Newspapers sales have fallen 3 percent year-over-year. With the exception of USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, the vast majority of major papers lost subscribers. This year the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry organization that reports subscriber information, included online readership in the report. In the last two years, half of 88 papers examined showed no change or an increase in combined print and online readings. That's good news for the news industry — online readers tend to be younger and more attractive to advertisers. That's fine. Maybe more papers should follow the New York Times' example — they may be just a fancy blog, but that's what the kids are reading these days. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

Hollywood writers are protesting in the street. They want a bigger piece of royalty payments studios earn when movies and TV shows find their way to the Internet and DVDs. The images from the scene are gruesome as police officers wield billy clubs to beat the protesting hordes back to work. Wait, no, those are images from Multan, Pakistan, where lawyers are fighting autocrats in the street. Still, this remains a very serious issue. No matter what you might think after viewing this SNL explanation of the news. (And yes, we suspect the writers aren't getting paid for this one, either.)

Charles Kaiser, author of "The Gay Metropolis" and the go-to man on New York Times exegesis, and also the man I have been stalking for years because he seriously needs to be my gay lover, is now the Monday media critic for Radar. His first column today is a passel of crazy and it could not be more enjoyable. He trashes Andrew Sullivan and Howie Kurtz, interviews Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal (who calls Times executive editor Bill Keller "crazy"), disses that ridiculous Obama-in-New-York story from last week, and counts the white people on the Sunday T.V. chatshows (answer: all of them). [Radar]

Last night, when Brad Stone and Miguel Helft got the scoop about Google's OpenSocial program, they included a quote from Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. You can still find the quote using Google's search engine, but it's gone from the text of the story, and we can't find any cached version. Why? Perhaps it was cut for space in the final print version. That strikes me as curious, since space considerations don't apply to the Web, where the full version could have easily remained. More intriguing is the whispers that an unduly loquacious Li might have played a role in the New York Times getting the scoop. We're stumped. Anyone have an answer?

The post office is going to kill all the magazines! Your favorite magazine's logo may soon be obscured by more than just the inhuman photoshopped face of Jennifer Garner, the words "PERFECT ABS IN 10 MINUTES," or a brown paper sack. No, a hideous mailing label might soon be up right where the logo's supposed to be, if the "chatter" overheard by Folio and Designing Magazines is to be believed.

Which is mightier, the pen or the search engine? On October 19, Fortune editor Andy Serwer blogged a short-lived rumor that Google cofounder Larry Page will marry girlfriend Lucy Southworth on December 7. Short-lived, because the passage about the smooch-prone couple's happy news quickly disappeared from the page:

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker again denied rumors of a possible sale of the company by parent General Electric. Zucker noted that GE chief Jeff Immelt "has said numerous times that NBCU is not for sale." Sort of like NBC's new fall season on iTunes. [Reuters]

For six long days, wildfires have raged across southern California, displacing thousands, destroying millions of dollars worth of property; they still threaten tens of thousands of homes. Seven people are confirmed dead and an area twice the size of New York City is a charred wasteland. But the magazines must go on. According to Folio, the fires "have affected countless numbers of staffers at the region's magazines, publishers there say, but have yet to disrupt magazine production."

You think advertisers are dropping print media for online? The latest Wired bulks up nearly as big as the 318-page October 2000 issue during the boom. (Disclosure: I'm procrastinating on a small Wired piece as I type.) The good ad spots up front are occupied by Hummer, Sprint, Claiborne, Canon, Jaguar, and Dillard's. Their glossy, photo-driven spreads are short on words, more image than message. Google is the best-targeted ad medium ever, but advanced inks on premium paper make these brands seem much, much swankier than any browser ad can. In ad-buyer-speak, it's "the place to be." You think anyone will ever buy a Hummer because they saw a cool update on Twitter?

Remember former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose tech magazine got shut down by parent company Time Inc.? Now an executive editor at Fortune, he outranks, on paper, assistant managing editor Jim Aley — the man he replaced as Business 2.0's editor five years ago. Which makes the following curious: The New York-based Aley, pictured above, is in town this week. Valleywag hears he started off his visit with a breakfast with Quittner. And then Aley met with the remnants of Business 2.0's staff, who now make up Fortune's San Francisco bureau — without Quittner. Remind us again who's in charge here? And if you want your startup written up in Fortune, who's the right guy to schmooze?

I love it when know-it-all techies compare Valleywag to the National Enquirer. The Enquirer is the most thoroughly factchecked publication in its genre, unless you include People. Former NYT legal reporter David Margolick wrote, "it stands head and shoulders above them all for aggressiveness and accuracy." The Enquirer has been all about the facts for 30 years now, ever since a major change in modus operandi after a series of libel charges and a damaging 60 Minutes exposé. You'll probably sniff, "I don't read it." Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?

Fatally overserious Read/WriteWeb blogger asks when Forbes editor Dan Lyons's Secret Diary of Steve Jobs became a "reliable source." He points to recent posts Lyons wrote as Fake Steve Jobs about PodTech and Facebook — both of which Valleywag picked up. I think the question is more when anyone at Read/WriteWeb ever had a blog post as funny, informative, and truthful — even when fictional — as Fake Steve.

Got 30 seconds? Read my summaries of the early reviews of Apple's new operating system in Thursday's papers. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, New York Times reviewer David Pogue, and USA Today's Ed Baig agree: Time Machine backups, yay. See-through menus, boo.

So typical for New Yorkers to think that everything comes down to money. The New York Post's late-to-the-game article on Facebook this morning had just one interesting, unreported tidbit among the rehash: The stakes in Microsoft and Google's race to invest have been raised to as high as $1.5 billion — or 10 percent of the company, valuing it at $15 billion. Frankly, I'm skeptical. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be stupid not to take all the money he can off the table, his outside investors — a list which includes Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, and Accel Partners — don't want their stakes diluted that much. Selling off that large a chunk of Facebook would shrink their collective holdings — as much as 27 percent of the company, we hear — down to less than a quarter. That's just one reason why money doesn't matter as much as the Wall Street set would have you believe.

Dead trees will weigh you down. The Tribune Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, New York's Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune, among others, reports third-quarter revenues dropped 4 percent to $1.28 billion from $1.33 billion. Meanwhile, the Tribune's Interactive division posted a 9 percent revenue bump to $65 million. Hmmm. $50 million drop overall, $5 million gain on the Web. On paper, that doesn't look good. [paidcontent.org]

"The horror of having to evacuate homes during Malibu's biggest wildfire in recent history is not being helped by fallen pop star Britney Spears' recent custody troubles. 'Basically, all the paparazzi are still out there trying to get their Britney shot,' said one resident of the beachy burg. 'They don't even care much about the burning houses.'" [NYO, Photo: AP]

Ever since studly Timesman Brad Stone outed Forbes editor Dan Lyons as Fake Steve Jobs, the author of the faux-Apple CEO Web diary, I've been waiting to see what happens when Lyons meets up with some of the folks he's savaged as the blog's anonymous auteur. I'll get my first chance when Lyons gets interviewed by former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, who's been repeatedly ridiculed by Lyons as Fake Steve. But why would Kawasaki display any hard feelings when he can use the notoriety of a feud to elevate his rapidly sinking profile? Dignity doesn't move units. The interview, sponsored by LinkedIn, takes place November 6 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (Photos by hyku)

In his guise as Fake Steve Jobs, Forbes editor Dan Lyons occasionally broke character to ask his readers for help in getting advertising for his site. It turns out that he could have just asked his bosses all along. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is now running an ad served by Forbes. The current campaign is for IBM, just a few inches above a post in which Fake Steve Jobs gloats about Apple's market cap passing Big Blue's. And to think — for this treatment, IBM is paying Forbes' staggering $109 CPM? Translation: Every time your Web browser pays homage to Fake Steve, a dime and a penny clink in the Forbes coffers. Congratulations, Dan-O: At last, you've made your sideline career as El Jobso pay off.

"Web 2.0 is rubbish," Donnacha DeLong writes in The Journalist, a magazine from the U.K.'s National Union of Journalists. (Socialist swine!) DeLong writes that journalists provide "truly authoritative content" and that bloggers foul up the facts in the course of democratizing media. Yes, old media hacks always get to the bottom of everything. Like Visto's history of IPO attempts, for example. Oh wait, that was us. The Telegraph's Shane Richmond took umbrage with DeLong's article, calling it a "reactionary, badly-argued piece." Just like you'd find on the blogs, in other words. What I want to ask DeLong: Who said we wanted to democratize media? (Photo by Gastev)

Maybe that last encore except from Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody was one too many. It's early, sure, but the book ranks way down at No. 1,432 on Amazon's bestseller list. Lesson? Fake Steve needs to send Moshe up to Seattle to have a chat with Jeff Bezos. [Amazon.com]