It seems like just last April that the venerable old Atlantic Monthly (wait, sorry, it's just The Atlantic now) launched a web-focused redesign based on the helpful input of presumably expensive "brand consultants." And, what do you know, it was just last April! But now we're in phase two of the magazine's makeover, which means increasingly insane covers and slightly more attractive blogs for their hundred bloggers (NB: we do actually like most of their bloggers, especially Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows, and crazy Andrew Sullivan—all better than TNR, basically). Here's the announcement! But will this save the magazine? While the newish Harper's website fits that magazine's fusty, "who needs to turn a profit anyway" aesthetic (and subscribers get full access to the indispensable indexed archives), The Atlantic's recent branding campaigns don't seem to have anything to do with the magazine's identity, whatever the hell that is anymore (plus: 300 articles for $100 with nothing from 1964-1992 just doesn't compare to the Harper's deal.) Honestly the Atlantic's identity crisis still stems from the move from lame Boston to miserable DC followed by a new focus on, you know, politics, though that crisis has actually produced what might be a better magazine with more interesting (to us) features. And hey, the website looks good, the new logo is a cool appropriation of their '60s logo, and the mag redesign will probably look very nice (unless it's as pointlessly busy as that first cover). Still, a massive ad campaign and a expensive rebranding for a smart current events mag seems a bit '90s, right? BUT! Atlantic Media also owns the expensive subscription-only political trade journals of the National Journal Group! And if there is a market for political journalism in this nation, that is the model, so far, that seems the best able to weather the storm. So, thankfully, Global Security Newswire will subsidize Andrew Sullivan well into the Obama administration and on until he turns conservative again.

Sure, it's "wrong" to date a source you quoted in 24 articles and/or a married man (and vice versa), but that very wrongness is what makes it seem romantic—until everything blows up in your face. Ex-Miami Herald and Boston Globe reporter, 27-year-old Tania deLuzuriaga, had a reported affair with a source, new Miami-Dade schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho, 44. It was uncovered when two dozen embarrassing e-mails ("don't shave") were anonymously delivered to media outlets across town. Carvalho's weaselly denials might cost him his new job—the school board has yet to vote on his contract. deLuzuriaga already resigned from the Globe, shortly after the e-mails were leaked. Now there are new e-mails!Sadly, they aren't as juicy as "Don't shave. Wanna are [sic] it." They say "I love and miss you too" and other boring crap like that. Oh, and this: "Keep texting. Keep clean as my daughter keeps lunging for it with those Carvalho quick reflexes.'' Almost as quick as the Carvalho denial-reflexes. [Miami Herald via Romenesko]

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

So. The McCain campaign oddly decided to run against the media this year. It's not that odd, because Republicans have been doing it quite successfully since 1968, but this is the first year they've had a candidate who started off beloved by the media. And they just sorta pissed that away. Then in running against the media, they pissed off the media, and suddenly John McCain can't get any favorable coverage anywhere, and then they push back againt the media even more, and then Times executive editor Bill Keller says: “My first tendency when they do that is to find the toughest McCain story we’ve got and put it on the front page, just to show them that they can’t get away with it.” Sorta giving the game away! So that explains the gambling story. But those terrible old standards of make-believe "fairness" are what then led the Times to enable the insane and vicious tone the campaign suddenly took this week. The Times put that gambling story on the front page even though there didn't seem to be that much to it. Now Keller admits, basically, that they did it because the McCain campaign was bothering them. So, obviously, then they had to be fair and put some sort of theoretically damaging Obama story on the front page a week later! And they did, with Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths, the story of how goofy '60s Weatherman Bill Ayers cleaned up and went legit and eventually served on a non-profit board with Barack Obama, which means Obama is a terrorist. Like, seriously, this is what they concluded:

Did you know Jennifer Lopez once had a nervous breakdown? Or that she's a pretty big fan of crackpot religion Scientology? By the standards of the average modern celebrity profile—where a diarrhea story counts as a scoop—this is pretty good material. So why did it end up running today in Tina Brown's newly launched Daily Beast, instead of in a real magazine? Because a real magazine spiked it. Because they were scared of J-Lo! Sez the Beast:

Although Sarah Palin said yesterday she was "impatient" and "annoyed" with Katie Couric's irrelevant questions about her book learnin' and whatnot, the CBS Evening News anchor wisely avoided firing any direct return fire when confronted with a camerman from TMZ, of all places. But it's all too easy to read — or invent? — meaning between Couric's lines, especially if you can successfully look past her usual smiling charm. Who might Couric be talking about when she says she doesn't "lie" about reading The Economist? Is "luckily I'm not running for vice president" some kind of swipe? It's harder to tell than you might think. Click the video icon to watch.

You may recall that extinct neoconservative vanity paper New York Sun used to run a little telemarketing scam in which it claimed to be a "snapshot" or "smaller version" of the Times. Misleading and dishonest, right? But there was a clue this was coming: The original incarnation of the Sun, which the new Sun zealously aped (save for certain inconvenient political positions), also scammed people. This fact was lost to history until a summer 1944 Sun sales rep described the setup, which involved the Lost & Found ads traditionally used to find pets and wedding rings and so forth. From a letter to the editor in the Times:

The New Yorker's big Arianna Huffington profile may have been a letdown, with very little dirt on the politics or business of the Huffington Post, as we said yesterday. And, granted, it also failed to establish that the HuffPo publisher is a "cutthroat boss," as the Post hinted it would. But those who have spent time in Huffington's orbit seemed determined to have their say. And so it is that we have come to understand more clearly Huffington's seemingly strange remark that " a lot of people who came to the office wanted to be writers" at HuffPo but left because "the jobs are administrative." That quote left one to wonder if people signed up to be Arianna's administrative assistants and were upset because they couldn't get bylines. But no. People signed up to be editors, we hear, and were upset because they were asked to do the work of household assistants.

The cornerstone of so-called Rovian politics is "attack your opponent on his strengths." At its most basic, perfect level, it means attack war hero John Kerry for being a spineless anti-American coward. McCain tried it early this season: Obama is popular and energizing, just like a dumb blonde celebrity. Everyone cooed and said "oh good one Mr. McCain." But that line wasn't enough to get McCain through the end of the summer, let alone the fall. So now, yes, Steve Schmidt and John McCain have developed and employed a brilliant new twist on Karl Rove's old dictum: attack your opponent on your own weaknesses! In McCain's terrible new speech today on how none of us know who this mysterious and dangerous terrorist Barack Obama actually is, he says, literally, that Obama gets "touchy" and "angry" whenever he's attacked or criticized or accused of lying. As Josh Marshall points out, this is called "projection," because Obama actually remains infuriatingly cool and collected in the face of things that would drive us insane. Meanwhile, McCain is notorious for his temper, for his pettiness, and for his grudges. So naturally McCain found that he was being criticized by everyone for lying all the time, and he decided that meant that he was hitting a nerve with Obama (and not just all the dudes in the press who used to have man-crushes on him), and decided further to expand this into a whole new line of attack. A line of attack based entirely on projection. So when we said "a brilliant new twist on Karl Rove's old dictum" what we actually meant was "a sad foray into the extreme disconnect between perception and reality that is probably the logical conclusion of Rovian politics."

Portfolio PR blogger Paul Pendergrass, a.k.a. Jack Flack, one of the media's sharpest translators of corporate bullshit, is leaving the mag and joining the NYT's Dealbook blog. Where his bullshit-translating skills will doubtless be put to good use. [PRNewser]

So this weekend, the McCain camp called up all the reporters they're still speaking to to be like, "fuck it, we're going negative." The reporters were like, "going?" And McCain's people were all, "no, like super negative!" Then Sarah Palin showed up saying nonsense and the press backlash was immediate. You don't call up the press corps to announce that you're finally utterly trashing your Honorable Brand, for good, when they're in the middle of tearing you apart for abandoning your Honorable Brand to begin with, guys. Sheesh. But Steve Schmidt can't grasp that it's not 2004 and, more importantly, John McCain thinks he is still the honorable one, because he personally dislikes Barack Obama. Regardless, Obama's in a fine position right now! He's winning, his favorables are great, his Brand is still in tip-top shape, and everyone is crowing about how much smarter his campaign has been. So why's he going and ruining that with this Keating 5 business? Obama's people called the members of the press in their tank today to point them toward Keating Economics, an Obama campaign site about John McCain's role in the Charles Keating mess, because no one remembers that anymore. Their problem was not so much in doing this, it was in making it an official Obama-funded campaign stunt announced to the press, and not just quietly pushing Keating stories, Rove-style. Yes, the Keating 5 scandal is a legitimate talking point. Yes, McCain is certainly more tangibly and credibly "linked" to misdoings by Keating than Obama is linked to misdoings by a hippie mad bomber in 1968. But guys, you are just opening yourselves up now to the worst story in the world: "Both campaigns intensifying attacks! Film at 11! Obama sez McCain's corrupt, McCain says Obama's a terrorist, boo hoo how the standards of discourse have fallen!" (Hi there Politico!) Now indications are the newly emboldened press will not treat the factually accurate if slightly spun Keating story as equivalent to the sleazy insinuations of Palin. But it's still a dumb move when all the momentum is already in your favor. (Or, of course, maybe it's brilliant. We're sure as hell no experts.)

So, you want to be a journalist? Ha ha ha. Jeez. Your timing sucks. But hey, it's a perfectly semi-honorable profession; nobler than finance, not as noble as being a postman. So whether you're already in journalism and wondering about what direction your career should take (besides down), or a terribly misguided young go-getter looking to get into journalism, we're here to help. Every freaking thing you need to know about the real state of the media job market, after the jump.

TMZ caught up with a rather cheerful Katie Couric on 59th and Fifth today and asked her how she felt about having Sarah Palin criticize her in the media last week. Katie didn't answer the question, but she did have a response when she was asked what newspapers and magazines she reads regularly: "Everyone lies about the Economist, but I actually read it." And with that the brainy anchor headed into Tiffany's. [TMZ]

Hollywood gossipmonger Nikke Finke hasn't wasted any time weighing in on Tina Brown's new Barry Diller-back website, The Daily Beast. Her one-sentence assessment? "It sucks." [Deadline Hollywood]

Well yes, sure, of course we can. But how? It's easiest to just blame greedy bankers or something, because Wall Street assholes act the same way in good times and in bad, and we lionize them in good and castigate them in bad (also we deregulate them in good and bail them out in bad, but whatevs). But now we have our media-blaming excuse: Howard Kurtz, media "critic" for the Washington Post, has weighed in on the financial crisis and is appointing blame in equal measure to everyone! That is the fair way to do things, you know. So hey let's join him in blaming the MSM. The fact of the matter is regular work-a-day journalists, even the high-falutin well-off name ones, don't get finance. Because no one really gets finance besides financiers, and journos are all soft-sciences arts majors. Math is hard! Even now they don't "get" it (though everyone's on the tail end of their "conversant at cocktail parties" crash course, and it shows). Honestly, we spent a couple years studying for BFA, of course we have no fucking clue what happened here. And as both media producers and media consumers, we're reasonably more conversant on many national public interest issues than Joe Sixpack Americans. And yes, in 2004 when the SEC decided to allow investment banks to self-regulate themselves we heard about it on Kos or something and were outraged and all that. But:

Consider Peter Shankman: skydiving flack, taser lover, and the founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the free (!) service that connects reporters with a world of flacks dying to appear in their stories. HARO is a lot like Profnet, except Profnet costs flacks thousands of dollars a year. We wondered why Shankman went to all the trouble of running HARO, and now we know: $800,000 a year! Is this oversharing man the future of flackery? Adweek takes an in-depth look at the HARO phenomenon, and does a little calculating to figure out that Shankman makes more than $3K every day selling ads on his two daily HARO emails, that go out to more than 30,000 flacks and other wannabe media sources. For an hour and a half of work. Okay, that's kind of slick. But you know who thinks HARO sucks? The people at Profnet! HARO's deficiencies:

The New Yorker festival culminated in a rockin' dance party. (Our publisher offered us his spare tickets, which we sniffily rejected. "The New Yorker dance party?" snorted a friend.) IvyGate went, though, and they were scared for their future social life. "This could be you in eleven years," warned the headline. "It was mostly professionals in their late 20s to early 30s talking and grinding." Oh, no, not that! Yep, that's how us post-collegiate Olds party. And then we stumbled home, drifting off to sleep imagining what type of hit our Roth IRA took with the latest crash. [IvyGate]

It took years and years and the attention of a new movie, but someone finally uncovered a smidge of plagiarism in the fired Vanity Fair Brit's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Daily Intel found near-identical passages from the book and a New York Times article by John Tierney. Young was unruffled, saying it wasn't plagiarism but loose English journalistic standards at work:

Early Saturday morning I dragged myself to the New Yorker Festival in Midtown, to see media mensch Ken Auletta moderate a panel discussion with Times editor Bill Keller, Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate press critic Jack Shafer, and breathless WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan, the token conservative. I'll leave out the boring recap parts and distill the experience down to its key point: Peggy Noonan should go back to writing political speeches, because—even taking into account the fact that she's a Republican hack—her dishonesty is embarrassing to watch. Ugh. Noonan, remember, was caught on a live mic talking about how the selection of Sarah Palin as VP was "bullshit." A fact that was referenced repeatedly by Ken Auletta! So what did Noonan spend the bulk of her time on the panel (subject: "Covering the Candidates") doing? Defending Sarah Palin. It was far too early to take notes, but I'll sum up Peggy's arguments: "Sarah Palin, fresh, new, American, real, six-pack, women, sexism?, the American people." The experience was strange because every single person sitting in the room—the panelists, the moderator, the audience, the security guards—was well aware how dumb Sarah Palin is. But there was Peggy, gamely searching for some all-American Reaganesque prose to elevate Palin into something legitimate. The panel was about the media, so the bold political hackery was jarring and out of place, like when those crazy Christians wave signs at the funerals of dead soldiers saying God killed them because of fags. There's a time and a place for your brand of lying, Peggy. It's on the weekend talk shows, after you sign on as a speechwriter for the sure-to-be successful Palin administration. There are lots of political hacks writing columns; but Noonan always wants to pop up as some sort of spokeswoman for Middle America, in the most patronizing way possible to actual Middle Americans. You failed at the New Yorker Festival, Peggy Noonan. The contrast between Noonan and the other panelists was what made the entire ordeal grimace-worthy. Bill Keller has more political pressure on him than almost anyone in the entire media. But when Ken Auletta asked him how it affected him when the McCain campaign charged the Times with being in the tank for Obama, Keller said (approximately): "It makes me want to find the toughest, hardest story about McCain we have and put it on the front page the next day." That's called honesty, Peggy Noonan. Retire with your trademark false grace. [Pic via Startraks]

Guerrilla artist Poster Boy razors away parts of subway advertisements and sticks them onto other subway posters. The end result: funny social commentary, often involving the unfortunate use of celeb's faces! New York magazine talked to him about why he does it: “No matter what I do... as long as I did something to those advertisements and that saturation, it’s political. It’s anti-media, anti–established art world.”