Despite what you might have heard, there's no one dumb enough to buy the Gannett newspaper company. [NYT]

"Massive Book Tour for Nixon Biography Unlikely, says Conrad Black." [AP]

You'd think Mark Zuckerberg would be thrilled to make the cover of Newsweek. But secretly, we bet, the CEO and founder of Facebook is fuming. Why? Because the venerable weekly made a newbie mistake on the cover, one that Facebookers find grating. The cover invites readers to "add" Mark as a friend. Yes, the site does have an "Add Friend" dialog, so it's technically correct — but insiders hate the "add" usage, since it's easily confused with MySpace's lingo. Mark's own sister, Randi Jayne, chewed me out a couple weeks ago for that very mistake. And anyone who's used the site — clearly, not Newsweek's editors — knows that the proper terminology is to "request" or "confirm" someone as a friend. The basic gaffe tells us that the rest of the story — a predictable rehash by writer Steven Levy, assisted by eight (eight!) colleagues — can mostly be dismissed with the "Ignore" button. A few interesting status updates, after the jump:

Now that he owns the Wall Street Journal, will Rupert Murdoch go after the Times? Former Post publisher Ken Chandler says yes. "I would expect that he would be very aggressive on ad rates, and I would also predict that he would be very aggressive on cover price, whether it's home delivery or newsstand." It'll be neato to see who goes free first, the online Journal or TimesSelect. [LAT]

New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse is afraid that if she appears on C-Span she might reveal the paper's secret agenda to force abortions on everyone. [NYP]

Metro's humor columnist Elliott Kalan fired for admitting that the only way to get people to read the paper is to shove it into their unsuspecting hands as they fumble for their MetroCard. [NYM]

Fake Brad Stone is doing a passable job of celebrating the career of the ruggedly handsome New York Times reporter who outed Fake Steve Jobs. Passable. I mean, I like the idea of supplanting the Pulitzer Prize with a new "Stoney" award. But Fake Brad could do so much more. He could, for example, burst into song. With apologies to George Thorogood — and, while I'm at it, to Brad Stone, Fake Brad Stone, and my readers — Valleywag presents a rock-and-roll celebration of our favorite Timesman. Here are the lyrics to "Brad to the Stone":

"New Yorkers think the format of the New York Times is sacred. I've never understood this. When read on the subway, the inky and oversized Times formerly required either the expert paper-folding skills of an origami champion or a ruthless willingness to elbow fellow passengers in the eye. So what would be so wrong with making the paper a little more compact, kind of like a magazine?" [LAT]

Brad Stone, the ruggedly handsome Timesman who outed Fake Steve Jobs, explains how Apple drove Forbes editor Dan Lyons to starting the faux-Apple CEO blog. [New York Times Bits Blog]

Portfolio.com somehow manages to be as tired, outdated, and pointless as the monthly magazine to which it's a companion. Well done, that. [24/7 Wall St.]

For months, we've known that Google has been busy photographing the streets of southern California. You know, so we can spy on people outside of Silicon Valley. But it's taken until now for a team of LA Times reporters to issue a warning to readers that their privacy may be endangered. Hopefully Google's camera trucks caught slow-moving celebrities before they fled the streets. The article, sadly, just rehashes the same privacy concerns aired in June shortly after Street View's launch. And it misses the most obvious impact this could have on the Hollywood economy.

"'There has been too much attention paid to Dow Jones. I'm sick of reading about it. It's such a small deal,' said David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co." [CNN]

"The rapid growth of online advertising is expected to see the sector overtake US newspaper advertising in terms of size by 2011." Wait, there are still gonna be newspapers in 2011? [FT]

The most fascinating bit in Brad Stone's exposé of Fake Steve Jobs? For commenter davidu, it was the revelation that real Apple CEO Steve Jobs was interviewed by instant messenger. Impressive: Someone at the Times — most likely John Markoff — has Jobs's iChat screenname. And editors at Gray Lady consented to the inclusion of notes from an IMterview. We sent our crack reporters on a digging mission and they discovered this exclusive transcript. Must credit Valleywag!

A year ago, Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, promised "the most expensive iPod" to the first person to identify Fake Steve Jobs. It took Brad Stone of the New York Times a year — or an afternoon, depending on how you look at it — but he's now in a position to collect. (We're deeming Karlgaard's prize to be a $599, 8GB iPhone, since the real Steve Jobs likes to tout it as "the best iPod ever.") Stone, of course, unmasked Karlgaard's own employee, Dan Lyons, as the writer of the faux Apple CEO blog. One small hitch in calling Karlgaard to account, however: I doubt Times ethics policies would allow Stone to accept the reward. Update: Karlgaard apparently reads Valleywag. He now proposes that he auction off a $599 iPhone in Stone's honor instead.

After Defcon organizers got wind of her ruse, they offered her a chance to register for a press pass and cover the conference openly. She refused — four times! — but, amazingly, still didn't understand that the jig was up. She was then lured into a conference hall and outed, on tape. Pursued by a pack of hackers and reporters with cameras of their own, she's captured in this YouTube clip fleeing the scene as she whimpers into a cell phone. "They're making fun of me and they're taking pictures!" was one pursuer's taunt. Cruel? A bit. But was Madigan planning to do anything different to the hackers she hoped to surreptitiously film?

"The future owners of Dennis Publishing's men's titles plan to fold Stuff as a standalone magazine in the fall and make it a section in flagship Maxim, sources told Mediaweek. The move is effective with the November/December issue of Maxim. No word on the fate of Stuff's staffers. John Lumpkin, publisher of Stuff, said a change in Stuff's publishing schedule is news to him. 'There's been no discussion of suspending publication,' he said." [Mediaweek]

Village Voice design director Ted Keller is now gone. Whoo, so much house-cleaning over there!

Lost amidst all the hubbub about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones is this little nugget: The little alternative weekly that could, the New York Press, got bought yesterday! Its new owners are "Manhattan Media." You may be familiar with their other publications, New York Family and AVENUE, not to mention a newish outfit called Our Town, Downtown. Doesn't that just sound so quaint! What's even quainter is that the new owners are going to merge Our Town, Downtown with the Press. Just when it seemed like it would be the perfect time for a real competitor to the New Times-ified Voice to emerge, the Press basically gets turned into a community paper. Then there are these reassuring words: "We also anticipate that most current New York Press employees will be joining the Manhattan Media family." (Does that include Martin Basroon, we wonder?) The full memo follows.

Last week, we tried to analyze the dust-up over the (alleged!) homophobic comment (allegedly!) made by New York Times photo director Michele McNally at a Times party to an employee. As her defenders like to note, she is the first photo editor to be named an assistant managing editor and therefore get her name on the big, fancy NYT masthead. And we didn't want to rush to judgment; after all, innocent until proven guilty and the like, and we speculated that maybe there were also some culture/gender clash issues at work. Well, the photographers, in addition to the gays, have now mobilized, and they're not exactly rushing to McNally's defense.