The FT, the Western world's last remaining respected financial paper not owned by Rupert Murdoch, has unveiled an early version of the redesign of its website's homepage. And we'll be damned if it doesn't look way more like a blog than like a traditional newspaper site. The clear messages: the online medium continues to assert its precedence over print; even the rich love blogs; and bloggers all deserve to be paid more money. Click here to peruse the prototype, or click through for a larger picture.

Barack Obama just visited the White House! He's the next president, so he's required by tradition to meet the guy still squatting there through the end of the year. They pose for pictures, then disappear into the Oval Office for a private talk about Russia and Iran and the helicopter button and how the White House Coke machine is free and how you get to call the Redskins and call your own plays that they have to run every Sunday during the season. In other words, no news. The fun stuff doesn't get leaked out for months, sometimes years after both guys are safely out of the office. So how did everyone cover this important event? With babbling about symbolism and historic blah blah and the weather today.

In a move oddly prescient of the HuffPo's model—soliciting mundane content from famous names to make ya look—Esquire is posting celeb and political Thanksgiving recipes from its 1984 issue—Walter Mondale, Nancy Reagan, William Styron, et al. Mmm, tastes like morning in America and trickle-down economics! It raises so many questions: Was Bill Blass being serious with his homoerotic recipe for "Hot Giant Pecans"? Wait, Ted Turner's Applesauce Cake? Was hardline conservative William F. Buckley's recipe for "Thanksgiving Pheasant with Chestnut Cornbread Stuffing" flavored with the blood of the innocent? As it turns out, it's currant jelly:

As the publishing heiress wrote this summer in her now-defunct Page Six magazine column, "It’s official. I am a Playboy cover girl. But get your mind out of the gutter—it’s a different magazine altogether. I was shot for French Playboy, which is very high fashion, sits next to Vogue on French newsstands and isn’t wrapped in plastic. No nudity for me." ...as you can see from the pic. The mag's out now. But why agonize over classy vs. non-classy, nude vs. barely-nude? Girl looks good. There's no need to waffle and get defensive, even though the double standard requires it. [Daily Intel]

What? Why... why is this happening? What is Keith Olbermann doing on The View? Look, there he is, looking weird and uncomfortable. He told them all he doesn't vote (!), and they all yelled at him. All of them! Even stupid Elisabeth Hasselbeck yelled at him, for this not voting, and she is actually totally in the right. Keith does this "not voting is a symbolic stand" thing because he is obsessed with the idea that he is a Big Serious Important Old-Timey News Man. You know who else makes a big point of saying he is so non-partisan that he doesn't vote? Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post. Len, in the words of Michael Kinsley, "does not even allow himself the luxury of deciding whom he would vote for if he was into that sort of thing." We'll freely admit that it is stupid and unfair to say "Keith Olbermann is a big fat liberal" just because he hates George W. Bush with great intensity. It is quite possible to intensely hate George W. Bush as a conservative, a moderate, a libertarian, an Anti-Federalist, a Whig, or a fascist. It is reductive and stupid to equate hatred of George W. Bush and the modern ruling Republican party with any political ideology beyond an affinity for competence and morality in government. And, you know, genuinely unbiased objectivity does sometimes mean saying "Jesus Christ this administration is terrible." That's not a political statement if it's true! But, Keith, it does not make you Serious to say you don't vote. It doesn't change the fact that you would've voted for Obama. It doesn't actually fool anyone, either. None of those View ladies would have any of it! You disappointed Whoopi. So we'll agree that we honestly have no idea what Keith Olbermann's political leanings are beyond hating George Bush if he'll stop pretending to be too Serious-Minded to participate in the vast voting conspiracy. And hey, maybe we'll get a chance, in an Obama administration, to figure out what Keith Olbermann's politics actually are! Because he just signed on through Obama's re-election campaign, hosting Countdown on MSNBC through 2012. NBC even gave him primetime "essays" on the network news and he gets two specials a year on regular NBC. Man. NBC had to give him network gigs to keep him from taking his show and moving to another channel, supposedly, though there is not a channel left, on the TV, that Keith Olbermann has not already worked at. And he left nothing but bad blood at all of them.

You've probably never heard of Bob Cohn, but he played a major role in saving Wired from running aground in 2001. As executive editor, Cohn was the low-key second-in-command to Chris Anderson. He pushed editors and writers to abandon Wired's too-insidery voice and craft a new kind of tech journalism aimed at curious outsiders. Trust me, that sounds great until you try to do it. Starting in January, Cohn will take editorial charge of TheAtlantic.com, reporting directly to editor-in-chief James Bennet. "It's a great website," Bob told me via cell phone just now. Translation: Change a-comin'!

♦ Keith Olbermann has signed a new, four-year contract with MSNBC. He'll earn $7.5 million a year, which is 25 percent less than what his arch-nemesis Bill O'Reilly is collecting from Fox News. [TVDecoder]
♦ MSNBC's new slogan—"Experience the power of change"—has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama's victory, naturally. [NYT]
♦ The job cuts at Time Inc. are underway. People is looking for 18 people to take buyout packages. Time is looking for 20 volunteers. [WWD]
♦ Jared Kushner says revenues at the Observer are up 40 percent, although the paper is still losing $2 million a year. [Guardian]
♦ Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, from DreamWorks/Paramount, reeled in $63.5 million in its first weekend. [NYT]

People magazine just sent out a staff memo soliciting buyout candidates, as part of the 600-person company-wide layoffs announced at Time Inc. two weeks ago. Although People has a large staff, the reporting cuts they seek in both New York and LA—which total 18 editorial employees—would add up to a significant loss of celebrity-watching resources. Click through for the entire memo [UPDATE: and details of similar buyout offers at four other titles]:

Square-jawed Fox News host Greta Van Susteren is out to show that the media is not totally in the tank, by giving a fair and balanced interview to Gov. Sarah Palin right in her own back yard! And by that we mean not just "the state of Alaska," but literally "her own back yard." Greta is chronicling her trip to Wasilla on her very own blog, "GretaWire," which allows us all to take an intimate peek into this cross-continental journalistic excursion. Question: On a scale of 1-10, how much of this trip was for "journalism," and how much was for "Whoa, free snowmobile ride!"? Let Greta's own pictures guide you:
EXCLUSIVE PALIN KITCHEN PHOTO!!!!!

So Joe Scarborough was on his MSNBC show this morning complimenting the Obama team for not going around "saying 'fuck you.'" The problem here, Joe, is that you actually said "fuck you" on air, which you're not supposed to do. Rather, you are supposed to indicate the foul word with a placeholder such as "bleep you" or the more edgy "F-you." But then you'd sound like a serious nerd. On second thought, Joe, just keep on doing your thing. Click to watch the historic video clip of Joe Scarborough, television host, saying the f-word, which leads to Time magazine's Jay Carney grinning outlandishly like a third grader whose best friend just called the teacher a "doo doo head."

Malcolm Gladwell has a new book coming out next month, have you heard? Outliers, for which Little, Brown reportedly paid $4 million, may be his most ambitious book or his least, according to New York, which takes a look at the cult of Gladwell in this week's issue. Among the things that you may be surprised to hear: The "rock-star" staff writer at The New Yorker has an "aversion to midtown" (which is where the Condé Nast-owned title happens to be located), but the magazine happily uses a courier service to correspond with him.

You just don't expect this sort of thing in small-town Tennessee: a columnist for the Murfreesboro Post has—we think it's safe to say—won the prestigious "Most Racist Newspaper Column About Obama's Election" contest (edging out Maureen Dowd). Columnist Stephen Lewis' "Ode To President Obama" keenly dissects our new commander in chief's ascension "To a deee-luxe pimp pad" in Washington, through the prism of The Jeffersons. Sing along, race-mixers!:

Had Ted Turner's old rival Rupert Murdoch just issued an "autobiography" written by a former lieutenant, as Ted Turner has, one suspects it would not have been embraced so eagerly by sympathetic journalists at 60 Minutes, the Times, the Wall Street Journal and even AP, which meditated whimsically on the CNN founder's chapter titles. Maybe that's because the News Corporation chairman still enjoys the blood sport of media feuds in his old age, coordinating multi-outlet attacks on relative small fry like Keith Olbermann, while Turner is in the business of moving on — and making plenty of media friends in the process. He has forgiven Murdoch for what he suspects was the hiring of private investigators to prove him insane in the 1980s, as he explains in the attached 60 Minutes clip, and put behind him the loss of $7 billion, a devastating divorceand a bad prescription for Lithium.

What's the deal Sarah Palin? Is Alaska too small-time for you to bother dolling up your hair all nice like you did for the media elites? The former Republican VP nominee's locks are, in case you didn't notice, way messy since she got back to Alaska; see the photos above, taken at her Anchorage gubernatorial office and at the Anchorage airport. Why is this terrible thing happening and how do we stop it from destroying us all?

Britain's Guardian profiled Jared Kushner, and while the Observer owner makes some positive noises about his company, the salient facts are as follows: After two years and a purported 40 percent revenue increase, the paper is still losing about $2 million per year. Kushner said he is " definitely scared about newspapers" and compared the industry to "a falling knife." And despite having Ivanka Trump on his arm, Kushner was recently turned away from fading nightclub Bungalow 8:

This is Adam Smith, "also known as Steve Zacharanda," in Chicago on Election Night. He is a reporter for the Birmingham Mail, a newspaper in the UK. He's just been approached by a friendly Dutch person with a video camera. He seems to be filing a story, and he's definitely been drinking. Please watch his hilarious reportorial style—"I'm just a little bit pissed.... Thank god for the BBC, because I'm cutting and pasting, baby!"—after the jump. Click to view As the Telegraph reports:

A fine Friday news dump: a tipster tells us that a slew of layoffs just went down at Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men's Journal. Let go, we hear, were several online people, several marketing people, an assistant, a sales rep, and three unnamed people from Men's Journal. Also, "the entire Detroit and San Francisco office," according to our source. That's harsh, but quite possible. Know any more details on the Wenner layoffs? Email us.

One of the best parts of that juicy NYT story yesterday about all the infighting in the McCain- Palin campaign was the fact that a huge chunk of the story was given over to exploring who was leaking to sniveling conservative columnist Bill Kristol—a Times columnist! It's pretty unusual for a paper to start digging on its own columnist's confidential sources, but hey, it's Bill Kristol and nobody at the Times likes him, so they just went for it. That prompted some further review by the Daily Beast, which concluded, yep, Bill Kristol is basically just a lackey for political operatives:

Rember how Obama's election was the greatest thing to happen to the newspaper industry in a decade? People lined up across New York City to buy copies of the New York Times proclaiming his victory! And the smart ones put those copies right on Ebay. This chart shows the average of the five highest prices paid on Ebay each day for that November 5 issue of the NYT. One early seller fetched $400; today you can have your pick for less than $30. Oh, the metaphor.

Days after winning the presidency for a skinny black man from Kansas and Kenya and Indonesia (and also rescuing funny-but-unwatched sitcom 30 Rock), it's been revealed Queen of Media Oprah Winfrey will end her syndicated talk show in 2011, according to Broadcasting & Cable. But according to sources with Oprah's production company, Harpo, the show will merely shift from syndication to her new cable network, forcing cable providers to add "OWN," which is currently called the Discovery Health Channel, or "the channel with the world's fattest man and the dying babies." What's going on? No one knows. The head of the Discovery cable empire David Zaslav stirred the Oprah pot when he announced on a conference call that Oprah was going to end her show in 2011 and focus primarily on building OWN. "This is her chapter two," he said. Those comments forced Harpo to release a statement: