This week the Daily News' Clem Richardson penned testimony to the gorgeous mosaic that is our city. Clem used to be a poor tipper to the delivery guys who brought him his Chinese food, but a call from the restaurant's owner helped him learn a valuable lesson. It's got so many of the great New York stereotypes: the black guy who skimps on gratuities, the comically-accented Asian restaurateur who refuses to pay his workers a decent wage, the surly deliverymen who will make a brother walk down the stairs if he doesn't treat them right.... The only thing missing is the Jewish guy who makes his money off the toil of others. Oh, wait, that's the paper's publisher! Anyway, a valuable lesson is learned and everyone discovers how to get along. Yay New York!

Here's how our three metropolitan tabloids covered yesterday's weather events. (Click to enlarge.) Oh, Newsday, you're so cute! You're almost like a real newspaper!

We hear that Daily News editor in chief Martin Dunn has taken off for London and won't be back all month. Feeling super-secure in his job? Or looking for a new one? We don't know. We would like to! We know only enough to make innuendos.

Nice work, Daily News. You just ruined any credibility the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had left.

Nice work, Daily News! A lesser paper would have gone with something like "staff issues."

We hear that Jo Piazza, late of Bauer's wretched and folded-before-opening Cocktail, is going back to her old home at the New York Daily News. That's crazy! Who goes back to places they quit? Oh right, this stupid industry. She'll be a features princess or something. We also hear she found out about Cocktail's death while on a cigarette break. Heh. Anyway, fellow Cocktail castoff Piper Weiss will also be rolling up to the Daily News. So much for that self-actualizing screenplay or book proposal or whatever she was talking about.

How crazy is it that Lloyd Grove, our favorite former gossip columnist at the New York Daily News, is on assignment for New York magazine to write about nutty New York Post editor Col Allan? So crazy! We hear the piece is at least a few weeks away, though he's been working on it for a while. One might assume the rationale for assigning the piece, despite any actual or theoretical conflict of interest, is that Lloyd would bring some sort of inside knowledge to the story. But if that were true, wouldn't he still have his job at the Daily News? Hi-o! Oh, just asking, Lloyd!

If you're of the opinion that wealthy people are innately fascinating because of their wealth, Nick Paumgarten's 13-page New Yorker profile of Daily News proprietor and real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman is a helpful corrective. That thing is a Lunesta in tiny type. We're not even inclined to blame Paumgarten on this one: Zuckerman may be the most boring billionaire in the world, which is particularly surprising considering he's essentially self-made, and his Canadian Jew background alone should at least provide some spark of interest. But guess what? He's full of himself, he brags about his influence in the political sphere, he talks a lot, he used to bang Gloria Steinem, and, uh, that's it. It's telling that Zuckerman only seems interesting in the pages of the New York Post, which has a vested interest in making its rival look bad. In fact, the only amusing anecdote to come out of the story sounds like something you'd read in the Post.

New senior vice president of Daily News Digital: "Our whole policy is to do things as cheaply as possible." [NYP]

After Metro editor Dean Chang and National editor Mark Mooney got canned from the Daily News, the Post's Keith Kelly said the following day that the firings were part of a panicked strategy by editor-in-chief Martin Dunn to please owner Mort Zuckerman. Kelly pointed out that Dunn's contract expires in the "fourth quarter of this year"—but it's sooner than it sounds, as sources tell us the contract actually expires in October, the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Dean Chang's replacement as Metro editor at the Daily News will be former New York Post managing editor for news Stu Marques, who most recently worked as a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers. Oh, and his wife, JoAnne Wasserman, is an editor at the Daily News, too! That's handy.

Self-styled "former popular-music historian" turned revirginized Catholic loonytune Dawn Eden is no longer a deputy news editor at the New York Daily News. She says she's leaving to take her "dream job" as director of the Cardinal Newman Society's Love and Responsibility program, whose "projects include promoting Eucharistic Adoration, monitoring commencement speakers, and campaigning to stop Catholic campuses from hosting Eve Ensler's play that reduces women to their anatomy." Dawn is "elated, excited, and, most of all, thankful," which is just how we'd feel about basically any news if we hadn't gotten laid since March 2003. And from what we hear, her Daily News co-workers are pretty elated to see her go!

Yesterday, the august literary journal called the New York Daily News dubbed Lori Culwell's self-published novel Hollywood Car Wash one of its "Sizzling Summer Reads." "It's hot because it's said to be written by a former friend of Katie Holmes who got dropped after she met Tom Cruise. It's cool for the same reason," they write. But even the author herself admits that this might not be, technically, the truth: "Hey, I can't control what they say, can I?" she winks on her MySpace blog. How did the Daily News get such a wacky idea? Maybe it's because many blogs received, and posted verbatim, an email that claimed Katie Holmes had read the book and was incensed.

Page Six's crazy—like a fox, perhaps—item today that laid bare some alleged misdeeds of the New York Post has reverberated far and wide. Even New York Daily News' gossip queen Joanna Molloy has been touched by the scandal! We asked Ms. Molloy what she thought about the allegations, particularly those that had to do with Richard Johnson's admission that he accepted $1,000 from restaurateur Nello Balan, presumably in exchange for favorable treatment. Turns out this was sort of a habit of Nello's!

If you're the kind of person who likes to read an actual paper - and have not yet left the house - we've got some good news for you: Both of the tabs are going for a quarter today, which spares you the agonizing decision of which paper to choose for your interminable commute. We're not sure how long the price war can last, but the Post is clearly on the defensive against the News, which, in a very sweet note, admits that it loves you.

• Oprah Winfrey endorses Barack Obama. Hell, if she can move copies of The Road she can probably sell anything. [NYT]
  

• Post calls out News' circulation figures: The "paper's overreliance on bulk sales is propping up a single-copy sales disaster." Expect some lame News response involving the phrase "New York area" tomorrow. [NYP]
  

• Newspaper circulation falls pretty much everywhere. Here on the home front, though, both the Post and the News saw increases. Other (slight) success stories: USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. [WSJ]
  

By virtue of our job we tend to consume more media than most folks we know; by virtue of being old we tend to consume more of that media in print form. Our mornings generally consist of waking up at an ungodly hour and reading the Times, then walking to the train station, where we buy a copy of the Post, wait for the 6, and head down to the office. We generally pick the Post over the News for two reasons: It's only a quarter, and it's quick enough that we've finished it by the time we hit SoHo. So the recent announcement that the Post was going to hike its cost back to 50 cents gave us pause: Would we still pick up the paper at that price point? Then we recalled an incident that happened a few weeks ago.

Longtime Daily News reporter Austin Fenner is jumping ship to the Post. It's not a particularly remarkable move; Fenner is a respected rewrite man and enterprise reporter, if not a marquee name. But Daily News staffers report that Fenner's departure is a sign of something more ominous for the tabloid—they're having trouble keeping people because of the money.