In your intrepid Thursday media column: the NYT's Tim O'Brien leaves for HuffPo (with memo!), NPR listeners have already forgotten Juan Williams, MSNBC salutes Larry King, and The Bloomberg Way of Opinion is coming.

  • Now that a little time has passed, NPR stations can survey just how much damage they took due to the Juan Williams fiasco. When you tally it all up, it's roughly...nothing. Nothing in the universe can absorb the attention span of Americans for more than a week, the end. By the time you leave work today you'll have forgotten you read this.
  • Well here's a nice thing: MSNBC bought a full page ad in USA Today in honor of the retiring Larry King. The message seems to be, "We'll smile when you're gone." Buenos suerte, Larry. You're always welcome as a Gawker intern.
  • Since Bloomberg has announced that it's going into the opinion game, it's worth repeating this excerpt from The Bloomberg Way, via Jeff Bercovici: "the Bloomberg Way necessitates a respect for life, peace and harmony, education, family stability, social responsibility, transparency, free trade and free markets." So... the standard centrist-fetishizing corporatist crap, mostly? Yea.
  • Tim O'Brien, the Sunday business editor at the New York Times, is leaving to become an editor at the Huffington Post, "where he'll oversee a team of reporters across politics and culture." New media, same as the old media! A job is created! Everyone move up one chair! Congrats to all! Here's the internal email NYT biz editor Larry Ingrassia sent out. Still hopeful:

  • All,
    I am sad to announce that Tim O'Brien is leaving The Times, where
    he has done a terrific job, most recently as Sunday Business editor
    and before that as a reporter, to become national editor at the
    Huffington Post.
    Everyone knows Tim's passion for great journalism, and his
    dedication. Under his direction, Sunday Business reached new heights.
    Week in and week out, it featured some of the best story-telling in
    business journalism today, with a wonderfully wide range of narratives
    - from investigative looks at Wall Street to delightful profiles of
    executives and companies to important trend pieces about the changing
    nature of the world of business. He played a major role in helping to
    oversee our incisive series, The Reckoning, about the origins of the
    financial crisis, which was a major component of The Times's work that
    was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize public service category in 2009.
    The last time Tim almost left - to take a job as a writer at
    Portfolio magazine - Bill Keller and I persuaded him to change his
    mind at the last minute and stay. I'm hoping to do that again, and
    won't give up until he is really out the door. Fingers crossed. (He
    says that will be Dec. 23.)
    Tim, we will miss you.
    Larry Ingrassia