In your head-scratching Wednesday media column: Barry Diller's wacky plan for The Daily Beast, Conde Nast advertising shakeup, Shep Smith stays on at Fox News, and Juan Williams fans continue to provide comic relief.

  • At long last, Barry Diller has revealed his plan to make The Daily Beast profitable: he'll launch a print version of it! "One way or another, we'll either find something [to make TDB break evern] or we'll create somehow, as Politico did, a print product to go with the Beast," Diller said. "For advertisers, that makes sense." Huh. It makes sense except Politico is actually a large news organization reporting exclusive timely news for a very focused, news-obsessed niche, whereas The Daily Beast is not that, at all. Give it a shot though, see how it goes.
  • Conde Nast is reorganizing its digital ad sales, aligning it under individual publishers. We tried very hard yesterday, but could not get excited about this. Still, now you know.
  • Fox News has signed Shepard Smith to a new contract that will keep him there until 2013. By then you might consider going somewhere slightly more sane, Shep.
  • Today in "Comical things that people outraged by the firing of Juan Williams think": They think that PBS is NPR. It is not.