Here's another reason to finally cancel your landline telephone and just use your cell: home phones are "really, really easy" to tap, according to a Times digest of lessons from the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano, the Los Angeles private investigator of journalists and movie moguls. Anyone tapping my line would mainly just hear me calling my own mobile phone to determine which pocket I left it in. But in case you actually conduct secure communication from home, or like to indulge in the occasional Raymond Chandler fantasy, here are the key attack vectors:

The Strand, the humongous New York bookstore by Union Square that is like one of the biggest used book stores ever of all time, has always attracted lots of young workers who take the low pay in exchange for the cool factor of working at the place, and the chance to be around books all day. One negative: the store is run by a despised woman named Nancy Bass Wyden (trivia: she's married to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden). I've known several people who worked at The Strand, and they universally agree on her tyranny. Now, the New York Press has actually done some investigative work on the claims, and it's found evidence for allegations of racial discrimination, callous disregard for pregnant women, and—most terrifyingly—"fungus from rats."

Sometimes a brief, seemingly casual line in a news story can set it head and shoulders above the competition. That was the case with the Times' coverage of movie star Uma Thurman's testimony against her alleged stalker yesterday in New York State Supreme Court. A trembling Thurman told a jury about a disturbing card that included "a picture of a headless bride" and the inscription "My hand should be on your body." The defense tried to paint the alleged stalker, Jack Jordan, as crazy "in love" but benign and compliant. Jordan carefully avoided looking at Thurman during her testimony — important when you're accused of being her stalker, presumably. But one detail, which eluded the Post, Daily News and People, among others, indicated Jordan was still more than a little obsessed with Thurman:

The Yale Daily News has uncovered a bombshell: The University Dining Services-operated Thain Family Cafe secretly replaced its caffeinated espresso with decaf beans. They've been serving useless, unstimulating brown water to caffeine-fiending students since April 15, with no intention of revealing the ruse. This scrappy student paper got their hands on the documents that prove it: "An unsigned letter received by the News last week included a supposed photocopy of a Thain Café logbook entry from Feb. 29 that reads: 'We will also run out of reg. espresso and French roast most likely—secretly use decaf espresso to substitute the espresso—for the French, I don't know—I think we'll just have to be out.'" Cafe Manager Brian Yezierski denied the charges. But! Journalism!

If the New York Post had to name three things that it can't stand, those things would be: cultural sensitivity, wisdom, and peace (fourth: stepping on gum). That's why the paper is outraged that "the Bush administration has gone all PC in the War on Terror." They've stopped using words like "jihad" and "Islamo-fascism" because they may be provocative or offensive. The Post's jaw literally dropped onto the floor at that news! Right onto the floor! So the neocon, Murdoch-owned scandal sheet had to evoke the memory of prominent socialist revolutionary George Orwell to help it call for harsher language about the Arabian menace:

Any smoker who moved to New York from another state has probably reflected on the fact that they could make a lot of easy cash just by filling up a U-Haul truck with cheap cigarettes from back home and driving them into the city. And boy would they be right! Congressman Peter King has helpfully crunched the numbers for an editorial in the Post today, and now we are seriously considering getting into the Newport-smuggling business full time. Upside: you can make $50K in a single trip. Downside: according to Peter King, you will probably use that money to finance "another 9/11-style attack." Also: Peter King loves to use the phrase "butt-smuggler":

Rabid New York Post attack columnist and X-ray pornographer Andrea Peyser finally weighs in today with her take on the Miley Cyrus uproar, and a breathless city exhales. She's upset! Now she has to add Miley to the list of pop stars "not welcome in my house" (you're on there too, Jamie Lynn Spears). But she reserves most of her contempt for Miley's dad Billy Ray Cyrus, a "one-hit wonder who lives like a leech off his billion-dollar baby." Zing! We agree the photo of the two together was a little weird. But Peyser is also mad that Billy didn't stop his teen daughter from being such a freaking idiot when she opens her mouth:

The LA Times' current news headlines: Everyone at home and abroad is dead. (Click to enlarge)

The New York Times Company is back in the money, baby! "Boston.com today announced that Cheapflights.com will serve as its exclusive travel search provider. " In a made-up related story, Cheapflights.com is now the exclusive travel provider for journalists everywhere, you better believe. [NYT Co.]

This email has been floating around for a week or so, but we're going to run it as a public service. It was first circulated by a PR guy named Peter Shankman as a classic "How Not To Pitch A Reporter" lesson. In this case, the email pitch below was sent to a hedge fund reporter. That is to say, a professional journalist who spends his days chronicling the ins and outs of the secretive high finance world. So one might have expected that a PR firm would cull its email blast list just a bit before it went to work on behalf of its "Long Island based car shop" client. But no! Pitches like this are why reporters hate PR people. CAN YOU GUESS WHICH PR AGENCY THIS CAME FROM? The full pitch (to, again, a hedge fund reporter), and the stunning reveal of the agency's identity, after the jump.

The Times profile of Rupert Murdoch's man at the Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson, reinforces much of what was already known about the newsroom leader. He is good friends with the News Corp. chairman, charming to coworkers, a proven news chief and has responsibilities at the Journal that have long outstripped his title of "publisher." But the Times story adds new information that makes it sound like Thomson will play good cop to Murdoch's bad cop:

Martin Gee is a designer at the San Jose Mercury News, which, like every other paper, has been gutted by budget cuts, layoffs, and buyouts recently. One night on a whim he took a camera and shot a series of photos inside the almost abandoned newsroom. They do an amazing job of capturing the junkyard aura of the place [PDN via Animal]. It's newsroom-as-battlefield, the day after. You can see his full set of photos here. Below, our five favorite shots.

The newest reports on Marcus Brauchli's departure from the Wall Street Journal offer a fresh list of slights inflicted on the outgoing managing editor by Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants, beyond that time the News Corp. chairman forgot to call on Brauchli during an introductory speech to Journal staff. Murdoch and his men also kept Brauchli in the dark about Project Eagle, the Journal's British edition, until one week prior to launch, when Brauchli reportedly discovered it at a New Jersey printing plant, deeming it "cartoonish." Brauchli's chosen editor for the paper's new glossy magazine was tossed aside for a Murdoch lieutenant and his vision for it scrapped. And Brauchli's authority was sufficiently undercut that on a recent trip to the San Francisco bureau he began explicitly invoking Murdoch's name to explain some plans for the future, not even making the pretense of broad consensus among top editors. "My view of that situation is, and I'm hard-pressed to think how anyone could think of it differently, is Rupert Murdoch is the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal," media writer Michael Wolff told the Observer. All the more important, then, to look at new information on where Murdoch wants to take the paper.

In a cost-cutting move that is, frankly, kind of sad, the DC bureau of the legendary Hearst Newspapers chain has moved into the same office space as McClatchy's DC bureau [E&P]. "They just have a small area in the back of our offices, they have three rows of work stations," a McClatchy manager said. Your front line watchdogs of democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Among the new denizens of the cramped, back office workspace is 87 year-old Hearst columnist and prime Bush tormentor Helen Thomas. She really deserves better. But, death of print and all that. Below, a classic news conference clip of Thomas questioning the president about the Iraq war, to his discomfort.

Is there anything worse about being a reporter than transcribing? Well, maybe, but listening (and relistening) to tape from an interview is one of the most mind-numbing tasks in journalism. Actually, your mind can't even turn numb, because you need to be at attention the whole time. Added to the fun is hearing your voice on tape, which at first makes you wonder why you haven't been punched in the face more for your bizarre inflections. Once you get to the top of the journalism heap, though, you can just get American Apparel models to transcribe for you! As long as your husband hired them to intern at his legendary literary magazine, anyway. Even if you yourself aren't actually writing for that particularly legendary literary magazine!

AngryJournalist.com, the rant-based website that serves as an online barometer of the journalism zeitgeist, has started selling t-shirts. Why is this bad? Well, it means that the site's founders have been thus far unable to properly monetize their online content. Of course, they're journalists (not really, but it sounds better)! Coincidentally, that's about the level of insider joke that you'll find on their t-shirts, as well. Still, we'll be buying the "Print Is Dead" one for Nick Denton to wear triumphantly to media parties. Click through for a few more examples, or visit the crotchety store here.

"Star New York Ranger and man-about-town Sean Avery is out to build up his résumé this summer - by interning at Vogue... He wrote a letter to Anna Wintour expressing his desire to work there... Avery likely will work with a variety of editors, including European editor at large Hamish Bowles. There's also talk of him working at Men's Vogue. And the spokesman claimed that, like most interns, the 28-year-old Avery will be expected to do traditional assistantlike tasks." [WWD]

He's a freedom-hating crazy and everything! Not really, but sufficiently so in his debut column to fascinate the WSJ op-ed regulars: "The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup." [Radar] (Image via TCFrank.com)

Which is funnier: hippie college kids engaging in a weed smoking festival, or the local paper trying to cover that event in respectable language? You decide! In honor of 4/20, 10,000 kids at the University of Colorado hit the quad for a massive smoke-out, and the Boulder Daily Camera was on the scene to record all the magical high-ass quotes that spilled forth from the participants. Here is just one, from freshman Emily Benson: "We're at the starting point of a movement," she said. "This is a big part of the reason I applied here — for the weed atmosphere." Ha, yes you did! And there are so many more:

Those young reporters at the Cypress Bay High School newspaper who are starring on the new MTV reality show "The Paper" better straighten up and fly right before they learn some hard lessons that grizzled journalism veterans already figured out, according to Middle Tennessee State University newspaper writer and senior journalism major Andy Harper. These kids should have known that journalists are here to relay the hard news, not mess around with this reality TV thing—a genre in which "everyone loses." Indeed, they could have asked senior journalism major Andy Harper for a bit of advice before they went and let their on-camera kissing and alcohol sipping leave their "byline tattered with a mixture of mud and shame."