It's a Chicago media tussle—hardball style! Yes, well. The Chicago Sun-Times threatened to sue the Chicago Tribune for job discussions the Tribune had with Jay Mariotti, the sports columnist who quit the Sun-Times just last month. But, um, hey Jay: didn't you quit your LUCRATIVE NEW contract at the Sun-Times out of the blue because you were inspired by all the other sports journalists you saw "writing for web sites?" Where's your "web site" now, you idiot man-child? Ahahaha!

"The company will be sold or, failing that, will close operation on Jan. 5, 2009." [Post] (Image)

Oh, great: The children's division at HarperCollins is planning a novel based on the teenaged years of Sex And The City character Carrie Bradshaw. Sex inspiration Candance Bushnell will write the thing and HarperCollins will target it at both teenagers and older fans, making the novel perfect for parents who'd like to give it as a "gift" to their children before awkwardly reclaiming it once it's been read. And what sorts of sex scenes might whole families be enjoying once this book is published two years from now? The Observer's Leon Neyfakh used this question as an excuse to re-watch his entire collection of SATC videos:

Saturday Night Live cast members sounded really concerned about the level of fairness on their sketch comedy show the other night, the Times' Brian Stelter noticed. Head writer Seth Meyers said the show tries to be "as fair and evenhanded as possible." It was "safer," he added, to mock both Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in a recent sketch, since without the latter it might have seemed "like an attack piece." Wait, since when is SNL so jittery about offending people? Is this the level of conscientiousness that comes with unexpectedly influencing the Democratic primaries? Sure, but more importantly this is the latest evidence all media will soon have to watch their political step. A few more signs:

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We... didn't expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch. "Smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses," Fortune wrote, calling a recent correction in Merrill stock "an overreaction." Investors who followed this advice are now down 93 61 percent. All the big financial magazines butter their bread with dubious prescriptions for how hobbyist investors can beat market professionals, so Fortune is hardly alone in being humiliated by the ongoing market meltdown. We'll spread the embarrassment around after the jump.

This is what happens when you let an Australian-born media mogul buy an American newspaper and import his chief editor from Britain: Suddenly no one on staff can correctly identify the country to the north (for the record, it's "Canada" — just "Canada"). And to think we actually believed Robert Thomson would make the Wall Street Journal more globalist! [WSJ]

As the CEO of a publicly traded company, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes is, as he protested to Portfolio's Lloyd Grove, obligated to consider strategic acquisitions as they become available. So he had to say, when Grove asked, that he'd consider buying NBC Universal if GE decided to spin off the media company. But he didn't have to so mildly rebuke speculation he was "intrigued" by such a deal, or go on at such length about the possibility:

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday:

Gnomish asshole Tribune owner Sam Zell is getting sued. By his own (current and former) employees! They filed a class action suit in LA today charging that "Zell's illegal and irresponsible actions and public statements have damaged the reputation and business of the company." Which is legalese for "You made all the Tribune employees take ownership of this shitty company under your stupid ESOP plan and we'd rather not all go broke, thanks." We imagine Zell is uttering some colorful expressions right now in response. ("Fuck you!" is what we mean specifically). This should be interesting! Click through for the full press release.

Remember Chucky Taylor, the young American who his who helped his dictator Dad Charles Taylor brutally terrorize Liberia? (His moved to live with his father there from Orlando, and that's when the trouble began.) He now has the distinction of being the first American to be tried for torture abroad. He is a bad guy. But he's also been sending his newly-recorded rap track around and, well, we have it. Click to listen (it's actually kind of good?) and for a preview of his upcoming Rolling Stone profile.

Hey, Washington DC is getting its very own newspaper fashion magazine! The New York Times has T, which makes enough money to pay for the other, real news bureaus; the Wall Street Journal has its new glossy weekend magazine, which debuted with a model on the cover; and now the Washington Post has decided to celebrate DC's fashionistas with... a "newspaper insert"?

On the whole, the journalists who've TURNED AGAINST their former boyfriend John McCain are some of our least favorite journalists in the nation, embodying as they do everything insular and adolescent about the Washington Press Corps. They loved John McCain when he could convince them that he was only bullshitting to the voters, not to them. Now, he won't speak to them! And hey, he's lying about shit, too, but whatever. Today, another media person handed McCain back his class ring and ran home, weeping. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, explain yourself!

♦ NBC's Ben Silverman says he hasn't managed the "unrelenting press attention" as well as he could have, and he's doing better than most people assme, a sentiment echoed by his close pal, Donny Deutsch. [TVDecoder]
♦ Harbinger's Phil Falcone says he has no plans to dump his investment in the New York Times. [Reuters]
♦ MTV is pulling the plug on TRL. [WSJ]
♦ Mark your calendars: Jeanine Pirro's court show debuts next week. [HuffPo]
♦ Current and former staffers at the LA Times are planning to file suit against owner Sam Zell. [LA Observed]
♦ How writers in Hollywood are dealing with the "new comedic landscape." [NYO]
♦ Product placements have earned less airtime on network TV compared with the same period last year, according to Nielsen. [AdAge]
♦ How the financial meltdown will affect Hollywood. [THR]
♦ Jeff Zucker, Mel Karmazin and Steven Rattner weigh in on the state of the media biz. [Portfolio]

It's about time the magazine world jacked Netflix's business plan. Maghound is Time Inc's new service that lets you, the consumer, choose which magazines you want to receive every month—with no hassles, and one low price! (Runs hand, model-like, over selection of 240 glossy magazines). Seriously, this may not save the magazine industry, but it's a good product for anyone who likes magazines. For these three reasons! 1. Gladiator Wars: Assuming Maghound takes off, it will offer a pure look at what consumers want to read (at least within the limited, non-Hearst pool of 240 magazines) when offered a broad array of choices. It could become the Billboard charts of magazine popularity. Plus you can watch magazines get dropped from subscriber lists immediately when people find out their content sucks! Now we just have to ask Time Inc. to make all this data public. 2. Price: Three titles for five bucks a month, five for eight bucks, seven for ten bucks. It's a deal and a half. If Maghound takes off it should cut into news stand sales, because it allows you to sample issues without paying the price of a subscription or the higher price of a news stand copy. 3. Expansion: The roster of magazines available now lacks big names like The Atlantic, The Economist, Esquire, and a bunch of others. But if Maghound proves to be a successful business, that list is bound to expand, because magazines—except very high-end titles—will see that it's in their economic interest to be included. So it's fair to expect more choice in the future. Or the thing will fold, but you only lost five bucks a month. So who cares? [Folio, Paid Content]

Here's a throwback idea to revive the flagging newspaper industry: an 81-year-old Urdu paper in India is written entirely by hand! "I like it a lot," says a calligrapher there. "But there is no money in it." Oh. Shucks. [WSJ]

Harper's has made available online eleven essays by David Foster Wallace following the postmodern writer's suicide last week. Bloggers have rounded up other DFW work available online, including his Times profile of Roger Federer and 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain. There are also videos, including the writer's appearances on Charlie Rose (other) and these moments collected by the LA Times. All told, the world is left with a reasonably extensive sampling of the writer's work available at the click of a mouse — at least enough to draw in new readers and perhaps even convince them to attempt his daunting masterpiece, Infinite Jest. [via Daring Fireball, Wonkette, LA Times]

"Bloomberg LP, whose best-selling financial news and data terminals are ubiquitous on Wall Street, is trying to reassure jittery employees that it will weather the financial storm after the failure of one major client and the sale of another." [Post]

No story about a bankrupt company is complete without the requisite "sad sack carries own crap out of office in boxes" shot, so of course every media outlet in the world was rolling tape or snapping pictures outside Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York Monday. TV reporters were doing their standups with the building in the background, so the average Joe watching at home would be able to say to his wife, "so that's where my securitized subprime mortgage is bundled with commercial-mortgage-backed securities into a mark-to-model collateralized debt obligation!" Over-extrapolating from the financial fortunes of others is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place but, but on the other hand you can't expect people not to stare at pictures of anyone potentially in the process of becoming a hobo. Watch the media watch the (maybe) new poors in the gallery after the jump.

If Page Six is to be believed, Sarah Palin's "second big interview" will come next week, when the Republican vice presidential nominee will travel with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric. (Ha ha, apparently Sean Hannity's interview doesn't count as "big," even within News Corporation.) It remains to be seen whether Couric will lay Palin embarrassingly bare as ABC's Charlie Gibson did last week. But just scoring the sit-down adds to the evidence Couric is mounting a sort of comeback from the dark days five months ago when she was said to be leaving CBS. A summary of Couric's oh-so-modest recent victories:

So it was a year ago now that shouting head Jim Cramer completely lost his mind in front of the cameras at CNBC. Cramer screamed that government officials had "NO IDEA how bad it is out there — NONE!!!" and that the economy was becoming "armageddon." It was glorious television. Now that the meltdown is truly molten, it's the former hedge-fund manager's turn to gloat. Last night on his Mad Money, Cramer assailed federal officials as "disgraceful" and "ignorant" for allowing things to get this bad. He also called Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke "in over his head." And he did it all with relative calm — perhaps content that, for once, he was both correct and correctly understood. (Twenty minutes later, Cramer was screaming "booyah!" and triggering cannon sound effects for his "Buy Or Sell... lightning round.") Video after the jump.