Impoco headed back to NY Times?

The Gawker web site reports that New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia is trying to bring back former biz desk staffer Jim Impoco, who was fired last week as deputy editor of Conde Nast Portfolio by editor Joanne Lipman.

Impoco was once in charge of the Times’ Sunday business section.

Gawker wrote, “That would be an interesting, if not entirely unpredictable, turn of events. (Where is there to work, anyway?) And they have something in common. When Igrassia left the Wall Street Journal for the Times, one of the great benefits for him was getting away from Lipman.

“It couldn’t have thrilled him that Impoco left the Times to go to Portfolio in the first place; Impoco’s firing would only cement his opinion of Lipman. (We’re going with ‘controlling bitch.’)

“Earlier, we noted that there seem to be two prevailing impressions of what went wrong between Impoco and Lipman. But we’d like to propose the not-so-radical idea that these two impressions (Impoco is ‘pugnacious,’ says Lipman’s camp; Lipman ‘thinks she is 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time,’ says an Impoco defender), are not mutually exclusive.”

Read more here.