• How's the New York Times Co. planning to lift itself out of the financial mess it's been in? Times Co. chief Janet Robinson says more cuts are on the way and the company is planning to sell off more assets. Also, there's some sort of paid membership model in the works, apparently. [WSJ, Gawker]
• Related: The paper says it will sell its stake in the Red Sox by January. [BG]
• What you missed at Walter Cronkite's funeral yesterday. [NYT, WaPo]
• Best-selling author E. Lynn Harris has died. He was 54. [NYT]
• More magazine is teaming up with Candace Bushnell on a new Web series starring 90210's Jennie Garth and Talia Balsam from Mad Men. [MW]
• After a ten-year run, today is Paula Froelich's last day at Page Six. [NYM]

Chris Matthews had former Nixon henchman/radio talk show host/Birther G. Gordon Liddy on Hardball tonight to talk about the dumb Obama birth certificate controversy and Liddy looked as though he might die on the air while Matthews surgically debunked him.

Remember last week when Pat Buchanan, noted fighter of white male oppression, went on Rachel Maddow's show and launched into one of the more staggeringly imbecilic rants in the history of political punditry? Last night Maddow re-visited that whole episode.

Bill O'Reilly is so torn up over the death of Walter Cronkite. According to Bill, Cronkite was a liberal, but he didn't let his political views influence his reporting, unlike everyone around today, everyone except Fox News of course.

Oh Pat. Rachel Maddow had crazy ole "Uncle Pat" on her show tonight to discuss the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination and Buchanan went over the dark side with a "white people built this country and deserve more" rant.

Remember Erich "Mancow" Muller, Keith Olbermann's radio-clown pal who kept getting MSNBC airtime because Olbermann found his waterboarding conversion politically useful to flog even though it was a hoax? He just called Barack Obama a "Kenyan-Muslim turd" on the radio.

Because they'll say "blow job," like Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel just did on MSNBC.

Last night we kinda took Newt Gingrich to the woodshed for a grammatical abortion of a tweet he posted to his Twitter account yesterday. Apparently Newt took note of our criticism, as did MSNBC's Contessa Brewer.

Today on MSNBC David Shuster and Tamron Hall did a story on the "longest cucumber in the world," which was a bad idea right from the start.

Hah. So Mika Brzezinski complained about the old sex scandal double standard, and then when she had Rudy Giuliani in the studio to talk about Mark Sanford, she forgot to ask him about his own business.

• Despite unkindly reviews from most critics, the Transformers sequel racked up $112 million at the box office over the weekend, bringing its five-day gross to more than $200 million. [THR]
• Don't worry too much about the New York Times going under. AdAge reports the paper should be in business until at least 2011. [AdAge]
• Viacom is not going to buy MySpace from News Corp., alas. [Reuters]
• NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker is so concerned about the situation at the company's film division, he's sending his CFO to LA to crack skulls. [NYP]
• More bad news for the TV biz: According to a new report, the industry faces a $2 billion ad slump over the next four years. [FT]
• Not only did the New York Times keep news of reporter David Rohde's kidnapping a secret, the paper kept it off of Wikipedia, too. [NYT]
• MSNBC's is hoping broadcasting in HD boosts ratings. [B&C]
• Kate Gosselin's next book has been postponed; you can guess why. [NYP]
• VH1 has two new hip-hop-themed reality shows in the works. [THR]

Aw. Non-MJ-mourner and celebrity Twitterer Ana Marie Cox will not host The Rachel Maddow Show tonight, because MSNBC is devoting all its primetime programming to the still-classified 2004 CIA report into interrogations and detentions. Ha ha, just kidding.

Dylan Ratigan's new MSNBC show launches next week. To judge by this audio, sent by a tipster, of Ratigan berating a producer during a commercial break, his new colleagues must be thrilled to have him.

With the whole Mark Sanford thing going down today it was not hard to lose sight of other, more important things going on in the world, like, oh yeah, Iran! And that situation just gets more and more depressing.

So a live, rambling, out-of-left-field admission of adultery by a sitting US Governor is big news, and it is just the sort of thing our 24-hour news networks should love. Except Fox, which cut the feed.

• New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson "isn't happy with the media." She'd also like to make it clear that the company is not currently up for sale, so please put your dollar bills back in your wallet, thank you very much. [MW]
• Ten movies will compete for Best Picture at the Oscars now, not 5. [THR]
• Sad: Dick Cheney landed a $2 million deal to publish his memoir. [NYT]
• Also sad: MSNBC, the illustrious home of blowhard Keith Olbermann, seems to think its tired prison docs are more important than covering Iran. [LAT]
• Director David Fincher is in talks to make a movie about Facebook. [Reuters]
• The always classy In Touch spent $75,000 to purchase photos of Kate Gosselin spanking her kids in public for its cover last week. [WWD, NYP]

Dan Abrams is soon launching Mediaite, his very own "Drudge meets Huffington Post," which he'll certainly use to promote clients of his endlessly shady PR firm. He's now looking for contributors who, like him, have no qualms about selling out.

MSNBC's token Republican Joe Scarborough appeared on a guest on Meet The Press this morning and essentially gave credit to Barack Obama for setting the stage for revolution in Iran with his recent speech in Cairo.

One of the strangest explanations Chicago shock jock Erich "Mancow" Muller gave for why his publicist had called his waterboarding "a hoax" was that he risked arrest if she said otherwise. For real? Like Mancow's original stunt, that's a fabrication.

If you watch the Daily Show you've seen Jon Stewart taking some shots lately at Joe Scarborough and MSNBC's Morning Joe. Today Scarborough fired back, going so far as to say that Stewart's raging persona is "kinda like Bill O'Reilly!"