New York Times Twitter wunderkind and media reporter Brian Stelter has once again been tripped up by the source of his power. He pulled his second Weiner this month, and told us he's been forced to resort to... email.

About an hour ago Stelter published this errant tweet:

hey, i was watching the sign-off yesterday & wondering if you'd talk to me about it for my morning book. embargoed til 2013. any time today?

Obviously, this tweet wasn't meant for his 100k+ Twitter followers; Stelter had accidentally tweeted a private message: the dreaded "DM fail."

Stelter quickly deleted the tweet, writing:

Probably a good idea, since this is the second time this month that Stelter, who's become famous as The New York Times Media Reporter On Twitter Who Isn't David Carr, accidentally publicly broadcast a private message to a source.

For a Twitter power user who once lost 75 pounds with a "Twitter diet," Stelter was surprisingly puzzled by his mishaps when we reached him by email, after thinking twice about trying to message him on Twitter:

I literally do not know how my DMs were published as tweets. Maybe there's a Twitter instruction manual I should read?

But on Twitter, Stelter blamed the service's recent redesign, which, we agree, has made sending direct messages slightly more difficult than programming an unmanned spaceship to land on an asteroid.

As for the intended recipient of his message, we suspect it was Christiane Amanpour, who signed-off as host of "This Week" last weekend. But Stelter wouldn't say.

"No comment re: the intended recipient, whose email address I will now try to guess," he wrote, "so old-school."

Somebody tell Stelter about the ancient art of the phone call.

[Image via Getty]