CSI: Denver

Bull's-eye -- and when Enron execs learned that Weil planned to put down these findings in black and white, they sent a damage-control crew to the Journal's Texas office to convince him that his suspicions were misplaced. They failed, and the meeting, which is recapped in 2005's Conspiracy of Fools, author Kurt Eichenwald's epic dissection of Enron's collapse, proved to be a harbinger of catastrophes to come. Yet Weil didn't dedicate himself to this subject after moving to the Journal's New York headquarters in 2000, shortly after the original salvo saw print -- not that he could have. After all, giant conglomerates were disintegrating so quickly in the early years of the century that it was all he could do to keep up with the carnage. "When the deluge of scandals starts taking away your ability to check out the new ones no one knows about, that's when it gets a little frustrating," he says.

Such a balancing act won't be necessary at Glass Lewis, since the company is more interested in the future than the past. "Finding issues before they implode, and presenting the issue to investors on a proactive basis, is what Glass Lewis is all about," e-mails Lynn E. Turner, the former chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission, who's now Glass Lewis's managing director of research (and Weil's new boss). He's confident that "GL will provide Jonathan an opportunity to both continue the investigative reporting he has done in the past and expand on it, with additional resources at his side."

Leslie Scism, Weil's longtime editor at the Journal, wasn't shocked by his career shift. Staffers at the paper aren't regularly cherry-picked by recruiters from outside of journalism, "but it's not rare, either," she says. "Reporters who work on the more financially oriented stories often get approaches from the business world, and a few of the offers are too hard to resist even for people who love journalism and who've spent their whole lives at a newspaper." While she's happy for Weil on a personal level, Scism believes "it's a loss to the Journal that he's moved on to this new job, because he's such an original thinker. He likes finding unique angles that most reporters wouldn't even begin to think about, and he takes pride in originality. He does not like following the pack."

With his leap to Glass Lewis, Weil is cutting his own trail again. He hopes the business media he's leaving behind doesn't trade in aggressiveness for the sort of "stenography" that helped enable Enron-style financial shenanigans in the first place. "There've been a lot of magazine covers and assorted hype making CEOs larger than life and transforming people into celebrities, and that feeds the whole culture that was at the heart of what the press was exposing a few years ago," he says. "We need to be as careful about building people up as we are about tearing them down."

Either way, his scalpel is ready.

Hoover time: In a January article about a town without cell-phone service by Rich Tosches, the Denver Post's "Rocky Mountain Ranger," a local expressed his displeasure in a very strange way. "Sometimes," he said, "I actually forget that I even have a cell phone. It just (word meaning 'vacuum-like function')."

Is the Post really so squeamish that it's made "sucks" off limits? What's next -- banning "heck," "gosh" and "gee willikers"? The answer to these questions is no, as Tosches reveals via e-mail. "It was indeed me who went with the 'vacuum-like function' line instead of 'sucks,'" he confirms. "I am willing to bet the Post would have allowed me to use 'sucks'' but I'm old school. And I'm from Boston. The only thing that really sucks is/are the New York Yankees."

Suck on that.