• Chuck Roberts has apologized to Ned Lamont for calling him the "al Qaeda candidate." No word on the goat thing. [C&L]
• Tony Kornheiser refers to Washington Post Style reporter as "putz"; each WaPo Style reporter secretly convinced he's talking about them. And rightly so. [WP]
• Greg Lindsay just got $954.70 from the folks at Absolute. Drinks at Shannon's Bar (JFK Terminal Four, A Concourse) are on him. [NYO]
If you read the Drudge Report yesterday, you saw this link to the (UK) Sun's coverage of "party-loving" Prince Harry enjoying the company of a young woman while, as the Sun has it "saucily groping her BOOB with one hand." (The gropee is described as a "pretty blond"; the News Corp exhange program really is a thing of beauty.) The Sun went on to explain that "The fun-loving shots were taken in a trendy London nightclub."
• Contrary to popular opinion, news actually does happen in August. [USA Today]
• Contrary to popular opinion, news actually does happen in August. [WaPo]
• ETP notes the first use of the word "douchebag" in a mainstream newspaper. Probably the kind of thing you can only get away with in August, when editors are busy focusing on all the articles about how news actually happens this month. [HuffPo]
Did David Carr and Paul Farhi see the same movie? Using Scoop as a jumping off point, they both wrote pieces on the image of reporters in film. Back at the end of July, Fahri had the following in the Washington Post
• Young people like iPods, social networking, the internet. Reading newspapers? Not so much. You're shocked, right? Who keeps putting up the money to fund these studies? [Guardian]
• Wait, young people! If you promise to watch the news, Brian Williams will read your e-mails and Katie Couric will blog for you! Not curmudgeonly uncle Charlie Gibson, though. He just wants you to sit down, shut up, and listen to what he's saying. [NYP]
• We would pay good money to see a bare-knuckle fight between Bill Cosby and Len Downie. Seriously. [Romenesko]
• Wanna work for Lewis Lapham's new publication, More Soporific Than Ambien Quarterly? Well, don't expect any remuneration or anything. On the plus side, he may let you bum a smoke every now and again. [EH]
• WWD moves the ball on Wenner's buyback of Us Weekly: It's either "a sign of genius or fear." We just thought it was a sign that Jann likes to throw money around. [WWD]
• Think your media organization has problems? (Okay, if you're at Wired News, you're right.) Over in London reporters are actually getting arrested. And not in the good Josh Wolf way. [WSJ]
• Sure, Iran's president is a complete loon who would probably like to see us burning in a lake of fire, but anyone who makes fun of Mike Wallace can't be all bad. [THR]
• Wenner Media buys out Disney's share of Us Weekly. We're not sure why this is important, but the folks at WWD thought it merited an e-mail alerting us to it, so what the hell. [WWD]
• Asking a quarter for Keith Kelly's work always struck as a stretch; $950 is too much for even Kelly himself. [NYP, third item]
• When Jon Friedman says it's time to give someone her due, well, it's time to give her her due. Okay: Maria Bartiromo is both cute as a button and a well-known business journalist! Just out of curiosity, how does this shit keep getting linked on Romenesko? [Marketwatch]
It was just a week ago that humpy E! gossip-gerent Ted Casablanca chummed the waters of scandal by telling his perpetually baffled readers that he knew "how Star Jones Reynolds felt" after being mysteriously yanked from his regular spot on E!'s airwaves. Suspicious fans immediately started dusting Casablanca's neck for Ryan Seacrest's fingerprints, but the crytpolinguistically gifted dirt-slinger has been silent about his job status since. That is, until now, when he updated the NY Observer about his standing at E!:
• Newspapers are packaging free CDs with each copy in an attempt to reach younger readers. Because that's what kids are into these days, CDs. This industry deserves to die. [LAT]
• Bloodbath at VNU. Yeah, us either. Apparently they put out Billboard or something. [Mediaweek]
• Cond Nast flack says don't call them a magazine company: "We're a company that provides content." Sure. Related: Gawker Media is not a blog company. We're an organization provides gratuitous use of the word "douchebag." [NYT]
• AOL fuckup. No, not the merger. [Reuters]
• Bono buys into Forbes, filling the "Sanctimonious Media Mogul Twat" position recently vacated by Ted Turner. [NYT]
• Dishy Jared Kushner wants to do things that are "exciting and respectable." Just like Bono! [NYM]
• Has Men's Health supplanted Maxim as the nation's best-selling newsstand men's mag? Rodale says yes, Dennis denies. Either way, we're pretty sure of who's still ahead in the all-important "incarcerated" demographic. [WWD]
• Lee Gomes doesn't care what all you Chris Anderson cultists think; The Long Tail is full of shit. Inevitable Anderson riposte t/k. [WSJ]
• Mariane Pearl, widow of slain WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, writes her first column for Glamour. Ann Coulter, 45, immediately calls her a whore. [Glamour]
• Hard-hitting Observer investigation reveals that some firefighters in the "FDNY Calendar of Heroes" come from out of state. [NYO]
• A San Francisco blogger / journalist has been jailed for refusing to turn over videotape to a grand jury. Note to prosecutors: We will happily deliver our Hasselbeck clip at any time and place of your choosing. [SFC]
• They're refurbishing the White House briefing room, because God forbid the press corps should lob its softballs in decrepit surroundings. [NYT]
• Fox News surprisingly non-homophobic. Apparently they only harass the women over there. [Out]
• Kanye West named to Vanity Fair's best-dressed list. He would have been on the cover, but they did Beyonce back in October, and, you know, that fulfills the quota. [MTV]
• 25-year-old MTV is actually perpetually eleven, says Virginia Heffernan. Eleven, coincidentally, was Heffernan's approximate age when the network debuted. [NYT]
• This is officially the 1,000th article about TMZ. [MSNBC]
The 2007 edition of the official FDNY's Calendar of Heroes goes on sale today; for just $15.95, you can buy yourself 12 sexy months of the city's hottest firefighters and their rock-hard abs — plus all proceeds go to the nonprofit FDNY foundation, which funds the fire department's training and recruitment. So you can entertain those erotic firehose fantasies and feel good about it too.
• Hearst mags to eliminate subscription cards for a month; will anyone dumb enough to subscribe to House Beautiful figure out alternative methods of contact? [WSJ]
• For $300 million you could pick up Ziff Davis. What you'd do with it is another story: the whole segment is dying. [NYDN]
• Couple of broads at Fox News got $225,000 in a sexual harassment settlement. Don't spend it all in one place, gals. [FOXNews]
• Sulzbergers buying up NYT stock. Insert your own "at least someone's buying The Times" joke here. [Boston Herald]
• Is Portfolio the new Inside.com? Probably not, but it gives us the excuse to mention that Kurt Andersen quote about how getting funding for Inside was as easy "as getting laid in 1969" again. Ha ha, what a douchebag. [Hard, Cutting]
• After last week's piece on Wikipedia, The New Yorker turns once again to the Internet, looking this time at citizen journalists or some such. We liked it better when The New Yorker's web coverage was mainly just Rebecca Mead writing about Meg Hourihan. [NYer]
The internet-enabled, reptile-riddled thrill ride of Snakes on a Plane buzz finally touches down on the runway of mainstream pop culture inevitability with this week's Entertainment Weekly cover story, featuring a greatest hits collection boasting all the "People either want to see that, or they don't," and "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!" standards everyone sporting a $3,900 necklace have been humming to themselves over the past year. While we wait patiently for the coming In Touch Weekly spread about how Samuel L. Jackson carefully coordinated his diamond stud earrings with the collection of serpents featured in a particular scene, here are some highlights from the EW piece:
• Gawker-reader Jon Fine doesn't give a shit where you put your ads, so long as it doesn't affect coverage. Unrelated: Go see Little Miss Sunshine, it's the funniest movie of the year. [BW]
• Ana Marie Cox on her new position: ""I've been trying to sell out for a very long time." About as long as she's been using that quote, actually. [WWD]
• If you want to get Rachel Sklar's attention, mention her vagina. Just be respectful about it, okay? [ETP]
• Boston Globe joins trend of selling ads on sectional front pages. God knows The Jimmy Fund needs more venues in which to get its message across. [BG]
• If Jon Fine weren't such a good person he would have had a crucial scoop about National Geographic. National Geographic. C'mon, yellow cover, comes with a map inside? Eh, never mind. [BW]
• YouTube dude doesn't envision bubble bursting, won't sell yet. We see Calcanis-like levels of bitterness on the horizon. [Marketwatch]
