It's always fun to see a journalist fall on his sword. It has that righteous feel of a principled but stubborn man putting on his dinner jacket to sit calmly on the deck of the sinking Titanic. Except in the case of the newspaper industry, that man would eventually float to the surface and go into PR. Anyhow, the editor of a Southern California business paper called The Business Press got himself stone cold fired for blasting out an adorably serious email about how design changes are eroding the paper's credibility. He was promptly ejected from the building! Fey big city media elites who mock traditional newspaper values can learn something from the memos below. (How to get fired):

Times food writer Kim Severson spends her time these days not with restaurateurs but in Alaska, where her background at the Anchorage Daily News has suddenly become a very valuable asset. Severson today reeled in a tasty scoop: Confirmation, first, that Levi Johnston, the teen father who is marrying into Sarah Palin's family, has in fact dropped out of high school, as rumored, amid slipping grades and unwelcome pressure from his family to play hockey. Severson also delivered the most credible explanation yet for why Track Palin, son of the Republican vice presidential nominee, enlisted in the Army. The rumor mill had him caught up in a drug bust, or perhaps nailed for vandlizing some school buses, and under pressure to join as a corrective. It sounds, for now at least, like the reality is more mundane, if still quite sad. It seems Track, a top Wasilla hockey prospect prone to rink rage, met his fate on the ice:

Apologies are in order to Charles Gibson, widely presumed to be too soft to credibly interview Sarah Palin. If anything, the ABC News anchor's first exchange with Palin, aired last night, is all the more embarrassing to Palin precisely because Gibson was hand-picked by her handlers. The Republican vice presidential nominee's awful performance is apparent enough from the transcript, which contains her horribly stilted answer to a question about Iran, invoking "nucular weapons... given to those hands of Ahmadinejad" and already compared to Miss South Carolina's famous thoughts on "the Iraq" at a teen beauty pageant. But things are even worse on video, as seen after the jump.

Former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee gave a speech today and got a lot of laughs when he said this about Sarah Palin: "People were coming into my office, phone calls were flooding in, e-mails were coming in, 'I just sent money to Obama, I couldn't sleep last night' - from the left. To see this cocky wacko up there." Now, Chafee was never that convincing a Republican, but here's the thing: neither, for the vast majority of his career anyway, was John McCain. And if Palin energizes the Republican base, she's sure as hell alienating a huge portion of the John McCain base. Let's call them "Angry White Men With Working Brain Cells."* My brother is one; he used to have a mild hardon for McCain; this morning I got an email from him about some Palin nightmare he had last night followed an hour later by an email from the Obama campaign informing me he'd donated a hundred bucks. He is part of the niche that gets riled up not over the idea bombing Iran, or even dumfuckedly joking about bombing Iran, but becomes suddenly borderline rabid over stories like this (as told to Bob Woodward.)

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's $127 million investment in the New York Times Company made headlines this morning, but left unremarked upon, including by the Times itself, are the murkier aspects of how Slim made his fortune. Yes, Slim acquired control of telephone monopoly Telmex in 1990 when it privatized in part by smartly partnering with Southwestern Bell and France Telecom. It's also true he has strongly denied there was anything untoward about the $1.7 billion purchase price, even though the company just 14 years later was valued at $37 billion. But Slim's financial support for the ruling PRI party, including a $25 million donation at a notorious 1993 fundraising dinner, was at the very least leveraged in an unseemly manner elsewhere. Slim went on to use his "influence over the government" to fight off the entry of competing phone companies into the impoverished Mexican market — that according to the Times itself in 2006. And what of the billionaire as a "decent philanthropist"?

"This has to be off the record," New York Times.com Digital Editor Jim Roberts told a room of about 150 people at last night's Future of Publishing panel. No problem, Jimbo. The question? Internet gaffes in the age of online journalism! "We [recently] had two major problems in two days. The Friday after the Democratic convention," as the Sarah Palin-as-running-mate rumor was unfolding, "our blog ran out of gas. Users were without access to the NYT blog platform" for several hours. Oh no! But even worse: the next Monday, when the Bristol Palin pregnancy story broke, "thousands came to the same blog" and crashed it again. If a news story breaks and nobody on the Internet comments, did it really happen? Sounds like the Times blogs can't handle Sarah Palin.

CBS News may be home to the once-groundbreaking newsmagazine 60 Minutes and even the instigator of an evening-news segment called "free speech," but it'll be damned if it's going to let John McCain use footage of Katie Couric to smear Barack Obama as a sexist. CBS said the ad took Couric's comments out of context, which it apparently did, implying a swipe at Obama that was never taken. But instead of pursuing a lengthy court case that would have to contend with extensive case law protecting political ads, CBS is borrowing a tactic from the Church of Scientology and alleging a copyright infringement, at least according to YouTube's statement on the matter. That got the video removed nice and quick-like, though it still exists on the McCain campaign website. Surely CBS news executives could have taken a a more elitist road than low-grade YouTube censorship. [Politico]

The pressure of financial woes at the New York Times must be getting to its Metro editor Joe Sexton. (That's him, dancing to hip-hop on the last day in the paper's old W. 43rd Street building last year.) Remember, his section is the one they're planning to consolidate with sports. His most recent memo takes comfort in a bought-out Des Moines journalist's farewell speech. The Bible is involved!

So they're pretty sure that Hannah Upp, the Manhattan schoolteacher who went missing last week, isn't kidnapped. According to the Daily News, she's been spotted in the Apple Store checking her e-mail and has been apparently wandering New York without her wallet or cell phone. Couple theories: she's a manic-depressive who's gone off her meds. Another theory: she's known to be a freegan, and this may have caused her to drop out of society and go "off the grid!" Wait, what?

We're hearing from inside Bloomberg News that the newswire is chopping up the Bloomberg Way, the cultish journalism guide assembled by tyrannical editor Matthew Winkler. Winkler believed in the manifesto so deeply he used it to raise his teenaged sons, and its rigid prescriptions became gospel. But what was once a rulebook has now reportedly been demoted to a set of guidelines. Said to be out is the proscription against the word "but" along with the 850-word cap on stories. Pressure to produce "Greet The Week" features (whatever those are) has abated. The changes, long anticipated, should come as no shock, but Matthews' closest underlings may be getting nervous over the continuing accumulation of power by Winkler's internal rival Norman Pearlstine. Said a tipster:

Remember when Vice magazine forced that intern to make and eat twelve flavored popsicles from this own semen to see how long it would take him to puke? Well you can't just do that sort of thing at Slate. You need a news peg, and some sort of underlying cultural criticism and/or geopolitical argument, a few riffs on the cognitive science of stoking consumer desire, maybe a reference to The Pentagon Papers. And most importantly you need a guy like Justin Peters here. Justin is the 27-year-old editor of a "print journal of arcana, deadpannery, and cultural criticism, nominally dedicated to the examination and deconstruction of that which vulgarians dub 'the American Dream'" you have obviously never heard of. Today on the internet you will find this vulgarian reviewing adult diapers for Slate…NEWS PEG? It is the "Geezers Issue" at Slate! Old people may be the only group whose failing eyeballs are actually less coveted by advertisers than politically engaged public sector-employed poors, but John McCain is old! And he is about to be elected president, holy fuck. OH GOOD FOR THEM! SO WILL I LEARN STUFF LIKE HOW THE DEMENTIA THAT GENERALLY SETS IN DURING ONE'S MID-SEVENTIES COULD EFFECT JOHN MCCAIN'S ABILITY TO GRASP COMPLEX ISSUES SUCH AS SOCIAL SECURITY PRIVATIZATION? Hm, don't think so! But they had this Brooklyn 27-year-old get drunk and feign incontinence in six brands of disposable "undergarments" and that is the point of this post. EW! WHAT HAPPENED? Nothing, duh. You know how dudes piss in the streets when they are drunk? Maybe they even got cited for it once, and everyone found it highly amusing that the one day Mr. Highbrow Literary Elite shows up to the office in a suit it is because he urinated on the wall of a police station, sort of like how it's kind of amusing that this guy's literary journal is called Polite. Not LOL-funny, obvs, but "all the female assistants at Slate who are busy researching the mortgage meltdown or whatever get to roll their eyes" funny. SO HOW DID THIS GET INTO SLATE? Glad you asked! For starters, young Peters came to the task armed with a cultural-economic theory:

Yesterday the stock market destruction of United Airlines looked like just another case of bumbling by the Bloomberg news wire. That still appears to be very much correct, but new details tell a larger and more sinister story — a conspiracy of robots to nuke United Airlines by duping one or two humans into acting as pawns. The robot cabal involves aggressive, autonomous bots at Google, Tribune Company and on Wall Street which, despite extensive safeguards, turned swiftly against the wishes of their creators. The whole thing was triggered by some seemingly innocent Google searches and only God knows who it will kill next!

An expanded version of this story about the Republican running mate's son—with details from the National Enquirer's print edition—is here.

Somewhere out there is a budding female public intellectual destined to marry an embarrassingly oversharey lifestyle magazine editor1 who dribbles out in monthly editor's letters the grotesquely bourgeois details of their life, providing endless gossip fodder to media workers frustrated in their own loveless (if not as literal!) marriages to the consumerism bankrolling their profession. Until then, however, we will have to be satisfied with the likes former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose wife shares their home life with the readers of the New York Times—and smartypants Jacob Weisberg. The Slate group editor sleeps on a horsehair mattress covered in "beautiful heavy linen" and sheets from a special shop in London, all of which we know because his wife, Domino editor-in-chief Deborah Needleman, told Fashion Week Daily in excruciating detail (click thumb for a closeup) about the marital bed. By the way, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell introduced the couple! (Hey Gladwell, anyone ever tell you you were a "connector"?)

After his comparatively disastrous speech at the Republican National Convention, it wouldn't seem John McCain could teach Sarah Palin much about public relations. But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have imparted an important lesson in one-on-one media manipulation: Sometimes the best response to a skeptical reporter is to draw him in as closely as possible. Politico said Palin will meet with ABC News' Charlie Gibson not only on Sunday, as originally reported, but in multiple interviews Thursday and Friday, as well, including at the prospective vice president's home in Wasilla, Alaska. Much as McCain used to score points with campaign reporters with seemingly chummy off-the-record chats, Palin no doubt hopes to soften Gibson up with a tour of her home state. Gibson, meanwhile, is supposedly racing to become the sort of interviewer who needs softening up:

As errors continue to mount at Bloomberg News, the question isn't just whose heads will roll, but from how high up on the org chart. The financial newswire avoided cratering Apple Inc stock with its premature Steve Jobs obituary last month because markets had been closed for half an hour by the time the false item was published. Bloomberg's incorrect report stating Sarah Palin had been arrested for drunk driving 22 years ago garnered little notice before it was corrected. But now Bloomberg has done some real damage. It incorrectly flashed a headline to terminals Monday stating United Airlines had filed for a second bankruptcy, sending shares to $3 from $12 and wiping out close to $1 billion in stock market valuation. After a halt in trading, the stock recovered to $11 by the end of the day. But the damage to both investors and to Bloomberg's reputation has been done. It hardly helps that the incorrect news bubbled up through a bizarre series of events:

The New York Times announced today that it's (finally?) starting a dedicated Media desk. The beat has been split between the Business and Culture sections, but now the paper is pulling a dozen reporters together and moving them to the third floor—the floor between the other two sections, and where the top Times editors now sit. Symbolic! It's all about "convergence," they say. But why now? And, look who's not going to be assigned to the Media desk: The Times' most visible media writer and newly minted authorial rock star, David Carr! We've emailed NYT Culture editor Sam Sifton for an explanation. Regardless, this has to be interpreted as a move that assigns more importance to the media beat. The Times currently gives over the bulk of its Monday business page to media stories, and there's no indication that that will change. The selection of that page's editor, Bruce Headlam, to head the new desk is a major promotion for him. A united media beat, though, will presumably be better able to coordinate its coverage so that it's competing every day of the week—which will become ever more important as the Wall Street Journal continues its own transition into a general-interest, business-friendly paper. The WSJ's media coverage is heavy on marketing, but it is naturally the Times' biggest competitor for the most important media stories. The full memo from the Times:

My only experience on a college newspaper was a mandatory one-semester period, the highlight of which was the adviser rejecting most of my stories for not being "serious" enough, and telling me menacingly, "People who work with me tend to do better professionally." (Confidential to that lady: Suck on the splendor of my cramped studio apartment, yea!). Some people parlay the editorship of their school papers into a nice journalism job—for example, every last employee of the New York Times was once editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson. Which is fine! Although it does increase your risk of being kind of a twit. Now college papers, like real papers, are having serious financial troubles. How to save them? Don't save them! The University of California- Berkeley and Syracuse University both had to cut their print papers back to four days a week recently, since they were losing money. Howard University had to stop printing its daily paper completely for several months earlier this year, until it was bailed out to the tune of $48,000. Of course, all these papers continued to publish online. The editor of the Syracuse paper said that "online readership was as high as it usually is" even when print publishing got cut. So tell us again: Why the fuck is it necessary for a college paper to publish a print edition at all? They're serving an audience where every last person has access to the internet. If a print edition isn't profitable, cut it. It's that simple. College papers are there for training purposes, primarily. There's no reason at all a college paper can't sell ads online, put all its content online, and be just as widely read as it was before. Print editions of college papers are either fully subsidized by advertising (which is getting harder, obviously), or they have some kind of endowment, or the university kicks in money to help them pay their expenses. Why not take that money and hire some laid-off journalists to teach these kids journalism? This way another former journalist would find a job, and janitors would have fewer things to pick up after entitled college kids, thereby cooling the simmering class war on campuses, leading to fewer administration buildings takeovers by young leftists channeling their rage into fair wage campaigns for university employees. College papers almost all suck, anyhow. [Inside Higher Ed]

Wait, is it really the New York Times that assigned at least four reporters to essentially investigate those conspiracy theories about how Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her son Trig? Because while internet rumors are never mentioned in the Times's lengthy Palin baby story this morning, it's hard to imagine any other reason the newspaper went to such great lengths to write about Palin's fifth and most recent child, despite a lack of cooperation from the Republican vice presidential candidate. The Times has not always been so eager to delve into the private lives of politicians, as John Edwards well knows! The bottom-line on Palin, for those who study intricate flow charts about why she took such a lengthy trip home when childbirth seemed imminent, or wonder why there are precious few photos of her pregnant:

It was unthinkable that MSNBC could come out of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions without a major, public shakeup of its political news team. The incessant fighting between the cable network's most opinionated anchors — Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews — marred the chance to retain all those new young viewers Olbermann has attracted over the past year or two. But now that the other shoe has dropped, with the anchor team of Olbermann and Matthews being replaced by comparatively neutral White House correspondent David Gregory, it would be a mistake to think MSNBC has undergone some sort of deep existential crisis that will pull it back from the brink of becoming the Fox News Channel of the left. The network's ratings growth, driven by Olbermann, has been too good and too long coming, and the lefty anchor (according to the Times) is about to re-up his plush contract, which in any case has three of four yeas left on it. And MSNBC will have done plenty if it simply gets its big-name blowhards acting at a high school level of maturity rather than yelling at one another like a bunch of kindergartners. Network executives appear to appreciate this! From the Times: