Having seen one too many $2000 My Super Sweet Sixteen party dress and Laguna Beach butt-floss bikini, The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke is finally ready to tune her television to MTV and chainsaw the fucker in half (kids, ask your parents!). In this week's column, Finke laments the network's—which, we hear, used to primarily present delightful mini-movies set to the most popular songs of the day—loss of semi-innocence; after all, what kind of basic cable channel can claim a rock-and-roll soul when it cynically underwrites some Hollywood do-gooding just because the host is a movie star who boffs Justin Timberlake?

Cosmopolitan, November 1971.
For reference: 30 years later, the current issue of Cosmo features articles such as "20 Sexifiers Just for Your Eyes" and "How to Turn Him on Without Touching."

Flush from the stunning success of the weekend edition, the Wall Street Journal has decided to tear the guts out of anachronistic print-media fans by shrinking their paper:

A confused reader sends us documentation of our confused state of existence:

• Big ol' pictures of the eye-meltingly pretty new LES — thanks, Hollywood! [Curbed]
• You want to stop by Kate Spade's place tonight? Here's her address. [Planet Gordon]
• Even the inexplicably still-employed David Spade ought to know better than to piss off Robert Blake — while he's going back in to get his gun, someone could get hurt! [CC Insider]
• Those Observer bastards just outed William Li, effectively ending his career. [Media Mob]

We're so excited about this that we almost busted the sirens out again — do you notice anything slightly different about Romenesko Letters?

• "Another decade, another lengthy Harper's state of the novel essay." [Media Mob]
• You'd better shatch up that DVD collection of every New Yorker issue ever while you still can, because someone might be having an electronic rights problem down the line. [Boston Globe]
• And speaking of The New Yorker, Ken Auletta's piece is all about how when a national chain owns your newspaper, you totally don't have to feel obligated to try very hard anymore. [E&P]
• Wolf Blitzer insists his name is real. His integrity, not so much. [Post-Gazette]

Find the front page of the Times, with all its hurricanes and floods and Gaza and George Bush, too depressing for you? Troubled by the TV news, with its murder and mayhem and health scares and Fleecing of America? Disappointed that even our commentary isn't quite cheery enough for you? (Us? Negative? Never.)

We here at Gawker cover New York City, and we cover media. So you'd think we'd have nothing to say about a story in today's Times recounting the tale of a JetBlue flight that took off from the Burbank airport, in Los Angeles, discovered a problem with its landing gear, circled for several hours, and then quasi-crash landed at LAX. But you'd be wrong. Because, naturally, there's a New York media angle to the story, buried at the end:

We reported yesterday on media-business news site PaidContent.org, which threw a little (admittedly justified) tantrum that The Wall Street Journal had repeated a scoop it broke without duly crediting the site. So we must point out today that the Journal has corrected its coverage. Reports PaidContent:

Media business-y blog Paid Content writes:

It's been a day of dissatisfaction with our two most Respectable Newspapers over here. While we take a break from the TimesSelect (exclusive) outrage, here are a couple of your responses to the new Wall Street Journal weekend edition:

The Wall Street Journal — favorite newspaper of robber barons, those with an irrational fear of photography, and rich people too smart to read the Sun — introduced its heavily publicized, TimeSelectian experiment in catching up with the turn-of-the-20th century last Saturday, a so-called "Weekend Edition." But, you see, we live on the internet, and the Wall Street Journal lives in the offices of the powerful people whose salaries New York Magazine is more generous in guessing/making up. In other words, it ain't online for free and we didn't get it in print. As an emailer wrote in earlier today:

This week's New York mag cover story is a brilliant study in class envy: It's the salary issue, in which the projected payoffs of various Manhattanites are presented in a handy listicle, ready for your shock and ire.

Now that they want your precious scratch, will the Times be even more vigilant about their exacting standards of accuracy? That may be the only explanation for the "correction" they appended to Elmore Leonard's first installment of his weekly serial story in their much-ballyhooed new "Funny Pages" section. The correction, mysteriously, is some obscure military something-or-other — and not an acknowledgment that the story isn't funny.

While today's Post is full of its typical subway shootings and Bloomberg-fellating, those upstarts at the telegenic Daily News are hitting them where it hurts, with a stolen-memorial story offering, per their front page, "EXCLUSIVE 9/11 OUTRAGE." Of course, the inclusivity of outrage is the reason we have two tabloids in this city, but all Murdoch's giving us today is exclusive outrage at the degrading treatment of "superstar rapper Lil' Kim." Or is it voyeuristic excitement? We can never quite tell the difference. In either case, look for the tomorrow's Post to feature at least 4 defaced or vandalized 9/11 memorials, as well as an exclusive (and outrageous) photo of Freddy Ferrer spitting on firefighters' graves.

The LAT profiles industry uber-lawyer Skip Brittenham, who, it turns out, is more than merely one of the industry's most powerful behind-the-scenes players. ("All roads lead to Skip" declares Sony's Amy Pascal! "If you're going to have just one new Lew Wasserman this year, make it Skip Brittenham!" says Harvey Weinstein of the The Weinstein Company Gazette! etc etc.) He's also a dedicated dad, devoted fisherman, and, it seems, an amateur comedian. Humanizes the Times:

New on Poynter, your one-stop source for one-note journalism.

Christina Valhouli, who famously wrote on Salon that she couldn't shit in front of her boyfriend, is working on a story on party spots. Maybe you guys can help, eh?

Fresh off the AP wire, an almost minute-by-minute account of how your favorite celebrities have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, presented in reverse order of severity: