So, what's happening in Boston today? An outpouring of grief from the Boston Herald! The paper runs what may be the biggest correction of all time, size-wise: a front page splash apologizing to the New England Patriots for alleging that the team had videotaped an opponent's practice session. The original story ran February 2—the day before the Super Bowl, which the Patriots lost. Since the team obviously suffered morale failure from this traitorous blow by their hometown rag, this was really the least the Herald could do. (News of the apocalypse, P. 24). Click through for a larger picture.

When Cablevision's ruling Dolan family—famous for making reporters' lives hell as they try to cover the Dolan-owned New York Knicks—became the new owners of Newsday , every media reporter in the city simultaneously realized that they could write a funny story about how the asshole Dolans probably won't even speak to their own company's new reporters. And everyone obliged! The Observer wraps the story in a nice little bow, detailing how Newsday editors got "screamed at" for sending a reporter to the Dolans' house. And while the paper's top editors are now obliged to be nice to the Dolans, most of the reporters are pissed off or just sad, as their quotes show pretty plainly:

Well. The Times sent some poor stringer to ask about salmon diseases at some port in Chile. Fun gig! One can understand why he was maybe inclined to get his interviews done and get the hell out. Fish smells gross! Still, he might've wanted to ask around a bit more after his interview with the "port director." He might've learned that that guy was, in fact, the security guard. "Had The Times been aware of his actual position at the time, it would not have cited him as an authority on the contents of the bags, which were labeled medicated food." Well heck, why didn't the Times just say "the port director might've said" and saved themselves the trouble of getting that pretend expert opinion? Text of the correction below.

The Observer covered NBC's press conference anointing never-funny (but cute!) former SNLer Jimmy Fallon the new king of late-late night. They included this anecdote: "Mr. Fallon claimed his kindergarten yearbook featured his photo above the caption 'Most Likely to Take Over David Letterman.' (Someone in the crowd, possibly auditioning to be Mr. Fallon's sidekick, let out an audible 'Wow' at this point.) When asked what kindergarten had yearbooks, much less ones with references to David Letterman, Mr. Fallon joked, 'It's a magical kindergarten. It's taught by a unicorn, a talking unicorn.'" See? He's doing some of that funny joking-around stuff the late-night comics do. But no one told the Associated Press, as you can see in the attached story. [NYO, AP]

Jake Adelstein is an American reporter who spent the last 15 years covering Japanese organized crime for that nation's largest paper. I have to admit I always thought the Japanese yakuza crime syndicates were some overblown fantasy movie creation, but turns out they're actually very real, 80,000 strong, and they want to kill Jake Adelstein. You learn something new every day! Adelstein got along with the cops and the gangsters fine for a while, until he tried to break a scoop about the "John Gotti of Japan" flying to the US for a liver transplant. "Erase the story or be erased," said the gangsters, dramatically. So Adelstein decided to hold off on the story until things blew over. But that plan didn't quite work out:

Doesn't quite understand its audience: "'People don't come to us for explicit content,' said [CEO Christie Hefner]. 'In fact, they'd be very disappointed if that's what they were looking for and they bought Playboy magazine or went to Playboy.com.'" [Times]

New Yorker fact checkers are freaking out about submissions from comic writer and accused bullshitter David Sedaris, so sister Amy Sedaris (also comic writer, arguably funnier) had some fun: "Once, a checker asked Amy to verify if it was true that 'David paid her a dime for a chicken leg at childhood dinners.' But the comic star caused havoc when she jokingly said she was actually paid 20 cents, forcing the checker to call David back about the conflicting facts in his piece." [Post]

Alyse Myers, a Times vice president, recently published a book about her cruel mother. Perhaps you heard about it last week in the Times, where it received a glowing if stilted and end-spoiling review. Or perhaps you missed that review but caught Myers' essay in this past Sunday's Times magazine, in which Myers revisits the topic of her mom, and gets another nice plug for her book. Granted, it was Mother's Day Sunday, so the book was topical. And, granted, Myers' employ at the Times was disclosed in both articles. But so much kind coverage so quickly on a Times executive lends at least the appearance of favoritism. And according to one email tipster, Times staffers are upset not only at appearances, but at Myers' behavior, as well:

The Parents Television Council—the shrill right-wing arbiter of entertainment morality last seen reprimanding companies for associating with rappers—is now busy condemning the brilliant, violent, and controversial new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Unfortunately for the forces of purity, the Council decided to do its condemning primarily by making things up:

Animal NY street chronicler Bucky Turco took the bait of our sighting this morning of the elusive British stencil artist Banksy. Bucky traipsed over to Thunder Jacksons in the West Village and captured THE FIRST PICTURES of this new Banksy piece, which have just increased the value of the building 25-fold [UPDATE: Or have they? Gothamist says this work is by Nick Walker, not Banksy. We're investigating. More to come.]. Click through for some larger pics of the three-part work, and then go over to Animal NY to read some more clues that Bucky gleaned about the artist . Journalism in action:

This week Susan Edgerley, an assistant managing editor, is answering questions from the public on the New York Times' website. Her job, according to her, is "to listen to the career aspirations of the people in the newsroom and help them realize them," and to help the paper integrate its web and print operations more closely. But according to a tipster with a grudge, Edgerley's real title at the Times should be Shouter-In-Chief!:

Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor responsible for publishing the controversial Muhammad cartoons that caused a global Muslim fundamentalist uproar in 2006—and which still threaten the life of one of the artists, who has been condemned by Osama Bin Laden— has a message for all the American papers that refused to publish pictures of the cartoons even as they were writing news stories about them: thanks a lot, pussies.

Yesterday the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal suit alleging police racially profiled Leonardo Blair, a black New York Post reporter who said he was arrested and harassed for simply walking down the street with his fiancée. The same day, his bosses at the Post ran an editorial saying there was too much fuss made over racial profiling:

Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008.

The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."

There are so many possible stories for the front page of a national business newspaper this morning. The new Democratic primary votes, for example, or the UBS banker detained amid a tax evasion investigation, or the multi-billion-dollar loss at home loan giant Fannie Mae. And The Wall Street Journal made room for some of that today, but it also decided its cover wouldn't be complete without a first-person account of the trial of Uma Thurman's stalker. Reporter Emily Steel was lucky enough to be allowed on the jury in the movie star's case, and as you read her story, you can just see Rupert Murdoch, head of Journal owner News Corp. and frequent presence at the newspaper, rubbing his hands together in glee, his taste for the sensational and drive to broaden the WSJ beyond business both satisfied.

Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative rarity. More common—and more threatening, if you happen to be a US newspaper employee—is the large-scale outsourcing of advertising department work. People in India can assemble newspaper ads just as well as people here, and "many sources agreed that a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that metro newspapers can realize a savings of about $500,000 a year when ad production work is offshored."

In the following clip, Hillary Clinton is asked to choose between celebrities Ellen DeGeneres, Simon Cowell and Jimmy Kimmel as a vice president. "Who would you pick and why?" asked Mary Alice Haney, of MomLogic.com and TV channel Extra. The only appropriate response, of course, would be for Clinton to use the lasers behind her cyborg eyes to set Haney's hair on fire, but it's 2008 and the Democratic presidential candidate needs to out-cool Barack Obama and John McCain, so she just laughed (at the sad future of our country) and said they'd all be on her short list. I really wanted her to snap and live up to her reputation as a caustic bitch, but she didn't, not even when asked about inane advice from Cowell. Clip after the jump.

David Rothkopf, a highly educated scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, penned an explosive op-ed for the Washington Post that could upend the global power structure and spark revolution across the earth. Because it seems that our world—far from being one in which each of the 6 billion humans shares in an equal portion of the political, economic, and cultural power, as you had believed—is actually run by a "superclass" of people who control everything. Rothkopf reports, in direct contradiction to everything that your third grade social studies teacher promised you, that very powerful people are, in fact, very powerful. Bummer!