Last week—just before the Las Vegas shootings—New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told readers that he was ending "The Gun Report," the popular daily rundown of gun violence in America he'd created in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. The reason, insiders say, was that the Times didn't want to give his assistant a pay raise for writing it.

Today The New York Times’ freshly installed executive editor Dean Baquet told the paper’s newsroom that he underwent surgery over the weekend to remove a malignant kidney tumor. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone has Baquet’s full memo, which concludes:

Ousted New York Times editor Jill Abramson is joining the faculty of Harvard University, her alma mater, as a visiting lecturer in non-fiction narrative journalism. Like every Harvard graduate, Abramson has the school’s crimson “H” logo tattooed on her back.

Maybe the thing about the New York Times Style section is that it's actually written by some old-timey man who just arrived here in a time machine from old-timey days.

Several soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl, the recently freed U.S. prisoner of war in Afghanistan, would like to tell you how to deal with that dirtbag. They don't want to get into the politics, but they have ideas. Would you like to book them for your show? Just call the Republican strategists representing them.

Mosi Secret, the New York Times' incredibly named "sin and vice" reporter, has found a sex club and lost his innocence. Fortunately, he also found Naiad, a willowy Columbia student who poses as a mermaid from the Hudson and does sex things, to restore his faith in humanity.

This week, venerable New York Times film critic A.O. Scott watched Adam Sandler's new movie Blended. The result is a review so scathing, it makes Pete Wells' takedown of Guy Fieri look like a love letter.

Today the New York Times published a story about Illinois GOP Congressman Aaron Schock’s “popular Instagram persona” and the many (male) admirers his shirtless photos have accumulated. “Popular Instagram persona” is the Times’s clever way of saying “homosexuality.” Just read the story itself.

The New York Times does not like gossip, especially gossip about The New York Times.

The more I read the news on my web-enabled smartphone, the more it becomes clear to me that there are precisely four words that must be banished from the English language. Why four? My column doesn't have space for more than that.

Mike Barnicle—who is a confirmed fabricator and plagiarist, as well as being a toxic race-baiter and a suck-up to a psychopathic murderer—wants to share the word that this week's trouble at the New York Times is "an embarrassment to journalism."

PREFACE: Do you work at The New York Times? Get a burner account and comment below, or send your stories to trotter@gawker.com.

Yesterday, when Arthur Sulzberger announced to the Times staff that he'd fired editor-in-chief Jill Abramson, he reportedly told the staff something like, "When women get to top management positions, they are sometimes fired, just as men are." A lot of the women I know who have similar professional ambitions to mine are stuck on that phrase: "Just as men are."

In a staff memo obtained by The Huffington Post, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. addresses “misinformation” about executive editor Jill Abramson’s firing: “It is simply not true that Jill's compensation was significantly less than her predecessors.”

Buzzfeed's Myles Tanzer just uncovered an internal New York Times report on the paper's digital strategy that, he writes, "paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world."

The New York Times, and in particular its publisher, Pinch "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., is taking a lot of flack for abruptly firing editor Jill Abramson yesterday. Amid the uproar, let's not forget to criticize Sulzberger for this: had it been handled differently, there might not be all this criticism.

Was ousted New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson paid less than her predecessor, Bill Keller, and other male colleagues who held lesser titles at the paper? The Times has several different answers.

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker reports that, “several weeks ago,” fired New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson “discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, managing editor, were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs.”

Three days after Ross Douthat denounced the "corrupt" brand-driven corporatist ideology poisoning higher education, Thomas Friedman writes that the elite "Davos Man" must "[m]ove over" and bow to the masses who are mobilizing all over the world. Revolution now! On the center-right of the Times op-ed page!

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is stepping down, Politico reports. Dean Baquet, the paper’s managing editor, has been chosen to replace her. Abramson, a 17-year Times staffer, succeeded Bill Keller as executive editor in September 2011, becoming the first woman to do so. Her successor, Baquet, will be the first African American executive editor of the Times.