• As expected, Barack Obama has been named Time's person of the year. [Time]
• Oprah has negotiated a deal to produce movies for HBO. [Reuters]
• It appears the end is near for Lenny Dykstra's Players Club magazine. [NYP]
• News Corp. is moving its listing from the NYSE to the NASDAQ. [NYT]
• American Idol was the most time-shifted show in primetime in 2008. [Reuters]
• Cutting web staff seems to be a popular way for magazines to keep their print titles afloat. [NYO]

Lovable, tobacco-spewing former ballplayer Lenny "Nails" Dykstra is having serious problems at his new ballplayers-with-money magazine Players Club. Proving you don't have to be a media professional to run a magazine into the ground:

In an announcement overshadowed by the news of a man dressed as Santa receiving a parking ticket (the nerve!), Time has named Barack Obama Person of the Year.

Former newspaper mogul and current jailed columnist Conrad Black says that Michael Wolff's book about Rupert Murdoch was all wrong, and furthermore, that Conrad Black is a heroic innocent man:

By now, we've seen lots of fly-on-the-wall, non-MTV-sanctioned psychodrama between the Real World Brooklyn kids, who had to do much of their filming in Manhattan due to Brooklyn bars not wanting them around.

Finally, hero president George W. Bush is speaking out on the terrorist shoe assault that shook the world to its very core. He doesn't want the attacker's violent jailers to "overreact." Our beatific leader!:

Mexican Playboy denies that cover photo of woman in white posing in church with tagline "Te Adoramos, Maria" is "intended to portray" the Virgin Mary. Others say lying and lust are both sins. [Ad Age]

Have you guys been able to enjoy the news at all with this big AP byline strike? Been going on since Sunday? Anybody? Hello?

The Huffington Post announced just weeks ago that it had landed $25 million in new investments. Now, their traffic is (predictably) plunging. Arianna Huffington's dealmaking abilities are awesome.

Caroline Kennedy, do you seriously want to be a Senator? Don't you know people are going to start asking uncomfortable questions about, say, your marriage?

• The bloodletting at CBS is underway. [THR]
• Macmillan Publishing and FSG are both trimming staff. [AP, NYO]
• Ad spending for the first nine months of this year fell 1.7 percent. [WWD]
• Katie Couric, Campbell Brown, and Rachel Maddow will appear in the next issue of Vogue. [TVN]
• Sean Hannity's Alan Colmes-less show begins January 12th. [NYT]
• The Disney Channel is taking its act to Russia next year. [NYT]
• The most amusing corrections published this year. [Regret the Error]

Time's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney became Joe Biden's spokesman yesterday, but he's definitely not a biased liberal, according to Time editor Richard Stengel—an even bigger confirmed media liberal Democrat:

Slate columnist and randy ex-governor Eliot Spitzer showed up at a Slate party last night at—get ready for this, guys—Happy Ending, a former rub-'n-tug spot. Oh, you! Then he gave this soulful quote:

With this "holiday" card, Fox is again on the wrong side of the "War On Christmas" it's so worried about. And apparently this is supposed to totally make up for smearing all those reporters:

We heard Time's Washington Bureau chief Jay Carney was leaving the magazine, but now we hear the stunning reason: to be VP Joe Biden's communications director. Carney was in the tank all along!

These last few months, Fox News anchor Shep Smith has been acting weird. Liberal weird. Now we're sure something's wrong, because good ol' Shep is talking up Hussein Obama, and talking down god:

The celeb-intern trend is out of control, and it's partially our fault! Playing the "fabulist angle" forward, model-socialite-publishing heiress Lydia Hearst is interning for Blackbook.

Where did disgraced governor and brush-fanatic Blago get his hair? Astute Simpsons historian and Gawker videoguy Mike B. points out that it was clearly from "ancient Simpsons pre-Kent Brochman anchor Scott Christian."

It's only been one day, and already Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who terrorized George W. Bush with high speed shoe projectiles, is already a full scale national hero. Viva los zapatos (in Arabic)!

Tina Brown — who once edited Tatler, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker and Talk — has reinvented herself by editing a website that mixes high and low culture. Where have we heard that before?