, Dowie has become bored with reading books and has taken to the road alone. She opens with him doing 90 on Interstate 5, chatting her up by cell, and calls him "darkly funny about his situation, which has left him idle, angry, worried about his family and wondering about his future. In one e-mail, he jokes: 'If I didn't have so many frequent flier miles, I'd shoot myself.'"

In my favorite passage, he expresses shock at the office culture he found in the public relations world after years in newsrooms.

During his first meeting at Fleishman, staff members took turns discussing their projects.

"They would go around the room and talk about what they had done recently," Dowie says. "After they had finished, people would applaud.

"I thought they were goofing on me. I had come from the Daily News, where people joked in meetings about how many babies you could fit in a glove compartment, and here these people were cheering each other for writing a good press release."

Dowie can't talk about Fleishman or the allegations, except to deny that he had staffers pad billing charges to the city. Defenders and detractors speak in the piece, among the latter ex-reporter Dan Blackburn, who worked with Dowie at Fleishman and says of his current troubles: "I don't know of anyone who didn't feel he had it coming."

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