• Tribune: The Chandler family hits the road, Sam Zell talks to David Geffen, gets veto power on the board, bashes Google. [LAT]
  

• CBS News hired Rick Kaplan without consulting Katie Couric. They probably just didn't want her to worry her pretty little head about it. [NYT]
  

Google is amping up its Adsense offerings with embedded video clips from sources such as Dow Jones & Co. and Condé Nast. A variety of revenue models are being explored, but the basic deal has Google sharing ad income in some proportion with the video content creator and the hosting site; ads are arranged around the video and occasionally inserted between clips, as each video box has a mutli-clip "playlist." Contextual relations between the clips and surrounding material is pretty thin, but no worse than most contextual ads. More interesting is what this could mean for other video creators, should the system's economies scale down as well as up. With a small amount of judicious oversight, even the vast wasteland of Youtube content could be leveraged into embedded clip boxes to punch up boring site content elsewhere, perhaps creating a Revver-style payment scheme for Youtubers.

• Who will succeed Bill Keller as Times executive editor: Jill Abramson or Dean Baquet? Get set for the inevitable Hillary-Obama comparisons. Either way, oddly, the real job worth having seven years from now will be digital fella Jon Landman's. [WWD]
  

• "Time Inc. has selected Stockholm's Bonnier Group as the winner of the auction for the right to buy 18 of Time Inc.'s magazines. There was no immediate word on the price that Bonnier will pay, but the terms are in place and a deal should close within a month." That's what AdAge said, but then they pulled it. So who knows? [AdAge]
  

• 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]

• Lindsay Lohan admits to Vanity Fair that she's used drugs and struggled with bulimia. When we blow rails and boot our brunch, we usually go to Graydon Carter for confessional, too.
• Zeta Graff sues Paris Hilton for being a big, fat liar — but, as it turns out, her paid liar/publicist Rob Shuter might be just as bad.
• Peter Braunstein pleads not guilty to charges of sexual assault; guilty on all charges of looking incredibly frightening.
• Left befuddled by the state of the odd-amounted Metrocard, we fall victim to the strange intricacies of the card machine, only to find eventual redemption.
• Jon Stewart attempts to save the Oscars from total irrelevance.
• Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann and his wife, Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliot House, leave the company, but not without a handsome payoff.
• Marc Kramer is hired as CEO of the Daily News. Les who?
• Observer editor Peter Kaplan looks to save the precious pink paper with the power of Bruce Wasserstein.
• West Virginian miners die in tragic explosion; media runs inaccurate, opposite story in tragic miscommunication.
• And in more bad news: the health of Israeli PM Ariel Sharon is not looking good .
• But cheer up, because Real Simple will soon suck on a tv near you!

We pointed out earlier today that it must suck a little bit to work at the Times today, unless you're Sulzberger or Robinson or Nisenholtz or one of the few other bigshots who got tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in free stock.

We confess we're not quite as up on our Dow Jonesiana as we ought to be — Ken Auletta, we're sure this lacuna is ultimately your fault — but our general understanding, construed as uncharitably as possible, has been this:

Amid all the Media Christmas cheer, this sad email arrived today from Liberty Street:

• 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]

• Parents Television Council names list of best and worst shows for "families"; Gawker names PTC to list of worst bullshit "family values" advocacy groups. [NYDN]
• Judy Miller testifies before Congress in favor of shield law, several months too late. [NYT]
• Esquire-food-critic-gate continues: The Houston visitor's bureau paid to fly him down to sample four eateries, which comped his meals. Because, you know, Hearst doesn't have much cash to throw around. [Houston Press, second item]
• Dow Jones had a bad quarter, too — but still not as bad as the Times did. [WSJ]
• This just in: Elizabeth Spiers sells book, to leave Mediabistro. [FishbowlNY]

When we were at the newsstand earlier, we couldn't help but notice the cover of this week's Barron's. "Your Worst Nightmare," says the headline. "Rich parents say their biggest fear is having their children turn into the next Paris Hilton. What wealth managers can do to help kids cope gracefully with money and privilege." And it's illustrated, natch, with a picture of her Parisness.

Dow Jones chief Peter Kann to employees: this isn't a democracy. Get over it.
Kann gives angry WSJers a new lesson in capitalism [Post]