Did you catch the BIG SPLASH on the front page of NYT Travel section this past weekend? "Single in Chicago." Summary: Single woman goes to Chicago. Opening sentence: "IT'S hard to decide, while sipping a citrine cocktail called Sex on the Roof, what to gawk at first..." And?

From the current (July 16) issue of OK! Magazine: "We often see Katie Holmes carrying around 6 year-old daughter Suri— dollies, blankets, and all. But on June 25, the little princess gave mom's back a break as they sprinted through the streets of NYC. With husband Tom Cruise shooting Oblivion in Iceland, the dressed-down Katie enjoyed some just-us-girls time with Suri, stopping by Chelsea Piers, Whole Foods and Jacque Torres Chocolate. They also saw the film Brave in the East Village. The pair rejoined Tom for his 50th birthday on July 3."

Wal-Mart has been the target of union campaigns for years. Why? Because Wal-Mart is the biggest fucking retailer in the world, and the most famous anti-union company in America. It makes sense for both practical and symbolic reasons. In L.A. right now, unions and worker advocates are trying to stop the construction of a new Wal-Mart in the city's Chinatown district. But Wal-Mart has an ally in the fight: the Wall Street Journal.

In 2007, the New Yorker published staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian's lengthy and nuanced profile of "American Al Qaeda" Adam Gadahn, the California-born death metal enthusiast who converted to Islam, moved to Pakistan, and rose to the leadership of Al Qaeda. What the magazine has never reported: Gadahn wrote back.

Shauna Bass is the entertainment director and former East Coast news editor at OK! Magazine. She frequently makes media appearances as an expert on reality TV. Last week, Simba, her pet Pomeranian, passed away. Sad. But Shauna's pain has been soothed by more than $5,000 in donations—most of it from people who have a professional obligation to get into OK! Magazine.

This week, News Corp announced that it would spin off its publishing division, thereby sequestering the moldy old newspapers and other not-so-good-but-romantic businesses in their own little quarantine area, while the moneymaking TV and entertainment properties shed the dead weight and continued to print money. It's a common-sense move that News Corp executives not named "Rupert Murdoch" have been advocating for for years. But with all due respect to the mean old man, he's organizing this thing all wrong.

A tipster tells us (and Twitter confirms) that Bloomberg's website has been blocked in China thanks to their publication this morning of this lengthy investigative story detailing the wealth of various relatives of Xi Jinping (pictured, with Hank Paulson), the man likely to be China's next president.

Ink may run in Rupert Murdoch's icy veins, but he's dumping his first love—newspapers—for the bitch-whore of film. News Corp. announced today that all of its newspapers and publishing assets (the dying, scandal-ridden ones) will be spun off into a new stand-alone company called Papers'n'Shit, leaving its film and television assets to make fistfuls of money unmolested by dinosaur media.

The setup: two young female Washington Post reporters, frustrated with the bad dating odds in DC, fly to Alaska, where there are far more men than women, in order "to find romance." Allllll, the way to Alaska, they went, on the company dime. For romance. *Wink*

Fabulously wealthy CEO whisperer and newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman is little more than a human-shaped random word generator programmed with the "Computers and Internet" section of a fourth-grade vocabulary textbook and fitted with a mustache. He writes one single column, sometimes using different proper nouns or cycling through slightly new platitudes, in order to allow a new headline to be written. The Only Thomas Friedman Column That Exists—which ran right on schedule yesterday—opens like this:

Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who's The New Yorker's newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he's written for The New Yorker so far. A self-plagiarist, he is. Big time. What's the latest? He is an even bigger time plagiarist (self, and otherwise!) than we knew yesterday. And for it, he should probably be eased out of journalism's highest echelon.

Jonah Lehrer just landed a job at the New Yorker—one of the most coveted jobs in all of journalism—and already he's fucking up. Lehrer? You're fucking up.

Gina Chon, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was forced to resign after emails were leaked showing that she was romantically involved with a Bush Administration official while covering the war in Iraq, defended herself today in an email sent to friends and colleagues.

Doddering Reaganite Peggy Noonan has become the conservative version of Richard Cohen: a doddering old columnist employed by a respected journalistic institution who uses their column space to demand less journalism and more government secrecy. Have you heard of these so-called "leaks," from our leaders? The United States government is not a house of plumbing, sir. Sir? Sir.

Wal-Mart is trying to open a new store in LA's Chinatown area. Local labor groups, among others, are challenging the store's permitting. It's a fight with big stakes for Wal-Mart, as it goes right to the heart of the company's strategy of expanding in large cities. And now, one labor group says that an employee of a PR firm working for Wal-Mart actually posed as a reporter in order to infiltrate one of their meetings.

Cottonheaded Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is fond of adopting odd positions. Sometimes, he takes the position of the people he's supposed to be policing. Sometimes, he adopts the position of rapists. And sometimes, he adopts no position at all. Now, for your pleasure, Richard Cohen is rolling out a new type of position: the ??? position.

GMA co-host Robin Roberts announced on the show this morning that she has been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. Roberts explained that she will begin chemotherapy for MDS, a disease of the blood and bone marrow, today. She was diagnosed with the rare disease on the same day as the much-scrutinized Obama same-sex marriage interview.

In effort to free up the longtime staff writers from a daily content quota and give them more breathing room, we instilled the whole traffic-whore model for about a month with varying results. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to show how, often times, the stories thought to be guaranteed traffic-drivers never materialized and how some of the longer stories outperformed them. The message: good is good, and you don't have to anchor your success to the oftentimes flukey nature of internet readers' tastes.

On Sunday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said the following, in a discussion about war, soldiers, and death: "It is, I think, very difficult to talk about the war dead, the fallen, without invoking valor, without invoking the word 'heroes'... I feel uncomfortable about the word 'hero' because it seems to me it is so rhetorically proximate to justification for more war... it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic."

This week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that it is cutting its print publication schedule back to three days a week and laying off staff in an effort to remain financially viable. It's a sad step for a storied and respected newspaper. It is also, on an industrywide scale, a completely expected evolution. Let's briefly review the recent past, and the future, of newspapers.