You know how doctors and elementary school principals all through the land are canceling their subscriptions to Us Weekly in the aftermath of the jihadist pinko rag's biased coverage of Sarah Palin? Well today we learned there may be a "silent majority" of folks who would be doing the exact same thing with the New York Post, right here in New York, but no one hears from them because they don't consume a few metric tons of gas just getting to work every day and are thus subjected to the presence of these innovative small businesses known as "newsstands" on a regular basis, and it is at these operations that liberal-leaning media consumers are casting their votes. "If I had a nickel for every friend of mine who told me they stopped buying the Post every time an election cycle hit," a Post employee told a Gawker operative today…well he'd probably be able to afford a copy of Italian Vogue! The point is, we know the Post's coverage of this Palin crap has been hard on all of you. Some of you may have quit reading it altogether! If so, here is some stuff you've missed. I scanned it in so we wouldn't have to link!

Ha. The illustrious Columbia Journalism Review, stuck in the no-fucking-news months with the rest of us, tracked down John Quinlan, the Sioux City Journal reporter who wrote the most Onion-like real news story of all time, which will forever stand as our single favorite work of journalism. ("Olive Garden arrives" in Sioux City. That guy!). And he's very even-keeled about his newfound internet fame. "I wanted to have a little fun with the story," he says...

The New York Times is always looking for a way to save a little scratch, since the paper is losing revenue like a Bible store in a whorehouse, for lack of more time to think of a better metaphor. So today NYT publisher Arthur "Pinch My Moose" Sulzberger announced the paper is going to be combining the metro section with the main news section, and the sports section with the business section on most days of the week. This will save printing costs but will not shrink the news hole, they say. Full memo from Pinchy to the staff after the jump [UPDATE: And an even more detailed memo about the changes from Times editor Bill Keller]: From Sulzberger:

Do arts organization have an unhealthy relationship with the New York Times? Probably! Tyler Green wrote in the Arts Journal blog about how the NYT and art institutions deals with art news: "In return for receiving stories first, the NYT provides coverage... If the NYT doesn't discover major arts news stories first, it doesn't report on them." Well, yeah—otherwise, it's just kind of embarrassing. While reporting on a story about the National Gallery of Art, he noticed that everyone was holding or keeping off-record the information about their latest major project: "the NGA's chief spokesperson wanted the Villareal item to debut in the NYT."

Katie Couric was supposed to be a terrible overpaid diva whose terrible "soft" overhaul of the CBS evening news had dragged the network down to dead last in the ratings and whose entire career was on life support due to the poor return on investment the network was booking on her annual $15-22 million salary. But look, it turns out her flagging Q-rating has not completely robbed her of all talent and skill! Today's Times suggests this presidential campaign might rehabilitate her broken reputation. Because she gets "more interesting answers" from politicians. Like, holy shit! On Wednesday night, she interviewed Cindy McCain, and it turns out Cindy McCain does not know what Roe V. Wade is! No really, check the transcript:

A select group of New York's "most discerning readers" have been invited to receive a free, one-year, no strings attached subscription to the failing, soon-to-be-nonexistent New York Sun! Their marketing department's belief that a taste of the Sun will cause you to "spread the word about our rare journalistic and literary excellence" is sort of funny but more sad. This is possibly the least valuable free offer of all time. The full exciting letter, below:

Maybe it should have been obvious that the celebrity weeklies were going to politicize as soon as Hillary Clinton and her supporters showed strong resistance, during the primary season, to acquiescing to Barack Obama, thus highlighting the importance of women voters in 2008. But the heightened political importance of the magazines, whose readers are overwhelmingly female, wasn't in anyone's face until this week, when Us Weekly made waves with its controversial "Babies, Lies & Scandal" Sarah Palin cover. The issue, unflattering to Palin, has so far resulted in 5,000-10,000 cancelled subscriptions, MSNBC.com's gossip column is reporting. (Though MSNBC's Courtney Hazlett is close to Us Weekly's rivals; and-see below-the magazine's Janice Min says the losses are overstated.)

It's been more than three years since the identity of Bob Woodward's famed Deep Throat source was broken in Vanity Fair rather than in Woodward's Washington Post, as he had planned. So perhaps the newspaper is not all that bitter that Woodward, a longtime editor there, has yet let another book project emerge first in a competing news outlet. Last night it was Fox News Channel, not the Post, with exclusive first details of Woodward's fourth book on President Bush, The War Within. Among them was the revelation that John McCain, while standing in the West Wing, clenched his fists and said of the Bush team, "everything is f—-ing spin." Now that's a revelation that's well-timed for the McCain campaign. Wonder who leaked to Fox?! (*McCough.*) Anyway, the Post apparently had its own Web story ready on a hairtrigger, and published it, bringing forth slightly terrifying revelations like how a cadre of generals organized to do something about the inept civilian Commander in Chief:

The Associated Press has a celebrity news division, writes long fluffy trend stories and offers opinionated (and controversial) political analysis. So while we haven't really been keeping up with what's going on at Reuters, we probably shouldn't be shocked that the newswire, once focused on financial information, just issued a long feature story asserting that 1> Tinsley Mortimer exists, and 2> that she heralds a new era in which New York socialites like herself pretend to have day jobs. Staying focused on business news seems to have paid off for the tyrannical regime that runs Bloomberg, and there seems to be plenty of high-impact finance stories to chase at the moment, but the temptation to swerve lanes on the information highway — newspapers making video, TV shows soliciting user-generated content, media gossip websites covering the Republican National Convention — is strong. Especially when you can always argue a connection to your core competency — in this case, that rich girls who don't need to ever work now feel the need to start their own businesses:

Is it possible that the dying newspaper industry can be saved by skillful advertising? No, but it can certainly be helped. This ad for Australia's The Age is visually enthralling, and captures the promise of a paper that brings the entire world to your door. Though it's too bad that it also reinforces the fact that video is way more exciting than print. And, you know, it's not an American paper. Still worth watching. [Fitz & Jen]

Just as Sarah Palin was preparing to speak at the Republican convention in St. Paul (more on that momentarily), word bubbled up that the National Enquirer alleged in its print edition that John McCain's running mate had an affair with a business partner to her husband. With the sensational charge, the supermarket tabloid is gambling the measure of respect it has earned from more buttoned-down media in the wake of its reporting on John Edwards's affair with a campaign staffer, which was partially admitted to be true by Edwards himself. And early signs are that it may lose that gamble: The Enquirer issued a wishy-washy statement to the Huffington Post addressing its charges only in the context of other allegations, rather than backing them head-on:

Presumably, Reuters's coverage of the forthcoming Republican convention address by Sarah Palin is based on a pre-distributed written version of the speech, and that's why the report at left was posted at least an hour ago. But shouldn't the future tense be employed, or a disclaimer be included, given that the speech hasn't, you know, occurred yet? Wrote the newswire of John McCain's running mate: "Sarah Palin touted her small-town roots and swiped at Democrat Barack Obama during a highly anticipated speech to the Republican convention on Wednesday, ridiculing her critics as 'the Washington elite' who did not understand everyday life in America." Sounds like someone is angling for a job at Bloomberg! [Reuters]

Could the editors at the Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood and the Huffington Post. Just last year the paper installed new publishing software that couldn't even handle hyperlinks. And yet newsroom "leaders" just spent 18 months in a fucking (ahem) committee debating what swears LATimes.com bloggers should be allowed to use, and when. The byzantine machinations involved some sort of appeal to a "ruling" of a special committee about some formal guidelines, and of course resulted in a tedious and useless memo that should make anyone who ever cared about the once-great newspaper want to slit his wrists. Its insufferable, self-indulgent stupidity lies after the jump. Oh, and it basically says no one can use "pissed off" because it's crude and might tarnish the LA Times's sterling image in the remaining months before the paper's now-all-but-inevitable collapse.

"I mean, just, the conservative elites ... it's actually an intellectual blockage ... that keeps them from supporting this stuff." That is National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru enlightening today's Observer as to why conservative lobbyists don't promote his "pro-growth pro-family" tax initiatives, but why don't we just get hacky and apply it to another sad development for thinking conservatives broken today by the Observer: the New York Sun, a conservative New York daily that secured its initial funding in 2001 from a hodgepodge of investors united most visibly by an abiding love for Israel, has announced it will close at the end of the month unless it secures new funding.Many things have changed since the Sun was founded: lead investor and Chicago Sun-Times owner Conrad Black went to jail, oil went above $100 a barrel, Israel went to war with Lebanon, Bill Buckley died and someone named "Julia Allison" gave birth to something called "microcelebrity," and the embarrassing unbridled jingoism unleashed by the events of September 11 greased the proverbial wheels of a prodigious bounty of lousy deals that would result mainly in death and disillusionment, the latter of which would eventually, mercifully, find itself directed at the Republican Party and the conservative movement that, in addition to God, granted it so much power. But here is what has not changed: conservatives do not really read, which is to say, of course conservatives read but not things that are like, long*, and those who do tend to compartmentalize the pastime as something rather far removed from their ideology, and if that's not the case, well, they would seem to be sufficiently alarmed by the defilement of their once-optimistic "movement" to be directing their information demands at suppliers of cruder, less ideologically-refined sources than the Sun. Of course, this is all blather and speculation; I am merely stating what I believe to be the nature of business conditions in the niche. But it is not just the Rupert Murdochs of the conservative media ideologically softening these days; the nuttycon Washington Times would seem to be on a bid to "mainstream" itself, while the talking heads and bloggingheads running such outlets as the National Review seem primarily to be brokering in new cute phrases: Sam's Club Republicans! The Sourpuss Vote! We've been Palinized! We think you'll agree, if there's anything the industry needs right now, it's de-Palinization.

The Wall Street Journal's new glossy quarterly "Modern Wealth "-themed grab for the pocketbooks of the plutocracy-in-waiting is here!!!! And…would you believe that model's "dress" was "designed" by Roland Mouret? Huh. I can think of some Project Runway rejects who might have done it better for cheap?? But, whatever, it's a fine cover, so let's get down to "business": as we've discussed previously, this magazine is a naked appeal to modern wealthy Journal readers to finally take their ad pages home and leave them toiletside. But don't get it twisted! "The eschatological angst that characterizes much of the newspaper industry does not define Dow Jones," said new managing editor Robert Thomson at a press conference this morning.* Meanwhile, silver-dollar-shaped scones and "flights" of three different types of juice (Juice?) were served and Thomson talked lots of schat on their New York Times counterpart T.Oooooh, how snug indeed, that synergistic Commieloving capitalist News Corp embrace! Nah, for real though: Thomson has a right to be legitimately stoked that his newspaper is just now getting into the "read it at home and peruse it in your leisure hours" business because unlike his pals over at the Times he doesn't have to now endure the wrenching financial fallout of non fetish-inclined old people finally discovering Craigslist. But next time you give a press conference, bro, maybe remember that you're talking to the press, as in the "broke-ass former journalists who have to blog this now because yes, that is what it's come to for most of us" and that a lot of them are past the point of "schatenfraude."

Is Us Weekly biased? That's what Fox News has been saying all morning in light of that "Sarah Palin, Governor of the Rhythm Method State" cover. But (in stark contrast to so many of the other things we hear on Fox News) we did not want to believe Us Weekly had a political agenda, mainly because, as with Fox News, we like to forget that whoever Us Weekly is targeting at is actually allowed to vote. But in the face of mounting evidence that the network might be on to something we gave the issue a thorough examination, and it pains me to report that Us Weekly is biased. So biased. You could be forgiven for wondering if the whole rag wasn't being bankrolled by a big gay homofag! (If not Hamas!!!) Here readers, the evidence:Its owner is Jann (pronounced Yann, like the first syllable of "Yanni") Wenner Jann Wenner not only gives money to Democrats, he has such a hard-on for some Democrats his other magazines have been known to run images of Democratic candidates with sporting actual hard-ons. (Fig. 1) Also, ever since he came out of the closet after in his mid forties, Jann Wenner has been a "known homosexual." Us has a known toxic love-hate relationship with probable neoconservative Angelina Jolie. Despite her estrangement from her Republican father*, Angelina Jolie has persistently refused to tow the typical Hollywood liberal line, telling interviewers she hasn't yet decided which candidate will get her vote in the November election and allowing that she is fond of John McCain. Savvy observers will note, however, that Angelina Jolie's conservative leanings, aired most publicly in her February Washington Post guest op-ed piece supporting the McCain-backed troop surge, actually predate the conception of Bristol Palin's unborn child. Surely Us has been "keeping tabs" on Jolie's political sympathies, and quite possibly applied pressure in the case she threatens to break from the socialist liberal Hollywood homodoxy. Do you think it's a coincidence that their harshest attack on Angelina's fitness for motherhood coincided with the theretofore deadliest form of exactly the sort of insurgent attack the troop surge was engineered to combat? ("Yes" is actually the right answer to that question, just to be clear!) (Fig. 2) Today's headlines speak for themselves. COVER STORY: Sarah Palin: Political Opponent Recalls Being Ridiculed EXCLUSIVE: Cindy McCain's Half Sister: I'm Voting For Barack Obama EXCLUSIVE: Tim Gunn: "No Contest" — Michelle has better style than Cindy Father Of Bristol Palin's Baby: I Don't Want Kids But in fact, Us has been tacitly endorsing Democrat Barack Obama ever since it branded the Illinois senator Just Like Us in February. (No such pronouncement was made of John McCain, whose appearances in the magazine have thus far been limited primarily to his surprise show of support from The Hills star Heidi Montag, which the magazine immediately undermined by quoting Heidi's fiancee Spencer Pratt saying he "didn't think America cared" who Heidi supported.) Meanwhile, when Obama nakedly dodged a question posed by the magazine earlier this year, the magazine managed to "package" it (so to speak) in a way that seemed to paint the Democratic senator in a favorable light. IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, though, the media crit mob is probably right that going all "Kos" on Palin — and seriously, how exactly does a Troopergate cover line sit next to "Halle Berry First Baby Photos!"?? — smacks of hubris and recklessness, if not another outright attempt to distance itself from the heartland and paint itself as the trashy supermarket tabloid of privileged thin Blue Staters who just like killing brain cells. Either way, it's kind of tacky. But um, then, we are the ones who just spent the last hour assessing the policy agenda of Us Weekly.

Wow, those scoop artists at Bloomberg are really on a roll! First they got the exclusive on Apple CEO Steve Jobs's obituary. Sure, Jobs wasn't actually dead, but the report generated all sorts of interesting attention and buzz. Now the financial wire's editors have become the first in the world to report that John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge. Bloomberg arrived at this conclusion after misreading the Times, which reported that Palin's husband was arrested 22 years ago on a drunk-driving charge. Compounding the mistake, a tipster told us, is that the error was silently fixed, with no correction issued — "a verboten act under the Bloomberg way." Perhaps the DC bureau, headed by old Wall Street Journal hand Al Hunt, conspired to guard against anyone's summary dismissal from the unforgiving high-pressure news organization. Click the thumbnail to see Bloomberg's original mistake.

Well, duh to this: MSNBC wants to give their beloved new anchorlady and coiner of the term "post-rational" Rachel Maddow a makeover. (Click through to see Gawker's Steven Dressler imagine the results.) Who doesn't want to give Rachel Maddow a makeover? Rachel Maddow is Every Girl's Best Friend Said Girl Would Love Just .01% More If Said Friend Would Layer Her Hair And Buy A Lipstick Already. I am that friend to a lot of people! Plus there is a storied tradition of anchorwomen celebrating their new jobs with makeovers. Greta Van Susteren got an eye job when she went to Fox, and I heard once that former Wall Street Journal reporter Becky Quick got carded at R-rated movies before she started appearing on CNBC every day in 2000. Oh, but she is a dyke icon you are telling me?So what, she has to be the female Cojo or something? Last I checked dyke icons were still allowed to have haircuts I coveted. And of course Page Six is all over MSNBC for allegedly putting its "glam squad" on Maddow. The hypocrites! But Rachel Maddow, an ex-landscaper a few years fresh from a long career in left-wing activism, has spent her whole entire life not using her irresistible sexuality and expertly applied smoky eye to advance the media ranks. Maybe she wouldn't mind a little glam squad in her life just this one time. Maybe it could be kind of fun. So Rach, and I say this as an avowed enemy of the insecurity industry: fuck the haters, as long as they are paying you to take the day off and enjoy a little microdermabrasion, seize the opportunity. It is good for the economy I hear.

A retired police officer and microbrewer in the town of Weed, California has won the right to use the slogan "Try Legal Weed" in his marketing material—though he's never touched the herb himself. The news gives the LA Times the chance to use up all those weed jokes it had laying around. [LAT]

Dick Morris's political career ended when a British tabloid busted him sucking the toes of a prostitute and allowing her to listen in on his calls with then-President Bill Clinton. That was 12 years ago and would be of little consequence now except that Morris has reportedly just taken a job writing a weekly column called "Political Animal" for Playboy.com. One would expect a salacious gossip section like the Post's Page Six would make a fun little jab over the new gig and the way it recalls Morris' racy past. But then one would remember that Morris leans conservative, appears regularly on Post corporate sibling Fox News Channel and writes a weekly column for the Post itself. Then the tabloid's tame little item about the job makes perfect sense.