Times' Campbell Robertson "said he'll go once the Tonys are over!" [Observer]

Like all single guys on the subway, men in the publishing industry like to devise, or at least imagine they've devised, strategies for attracting cute women, and for maybe even making these lady strangers do the hard, traditionally-male work of striking up a conversation. Unlike other men, publishing types have access to advance galleys of hot books, and they hope this will give them an edge with New York's many literary babes. The Observer's bookish young Leon Neyfakh made an ernest — eager, even — attempt to prove this hypothesis true, in a story with the hopefully-worded subhead, "Carrying Bolano's 2666 Is Like Driving an Open-Top Porsche." And he found plenty of literary men to agree with that thesis. But the women? Different story.

Esquire's David Granger, you'll recall, secured a lone nomination in the National Magazine Awards this year thanks, reportedly, to lobbying by fellow Hearst editor Rosemary Ellis, of Good Housekeeping. No surprise, then, that Granger was all-too-happy to do a solid for another Hearst title, O, The Oprah Magazine, when editors there asked him to answer the question "Men! What Do You Like Most About Us [women]?" Granger's exuberant response (last item) is clearly intended to flatter O's middle-aged lady readers, which is fine, since that's half the point of these things. But the answers are so obviously terrible one almost wonders if it was written as parody. Did Granger hand this one off to a junior assistant or something? The four worst tips:

Oh, hey, bitter Hillary Clinton supporters! The Barack Obama presidential campaign knows many of you are threatening to vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain because supporting Obama would feel like swallowing insults to feminism and, I guess, the "popular vote" in the sham Florida and Michigan elections or whatever. To help you get over these irrational fears you are selling out, a triumphant Obama and a heavily-indebted Clinton would like to meet you personally, in Washington, at a hotel famous for bringing together powerful male politicians and desperate female whores. Bring your checkbook! Leave your uncomfortable analogies at home, please, kthxbai. [Daily News]

So. As we noted this morning, blog mistress Arianna Huffington didn't weigh in on the unexpected death of departed Meet the Press host Tim Russert until well after everyone else, and once she did, she didn't have much to say. Because of the old axiom about how much one should say when one doesn't have anything nice to say. (HuffPo's regular feature "Russert Watch" has gone blank—technical glitch or archive-scrubbing?) As anyone who's read Arianna's media writing over the last couple years knows, she never liked Tim. And we only just recently wandered into the fray, when we learned that Russert's unappreciated lapdog Chris Matthews hated Huffington for her years spent bashing his idol. And why did she hate Tim? This book excerpt might explain it all!

The New York Times, ever ranged against the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, hosted a fascinating symposium in May called "Jews and Power." If this is how the Sulzberger clan distances itself against nasty but enduring rumors, then Times, Inc. stockholders might consider now a good time to sell. Bad PR! The event — sort of like the New Yorker Festival, except way more open about who's in charge — borrowed its provocative title from Ruth Wisse's well-regarded intellectual history of the subject, published by Shocken Books a year ago as part of its series of volumes dealing with explicitly Jewish themes. (Also not to be missed: David Mamet on why anti-Semites are limp-dicked liberals who can't close). Some of the conversational pairings were rather inspired: Shalom Auslander, the smashmouth Spinoza of upstate New York, kibitzed with Rebecca Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, on what it's like to give up Orthodoxy and any chance of not being hounded to an early grave by your parents. Also, Washington Post journalist Warren Bass, reconstructed lefty Paul Berman, and Mideast analyst Aaron David Miller partake in this fruitful discussion:

Every big website in the world suckles at the teat of traffic like so many piglets fighting over a bloated sow. But figuring out the whims of the traffic gods is not as easy as you might think. If the oldest magazine in the world hasn't cracked the code yet (see the pitiful performance of the The Atlantic's Britney Spears cover), it's a lot to expect from the "new" media, even with all our fancy computerized counting machines. Sometimes it's out of your control; CNBC.com's chief just wrote that the business site's traffic took a dive yesterday when all of its golf-loving rich white guy readers turned away from their computers to watch Tiger Woods win the US Open. But there are some fairly reliable ways to build traffic successfully, which we will now reveal to you, after the jump. Is sex involved? Click now to find out!:

A half-hour before the news broadcast on NBC, a Wikipedia user hailing from IP address 66.187.200.74 updated NBC's Tim Russert's page to report the newsman's death. Scooped by the world's most authoritative guide to Idaho wine? How embarrassing for NBC. How worrisome for one of its contractors. See, the IP address 66.187.200.74 belongs to a company called Internet Broadcasting, which maintains some of NBC's local news websites. Not a very good way to keep a news organization as a customer.

XXL Magazine, one of the biggest hip hop magazines in America, appears to have forgotten to pay its internet bills-the entire website is now just a landing page offering to "renew this domain." Uh, that's not good. [XXLMag.com]

Gerry Marzorati, editor of the New York Times Magazine, was recently spotted on a plane headed to Milan for a T magazine party, swearing under his breath as if he had Tourette's Syndrome. It's understandable-he's been working too hard. The man has his own magazine to worry about, and here he is trekking across the globe to celebrate the new magazines his paper keeps adding, like the the fashion-centric T. That's because print, despite being on the way out, still has its bright spots. Chief among them for the miserable newspaper industry: Sunday magazines.

When ancient and respected old magazine The Atlantic put Britney Spears on their cover for an utterly so-so story on the celebrity-industrial complex or whatever (it was OK but Rolling Stone's piece was better), everyone (i.e. us) mocked them for selling out and claimed it was a cynical ploy at boosting newsstand sales or something. Well. Mea culpa! Because if it was a cynical ploy at boosting newsstand sales, it failed miserably. "The magazine sold approximately 24,000 copies at the newsstand, some 21,000 less than March and nearly 30,000 less than its January/February issue." According to Atlantic Media president Justin Smith (the man who destroyed The Atlantic), they meant to do that.

"Kazakhstan's sole communication satellite, used by many of the nation's TV broadcasters, is out of control due to a computer glitch and may be lost altogether, officials said." At least they won't be able to see all the "Borat" jokes that are coming. Ha, who's running the space program over there, ha? [NYP]

Air conditioning is not just one of the most important summertime problems facing the media. It's a problem facing everyone, because high gas prices are turning air conditioners into machines that burn $100 bills to produce cool air. Stores in high foot traffic areas have always thrown their doors open in the summer and blasted the AC, knowing that sweaty people will come in and browse just to get out of the sun. But now that strategy is not only hugely expensive, but bad PR as well; environmentalist customers will whine and complain and call the city and organize boycotts. An intrepid NYT reporter finds that wanton AC-wasters are centered—like the media—in SoHo:

Yesterday, Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy speculated that maybe, just maybe, the novel from the wife of comedian Denis Leary (above, right) is autobiographical, since it's about a wife whose famous husband is good friends with a hot Australian movie star, sort of like how Leary is friends with hot English actress Elizabeth Hurley (above, left). In the novel, the actor's wife is upset by his "schoolboy crush" on the friend. We wrote that Ann Leary had "sadly channeled her frustrations into a thinly-veiled 'novel.'" But she replies that Gawker is "crazy," and told Choire Sicha of the LA Times that we're just clawing for cheap attention. Well, that last part is true. But at least we can admit it!

As reported previously, the Associated Press is attempting to define "guidelines" to allow bloggers to quote its content, even though substantial quoting is already allowed under federal copyright law. The wire service will arrive at these guidelines after meeting with the Media Bloggers Association. And who are they? It's hard to say, even after reading the group's site and searching for more information elsewhere on the Web.

David Gergen just made a good point on CNN about John McCain: We all laughed when the Republican presidential candidate said he didn't use a Mac OR a PC, and that his second wife did all his internet surfing for him, but McCain's luddite tendencies are screwing up his campaign and thus could wreck the country someday. Exhibit A is Clayton Williams, who was to host a McCain fundraiser but who was discovered to have once made a crass rape joke. It turns out the rape joke has long been in Williams' Wikipedia entry, ranked number three by Google in a search on Williams' name. Whoops! McCain clearly needs to learn The Google. As internet-savvy Barack Obama can testify after his jettisoning of vice-presidential-screener James Johnson, it won't weed out all the tainted associates, but it's great for that critical first cut. Clip after the jump.

So we were vaguely aware Katie Couric had a YouTube channel, but had no idea the CBS Evening News anchor put so much energy into it. It's almost as though she feels stifled at work! Can't imagine why that would be. Anyway, Los Angeles Times writer Matea Gold watched all the videos so you don't have to, and wrote up the highlights, which we've assembled into a quick montage after the jump. Couric snaps Larry King's suspenders, chats up the paparazzi, sings with Bette Midler, makes a Saturday Night Live joke and hangs out barefoot with a bunch of mom bloggers.

Is it possible that beer advertising is becoming "silly" and "arbitrary?" We're going to go with "what do you mean, 'becoming?'" But the lack of "weight" and "integrity" to the "brand stories" of beer companies these days is really weighing on Seth Stevenson, Slate's generally sharp ad critic-and a man who obviously takes beer very seriously. While you or I might just accept that beer ads, of all things, are destined to be stupid in order to appeal to drunks, Stevenson allows a vapid Amstel commercial to send him into a deep spiral of despair. Why aren't they emphasizing the "five valid, logical criteria for choosing one beer over another" in their TV spots?!?!:

Obama's newest flack is former journalist! It's cute when journos move to politicians' press offices and pretend they'll still give a shit about The People's Right To Know. "The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this conversation we had about telling the truth," Linda Douglass says. (Obama's DIFFERENT he cares about CHANGE and TRUTHS.) And so, it begins. [WP]