STOP THE PRESSES!!!  The cover story in the NYT Magazine today is about me.  Well, not really – but it's about who I hope to be someday.  It's about journalist and prolific emailer Mike Allen, who is to politics what I hope to be to school reform.  The similarities are hilarious (though there are two huge differences between us: I'm far from intensely private, and I'm pretty neat and organized).  Check out these quotes (the full article, a very long one, is at the end of this email):

Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits "send" on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America's most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses.

Allen's e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider's hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you've never heard of, random sightings ("spotted") around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen's morning distillation of the Nation's Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

…"He is part mascot and part sleepless narrator of our town," Tracy Sefl, a Democratic media consultant and a close aide to Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, told me by e-mail. "He is an omnipresent participant-observer, abundantly kind, generous and just unpredictable enough to make him an object of curiosity to even the most self-interested. Everything about him is literary."

… Allen also has a tendency to suddenly vanish. But then he will pop up on a TV screen a few minutes later. Or you then learn via e-mail that he is racing through O'Hare or via Playbook that he took an excursion to the circus (with "Owen and Grace Gallo, ages 3 and 4, who especially liked: doggies on a slide") or Maine ("where an eagle might grab one of your fish while you're focused on the grill").

…"I get that what I do is a little elusive, ambiguous," Allen told me. "I try to be a force for good. And I try to be everywhere."

… Allen sends out Playbook using Microsoft Outlook to a private mailing list of 3,000. A few minutes later, an automatic blast goes out to another 25,000 readers who signed up to receive it. An additional 3,000 or so enter Playbook from Politico.com, which adds up to a rough universe of 30,000 interested drivers, passengers and eavesdroppers to the conversation.

Playbook started three years ago as a chatty "what's happening" memo that Allen sent to his Politico bosses. Eventually he started sending it to presidential-campaign officials — the first outside recipient was Howard Wolfson of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Soon Allen would send it to non-Politico journalists, White House officials and, before long, anyone who asked. While most Playbook subscribers live around Washington, significant numbers work on Wall Street, in state capitals and at news and entertainment companies on both coasts.

…"You don't have to do anything else, just read Mike Allen," Bob Woodward declared…

… Allen is a master aggregator, which leads some to dismiss Playbook as a cut-and-paste exercise. But that ignores Allen's ability to break news (even if by only 15 minutes), to cull from e-mail only he is receiving, to get early copies of books and magazines and to pick out the prime nugget from the bottom of a pool report. He has a knack for selecting the "data points" that an info-saturated clan cares most about and did not know when it went to bed.

… Before there was e-mail, Allen would do this by fax; before there were fax machines, he would drop off newspaper clips (or entire out-of-town papers) to his friends' doorsteps. "He operates at such a faster speed than any of us and carries on many more relationships than any of us and so many more simultaneous conversations than any of us," Morrell says.

"The most successful journalists have their own unique brand and circle of friends," VandeHei, Politico's executive editor, told me by e-mail. "This is the Facebook-ization of politics and D.C. The more friends or acquaintances you have, the more time you spend interacting with them via e-mail and I.M., the more information you get, move and market."

… People routinely wonder whether Allen actually lives somewhere besides the briefing rooms, newsrooms, campaign hotels or going-away dinners for Senator So-and-So's press secretary that seem to be his perpetual regimen. And they wonder, "Does Mikey ever sleep?"

The query tires him. He claims he tries to sleep six hours a night, which seems unrealistic for someone who says he tries to wake at 2 or 3 a.m. to start Playbook after evenings that can include multiple stops (and trails of midnight-stamped e-mail).

… Allen clearly plugs his friends in Playbook — quoting from press releases announcing their new jobs ("Taylor Griffin Joins Hamilton Place Strategies as Partner"), referring to pal Katie Couric as a "media icon," reporting that the model car built by Ethan Gibbs, the 6-year-old son of Robert Gibbs, finished second in the Cub Scouts' Pinewood Derby. Isn't part of the function of Playbook to plug Mike Allen's friends? "I wouldn't agree with that," Allen told me. "Playbook is to serve its audience and community, and we serve them by giving them information they need and want. If it were the way you describe it, people wouldn't read it." Recognition of a friend's milestone can also be a data point. People in this tiny world care if two of their own (say, the Democratic operatives Phil Singer and Kim Molstre) have a baby ("Introducing Max George Singer," Playbook, March 18).

Allen's focus is customer service. He wants to "spread joy" as the Holy Ghost of the Almighty News Cycle. "I am fortunate," he keeps saying. (Hat Tip: God.)

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The Man the White House Wakes Up To

By MARK LEIBOVICH

Published: April 19, 2010

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/magazine/25allen-t.html