Hewlett-Packard has paid The New York Times and three BusinessWeek reporters an undisclosed amount of money after the Palo Alto company’s private detectives obtained the journalists’ private phone records, the Times reported on its Web site this afternoon. HP obtained the phone records of three BusinessWeek staff members — Ben Elgin, Peter Burrows and Roger Crockett — and the family phone records of Times reporter, John Markoff, and his wife, Leslie Terzian Markoff. The company still faces five lawsuits pending in San Francisco Superior Court brought by other journalists and their families. California Attorney General Jerry Brown dropped criminal charges against HP and its top executives when they agreed to pay $14.5 million in fines.