God knows what they're selling here, but suddenly we're reconsidering our lifelong (and presumably hereditary)
aversion to fishing.

• Dow Jones reorg combines print and online editions of WSJ. [AP via Yahoo]
• New Meredith editorial director Mike Lafavore fires Fitness EIC Emily Listfield and then gives himself the job, at least for now. How very Wennerian. [NYP]
• Carl Icahn's Time Warner breakup plan had a 37-page chapter on why Time Inc. doesn't fit with the rest of the company. How does John Huey react to that? "I didn't find it a very compelling chapter." Of course not. [NYO]
• Jack Shafer prefers his newscasters brunette. [Slate]
• Maxim redesign to remove "a layer of goofiness"; Graydon promises his next car will be a hybrid. [WWD]
• Breaking: Newspapers sometimes create sections as vehicles to attract advertising. [NYO]
• LAT NYC bureau chief to take on book-publishing beat, too. Because there's just not enough going on in the city itself to keep a reporter busy. [LA Observed]
• Eleven mags missed their rate base in the last half of 2005 — and that doesn't even court the half-dozen AMI titles set to miss in the next go-round. [BW]

The complete script of a new Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad we saw for the first time during The Simpsons last night:

Just noticed a funny thing while flipping through today's Weekend Arts section. At left is the official poster for the Public Theater's Measure for Pleasure. At right is the version apparently deemed suitable for publication in the Times. It would seem the Gray Lady finds ass-fucking, even obscured, too obscene for its pages.

Starting Monday, the Newspaper Association of America is launching a $50 million campaign to promote newspapers to advertisers. At right, one of the new ads (click to enlarge), which supposedly will help to remind advertisers that newsprint is not outdated and still very relevant (newspaper ads are a "destination," reads the copy.)

We love Target, and we're down with Luella Bartley's fun style, so it's cool that the designer is doing a line of clothes for the retailer. And she's British, and so are double-decker buses, which are equally fun at times, so it kind of makes sense if...

• Behold Philippe Starck's Downtown Chandelier of Insanity, to be housed in his Broad Street condos. Luxury units still available, if the lighting fixture doesn't scare the shit out of you. [Curbed]
• After five cold, long years, Fabio is back and still completely in awe of that margarine. [AdAge (reg. req'd)]
• The perfect singles mixer: Girls meet, get wasted, bitch about dating and men. Men show up 2 hours later and are promptly torn to shreds. [LWE]
• If you're anything like us, you saw Brokeback Mountain and immediately wanted to be a Gay cowboy. Now a ranch in Montana is offering a vacation that will allow you to be exactly that. [Mirror UK]
• There was once a time when it was OK to say "Ayds helps you lose weight." [YouTube]
• A little too Donnie Darko for comfort. [CNN]
• First Grilled Cheese NYC closes its doors, and now 71 Clinton is nearing the end. A moment of silence, please, for the death of the Lower East Side's original gentrifier. [The Strong Buzz]
• A numerical study of the popularity of the phrase "more cowbell." Fittingly, it comes out on top of Clay Aiken — but who doesn't? [Parenthetical Remarks]

• Fighting back against Fox News, whose ratings dwarf CNN's, Jon Klein savors small victories. Which makes sense, because there ain't been a whole lot of big ones. [NYT]
• Conde Nast is running out of ad inventory. [WWD]
• Nick Kristof manages the delicate trick of making Jack Shafer feel a little bit bad for Bill O'Reilly. [Slate]
• Icahn and Wasserstein's TW plans don't don't help thing. [NYT]

Another local website falls victim to the corn-car marketing plague. Seriously, GM, listen up: New York City is NOT your demographic. We only care about our taxis. Please, for the love of God, stop the madness. We once endured an entire winter of saffron — haven't we already suffered enough?

Tragedy du jour: The Post's newly jaundiced homepage, which stems from a vicious advertising deal with GM's GoYellow.com campaign for corn-powered cars. Surely such expensive, prominent placement came at the cost of some soon-to-be-laid-off employee's entire salary — but reaching an audience where maybe 25% of readers own a car? Invaluable marketing, that.

We're quite fond of our broker at Stribling. We really are. But after flipping past page A15 of today's Times, we can't help thinking that we would have quite enjoyed looking at the things Corcoran had to show us.

Copyranter calls our attention to a house ad in Friday's Times:

Not that we ever much care about the Super Bowl, but it was particularly hard to care about it last night, when two irrelevant-to-us cities faced off. (Ultimately, we decided to root for Pittsburgh, on aesthetic grounds. We appreciate that they stick with the proudly old-school insignia, while the Seahawks go the woefully overused streamlined-animal route.) Mostly, then, the night was for two things: Commercials, and food.

Somebody give AKQA a "perfect timing" award. Two weeks ago, the ad agency scored a fawning media profile of president Kate Everett-Thorp. Industry portal Adotas praised the exec for bringing her "Human Media" marketing ideology to AKQA. This week, Everett-Thorp took that ideology somewhere else, dumping AKQA for Walden VC. Now she's shopping around for a startup to run. Hopefully we'll hear about her next job before she quits it.

As we said before, you get what you pay for. And that doesn't include a calculator.

• 3 years later, a resolution to the legendary fake Puma blowjob ads: They were specs from a European off-shoot of Saatchi & Saatchi. And while they weren't supposed to hit the internet, they did wonders for online store sales. [MemeFirst]
• Just in time for Valentine's Day, FreshDirect appeals to singles by suggesting they avoid suicide by gorging on Ben & Jerry's. [Gothamist]
• The queen Scissor Sister goes shopping for sex toys. Big whoop, right? Actually, the big whoop is that someone's taking camera phone pictures in the sex shop. Creepy much? [Two Martini Lunch]
• Saturday's Idiotarod — in which teams race shopping carts from Brooklyn to Manhattan's East River Park — only received minimal NYPD interference (cops just asked the teams to "slow down"). Are we supposed to believe that having shopping cart barrelling at you is much less a public concern than, say, riding the subway pantsless? [NYDN]
• You can question James Frey's honesty, his writing, his story — but don't you dare question his break-dancing skills. [H-P]

Just a bit more than two years ago, in a surprise last-minute move, Bruce Wasserstein won the auction to buy New York magazine. Just a bit less than two years ago, in a surprise move, Adam Moss left the Times to become editor of New York. For the last two years, then, a common Manhattan media conversation starter has been, "So, what do you think of the new New York?" In a press release issued this afternoon and based upon various just-compiled 2005 statistics, the magazine itself thinks it has an answer:

Don't get us wrong; we are among the leading practitioners of subway-germ paranoia. (We do not, under any circumstances, allow our hands to touch the subway. Or the turnstile. Or the handrail in the station.)

From the February issue of Esquire, the Burger King ad campaign hits unprecedented levels of ubiquity.