The Post's Keith Kelly reports that former US Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller has missed her first deadline at her new employer, American Media. A last minute change to the layout resulted in an additional $20,000 printing fee. (American Media CEO David Pecker's inner monologue: "Ooooh, missed deadline! Pinch me! We really do have Bonnie Fuller!") Last minute changes and costly missed deadlines were a standard operating procedure for Fuller at US Weekly, so the Star "insiders" expressing varying degrees of shock and dismay are either woefully naive or pissed off because they don't like the new girl. Next up: "Star Staffers Report That Fuller Yells At People"
Fuller's Star turn costs $20K for missed deadline [NY Post]

Bonnie Fuller, interviewed by Newsday, won't answer the suggestion, put about by former colleagues, that she's all about money. But the tabloid mag editor, recently hired to remake American Media's titles, revels in her geekiness. "I was the girl in the front row of class with my hand held very high. And I wore glasses."
Bonnie Fuller's New Empire [Newsday]

I'd assumed that gossip columnist was a position from which one could be removed only by death or assassination. The New York Post's gossip doyennes have outlasted even the Soviet Politburo. But there are changes afoot at the New York Daily News. Joanna Molloy, half of the husband-and-wife gossip team at the paper, is rumored to be up for Star Magazine. (Star is part of Bonnie Fuller's new editorial empire at American Media.) Which of course has nothing to do with the fact that Lloyd Grove, who wrote the excellent Reliable Sources column at the Washington Post, has finally confirmed that he's moving to the Daily News.
Washington Buzz: Post Gossip Lloyd Grove to Write a Column for the New York Daily News [Washingtonian]

New York Magazine shows how deals for first fiction have gone through the roof since the success of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. (The figures, which speak louder than words, are listed below.) An established writer with so-so sales is soiled, but publishers can tout a debut novelist as the hot new thing. A writer's track record is like credit, says Christy Fletcher, an agent: "It s better to have no credit than bad credit. I showed the article to a friend, a published novelist. "I'm going to change my name," he says.
$4,000,000: Stephen Carter, for first two novels
$1,200,000: Daniel Mason, for The Piano Tuner and a second novel
$1,000,000: Hari Kunzru, for The Impressionist
$625,000: Plum Sykes, for Bergdorf Blondes
$500,000: Arthur Phillips, for Prague
$500,000: Jonathan Safran Foer, for Everything is Illuminated
$475,000: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, for The Dirty Girls Social Club
The New Literary Lottery [New York Magazine]

Bill Keller, named life coach executive editor of the New York Times yesterday, told staff to take time off, view art, and savor life. Frank Rich, writing in the Washington Post, says the appointment marks a return to "stability and steadiness." Not to be confused, as did Howell Raines in Friday's performance on Charlie Rose, with complacency. According to Newsweek's Seth Mnookin, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger snapped: "There s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be."
Keller appointment [Romenesko]

Andrew Sullivan, the conservative commentator, is a believer in the direct approach in the job market. Sullivan, who was dropped from the New York Times Magazine and took refuge in blogging after Howell Raines became editor of the newspaper, was one of the people asked by New York Magazine for his recommendation to the Times' new editor. How would you change the Times? Sullivan answered: "Hire a real conservative columnist."
If You Were Made Editor of the New York Times.... [New York Magazine]

New York's newspaper industry will survive the resignation of Howell Raines from the Times, and the humiliation today of yet another mammoth correction. However, a ranking of America's most literate cities may prove more difficult to live down. It's not so much that New York ranks 47th in the country; it's the identity of the town at the top of the table, Newark, which has the highest rate of newspaper circulation in the country. Residents of the New Jersey city are gripped by stories such as (from today's Star-Ledger) "Program produces new crop of teachers for urban schools."
America's most literate cities [University of Wisconsin-Whitewater]
Star-Ledger

In Touch magazine was barred from the party for Reese Witherspoon's new movie. While denying the actress personally struck In Touch from the list, Witherspoon's publicist explained the dynamics of celebrity profiles. "That's a complete lie," Witherspoon's rep, Leslie Sloan, told The Scoop. "She wasn't the one who disinvited In Touch. I did. In Touch ran an unauthorized profile [of Witherspoon]. They've done this before. In Touch needs to be stopped. They need to learn their lesson... Reese didn't have anything to do with [the disinviting]. Stars shouldn't be subjected to this sort of stuff. This is so stupid."
Reese Witherspoon, the new diva? [Jeannette Walls]

BREAKING: The New York Times Names Bill Keller Executive Editor [Business Wire]

Keith Kelly of the New York Post says that Bill Keller will be named the new editor of the New York Times today. Keller, former managing editor of the newspaper, had lost out to Howell Raines last time round; he is an obvious and uninspired choice. Meanwhile, Howell Raines went on Charlie Rose on Friday night to explain how he let the Times get away from him. At the time, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, said Raines had stepped down voluntarily, which was about as credible as the Bush claims on Iraqi nukes. According to Raines, "Arthur said, 'I don't think we can calm this place down. ... I'm having to ask you to step aside.'"
Embattled Times stays inhouse for new top editor [New York Post]
Ex-Times Editor discusses Blair scandal [AP]

I'm off to Des Moines (home of soybeans, corn, and the Vanity Fair demographic) for two days and Gawker Publisher Nick Denton will be blogging, but before I go, I leave you with the condensed version of my roman-a-clef about my three days at the New York Post's Page Six last week. (If the success of Lauren Weisberger's Vogue novel, The Devil Wears Prada, is any indicator of demand for this sort of thing, I expect a bidding war to erupt immediately):

SUV-wielding flack Lizzie Grubman complained while speaking on a panel titled, "Are the Media Eating the East End Alive?" that the press inaccurately reported her story ("my accident," as she calls it) last year when she backed into several Conscience Point onlookers with her dad's Mercedes. I wonder which part of "Lizzie Grubman backed her daddy's SUV into several people because she was angry" was inaccurate. Unless, of course, "because she was angry" really should have been "because she was coked up." Not that I'm saying she was...
Hamptons celebs turn tables on the media [Newsday]

The Black Table's Will Leitch comments on a recent Page Six item about NYT A&L editor Jodi Kantor in which an anonymous Times employee complained that Kantor was hiring web journalists for freelance pieces, citing Sarah Hepola of theMorningNews.org as an example (despite the fact that Hepola also has several years of experience writing for the Austin Chronicle) as well as Kantor's prior experience at Slate: "Amazingly, Web journalism is still seen by many as reckless, a couple of geeks in their parents' basement with a modem and a bunch of free time. This preposterous perception could be classified as quaint or outdated if it had ever been true in the first place. And let's face it: What publication has a wider credibility gap these days: Slate, or the Times? Think hard about your answer." [Disclosure: Kantor's my editor at the Times and I'm also one of those obnoxious web people she hired.]
The Old Gray Lady is eating its young [TheBlackTable]

Report from a reader: "check out the free magazine boxes in front of 66...they have giant stickers on them that say something like 'failure to keep a tidy display' or something like that. Is this a new Bloomberg ticket harassment or just a prop from Sex And the City? this is good news for blogers but bad for all the free mags....maybe it's a result of the 'feud' between The L Magazine and the Press over the color orange...I am working on a new free magazine called Spike (just kidding.)" Has Jean-Georges removed the Vanity Fairs yet? Or at least torn out A.A. Gill's scathing reviews of 66 from the issue?

In the continuing "trace the unattributed quotes that were lifted from other sources" vein, a reader points out that the Niall Ferguson quote in the Observer UK article below "appears to be lifted not from the NYT magazine but from a 6/29 Boston Globe magazine article that was posted on Arts & Letters Daily a few days ago: unless of course the Globe writer lifted his quotes from the Times article, but I don't think that Times article was even about Ferguson." Times gets lifted by the Globe gets lifted by the Observer? Or there's the equally amusing reverse conspiracy theory: maybe all three reporters were standing there when Ferguson said it.

Not only is Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hanging out in the Hamptons (after saying he hated the scene), he's also hanging out with Regis and Kathie Lee. From a reader: "I couldn't get my ass off the couch Monday morning so watched Live with Regis and Kelly, in which Regis and Kelly showed off their Hamptons weekend photos. Not only is Graydon Carter hanging in the Hamptons now, but he's schleping at parties with Regis and Kelly. You would think a guy like Graydon would know the difference between A list and C list." What's happening to our Graydon?! Hanging out in the Hamptons with C-listers?! There's no Da Silvano in the Hamptons! P. Diddy lives there, for god's sake!

Clare Zulkey interviews a "senior editor at a large circulation magazine" about what freelancers should and should not do when submitting freelance pitches in an article entitled, "What would Tina do?" Some tips:
· "If you have little birdies or flowers or kittens on your return-address sticker, it may take me a couple of years to get around to opening the envelope."
· "If I like your idea, or think it shows promise, I'm going to Google you. Just thought you might like to know. And if your cover letter screams out Cuckoo! Cuckoo!, I'm also going to Google you, if I get a minute, just for the hell of it."
· "If I receive something from you sent via Fedex or Airborne Express, I'm going to wait at least three days before opening it. I don't know why. I'm not saying it's right. That's just how it is."
· "If you're currently serving time in a penal institution, the chances are slim that we're going to assign you that Jennifer Aniston profile... although, come to think of it, it's probably not such a bad idea."
[Ed.Anyone want to play "guess the senior editor?"]
What would Tina do? [MediaBistro]

A reader provides a mock up of a smarter Star magazine (per yesterday's request.)

When the NYT had former Harper's Bazaar editor and [Vogue editor] Anna Wintour protegee Kate Betts review The Devil Wears Prada, (Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about her job as Anna's assistant) I thought it was incredibly unfair, even though I thought the book was badly written and agreed with most of what Betts said. But Betts couldn't have possibly been expected to write an objective review, and the NYT knew that. They commissioned the review because they knew it'd be vicious (and therefore "interesting"). Now the Atlantic has asked leftie columist Christopher Hitchens to review former Clinton aide [and longstanding Hitchens nemesis] Sidney Blumenthal's book, The Clinton Wars and it's exactly the same bullshit. Not that I didn't enjoy it. But come on.
Thinking like an apparatchik [The Atlantic]

NY Mag's Carl Swanson writes that former US Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller has "dumbed down every magazine she's ever worked for." This is probably true. The only way US Weekly could have been any dumber is to replace the multisyllabic words in the captions with icons representing various facial expressions. (Demi and Ashton: a scandalized smiley face.) I'm fully convinced that Fuller's ultimate goal at US was to make the magazine intelligible to the completely illiterate. That said, she's presumably being brought into American Media to turn Star and possibly the National Enquirer, The Globe and Weekly World News into serious journalistic endeavorsinasumuch as they feasibly can be serious journalistic endeavors. (I guess this translates to paying the sources on "bat boy" stories $2,000 instead of $10,000, as was previously customary.) [Ed.I started to do a mock-up of a smartened-up Star and an even-more-dumbed-down US Weekly, but I battled my Photoshop installation and Photoshop won. If any of you want to try, feel free to send the results to tips@gawker.com.]
What makes Bonnie run? [NY Mag]