Do arts organization have an unhealthy relationship with the New York Times? Probably! Tyler Green wrote in the Arts Journal blog about how the NYT and art institutions deals with art news: "In return for receiving stories first, the NYT provides coverage... If the NYT doesn't discover major arts news stories first, it doesn't report on them." Well, yeah—otherwise, it's just kind of embarrassing. While reporting on a story about the National Gallery of Art, he noticed that everyone was holding or keeping off-record the information about their latest major project: "the NGA's chief spokesperson wanted the Villareal item to debut in the NYT."

The more we learn about the true extent of Seth MacFarlane's empire, the more we become quietly frightened. MacFarlane, the 34-year-old creator of Family Guy, is just about to roll out his huge new online cartoon series in partnership with Google, which will reap him just a disgusting amount of money from sponsors like Burger King. And yes, Family Guy is well on its way to becoming the Simpsons of a new generation. Sorry, haters:

Brit Hume is exhausted. The flinty Fox anchor has always seemed short-fused and quietly seething (right?) but covering campaign '08 has drained all the joy out of his life. (As have the tensions in his marriage and his fling with Megyn Kendall?) A profile by useless Washington Post media something Howard Kurtz finds the original face of Fair and Balanced Fox openly disgusted with the empty gimmicks of the Republican National Convention: "Baby pictures of John McCain? What in the world are they doing? Oh, this is just atrocious." And: "I'm 65, for God's sake. I don't want to do all that stuff anymore." And "It's dispiriting. This is just partisan poison, and after a while you get tired of covering it." Jesus, he sounds like us. Remember when Fox was the terrifying propaganda organ of a far-right cult of personality? Now it's just the sad official network of embittered, impotent, cranky old white men. (In the event of a McCain victory, of course, it will become both.) [WP]

Matt Drudge's sources tell the staff of Oprah are bitterly divided over Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate: some thinking the daytime talk show host owes Barack Obama her continued loyalty; others wanting to respond to the flurry of requests on Oprah's website for an appearance by the twangy-voiced moose-hunting Republican vice-presidential nominee. And here's why they'll book her: Sarah Palin sells.

ESPN is the USA's sports leader, sanctioned by God, the American Way, and Brett Favre. Males of a certain age (11-75) who don't watch the network risk placing themselves under serious suspicion of being candy ass pansy boy homos, NO HOMO. So you'd think that ESPN wouldn't have trouble drawing young viewers. But America's sports indoctrination machine is flagging because of the internet and the computers and the fatness! So ESPN has been forced to take drastic and, we daresay, un-American measures: Video games in the football broadcasts. This marks the failure of American P.E. teachers:

Maybe it should have been obvious that the celebrity weeklies were going to politicize as soon as Hillary Clinton and her supporters showed strong resistance, during the primary season, to acquiescing to Barack Obama, thus highlighting the importance of women voters in 2008. But the heightened political importance of the magazines, whose readers are overwhelmingly female, wasn't in anyone's face until this week, when Us Weekly made waves with its controversial "Babies, Lies & Scandal" Sarah Palin cover. The issue, unflattering to Palin, has so far resulted in 5,000-10,000 cancelled subscriptions, MSNBC.com's gossip column is reporting. (Though MSNBC's Courtney Hazlett is close to Us Weekly's rivals; and-see below-the magazine's Janice Min says the losses are overstated.)

It's been more than three years since the identity of Bob Woodward's famed Deep Throat source was broken in Vanity Fair rather than in Woodward's Washington Post, as he had planned. So perhaps the newspaper is not all that bitter that Woodward, a longtime editor there, has yet let another book project emerge first in a competing news outlet. Last night it was Fox News Channel, not the Post, with exclusive first details of Woodward's fourth book on President Bush, The War Within. Among them was the revelation that John McCain, while standing in the West Wing, clenched his fists and said of the Bush team, "everything is f—-ing spin." Now that's a revelation that's well-timed for the McCain campaign. Wonder who leaked to Fox?! (*McCough.*) Anyway, the Post apparently had its own Web story ready on a hairtrigger, and published it, bringing forth slightly terrifying revelations like how a cadre of generals organized to do something about the inept civilian Commander in Chief:

"The bondholders, who own a portion of American Media's junk bonds, want the company's private-equity owners to give them a larger take in return for retiring some of its debt, according to sources close to several bondholders." [Post]

For some strange reason, the Post's Page Six today published a long item on the book Black & White And Dead All Over, a newsroom roman a clef by a 40-year Timesman. The timing is a bit odd because this book was reviewed in the Post in late July, around the time we posted our second item on it, and according to Amazon it's been on sale since July 29. But Page Six does reveal the book contains a hard-to-believe interaction we somehow missed, between elder Arhur "Punch" Sulzberger and his son Arthur Jr.:

The Associated Press has a celebrity news division, writes long fluffy trend stories and offers opinionated (and controversial) political analysis. So while we haven't really been keeping up with what's going on at Reuters, we probably shouldn't be shocked that the newswire, once focused on financial information, just issued a long feature story asserting that 1> Tinsley Mortimer exists, and 2> that she heralds a new era in which New York socialites like herself pretend to have day jobs. Staying focused on business news seems to have paid off for the tyrannical regime that runs Bloomberg, and there seems to be plenty of high-impact finance stories to chase at the moment, but the temptation to swerve lanes on the information highway — newspapers making video, TV shows soliciting user-generated content, media gossip websites covering the Republican National Convention — is strong. Especially when you can always argue a connection to your core competency — in this case, that rich girls who don't need to ever work now feel the need to start their own businesses:

Why is Cindy McCain speaking so slowly and making everyone at the Republican Convention pull embarrassed faces right now? Probably because there are two minutes and God-knows-how-many time-outs and commercial breaks left on the NFL season opener, threatening to keep red-blooded, football-loving Republicans and right-leaning Democrats away from John McCain's climactic speech, just as was feared. Go long, Cindy, go long! [via Wonkette]

Time Out New York president Alison Tocci just sent out a memo to the magazine's staff addressing the "anonymous, typo-riddled post on Gossip, I mean, Gawker.com, which alludes to our imminent demise." She confirms TONY's money troubles, which were the subject of our rumormonger post yesterday, but says that the magazine's trusty investors are ponying up cash to ensure that everyone is paid! Within three months. The full zing-y memo:

Where does the Wall Street Journal's Tina Gaudoin find the time for her hectic trans-Atlantic lifestyle? She'll tell you, in book form! Gaudoin, the yoga mogul who edits the business paper's new glossy weekend magazine, somehow found time to write an autobiographical book about "the ins and outs of the most glamorous and bitchy of industries" (magazines!). After the jump, the semi-grammatical Amazon summary of Gaudoin's Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines (Paperback) [sic]:

So the rumor—which is still, we should note, just a rumor—is that listings-and-more magazine Time Out New York is in financial trouble. Tipsters say the money trouble is a result of bad investment decisions by management. But TONY has even bigger problems: its entire business model is built on quicksand.
TONY is light on content and heavy on listings. That's probably not going to change significantly. So consider what they're up against:

Assuming that people are actually interested in how a story is formed and goes to press, Wired magazine is continuing how-to series with a blog about how a Wired article gets written. The article in question is about Being John Malkovich/Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, so it's "meta." Wondered some editors, "What if we posted the edit—hell, the rough draft. What if we posted the pitch letter? What if we posted the emails about the pitch letter?" Haha, what if you exposed the sad quotidian details of our everyday work lives?

Rob Shuter may be single most well-qualified man for his job in all the celebrity media. His job, of course, is editor of photo-happy, celebrity-friendly, "What interview questions would you like to answer, Britney?" pseudo-magazine OK! But set aside your revulsion at the existence of this pair of celebrity culture warriors, and you come to realize that we can all learn something from the way the man does business. His reputation is (grudgingly) improving along with his personal appearance (pic: old on left, new on right). Shuter told CoverAwards that his magazine is "celebrity-fair." Classic, classic. Break it down: Shuter was a celebrity flack before he came to OK. So when he got the job, some of the esteemed journalists at the magazine were angry at this publicist interloping on their territory. But really, a PR guy is much better suited to the job than someone with a history on the editorial side. The editor of OK essentially works to broker deals with celebrities and their managers and publicists. That was Shuter's gig before, on the other side of things, so he knows just how to make this work. His competitors, who came up as reporters and editors, will never have that experience. He could be functionally illiterate. No problem! Celeb magazines are driven by photos—exclusive photos. Who fucking cares what OK's brain damaged stories say? People want to look at pretty photos of famous people that they can't get anywhere else, and that's what they get from Shuter. Plus, appearance on shows like ET and Access Hollywood usually materialize only after the exclusive magazine deal has been closed, meaning that celebrities have to deal with one of the mags no matter what. And since OK is the friendliest and one of the most financially generous, bingo. Rob Shuter is a shameless man in a shameless job. Many lesser people would be embarrassed to be him. But Shuter can say with a straight face that he's "proud of the product" and dismiss competitors as "haters" and be totally genuine. He's worth every penny. "Celebrity-fair" is the new "right-sizing."

Today, a blog post on Glamour's Smitten talked about how it feels when an ex of yours gets married. Which makes it the second essay writer Joanna Goddard has written about Page Six Mag's Joshua Stein. Add this to the New York Times Magazine article by former Gawker Emily Gould that mentioned her relationship with Stein, which followed his own Page Six Magazine essay about the dangers of blogger love, and you have... well, you have an entertaining media clusterfuck. Why does it seem like he's the most written-about ex in New York? Hey, that's just what happens when writers date. Now that everyone's a writer—armed with their blogs and Tumblogs and lifestreams and the like—the scribes among us should just stop dating each other now. Think of it this way:Post-breakup, a writer's first instinct it to write or blog it out. This is their nature. It's totally fine if kept confined to a Word doc or a friends-only LiveJournal blog or whatever. But still, you must work, work—as Chekhov said. Maybe you're freelancing, and you're miserable, and all you can think about is this fucking ex of yours who keeps popping up in the damndest of places—whether it's their byline in a magazine or at the corner deli or at a media party. And hey, why not mine your life for stories? That's what your writing teacher at that night class at the New School told you! You might even earn some sweet freelance cash from a personal essay—or if you're really good, a Modern Love in the Sunday Times, which is the pinnacle of the breakup essay. You can then use the $500 to buy an awesome dress, which is sort of like an investment in a future relationship. (It's easier to catch flies at media parties with honey!) And so you write. Whether what you write is good or bad, the fact is that it's published, and it's out there. The written-about ex might form a rebuttal. They might not. They might get a six-figure book deal which allows them to feature you in any damned essay they want, like Ms. Gould! That essay might get leaked and it might contain certain bits about your sex life or your musculature. Of course, there have been other, more luminary, writer couplings. Sartre and de Beauvoir, Plath and Hughes, the Bloomsbury Group. Do not pay attention to them. They had no high-speed Internet. And so the vicious cycle continues. But enough about work. You doing anything Saturday night?

We are rarely, these days, surprised by much. Especially the behavior of the national political press. We devoted a couple paragraphs yesterday to predicting their reaction to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's speech before the Republican National Convention last night, but this morning we are having a genuine crazy pills moment. Are we trapped in Peggy Noonan's bubble? Seriously, people? The speech blew you away? It was a generic stump speech with a couple killer lines, delivered competently. It was the Republican equivalent of John Kerry's speech at the DNC, just given by someone America doesn't hate (yet) while the national networks were listening. We honestly can't believe the same media that knew full well that they were playing into the expectations game became so convinced that Governor Palin would massively fuck up that the fact that she was perky and pleasant and funny—the fucking reasons she was selected—was some revelation, or the birth of a new political superstar. We can't believe everyone gave her a pass on the 'bridge to nowhere' bullshit. We can't believe people keep calling her a "reformer" and "maverick" even though as a politician, completely outside her self-constructed narrative, she introduced focus-grouped wedge politics to small-town Alaska and lobbied for the most corrupt politicians in America. Is it really this easy? We know this miserable woman. We are from the great white north, the land of Ms. Palin's congressional doppelganger. We still can't help but feel that the "just folks" everyone images they understand better than everyone else will find Ms. Palin to be, well, as Ken Layne put it:

Is it possible that the dying newspaper industry can be saved by skillful advertising? No, but it can certainly be helped. This ad for Australia's The Age is visually enthralling, and captures the promise of a paper that brings the entire world to your door. Though it's too bad that it also reinforces the fact that video is way more exciting than print. And, you know, it's not an American paper. Still worth watching. [Fitz & Jen]

"Biden's comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin." [Guardian]