Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Andres Martinez has learned the hard way that no good can come from dating flacks. He resigned in a huff yesterday after publisher David Hiller killed his plans to install uber-producer Brian Grazer as "guest editor" of the Times's Sunday Current section for a day. News had surfaced that Martinez was romantically involved with a Grazer press agent. Martinez, the thinking went, could be suspected of selecting Grazer as a favor to his main squeeze—an unacceptable conflict of interest.

But Martinez wouldn't be the first newspaper editor to bed a professional spinner and pop open an ethical can of worms. Just ask Jim O'Shea, the Los Angeles Times's top editor. During the five years that O'Shea served as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, O'Shea was married to a manager of media relations for Chicago's Field Museum.

The museum turned up in the Tribune's pages more than 1,200 times during O'Shea's tenure, sometimes raising eyebrows in the newsroom. (Full disclosure: Your humble correspondent was a Tribune reporter during O'Shea's tenure there.) In April 2004, for instance, the paper ran two back-to-back Page One stories lauding the museum's efforts to establish a nature preserve in rural Peru. The feel-good nature of the stories, their lack of news hook, their unusual length for a newspaper (more than 8,000 words total), and their prominent placement all had staffers wondering if they were an anniversary present to O'Shea's wife. As one Tribune staffer puts it today, "Why put this meaningless Field Museum story on Page One?" (Adding to the intrigue over the Peru series was the fact that Jack Fuller, then the president of Tribune Publishing, was dating a Field Museum scientist featured prominently—and favorably—in the stories.)

O'Shea has no control over the Los Angeles Times's editorial page, so the decision to kill the Grazer deal fell to Hiller (a former Tribune publisher who worked there with O'Shea). But O'Shea supported Hiller's decision. "It raised questions," he says. "This is an entire section being handed over to someone who's represented by someone who's romantically involved with the editor who's handing it over. The whole thing smelled."

But didn't O'Shea's decision to prominently feature positive stories about the Field Museum in the Tribune smell just as bad? "I think it's pretty much of a stretch to compare these two," O'Shea says. His wife only represented the Field Museum's exhibits, so she had nothing to do with the stories about Peru. Besides, he recused himself from them, sort of. "I ordered some cuts and rewrites," he says, "and then turned it over" to other editors to avoid the appearance of a conflict. Also, he says, "I told my wife not to tell me anything about the exhibits she was promoting." But even though he thought his wife's gig was enough of a potential conflict to recuse himself from Field Museum stories, O'Shea says it wasn't a big enough conflict to disclose to readers—or step down over.

For his part, Martinez (who declined to respond to an e-mail) has insisted that his relationship with Grazer's flack had nothing to do with his decision to select Grazer as guest editor. But, as Hiller told his staff in announcing Martinez's resignation, "The problem with conflicts is, how do you know?"