• Will Michael Cooke's NYDN departure cause problems for Bravo reality show about the paper? Even worse: What about Hud Morgan's departure? [NYP]
• Jon Friedman thinks ABC fucked up its anchor decision. [MW]
• Even so, ABC's changes give a glimpse at CBS's future. [NYO]
• How did Us get the Nick-and-Jessica scoop? Through Dan Klores, the publicist the mag and the couple share, according to Access Hollywood. [MIN]
• Maureen may be everywhere these days, but the books she's flogging is "a glib, d j vu compendium of every Newsweek-style pop-science zeitgeist piece of the last 15 years." [VV]
• NYT Co. announces ad hikes, a $40M cost for layoffs. And says it won't give any earnings guidance for 2006, which can't be a good sign. [NYT]
• The Source is evicted from its offices. Which can't be a good sign. [NYP]

• Investor Carl Icahn signs on Bruce Wasserstein's Lazard to join in his crusade against Time Warner management. New York feature on Icahn's clever business strategy TK soon. [NYT]
• NYT Mag bigthinker Michael Ignatieff leaves magazine, Harvard gig, and the country to rescue his native Canada from its political crisis. NYU bigthinker Noah Feldman, recently signed up as Times Mag contributing writer, seems set to replace Ignatieff there. [NYP]
• Steve Capus named president of NBC News. [NYT]
• And Rome Hartman, 60 Minutes vet, named executive producer of the still-anchorless CBS Evening News. [NYT]
• Dear Les Moonves: For the love of God, please don't make Katie Couric the CBS anchor. Please. Love, Jon Friedman. [MW]
• Conde's standard Christmas directions aren't good enough for Anna. [WWD]

Jacques Steinberg includes an interesting fact in his piece on Lara Logan, the aggressive 60 Minutes correspondent (and former swimsuit model) whose tenacity has drawn comparisons to that of Dan Rather and Mike Wallace:

• Is Judy Miller now a right-wing hero? Wait, what was she before the war, then? [NYM]
• Andrew Sullivan to move his blog to Time.com. Sellout! MSM! All those other things we're supposed to say! Yada yada yada. [NYP]
• Bob Schieffer to stay longer as CBS Evening News anchor. [NYT]
• Times to launch quarterly sports mag. [NYP]
• Esquire likes undulating apartments. [NYT]
• Google considers offering book rentals, sort of. [Reuters via Yahoo]
• Ruth Reichl reads The Bruni Digest. Bruni doesn't. Or so he says. [AP via Yahoo]

• Are Men Necessary? is "a very odd, occasionally entertaining mish-mash of politics and sex, biology and Cosmopolitan-ology, gravity and wit, insight and carelessness." We don't care what it is; we'd just like to stop hearing about it. [NYO]
• And Maureen should go away for a while, too. [MW]
• Republican senators want another investigation of a leak to reporters. You know, because the last one worked out so well for their party. [WP]
• Anna Wintour may or may not be out to kill The Devil Wears Prada film. [Radar]
• Teen People lands racist teenie-boppers Prussian Blue, who apprently think — wrongly — they'll be getting editorial control. Isn't it fun to pull one over on Nazis? [NYP]
• Memogate producer Mary Mapes was right and everyone else was wrong, insists Memogate producer Mary Mapes. [WP]
• Less demand than expected for lunch with Rupert Murdoch. Which is fine news indeed. [Guardian]
• HBO documentary chief likes both highbrow and porn, and, likely, she'll soon snag Ted Koppel. [NYP]
• Apparently, Esquire had cool covers in the sixties. [MB]
• Meet Judy Miller without traveling to Sag Harbor — only $375! [HuffPost]
• As a kid, New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik used to sneak out after bedtime — to read. Which is somehow unsurprising. [S.F. Chronicle]
• 135K paid users have signed up for TimesSelect. As if you can't get more than enough Maureen for free these days. [E&P]
• Anderson Cooper does the self-deprecating shtick well, too. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Prediction: New ABC anchors will be Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff. Peter, however, would have wanted Charlie Gibson. [Newsday]
• Because one is never enough, negotiations continue at the Times continue over another fired reporter. [Media Mob/NYO]
• No one wants to read TV Guide offshoot Inside TV. [WWD]

• Syd Schanberg says journalism's big problem is insufficient transparency — that is, not enough journalism about journalism. In next week's "Press Clips," we fill him in on the existence of Jim Romenesko. [VV]
• Amid yesterday's newspaper-circ horror show, Post gains on News. Yay! [NYP]
• Yet the News is still ahead. Yay! [NYDN]
• Never mind the Judy mess; NYT still hasn't fulfilled post-Jayson promises. [PR Week]
• Why'd Andrew Heyward stick around CBS News for so long after the Memogate debacle? For his pension to kick in, of course. [Radar]
• Can't figure out why you should care about the recent sale rumblings at Knight Ridder? Because no less is at stake than — cue ominous music — the entire future of print journalism. Well, fuck. [LAT]
• Ted Koppel is leaving Nightline, in case you didn't know. [WP]

We're not sure if we feel worse for professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney, who gamely sat through a Public Eye non-interrogation, or Public Eye, the new CBS News non-ombudsman non-blog, which had to suffer through Rooney's charmingly dismissive responses. This exchange was our favorite, simultaneously an apotheosis of Public Eye's bushy-tailed earnestness and of Ronney's lived-spotted cynicism:

• Major investor in Knight Ridder newspaper chain demands the chain be sold "to increase shareholder value." Because 20 percent profit margins at KR papers — or whatever astronomincal number the company demands — clearly aren't enough. [NYT]
• CBS News's new Roone Arledge learned at the feet — literally — of the old Roone Arledge. [TV Guide]
• More tsuris for the hip-hop bible: The Source is $156K behind in rent. [Radar]
• Unsurprisingly, Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, is obnoxious — and successful. [NYO]
• After last year's bout of excitement, bloggers have not overtaken the White House briefing room. One imagines because bloggers chose not to waste their time being stonewalled and lied to. [E&P]
• Mother Nature for Time's Person of the Year, campaigns Jon Friedman, who is clearly hoping his weekend place — if he has one — will be spared when the next Nor'eastern hits. [MW]

• In new VF, producer Mary Mapes tells her side of Memogate. We can't bring ourselves to read it; perhaps you can. [VF (pdf)]
• In war over unauthorized Donald Trump bio, author calls subject a cartoon character; Trump replies by proving the point. [NYP]
• CBS News White House reporter John Roberts didn't really mean any sexual innuendo when he called Judge Sam Alito "sloppy seconds." We never would have figured that out if Public Eye didn't get to the bottom of it for us. [Public Eye]
• Reader's Digest chairman and CEO retires, looks forward to actually being old enough to read the magazine. [Folio:]
• Steve Case finally leaves TWX board; even so, stock still trading in upper teens. [AP via NYT]
• "Jeff Gannon" reappears, now as a columnist in the gay press. Shockingly, some gays react bitchily. [E&P]

• Despite Pentagon plea, newspapers realize that 2,000th Iraq death really is new. [NYT]
• Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports, is still the new president of CBS News. He's Jim McKay's son, and one day last week he thought that Harriet Miers was a bigger news story than the White Sox. [NYT]
• Meanwhile, in a CBS men's room, Mike Wallace and Dan Rather engage in a pissing match. [Radar]
• Tim Russert is a pivotal witness in Libby case while also being, well, Tim Russert. [NYT]
• New Teen People is already Majewski-fied, although the former Us Weekly resdesign doesn't technically hit till February.
• Biz magazines are in trou-ble. [Mediabweek]
• Martha Stewart wants a job at Martha Stewart. [NYP]
• Newsweek's Tom Masland obituary: "Then Tom stepped off that curb, and was hit by the offside mirror on a passing SUV; a freak collision on a rainy night that propelled him to the ground and caused massive brain damage. ... Thomas Wootton Masland died in intensive care at St. Luke's Hospital three days later, on Oct. 27, with his sons, Richard, Robert and James, his mother, brother and two sisters by his side, as Gina [his wife, a jazz singer] sang 'When the Saints Go Marching In.'" [Newsweek]

• Jon Friedman thinks the CBS Evening News needs more funny. [MarketWatch]
• There's a new round of rumors that Dow Jones is for sale. The alleged buyer this time: Warren Buffett. [Dow Jones Newswires via SmartMoney]
• At conference, Sulzberger lays out plan for "meeting the demands of modern consumers while staying true to journalism's traditional values." Surprising, "make sure your paper has a major ethics crisis at least every other year" was not a recommendation. [E&P]
• The Times scandals are good news, says Bill Powers. [National Journal]
• Is the final liquidation of Primedia imminent? One can only hope. [Folio:]
• New York mag adds new section of real-estate porn, and Cosmo editor Kate White hates late close nights at the office. Yes, it's hard being a Hearst EIC. [WWD]
• We'd make a joke about hip-hop mag The Source going broke and writing bad checks, but we're a little afraid of them. [NYP]

No one watches their Evening News, onetime top-ten perennial 60 Minutes hasn't cracked the top ten in years, their lead anchor of 20-odd years is now a laughingstock, and they can't figure who to hire to replace him or how to remake his show. So you'd think things couldn't get worse for CBS News. You'd be wrong.

Nikki Finke, our favorite left coast vituperator (besides our silicone-enhanced brother, of course), is not particularly fond, for some reason, of MTV:

• Walter Cronkite thinks CBS should keep one-anchor format. Also, he thinks the Evening News should keep its commercials for Depends, Just for Men, and Metamucil. [LAT]
• Sexy Jon Fine digs Vice. [BW]
• And less-sexy Jon Friedman digs Frank Rich. [MW]
• Upcoming NYT Mag poll of New Yorkers finds a quarter of Republicans would never fuck a Democrat. Unfortunately, those running the country come from the other 75 percent, and are happy to fuck us all. [E&P
• Peter Jennings left $50 million estate. For the record, our annual salary was under $25k when we worked for ABC News. [NYDN]
• The average U.S. household watched 8 hours and 11 minutes of TV per day in 2004-05, setting a record. USA! USA! [Reuters]

• Confessions of a (granted, emergency-landing-surviving) media whore. [NYO]
• Bossman Denton cruises the Jersey Turnpike on a bathwater-powered scooter, apparently. Also, he has a large head. [NYO]
• Nonfamous writer Matt Haber's past was pillaged by adorable and now-famous writer Benjamin Kunkel, and Haber'll be damned if you don't know about it. [NYO]
• Dan Rather wants to revisit Bush National Guard story; CBS brass won't let him. We await Public Eye's take, presumably that spirited debate is a good thing. [NYP]
• A day in the life of Us editor Janice Min — in which no one cares about Britney's baby. [asap/AP]
• Geraldo won't sue Times, but his feelings are still hurt. [NYP]
• Washington Blade launches a "gay Romenesko" site. We always thought that was us. [E&P]
• Turns out, SCOTUS nominee Roberts might not hate the press as much as the Times thought. Which still doesn't mean he likes it. [NYT]
• Sly gets up off the mat. [WWD]

• "ABC, CBS Secretly Search for Anchors," says AP hed. Yes, no one had any idea. [AP via Newsday]
• Shocker: Plame fallout makes sources less likely to trust reporters' promises of anonymity. [AJR]
• And another shocker: Bush SCOTUS nominee doesn't like the press. [NYT]
• Slightly more Americans trust the media than don't. Rejoice! [Gallup]
• Media more interested in Cocaine Kate than in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's stock sale. Can't imagine why. [Media Matters]
• Friday's kick-off party for The New Yorker Festival featured James Woolsey, Jonathan Franzen, and Gilbert Gottfried. [WWD]
• Mags hold benefits for Katrina victims. [MIN]

From its inception, we've mocked CBS News's non-opinionated, non-bloggy, non-ombudsman new ombudsman blog. But maybe we were too harsh on the Public Eye crew, joking that they'd be unveiling the behind-the-scenes workings of the CBS News programs no one watches in the first place. It turns out that they'll take a look at major media issues occurring in other outlets, too, and yesterday they weighed in on the raging did-Geraldo-nudge-someone? debate at the Times.

Oh happy day! Public Eye, the new non-opinionated, non-ombudsman, non-blog ombudsman blog from CBS News, launched this morning. Providing "unprecedented transparency" into the workings of a broadcast news organization, Public Eye will serve as a team of independent reporters, getting CBS correspondents, producers, and executives to talk about how editorial decisions are made within the organization, and it will also examine larger media issues.

• Principled, uncompromising Judy Miller now in negotiations to compromise and get out of jail — which Reuters doesn't mention till graf six. [Reuters via HuffPost]
• Media continue to develop backbone, as newsweeklies say no to FEMA request for no corpse pictures. [NYP]
• CBS News's non-opinionated, non-ombudsman, non-media crit blog launches Monday. We don't know how we'll last till then. [Mediaweek]
• Craiglist could kill the newspaper classifieds biz entirely. Plus casual encounters! [SmartMoney]
• TWX honchos go to fashion shows, and chief Dick Parsons is sad there's not Tyra. [WWD]
• Henry Luce III, son of Time founder and longtime Time Inc. reporter and exec, dies at 80. [NYT]

The publicity blitz is starting for CBS News's soon-to-come "nonbudsman" blog, the non-opinionated, non-media critical, non-house organ publication that, in wake of Memogate, seems designed to serve as a toothless CBS equivilent of the Times's post-Blair Okrentification.