d that Al- len's compensation was at best insensitive and at worst undeserved, considering the merely average performance of AT&T stock in recent years. The council's report came against the backdrop of an article in Fortune by one of the most respected business writers of all, Carol Loomis. Titling her piece "AT&T Has No Clothes," Loomis docu- mented how, since divesting its local telephone companies, AT&T had "lurched from one strategy to another and specialized in huge write-offs tied to downsizings."'s But the worst of the lot was News- week's second bite at the apple-a February 26, 1996, cover story that proclaimed Allen a "Corporate Killer."I6 Corporate Killer We first heard that Newsweek was working on another story about cor- porate downsizing because a woman who worked in our Washington, D.C., office was married to Evan Thomas, one of the magazine's assis- tant managing editors. She carried their pillow talk into the office and tipped us off. Since we had already had our say with Newsweek's Allan Sloan-in an encounter that neither he nor Allen had found particu- larly satisfactory-we decided to maintain a low profile and hope we would be mentioned only in passing. By Friday morning, we learned that the story was going to be worse than we feared-it had become a cover story, and we were promi- nently featured. In mid-afternoon, as our Basking Ridge, New Jersey, offices emptied in advance of a full-blown blizzard, Newsweek called. One of the more senior editors had asked Sloan, the story's principal writer, if he had tried to contact AT&T's Allen. He hadn't because he Understand the Power of Symbols 39 still had his notes from an earlier story on the same subject and he doubted that we were going to make our boss available a second time. But he also realized that this was a tactical error-he didn't want to give us the opportunity to complain that we had never even been called. So he went one better. He offered us the chance to write 500 words defending the downsizings and promised to publish it with minimal