♦ Rupert Murdoch says he has no plans to buy the New York Times. He also wants you to know that Fox News chief Roger Ailes is staying put: "He's not going anywhere. He's very happy. I'm very happy with him. We're good friends and we get on well" [SAI]
♦ Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin is official. [AP]
♦ A day in the life of Brian Williams and Erin Burnett, courtesy of the Observer's Meredith Bryan. [NYO]
♦ Newark's Star-Ledger may go under. [NYP]
♦ Consumers don't actually want to surf the web, talk on their cell phones, read a newspaper, and watch TV all at the same time. [AdAge]
♦ The New York Times will begin providing business commentary from Breakingviews.com. [NYT]
♦ Ariel Foxman is the new managing editor of InStyle. [Gawker]
♦ Ratings for the fifth season premiere of House were down from last year's debut, but Fox still managed to beat the competition last night. [TV Decoder]
♦ Craziest idea ever: Steve Irwin's 4-year-old son Bob wants his own wildlife TV show. [NYP]

Katie Couric's career is certainly on the upswing, isn't it? A day after the Times' David Carr called the CBS anchor a "highly skilled interviewer" and naturally funny" and observed that she's been in "the middle of things for the last few weeks" comes word that she'll be the second person to interview Sarah Palin next week. [P6]

If Page Six is to be believed, Sarah Palin's "second big interview" will come next week, when the Republican vice presidential nominee will travel with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric. (Ha ha, apparently Sean Hannity's interview doesn't count as "big," even within News Corporation.) It remains to be seen whether Couric will lay Palin embarrassingly bare as ABC's Charlie Gibson did last week. But just scoring the sit-down adds to the evidence Couric is mounting a sort of comeback from the dark days five months ago when she was said to be leaving CBS. A summary of Couric's oh-so-modest recent victories:

• The premiere of Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and Michael Phelps as guest host generated the show's best season debut since 2001. [THR]

Good news for Katie Couric: the ongoing psychodrama at MSNBC has caused people to forget entirely that she was widely considered a unhappy failure as the anchor of the CBS evening news. Remember how she hated the job, and the criticism, and was going to quit after the elections and take over for Larry King or something? That was a long time ago, and the spectacle of Chris Matthews versus Keith Olbermann versus Joe Scarborough versus NBC News brass versus viewers has basically taken all the negative attention off of poor Katie. As a result, now it is time for people to decide they like her again! First up, Times media person David Carr. David Carr got in trouble for being all sexist about Katie last time he wrote about her, and in this piece he once again reminds everyone that she is "perky" (almost!) and "America's Sweetheart" (almost!). But he also says: "Ms. Couric is a highly skilled interviewer, and people tend to tell her stuff." Of course CBS is still in third place and the fact that MSNBC has sucked all the coverage away from Katie is good, sort of, but also means that no one is talking about Katie and CBS. So she can do all the surprisingly good work in the world, but it won't attract the attention of a Chris Matthews meltdown on a third-place cable network. In other words, we figure she's enjoying herself as anchor for the first time since she started, mostly because she's still going to quit soon, so why not have fun. (Of course she still needs to make sure she's getting that payday before she hands the reigns back to Bob Scheiffer.) [Photo: HuffPo]

• Felix Gillette surveys the recent drama at MSNBC and chats with network president Phil Griffin about the decision to drop Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from anchoring the presidential campaign. [NYO]

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:

There's no news in Denver. At least, no news that couldn't be reported by watching it on C-Span from the comfort of home. So what to do? Report on what all your fellow journalists are doing! So far, the single greatest example of this is HuffPo's constant reportage from their own "HuffPost Oasis" in Denver. At left, an unretouched screengrab from their front page today. The Oasis is remarkably popular with journalists, considering that we have no idea what goes on there but we don't think it involves free booze. Wait, maybe we do know what's going on there! "'I feel relaxed!' said a particularly refreshed Eric Alterman as he stepped away from a complimentary facial for a minute. 'I'll tell you this—everyone should add facials to their lives.'" Oh, wow. That quote is from John Koblin's piece in today's Observer. It's got more gems: Adam Nagourney couldn't find a seat at his own paper's workspace, then bitched about having to cover the convention with so many other, lesser reporters. Fox's Greta Van Susteren, though, was more than happy to be there.

CBS hired anchor Katie Couric to turn return its news division to ratings glory. Didn't happen. So like any good media organization in the 21st century, CBS has resorted to good old-fashioned Diggbaiting. Below a video of Couric in her office, sporting a Digg T-shirt and reading a script — "Oh, hi everybody! Nice to see you. Welcome to CBS News. Sorry about my mess." Putting a woman in well-cut Digg clothing is a trick as old as the site of course. Two years ago alt-porn star Posh Suicide did the same thing, drawing 2,828 Diggs. Couric has a ways to go to catch up: Her video is sitting at a meager 40 votes after 18 hours. But then, we'd already discovered that Digg users aren't quite the slobbering teenage boys spammers assume they are.

• Yet another miserable day for people whose livelihoods depend on ink and paper: Gannett is cutting 1,000 jobs, McClatchy is freezing wages, Cox has put 29 of its papers up for sale, and Tribune is a mess as usual. [Gawker]

Moderators: Lehrer and Gwen Ifill of PBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, Bob Schieffer of CBS. [WSJ]

• Ashley Dupre's reps, who have been negotiating deals on her behalf, say she's interested in "journalism and lounge singing," and that she "sees herself as a kind of Dr. Phil." Appropriately, the $2 million TV offer she's considering would team her up with the producer to reunited Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher. [NYP]

"If [CBS head] Les Moonves wants to get rid of her, he's got to shell out around $40 million. He's tried to get her to move on, and she was like, 'Fine. I'll leave - where's my money?'" [Post]

When Katie Couric read a page from her "notebook" back in June, highlighting sexist media coverage of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, we wondered if maybe she wasn't also talking about herself. Couric was, after all, facing record-low ratings, and her bosses said sexism was partly responsible for viewer apathy. Well, Couric put to rest any doubts she identifies with Clinton in an interview with Haaretz newspaper in Israel, where she is traveling on vacation. In it, she argues that sexism is more common than racism in America, and that she has felt its effects — just like Hillary:

When Barack Hussein Obama summers in his ancestral home of Iraq in a few weeks, along with some other foreign places, the trip will, of course, turn into an elite party for his showbiz friends, all of whom are clamoring for seats on his campaign plane. Katie Couric of the CBS Evening News is arranging an on-trip interview, as is Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News and Charles Gibson of ABC World News. Meet The Press wants to talk to Obama. "Star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines" are also coming, the Times reports for Thursday's paper. So, why all the enthusiasm? John McCain's last big tour in the war zone was relegated to the evening news remainders bin. And the network newscasts have already given Obama 114 minutes of coverage since June, to McCain's 48, according to some study. The official reason: This is Obama's first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. The real reason? Let's ask some starfucking magazine editors!

At two weeks into your garden variety tabloid scandal, the regular spiel starts to get a little old—yes, yes, we know, that brainwashed third-baseman has been giving the aging pop diva the hot beef injection—and so new angles are required. For example, we have Page Six's item today which claims Madonna has been "loving" the attention, and plans on hitting today's All-Star game at Yankee Stadium. "'She doesn't care about the press it will get - she loves it,' said a spy. 'It just gets her more publicity for her upcoming Sticky and Sweet tour.'" How this spy managed to crack the complex Madonna Motivation code we'll never know—but crack it they did!

You know when you get really hungry and you're just dying for a delicious, rich, chocolatey piece of... Allen Grubman? Yes, indeed, you can pick up a slice of "Allen Grubman Double Chocolate Pudding Pie" at the tourist trap the Brooklyn Diner on West 57th Street. (It happens to be a block from Grubman's office.) Here are a few other dishes named after local boldface names.

Answering machine at the Park Avenue apartment of Katie Couric and her two daughters.

Last week brought the appalling news that pill-popping professional idiot Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year, $400 million contract with Premiere Radio Networks. He'll now collect $38 million a year, which he'll probably direct to some of the passions detailed in a NYT Magazine profile of Limbaugh this past weekend, like La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel cigars, private jets (he just purchased a Gulfstream G550) and life-size oil paintings of himself. (The deal also provided him with a $100 million signing bonus.) But what about the rest of the news media heavyweights—how much coin are they taking home annually? The salaries of America's most beloved anchors and blowhards of various political persuasions after the jump.

• A judge has decided to keep Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook's divorce case open, and Diana Bianchi, the teenager Peter cheated on Christie with, says she's willing to testify if need be. [NYDN]