• Jacob Bernstein reports that ineffectual Times public editor Barney Calame is considered either: "[L]ike Kenneth Starr," unable "to step back and ask what any of it means"; unable to see the forest for the trees; like a "mosquito," always biting but never wounding; an "umpire," merely calling balls and strikes; or "a judge, not a prosecutor." None of these are compliments. [WWD]
• CBS Evening News wasn't in third place last week for the first time in years. To reward Bob Schieffer for this significant accomplishment, naturally they're replacing him. [USAT]
• Bids are in to buy Knight Ridder's two Philadelphia papers from McClatchy, and Mort Zuckerman and his Daily News crew are among them. [NYT]
• Alessandra Stanley is no more accurate when covering politics than when covering television. [Wonkette]
• AMI loses a top exec, and faces circ trouble across its titles. Fun! [NYP]
• Jack Shafer is tired of magazines' anniversary issues. [Slate]
• To be clear: Endeavor agent Ari Emmanuel is not backing Radar. [WWD (last item)]

• Might John Huey poach Slate's Jacob Weisberg to run Time? Sure, maybe. Who knows? [Media Mob/NYO]
• Might John Huey poach Newsweek's Jon Meacham to run Time? Sure, maybe. Who knows? [MW]
• Stephen Colbert does not amuse Bush at White House Correspondents' Dinner. [E&P]
• Anderson Cooper's 60 Minutes segments will be shown on CNN, too. See, boys, there's Coop enough for all of us. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Rosie's View contract says she can't cut her hair. As will Keri Russell's next contract anywhere, if she ever works again. [Fox411]

• Page Six traffics in buzz, apparently. [NYT]
• Uncle Bob Schieffer might stick around to do end-of-show commentaries on Couric-led CBS Evening News. And also to show off his legs, of course. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Breaking: Daily News distributes sponsored copies! [NYT]
• It's hard to be a teen magazine. [Mediaweek]
• Real Simple loses two top editors; Details's Dan Peres tucks in. [WWD]

• Will Katie go to CBS? We continue to not really have any idea. [USAT]
• What did Bonnie Fuller learn from getting fired from Conde Nast? "Blatant disloyalty is never the smart course of action." Who knew? [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks — hopes! — that the celebrity moment might finally be over. [NYM]
• Elizabeth Spiers is starting a blog about Wall Street. Also, she used to work here. [IWantMedia]
• Esquire has a funny spoof in its new issue written by — who else? — a Foer brother, in this case champion memorizer Joshua. [WP]
• Simon Dumenco isn't sure newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took the Times until now to get rid of the printed stock tables. [Ad Age]
• Jim Surowiecki thinks newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took them until now to get rid of printed stock tables. [NYer]
• WWD media reporter Jeff Bercovici breakfasts on spelt toast with almond butter and a home-brewed cappuccino. [Jossip]
• Syd Schanberg quit his job as the Village Voice's Press Clips columnist just after the New Times deal closed, feeling that the company was no longer interested in media criticism. Friday he won an award for his Voice media criticism. [VV]

• Judy Miller finally figured out why her Times career went to hell: It was the bloggers' fault. Of course it was. [Slate]
• Six weeks later, ABC anchor Bob Woodruff is released from the hospital to continue his rehabilitation elsewhere. [ABCNews]
• And 18 months later, NYT researcher Zhao Yan is released from prison after the Chinese government withdraws state-secrets charges. [NYT]
• Jon Friedman's doesn't love Mike Wallace. [MW]
• Coming soon: Isaac Mizrahi: The Magazine? [WWD (second item)]

As a coda to her controversial column "Nicole Kidman deserves to be happy," antediluvian tattler Liz Smith notes that her own recent appearance on "CBS Sunday Morning" sent her book Dishing (a "little work about celebrity and food"; and here we'd thought Gael Greene had cornered the market on geriatric culinary gossip) soaring toward the rafters of the Amazon rankings. In a subtle dig at the inability of The Post to move merchandise, Liz puts this down to the power of television. We're just impressed that the seven aged viewers of "CBS Sunday Morning" were able to switch from their TV screens to their internet connections and successfully order the book, which, hopefully, is available in large-print format.

• Big media companies like buying popular websites. Who knew? [Mediaweek]
• 2005 was a bad year for newspapers. You don't say. [WSJ]
• David Carr can't quite figure out why CBS wants Katie Couric so badly. [NYT]
• Lewis Lapham's welcome present for Roger Hodge: Lots of readers pissed off about an article on researchers who dispute the idea that HIV causes AIDS. [NYT]
• Diane Sawyer will be the next World News Tonight anchor. [Newsday]
• No, wait. Charlie Gibson will. [NYP]

• Bill Powers says blogs are not, recent hype notwithstanding, dying. But you knew that. [National Journal]
• Old men make good anchors, says Mark Jurkowitz. [Public Eye]
• Because there aren't enough glossy style mags for rich people, the Wall Street Journal Europe is set to launch one targeted at rich men between 30 and 55. Style Journal launches in Europe next month, in the Asian edition in the fall, and could be coming to the United States, too. Thank God. [WWD (last item)}
• Speaking of mags for rich people, Keith Kelly thinks a trademark threat from Absolut vodka helped shutter Absolute mag, even though courts kept siding with the mag's publisher. [NYP]

• Not New York news, but kind of huge: Former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler — the guy who made it actually a good paper, then got pissed off when Times Mirror CEO Mark Willes did his best to undo that — died today at 78. [LAT]
• Walter Cronkite thinks CBS should keep Bob Schieffer as Evening News anchor. Which we're sure matters not a whit to CBS execs, who could care less about attracting octogenarians. [SJMN]
• Simon Dumenco is angry, as always, and now he wants apologies, from Graydon Carter, Tom Ford, Carl Icahn, Atoosa Rubenstein, NBC, and others. Good luck with that one, Simey. [Ad Age]
• No one likes White House press briefings. Who knew? [NYT]

• Say hello to News Corp.'s new My Network TV, a network for stations orphaned by the UPN-WB deal and what's sure the be the place to turn for shows not quite good enough to make one of those two flailing former networks. [NYT]
• Bob Schieffer is a folksy country doctor who performs with backup singers. [NYT]
• Those office pirates are multitalented: That's Office Pirates creator Mark Remy, former EIC of Giant mag, acting in several of the new Time Inc. humor site's video clips, which were shot by his colleague Mark Golin, former EIC of Maxim. [WWD]

• Now, Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson will take turns joining Elizabeth Vargas on World News Tonight. We really hope they can work George Stephanopoulos into that rotation, too. [NYT]
• CBS Newser John Roberts decamps for CNN. If your bosses told you they had no idea who'll be the next anchor but they're sure it won't be you, you'd leave too. [Public Eye]
• High-ranking laddie Andy Clerkson grows up and moves out. The Dennis Publishing editorial director will leave his job, summer in Montauk, have a kid, and move back to England. [WWD]
• One of the many companies that isn't buying the Observer: Reed Elsevier. [NYP (last item)]
• NYO on NYT: Ric Burns to produce docu on the Gray Lady, and war gets in the way of Jill Abramson and Maureen Dowd's planned trip to Iraq. [NYO (second and third items)]

• Because there just aren't enough glossy mags about celebrity gossip: Page Six magazine, coming in February to a newsstand near you. [WWD]
• For the first time, Mr. Sulzberger goes to Switzerland. And various other Timesiana. [NYO]
• Also, Mr. Sulzberger has taken valuable lessons from all his fuckups. Really. [MW]
• Hell with Couric. CBS News should give Diane Sawyer the Evening News chair. [NYO]
• Steve Brill gives money to Yale to make more journalists. Because what the media business needs in more Ivy kids. [NYT]
• How a rant becomes a letter to the editor. [CJR]

• CBS News chief Sean McManus won't say that Katie's his dream anchor, but he does say that the next anchor will be named within a year, will be a solo anchor, will not come from within CBS, will be a known persona, and will have covered a lot of big stories at a network. Later, he added that the new anchor, while not necessarily Katie, will be female, perky, and willing to undergo an on-air colonoscopy. [NYT]
• Why are guests willing to go on O'Reilly? Masochism, clearly. [Boston Phoenix]
• Huh. Turns out James Brady has done a whole hell of a lot more than just those inane celebrity interviews in Parade. We had no idea. Cool. [Forbes]
• In the latest twist of the ever-amused saga of The Source, the board fires co-founders Dave Mays and Benzino. [NYP]
• OK! encourages its staffers to go on all-expense-paid junkets. Shit, now we kind of want to work there. [WWD]
• New chief at Time4 Media. [NYP]

• Who'd have thunk it? CBS Evening News sees rising ratings, happy staff. [LAT]
• The newsweeklies are cutting their overseas bureaus and — stop the presses! — media do-gooder types think this is bad. [IHT]
• Judy Miller's tough post-Times life: Joining David Brooks on a panel at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]
• In honor of the Dr. King, Simon Dumenco confesses his dream: That one day bloggers and newspaper reporters will join hands together and sing "We Shall Overcome." [Ad Age]

• Martha Stewart is planning a new mag, this one for "modern, multitasking" women aged 25 to 45. Most significant: In a shocking bout of narcissism-suppression, it's called "Blueprint," not "Martha Stewart Blueprint." [NYP]
• Sumner Redstone — who may or may not have been in a senile flight of nonsense when he said it — claims to dream of combining CNN and his CBS News. Just like Steve Brill suggested, oh, seven years ago. [B&C]
• Dana Stevens's take on Vargas and Woodruff: Fine, competent, but definitely not PJ. [Slate]
• Jonathan Dahl is the new editor of SmartMoney. [NYT]

• James Risen's State of War — the impending publication of which forced the Times to finally publish the domestic-spying story — also makes Judy Miller's WMD excuses fall apart. [NYO]
• Still, the domestic-spying articles were better than the book is, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Lunatic talking head Bill O'Reilly promises to "get into the lives" of Bill Keller and Frank Rich if (perhaps imagined) Times attacks on him continue. We really hope he does, because Keller would be so much sexier if he were a little less earnest. [Media Matters]
• Yesterday was CBS's first day as its own company. Well, except for all those all days as its own company. [WP]
• New Oxygen show features middle-aged women partying with college guys. We're pretty sure we saw that same show on Cinemax once. [NYT]
• Not-quite-victorious — but still really good — GMA staffers get cheesy commemorative trinkets. [NYO]
• Jon Friedman is clearly smoking crack, as proved by (among other things) his prediction that MSNBC will beat CNN and Fox News in 2006. [MW]
• Latest Q-ratings study shows Katie Couric isn't as popular as she used to be. Clearly not in the polling sample: Les Moonves. [WWD]

• Megalomaniacal Jann Wenner is now picking on Us editor Janice Min, which doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. [WWD]
• Now The Washington Post has a staff blogger, too. [Washingtonian]
• Jon Friedman visits an EW focus group and finds that subscribers really, really love the magazine. Freakishly so, to be honest. [MW]
• Daily News readers overwhelming think Bob Schieffer should stay on permanently as the CBS Evening News anchor, according to Richard Huff's "highly unscientific" poll. [NYDN]
• If you look really closely, you can find Warren Buffett's hand in Time's Person of the Year issue. No, it's not holding cash. [NYP]

• The strike's overlooked victims: Those freebie papers you don't really want to read but grab anyway when the dude shoves them at on your way into the subway station. [NYP]
• CBS Evening News will — finally — be No. 2 within a few months, and Katie Couric will eventually be its next anchor, outgoing EP Jim Murphy predicts. [Phil. Inquirer]
• Now Al Sharpton says he won't do the proposed Al in the Family sitcom. This sort of breaks our heart, not least because we spend all that time a few weeks ago Photoshopping his head onto Carroll O'Connor's body. [AP via USAT]

• Murdoch, Newhouse, Philbin, and friends: Meet the city's media Power Geezers. [NYO]
• CBS wants Katie so badly that they're offering her a pay cut. [NYP]
• Food and the City: HBO buys rights to Ruth Reichl's memoirs for a new memoir. [WWD]
• A new front in the War on Christmas: Plano, Texas, where the school district bans kids from wearing red and green, according to Defender of the Faith O'Reilly. Except for one thing: It's not true. [Dallas Morning News]
• LAT to shutter national edition, ending its print presence in Washington and New York. Yeah, we're as surprised as you are to discover it had a print presence in New York. [NYT]

There's a 1980 Calvin Trillin book called Floater. It's a short, fun comic novel about working at a newsmagazine — the protagonist is a "floater," someone who fills in wherever he's needed each week — and it brilliantly captures some of the standard ridiculousness of life in newsmagland.