The proposal focuses almost exclusively on Mr. Blair's experience of and views on the spiky complexities of race, both in the Times newsroom and in the professional world in general.
"Why is not simple," Mr. Blair begins. "I want the chance to articulate the reasons for my downfall, not to excuse myself or to cast myself as a victim, but as a cautionary tale."
If Mr. Blair's instincts as a journalist are shaky, his skills as a self-promoter appear to be solid: On Monday, he issued a statement to CNN that said, "I hope to have the opportunity to write and share my story so that it can help others to heal."
Mr. Vigliano, meanwhile, is working hard -- and fast -- to turn the 27-year-old into Jayson Blair Inc. It's a story that he believes could be worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in film and book royalties.
But unlike Mr. Blair's career-suicide doppelganger, Stephen Glass -- who has said he spent five years in therapy before publishing a work of fiction about his fabrications in The New Republic -- the former Times reporter isn't waiting around to get his head straight. He's diving right in, not slowed down at all by the gummy ethical issues involved in exploiting his own bad behavior for personal profit.
The memoir that Mr. Blair wants to write will either justify his actions or further damn them. Above all, the proposal claims, the book will have something to teach others: "I want to offer my experience as a lesson," Mr. Blair writes, "for the precipice from which I plunged is one on which many young, ambitious, well-educated and accomplished African Americans and other "minorities' teeter, though most, of course, do manage to pull back from the brink. That precipice overhangs America's racial divide; and the winds sucking us down into the chasm (cultural isolation, professional mistrust, and the external and internal imperatives to succeed, at all costs, to name a few) can be too strong for the troubled and unprepared -- as I was -- to withstand.
"Today," ends that section of the proposal, "even at the most liberal, well-intentioned of institutions, race is still terra incognita, where the young and conflicted, like me, can all too easily lose compass."
Just a few days after Mr. Blair's compass sent him out the front door of The Times, which was on May 1, he returned a call from Mr. Vigliano -- whom he'd met while shopping a book on the Washington, DC, sniper case last fall -- to talk about a book deal.
"At some point, after I heard what had happened at The Times," said Mr. Vigliano, "I called him and said I was thinking of him and if he wanted to talk or needed help with anything, to give me a call. Then he called me."
Mr. Vigliano said he couldn't recall the exact date, but "a few days" after Mr. Blair's dismissal, the former reporter paid a visit to Mr. Vigliano's office on Broadway in Soho. He declined to describe Mr. Blair's emotional state at the time -- that would be material for the book, he explained -- but he did say that, "I obviously wouldn't be dealing with somebody who was unstable."
Some time after that, Mr. Blair wrote the proposal, to which the agent made "minor edits," according to Mr. Vigliano.
Mr. Vigliano said he had plans for Mr. Blair's book to be much bigger than a tell-all about journalistic sins, or even an inside look at the dysfunctional world of [Executive Editor] Howell Raines' Times.
"Clearly, there are issues of race here that transcend The New York Times," said Mr. Vigliano. The paper of record, he said, "is just one institution that's really a surrogate for many, many other institutions in America. It will also deal with issues of substance abuse. Clearly, he had psychological issues that he's going to talk about."
