The late, great Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has been given a cinematic boost, thanks to Julie & Julia. And she's not alone.

Three! That's how many days Times reporter Geraldine Fabrikant—one half of the duo behind today's sympathy-for-the-rich piece about the decline of the super-wealthy—spent hanging out in New Mexico with deflated multimillionaire John McAfee. Why are newspapers dying, again?

Kate Major, who quit her Star magazine reporting job after she "fell for" Jon Gosselin and now is very disappointed their love did not flourish: "I have a degree, I'm not some stupid girl." Okay.

In your sweat-drenched Friday media column: Newser's traffic plunches, Rupert Murdoch's paycheck plunges, the likelihood of Sam Zell staying at the Tribune Co. plunges, and The Progressive's bank account plunges.

Former New York Times food critic has been unveiling all his secrets in service of promoting his book—his undercover aliases, his credit card numbers, his weight issues. Today, it's the grand lie that was his fake author photo.

How many fortunate coincidences can one family have? First, three successive generations of Sulzbergers become publishers of the New York Times. Then young A.G. Sulzberger lands a reporting gig there. Now another Sulzberger relatives's joining the paper! Total insanity.

What, exactly, is McKinsey's strategy for cutting costs at Conde Nast? Having parsed today's worthless anecdotal evidence, we now know: Let Vogue do whatever she likes, and make the poor meek New Yorker staffers suffer to make up for it.

Here, perhaps the single most bootleg photo editing job ever, which spared 1971 LA Times readers the horror of seeing Charlton Heston bare-chested. Click to enlarge it right this instant. [LAT via Sociological Images]

In your desperate Thursday media column: America's toddler journalist has a lesson for Wolf Blitzer, college football wants to muzzle bloggers, newspapers burn, and ESPN magazine is mad cheap!

• Get ready to see commercials appear inside magazines. CBS is embedding tiny screens in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly, which will play a clip promoting the network's fall season. What will it look like? Like this. [WSJ]
• Poor Rupert: The billionaire chairman of News Corp. only collected a compensation package of $18 million for the most recent fiscal year, which is down from $30 million, or 40 percent, from a year earlier. [AP]
• David Letterman continues to beat Conan O'Brien in the ratings. [NYT]
• Did Glenn Beck get yanked off the air after stirring up so much controversy recently, or is he on a regularly scheduled vacation? It's a mystery! [Politico]
• 60 Minutes is planning to air a tribute to Don Hewitt this Sunday. [NYT]
• Meghan McCain is returning to The View as a guest host. How thrilling. [NYP]
• Reader's Digest is one step closer to officially filing for bankruptcy. [NYT]
• What is Jayson Blair, the disgraced ex-New York Times reporter, up to these days? He's a "certified life coach" for a mental health facility. [Gawker, AP]

According to Paul Caine, president of the Time Inc. magazine group that includes Entertainment Weekly, the ballpark dollar cost for one of these video units is in the "low teens," although he said the cost may come down before the issue comes out.

When a video of Barney Frank rhetorically picking apart a woman who accused him of being a Nazi gets traction, what do the bunch at Fox & Friends do? They recut the tape so he's attacking the poor lass.

• Don Hewitt, the man who invented 60 Minutes, is dead at 86. [CBS, NYT]
• Those McKinsey consultants at Condé Nast have commenced their work. The first order of business: a review of Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler. [NYO]
• Related: Anna Wintour is "said to have told" Condé boss Si Newhouse that "she would welcome McKinsey to her offices." So welcome, guys! [WWD]
• Nine companies are said to be eyeing BusinessWeek, the struggling title owned by McGraw-Hill. The front-runner, according to the Post's Keith Kelly: financier Bruce Wasserstein, who also owns New York magazine. [NYP]
• Is Fox News going to fire Glenn Beck given all his insane comments and all the advertisers who have since abandoned the show? Alas, no. [DailyFinance]

In your sweaty Wednesday media column: Bruce Wasserstein winning a dubious race, sports columnists are being eaten by Twitter, a Hunter S. Thompson story, and more!

Don Hewitt, a legend at CBS News for decades and the creator of 60 Minutes, has died at the age of 86.

Left: Andrew Hearst imagines what a shotgun merger between Out and Car & Driver might look like. Right: The work of artist Nate Page, who carves out layers of fashion magazines to "reveal the rainbow of colors behind the images," an artistic style, we're guessing, that's become considerably more difficult now that most glossies have been sliced in half. [Vanity Fair, PSFK]

With McKinsey digging around at Conde Nast, it makes sense that quite a few people are shaking in their Chanel boots, one of which may be Anna Wintour now that the consultants are reportedly "taking an early look" at Vogue.

Bloomberg has hired Dan Colarusso as its managing editor for U.S. television. It will be interesting to see how an editor known for his bright-burning departures melds with the combustible financial news company.

• Controversial right-wing columnist Robert Novak is dead at 78. [NYT]
• Sunday's hyped-up premiere of Mad Men attracted lots more viewers, as expected. Some 2.8 million people tuned in, up 33% from last year. [Reuters]
• Struggling studio MGM has dumped its CEO and hired a new one. [WSJ]
• Is Sam Zell going to walk away from Tribune? That's the rumor. [NYP]
• The president will speak at next month's Walter Cronkite memorial. [NYT]
• Steven Spielberg's new movie studio now has $825 million in the bank. The company says it plans to make 21 movies over the next four years. [WSJ]
• It looks like MySpace is buying the site iLike for "around $20 million." [DB]
• Newsday is under fire after rejecting an ad by the Tennis Channel that happened to be critical of the newspaper's parent company, Cablevision. [NYT]
• Irony alert: BusinessWeek, the struggling business mag desperately seeking a buyer, just launched a new website called "The Case for Optimism." [BW]

New York's epic article about Annie Leibovitz in this week's issue is well worth a read, particularly since it sheds a little light on how it is one of the world's highest-paid photographers now finds herself on the brink of financial ruin. (If the only person you'll allow to repair your air-conditioner has to travel to NYC from Vermont to do the work, that's probably not a good sign.) Leibovitz's financial fate will likely be sealed in September when the $24 million loan she secured from Art Capital Group last year is due. Interestingly, though, Leibovitz appears to be hinting that the terms of the loan— which required her to put up the rights to her photos and real estate holdings as collateral—only became apparent to her after the Times reported on Art Capital Group back in February. Friends of the photographer suggest that Leibovitz had no idea she was giving up so much when she took out the loan; they also seem to be shifting some of the blame to Ken Starr, the financial adviser who took the photographer on as a client in 2007 and who was also responsible for introducing Leibovitz to Art Capital Group. Pinning the blame on Starr, who boasts an insanely long list of celebrity clients, may be a hard argument to make.