In your perennial Tuesday media column: It still sucks to be a writer, sucks if you bought a newspaper, sucks to make stock picks, sucks to produce news on television, and somebody got a new job!

It sucks to be a writer these days, yet another writer confirmed today. Best-selling author Joe McGinniss, author of The Selling of the President, is soliciting book ideas on Facebook, because he can't come up with anything people actually want to buy. Furthermore, freelancing sucks:

"Some of you may have seen my cover story on Sarah Palin and the Alaska gas pipeline for Portfolio . . . At least they paid well, which not many places do any more. Among those that don't is The Daily Beast. I recently wrote a short piece for them . . . They said they'd pay $250. But then they said they'd only pay if I signed an agreement that is the nuttiest, most onerous, restrictive contract I've seen in 40 years . . . I said I couldn't sign it . . . and, of course, never got paid."

A successful, celebrated writer, kids.

The canny private equity firm that recently bought the San Diego newspaper, in exchange for actual American currency, has put two of the buildings it got in the deal up for sale at prices "significantly higher" (by millions) than the prices they paid for them, two months ago. As you know, real estate prices have skyrocketed in the past two months. As have newspaper valuations. Carry on.
[Though there is an outside chance that financial professionals know what they're doing.]

Haha yesterday the New York Post was all, hey, Media stocks look like a "good bet." But then yesterday, that same day, media stocks "took a dive." This is why everybody writing about stocks, in a newspaper, is just guessing, hey, 50/50 CHANCE.

CBS and ABC both had all-time lows in nightly news viewership last week, which they're probably going to attribute to the digital TV switch, because the confused olds who still watch the nightly news regularly can't figure out how to get these new teevees working, and this is probably the actual reason.

W magazine's L.A. bureau chief Gabé Doppelt—who worked with Tina Brown at Talk magazine—is moving to the Daily Beast as its West Coast editor.