The Salt Lake Tribune breaks down the text-to-hot-women ratios of leading men's magazines:

The Minor Fall, the Major Lift suggests alternative images for the "pencil erasing AOL from the AOL Time Warner logo" the NYT used to accompany yesterday's story about AOL TW removing AOL from the company name. Some recommendations:
· A gigantic crater in the ground, such as caused by some sort of nuclear event.
· In a sleek, streamlined kitchen Steve Case is placing accounting ledgers in an oven while Richard Parsons waves an admonitory finger.
· Steve Ross (the man behind the creation of Time Warner), oscillating in the tomb.
Or maybe just Michigan J. Frog eating the running man [TMFTML]

FOX Broadcasting is suing comedian Al Franken for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his (satirical) book, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. FOX alleges that Franken appears "shrill and unstable." They also claim that his use of the phrase "fair and unbalanced" would "blur and tarnish" it. (No word on whether Franken has plans to countersue, claiming FOX has already sufficiently blurred and tarnished "fair and balanced.")
To FOX, "fair and balanced" doesn't describe Al Franken [NYT]

I've had the 20th anniversary issue of Vanity Fair sitting on my desk for over a week. Under normal circumstances, I'd write something about it immediately, but the daunting prospect of reading 20,000 words about "the Royals" as well as the sheer weight and volume of the September issue (ads; not content) filled me with such an overwhelming sense of apathy that I could barely motivate myself to lift the front cover. I briefly considered dispersing the pages in the bug-infested laundry room of my building in hopes that they would bore the insect life to death, but refrained on the basis that I might have to read it in the process. For the sake of consistency, I was planning to eventually overanalyse Graydon Carter's editor's letter (as usual, per this and this) but wasn't looking forward to it. The NYT's David Carr to the rescue. Carr says exactly what I was going to say, but better and nicer: How can you write a scathing editorial about the elitism of the Bush administration (with which I agree, if it makes any difference) and at the same time celebrate the values of monarchical aristocracy, as if there's something inherently virtuous about being born with the right title? Carter says that journalists should be the foes of any administration. And he's right. But unless he's planning on intimidating the Bushies with Mario Testino shots of Prince William, I don't think Vanity Fair's going to be leading the charge.
For Vanity Fair, Bushes are exception to royal rule [NYT]

A Jayson Blair impersonator has established a Friendster account. (It had to happen sooner or later.) You can only see the page if you have an account and are linked within a certain number of degrees, so here's the relevant text: "GOD BLESS ALL OF YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LOOK BEHIND THE LIES AND FOR BEING OPEN ENOUGH TO APPRECIATE SOMEONE LIVING BREATHING AND UNEXPECTED WHERE THE MEDIA TOLD YOU YOU WOULD ONLY FIND FILTH!!!

The AP (and Variety, in more detail) reported over the the weekend that Esquire canned the assignment they gave Jayson Blair to review "Shattered Glass," the new movie about his fellow fabulist, Stephen Glass. The Gothamista thinks Blair got shafted when they pulled the assigment. Blogger [and Entertainment Weekly founder] Jeff Jarvis thinks they shafted Blair by giving him the assignment. Here's another scenario: Esquire shafted themselves by being dumb enough to the movie's production company talk them into letting Blair write a review. [Another note: Variety also reports that Blair is "reportedly in the movie biz himself, shopping a treatment for adapting his saga for the screen."]
On second thought, no thanks Jayson [NY Daily News]
Inside move: Glass houses

Lloyd Grove, soon to start a new gossip column at the New York Daily News, knows he is up against Mort Zuckerman, the paper's proprietor. W magazine quotes a former NYDN employee: "First, he wants you to write about his friends. And second, he doesn t want you to write about his friends." Grove's diplomatic take: "Mort has told me, and I really appreciate it, that his role in the production of my column will be to open his Daily News and read it." Which, I'm sure, is much the same as Zuckerman promised to the half dozen editors he's run through in the ten years the real estate tycoon has owned the Daily News.
Lloyd Almighty [W via Romenesko]

Bonnie Fuller's hometown paper, the Globe and Mail, lets Gwyneth Paltrow vent about the new tabloid magazines. The complaint: the tabloids encourage paparazzi photographers to capture the stars in mundane activities: zooming around London on a Vespa, for instance. Because, as US Weekly proclaims incessantly, the stars, they're just like us. Of the geeky US Weekly editor, who has since moved to American Media, Paltrow says: "She is the devil... The magazine culture has become insane because of these new weeklies. They just want pictures of people leaving their house, so now they follow you everywhere... the paparazzi are in my face, following me around... It's really poisoned me... In the darkest hour of my life, to be hunted like that, it's been hard for me."
The Fuller effect and the perils of tabloid-ization [Globe and Mail]

Another NYT staff memo (the third day in a row) announcing a managerial change: "Andy Rosenthal will be joining the editorial department this fall, succeeding Phil Taubman as deputy editor." I don't think that was a big secret, so assume they're just sending out a memo a day for consistency. (Conde Nast should start doing these. "Felix, the grill guy, will be joining the pasta bar this fall...") Perhaps they're assuming that people will stop reading them after a while and no one will notice when the managing editors announce that editor in chief Bill Keller has, in actuality, been locked in a 10th floor supply closet for the past two months as a computer has randomly selected a staffer a day from the Times' employee database to be slotted into a new executive position. Not that I'm saying that's what's happening.

The Observer reports that Kurt Andersen and (E.) Graydon Carter, the co-founders of SPY magazine, are thinking of putting together a book anthology of pieces from old issues. Progress, however, appears to be slow. Andersen: "Thus far, it's been a couple of codgers looking back on our youth. It's more like 'Hey, wasn't that great?' and 'Yeah, that was really great!'" (Which is exactly what the entire industry has been doing for the last year or so. "Hey, wasn't SPY great? Yeah, SPY was really great! Let's do another one! No, we can't. They went out of business. Clearly there's no demand. But wasn't SPY great? Yeah, SPY was really great!")
Moss tossed up, gets vast turf in Keller move [Observer]

The Black Table interviews Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto:
BT: Who are the top five people in media that you'd like to see naked?
MM: 'N Sync. Oh, in the media? The Village People. Oh, all right, just one. Jayson Blair. To see if he's telling the truth about THAT.
Between a rock and a hard place: the Village Voice's Michael Musto [BlackTable]

BREAKING: From the daily Shifting-People-Around at the NYT memo from editor-in-chief Bill Keller: "Phil Taubman has agreed to forsake the calm, reflective life (I speak from recent experience) of the 10th floor, where he is deputy editorial page editor, to take on one of the most exciting challenges in journalism, chief of the Washington Bureau."

BREAKING: NYT Magazine editor Adam Moss has been named First Assistant Managing Editor for Features at the New York Times. He will report to Editor in Chief Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson and oversee Culture, the Style sections, the Magazine, the Book Review, Travel, Circuits, Real Estate, Escapes and the Special Sections.

Folio's Simon Dumenco argues that ex-US Weekly editor-turned-American Media ("AMI") executive Bonnie Fuller dumped publisher Jann Wenner because she could, and was able to get away with it thanks to her sales numbers. Dumenco says that Fuller somehow managed to make her publisher disposable, and now AMI chief David Pecker is in the same position. (Dumenco also provides, for comparison, a pre-Bonnie US Weekly cover story headline"THE REAL MEL: LOVER, PRANKSTER, DEEPLY MORAL MAN"and justifiably invokes something about "projectile vomit.") I guess we can go ahead and start the death count: how long will Bonnie last at AMI and who's the next victim?
Bonnie's inner Jann [Folio]

No, seriously! What? Why are you laughing? The San Francisco Chronicle is hailing San Francisco a "magazine capital." Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner says that difference between the San Francisco media industry and the NY media industry is that in New York, people are obsessed with their jobs and in San Francisco, they make time for things like sports: "[In New York] People tended to define themselves by what they did...At Time magazine, you went into the building on Tuesday and came out on Saturday, and that was considered a normal way to live. That's why there's so much hard-core great media there... [In the Bay Area] the weather's too good. People want to go out on a mountain bike, and hike and take advantage of this incredible location." I think Quittner missed the point. In New York, social climbing, gossip, and building (or destroying) media empires are sports.
Bay area still a magazine mecca: it's not New York but flourishes after downturn [SF Chronicle]

First, you call up Asia Argento...

Someone just produced for me a pair of large faux radiation gloves that look like enormous silver oven mitts. They're emblazoned with the US Weekly logo. Why? Because US Weekly is HOT!! Ha ha ha! Geddit? Hot? Ha ha ha.

Journalist and writer Vivian Gornick (author of The Situation and The Story.) recently admitted, while conducting seminar at Goucher College, that she had invented some of the incidents she "recalled" in her memoirconversations with her mother and a street person who didn't exist, among them. Perhaps more shockingly, seminar attendees also reported that she admitted to using "composite characters" while reporting for the Village Voice. (The current editor, Don Forst, says that if she did it while in his employ, "that would be the end of it.") Fictionalized memoirs are one thing, but fictionalized reporting is quite another. Gornick seems to have confused telling the story with telling a story.
Confessions of a memoirist [Salon]

Legs McNeil, chronicler of all things New York punk rock and author of Please Kill Me, writes to Black Book magazine regarding their request for a "letter of protest" for their Fall protest-themed issue:
I wouldn't call Black Book a progressive culture magazine. I'd call it a shoddy way for your asshole publisher to get the fashion industry to advertise. Don't bullshit me with your hype, if you'd been a little sharper you would have seen that I've written for Black Book before, I think the pay was $500. Color separators make more. And you want me to write for you?
Legs

Protocols reports that Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman recently had lunch with News Corp head Rupert Murdoch and the following conversation ensued:
DG: You know, I don t think I am going to agree to be interview on Fox News anymore.
RM: For heavens sake, why not?
DG: Because every time I am on Fox your reporters embarrass me.
RM: They embarrass you?
DG: Yes, they always come off as being more pro-Israel than I, how am I supposed to compete?
He has a point.
Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman [Protocols]