• Time Warner's Q4 performances beat analysts' expectations and sent the stock price up 4 percent. Which I sentence we thought we might never write again. [NYT]
• San Francisco alt-weekly Tim Redmond editor really, really hates Craig Newmark. As all other newspaper people should too, really. [SFBG]
• Teen Vogue's Gina Sanders named Conde Nast's Publisher of the Year, which means she'll get something like a free European vacation. We really need to be moving to the publishing side. [WWD]

• Now, Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson will take turns joining Elizabeth Vargas on World News Tonight. We really hope they can work George Stephanopoulos into that rotation, too. [NYT]
• CBS Newser John Roberts decamps for CNN. If your bosses told you they had no idea who'll be the next anchor but they're sure it won't be you, you'd leave too. [Public Eye]
• High-ranking laddie Andy Clerkson grows up and moves out. The Dennis Publishing editorial director will leave his job, summer in Montauk, have a kid, and move back to England. [WWD]
• One of the many companies that isn't buying the Observer: Reed Elsevier. [NYP (last item)]
• NYO on NYT: Ric Burns to produce docu on the Gray Lady, and war gets in the way of Jill Abramson and Maureen Dowd's planned trip to Iraq. [NYO (second and third items)]

• ABC anchor, cameraman show improvement after surgery. [ABCNews.com]
• Ted Koppel is a sucky op-edster, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Even Dave Barry thinks newspapers are dead. [SFChron]
• Daily News TV editors doesn't get Jon Stewart's jokes, care much for the guy, or, it seems, care much for Stewart's fans. What was that, Dave, about newspapers being irrelevant? [NYDN]
• Syd Schanberg has misty water-colored memories of covering Donald Trump. [VV]
• Unsurprisingly, Pinch thinks everything at the Trib is just fabulous. When you're a scion, there is no rain on your parade. [AJR]
• Live like Anna: Vogue Living is on its way. [WWD]

• The Onion Diet: Move to New York, eat sushi, slim down. [NYT]
• Sez Dumenco: Magazines will soon start to die, too, and Anna Wintour will lose her Town Car, and it's all Lucky's fault. Of course, he says it with words like "transactionality." [Ad Age]
• WSJ discovers people. [WSJ]
• Jack Shafer says newspapers better give him what he wants, or else they're just gonna wither and die. [Slate]
• Joel Stein, says Jon Friedman, is just like Oprah Winfrey. But, you know, poorer and whiter and Jewier. [MW]
• Journo types who drink tab: David Edelstein, Steve Brill, David Bradley, and Danny Goldberg. Now you know. [New Yorker]
• Layoffs at Blender. [WWD (second item)]
• Journalism needs to more money and time from owners, more facts, more international coverage, and more tough questions, says Dan Rather. Also, it would very much like a pony for its birthday. [LAT]
• If CW — the WB-UPN amalgam — works, a CNN-CBS News merger could finally happen. [Mediaweek]

• Everything at the Times is great, says Sulzberger! He loves Bill Keller! His job is totally secure! The staff is all happy! And he still believes, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart! [MW]
• Stephen Colbert, fake blowhard political pundit, to emcee annual White House Correspondents Association dinner, filled with real blowhard political pundits. Also, universe to collapse just a little bit further. [FishbowlDC]
• Finally, some good news: Magazines aren't necessarily going away. [National Journal]
• Hed: "'First-Ever' Urban Gay Men's Lifestyle Magazine to Get U.S. Debut." You know, except for Details. (And we won't even get started on its name.) [Folio:]

• New anchors ain't helping World News Tonight's ratings. [WSJ]
• Details publisher Chris Mitchell was trying to get out, but Conde kept pulling him back in. [WWD]
• Cathie Black, feminist, and Bill Buckley, conservative, get MPA lifetime-achievement awards. [Ad Age]
• Whither poor, UPN-less Channel 9? [NYT]

• Because there just aren't enough glossy mags about celebrity gossip: Page Six magazine, coming in February to a newsstand near you. [WWD]
• For the first time, Mr. Sulzberger goes to Switzerland. And various other Timesiana. [NYO]
• Also, Mr. Sulzberger has taken valuable lessons from all his fuckups. Really. [MW]
• Hell with Couric. CBS News should give Diane Sawyer the Evening News chair. [NYO]
• Steve Brill gives money to Yale to make more journalists. Because what the media business needs in more Ivy kids. [NYT]
• How a rant becomes a letter to the editor. [CJR]

• Did Oprah know Frey was full of shit, and when did she know it? Likely before he was on her show, it now seems. [NYT]
• Channel Thirteen honcho to be new PBS chief. Tote bags for everyone! [NYT]
• 156K become paying members of TimesSelect in its first four months; Dowd starts mining list for potential dates. [E&P]
• Tired of tracking just Newhouses and Wassersteins and assorted Sulzbergers? It seems Florios are now invading 4 Times Square, too. [WWD]

• Simon Dumenco has a new media quiz for you. Yee-haw. [Ad Age]
• Breaking: In unmediated blog comments threads, people sometimes say bad things. [NYT]
• NYT reorgs Washburo, aiming for more investigative pieces, more and better explanatory journalism, and more D.C.-culture coverage. [Media Mob/NYO]
• What do you Radarites do while Maer goes a-hunting again? Take new gigs! For starters, Christ Tennant's at Page Six, Chris Knutsen's at Best Life, and Remy Stern's trying to be an entrepreneur. [WWD (second item)]
• Even on satellite radio, Stern now runs up against standards and practices. Which seems to defeat the purpose, no? [NYP]

• WP shuts off comments on a blog, because snooty MSM can't handle real reader's opinions. Or something like that; we haven't yet read the how-bloggers-should-be-dismissive memo. [NYT]
• TV news stars go to NPR to do reporting, get tote bags. [WSJ]
• This week fickle Jon Friedman crushes on Salon's Rebecca Traister. Because nothing's hotter than a chick who writes about chicks. [MW]
• MSLO had a good year, and only very partially because the boss got out of jail. [Folio:]
• Bonnie Fuller to speak to Columbia j-school; j-schoolers to throw themselves into Broadway traffic upon realizing they spent all that money to train for this? [WWD]

• CBS News chief Sean McManus won't say that Katie's his dream anchor, but he does say that the next anchor will be named within a year, will be a solo anchor, will not come from within CBS, will be a known persona, and will have covered a lot of big stories at a network. Later, he added that the new anchor, while not necessarily Katie, will be female, perky, and willing to undergo an on-air colonoscopy. [NYT]
• Why are guests willing to go on O'Reilly? Masochism, clearly. [Boston Phoenix]
• Huh. Turns out James Brady has done a whole hell of a lot more than just those inane celebrity interviews in Parade. We had no idea. Cool. [Forbes]
• In the latest twist of the ever-amused saga of The Source, the board fires co-founders Dave Mays and Benzino. [NYP]
• OK! encourages its staffers to go on all-expense-paid junkets. Shit, now we kind of want to work there. [WWD]
• New chief at Time4 Media. [NYP]

• James Risen wouldn't show Times editors his spying book until a week before it came out — and even then only after they signed an NDA. We can't imagine Denton even stifling a laugh if we tried the same thing. [NYO]
• MPA chief "regrets" making donation to conservative group Abramoff suggested. Just as we're sure Bob Ney regrets taking all those perks Abramoff offered. And Abramoff, we're equally sure, regrets offering them. [Ad Age]
• It's a dorky thing to be excited about, but, still, we're dorks: The Observer website finally gives each article its own URL, and our long national nightmare is over. [Jossip]
• Now only TimesSelect subscribers can email the paper's op-ed columnists. We hope, for Maureen's sake, that Aaron Sorkin's a TimesSelecter. [E&P]
• Jon Friedman misses Walter Cronkite. [MW]

• Who'd have thunk it? CBS Evening News sees rising ratings, happy staff. [LAT]
• The newsweeklies are cutting their overseas bureaus and — stop the presses! — media do-gooder types think this is bad. [IHT]
• Judy Miller's tough post-Times life: Joining David Brooks on a panel at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]
• In honor of the Dr. King, Simon Dumenco confesses his dream: That one day bloggers and newspaper reporters will join hands together and sing "We Shall Overcome." [Ad Age]

• Martha Stewart is planning a new mag, this one for "modern, multitasking" women aged 25 to 45. Most significant: In a shocking bout of narcissism-suppression, it's called "Blueprint," not "Martha Stewart Blueprint." [NYP]
• Sumner Redstone — who may or may not have been in a senile flight of nonsense when he said it — claims to dream of combining CNN and his CBS News. Just like Steve Brill suggested, oh, seven years ago. [B&C]
• Dana Stevens's take on Vargas and Woodruff: Fine, competent, but definitely not PJ. [Slate]
• Jonathan Dahl is the new editor of SmartMoney. [NYT]

• Hurrah: Mag ad revenues were nicely up in 2005. [Folio:]
• Boo: Mag ad pages barely rose in 2005. [Ad Age]
• Kurt Andersen is the godfather of snark, says Jon Friedman. And we fear for the day — and that day may never come — when Kurt calls upon us to do a service for him. [MW]
• Robin Williams made an ass of himself at Jann Wenner's big birthday bash. [WWD]
• TW COO Jeff Bewkes agrees with his boss, that the company shouldn't be split up, rather than with Carl Icahn, who thinks otherwise and is harassing his boss. Shocking news, that. [MW]

• The Post and the News, after years of fighting a circ war, will now be fighting a real ad-sales war, too. Fun! [Ad Age]
• OK! isn't so much, so price drop TK soon. [Independent (London)]
• It's a shitty time to be a journalist. Or, at least, to be a real journalist, the kind of who writes shit the government cares about. [NYer]
• 60 Minutes suddenly likes sports stories. Which we're sure nothing to do with ratings, at all. [NYT]

• More cuts at Time Inc.: This time, Time's London bureau! [WWD]
• Angry Simon Dumenco hates pay-per-use media content, and he thinks you do, too. Also, he hates the electronics industry for not being as smart as Tim Berners-Lee. [Ad Age]
• Today was Stern's first day on Sirius. Did you listen? We didn't. [NYT]
• Ah: The Observer listened, and discovered he said "fuck" a lot. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Media's still a man's world, says David Carr. (Though, of course, it wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl to buy the shelter celeb mags.) [NYT]
• People like snark, says Jon Friedman, who snags this delightful dek: "Commentary: Accent is on commentaries, not reporting." [MW]
• Big media sometimes doesn't credit blogs, and that makes Greg Lindsay sad. [MB]

• Timesman James Risen, who broke the domestic-spying story, is humble, modest, and likes to eat at Subway. Also, he ain't looking to move to the L.A. Times. [MW]
• How will Jann Wenner celebrate his 60th birthday? By having 142 of his best pals for dinner at Le Bernardin, where they'll be entertained by Bruce Springsteen. They best part, though: The party is being hosted by his wife, Jane Wenner, and his boyfriend, Matt Nye. [WWD]
• Prof thinks pundits' accuracy should be tracked. Perhaps in a handy-dandy "Pundit Scorecard." Why hasn't anyone thought of that before? [WSJ]
• There's a new literary superagency on the block: Folio. We sort of hope superagents dress in capes and codpieces, because that would be fun. [GalleyCat]

• Bush could out-Nixon Nixon and prosecute the Times and its reporters and editors for publishing domestic-spying story. Which would both suck and not be at all surprising. [Boston Phoenix]
• One, very small upside of the miners-are-saved-oh-no-they're-not disaster and debacle: Editors actually got to yell, "Stop the presses!" [NYT]
• WP pulls newspapering into the early 20th century, announcing forthcoming launch of Washington Post radio. [WP]

• James Risen's State of War — the impending publication of which forced the Times to finally publish the domestic-spying story — also makes Judy Miller's WMD excuses fall apart. [NYO]
• Still, the domestic-spying articles were better than the book is, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Lunatic talking head Bill O'Reilly promises to "get into the lives" of Bill Keller and Frank Rich if (perhaps imagined) Times attacks on him continue. We really hope he does, because Keller would be so much sexier if he were a little less earnest. [Media Matters]
• Yesterday was CBS's first day as its own company. Well, except for all those all days as its own company. [WP]
• New Oxygen show features middle-aged women partying with college guys. We're pretty sure we saw that same show on Cinemax once. [NYT]
• Not-quite-victorious — but still really good — GMA staffers get cheesy commemorative trinkets. [NYO]
• Jon Friedman is clearly smoking crack, as proved by (among other things) his prediction that MSNBC will beat CNN and Fox News in 2006. [MW]
• Latest Q-ratings study shows Katie Couric isn't as popular as she used to be. Clearly not in the polling sample: Les Moonves. [WWD]