The New York Times is reportedly determined to charge for its website; the only question is how. Offer special "membership" benefits, or rope off certain sections? Which sections? No one has any idea:

We're not ones to hype Matt Drudge's influence, but he is what he is, and New York Times editor Bill Keller and the Huffington Post's Tom Edsall's claims to the Observer that they don't read Drudge are transparent lies.

• Harvey and Bob Weinstein are breathing a sigh of relief today. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds did better than expected at the box office this weekend, raking in $37.6 million in sales. Not that one good weekend will be enough to lift the studio out of the financial mess it is in. [NYT, THR, WSJ]
• Related: In what may be a first for a movie opening, Inglourious Basterds seems to have benefited by a "crest of tweeting goodwill." [THR]
• Some 48 years after it was first published, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is now No. 1 on the New York Times' best-seller list. [NYT]
• Has the Glenn Beck brouhaha made advertisers skittish about buying commercial time during political shows in general? [AdAge, Politico]
• Jared Kushner's New York Observer is launching a new paper called The Commercial Observer. It's about commercial real estate, naturally. [NYT]
• Magazine newsstand sales continue to suffer, not surprisingly. [AdAge]

Clark Hoyt — de facto ballbuster and Public Editor of the New York Times — took the Styles section to task today. Hoyt finally went after Cintra Wilson's hysterically size-ist, Middle America tone-deaf, awesome assessment of NYC's new JC Penney's.

In your famous Friday media column: exclusive thoughts from Steven Brill on the future of paid online newspapers, Rebecca Dana gets a new job, newspapers die and thrive, and Bill Keller will never be on the Daily Show again.

• The bleak outlook for network news is getting bleaker: Both the CBS Evening News and ABC's World News suffered all-time ratings lows last week. [HuffPo]
• CBS chief Les Moonves's compensation was slashed by 76 percent last year. He still earned $13.6 million, though, so don't feel too bad for him. [Crain's]
• Depressing: Monday's breakup episode of TLC's Jon & Kate Plus 8 was the most-watched episode of the show ever with 10.6 million viewers. [THR]
• MySpace is closing four of its international offices and cutting two-thirds of its staff abroad advertising falls and Facebook and Twitter take over. [NYT]
• A woman in Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against Elisabeth Hasselbeck for allegedly ripping off her self-published book on celiac disease. [BH]
• Bravo honcho Andy Cohen is going to be hosting a live show once a week called Watch What Happens. You can watch what happens on July 16. [LAT]

You simply cannot turn on your television these days without seeing New York Times editor Bill Keller expounding on something, or explaining something, or being made fun of. He is ubiquitous!

As mentioned earlier: New York Times reporter David Rohde managed to escape his Taliban captors to freedom last night by hopping over a wall. He was imprisoned for seven months. How wasn't this widely reported? Even by us? Simple:

In your waterlogged Thursday media column: Bill Keller defends his Iran trip, Jon Stewart is cruelly eviscerated, the Weather Channel wants big ratings so it can then fail like other TV networks, and the internet reigns supreme.

When the Daily Show sent Jason Jones to viciously mock the defenseless New York Times last week, the universal reaction was: Ouch. Except within the New York Times! They thought they did great.

Times executive editor Bill Keller is still in Iran, reporting today that Goggling "hooker" leads to an "access denied" message and that the Iranian government is pissed at muckraking Western journalists like himself for disrupting their regime. [New York Times]

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has parachuted into Iran to lend his considerable expertise to his paper's coverage of the disputed election. He should have stayed home.

In what might be the most painfully funny Daily Show skit ever produced, Jason Jones visited the New York Times building in Midtown and interviewed some of the paper's staff, quite uncomfortably.

• Portfolio isn't over and done with, after all: An affiliate of Condé Nast—based in Charlotte, weirdly—plans to revive the magazine's website. [NYO]
• Josh Marshall has accepted Maureen Dowd's apology for swiping some of his copy; and Dowd's new column today is Marshall-free, thankfully. [TPM, NYT]
• Upfronts 2009: What the CW and CBS have in store for the fall. [THR, THR]
• Is Jann Wenner looking to poach Condé Nast honcho David Carey? [NYM]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller says Google is the paper's "frenemy." [NYO]
• CNBC's Jeff Macke had a meltdown on the air yesterday. [Gawker]

Everyone's joining Twitter, did you know? Even New York Times editor Bill Keller has gotten on board, we hear — and he's just as self-promotional as the rest! Today's other Twitter trivia.

Gone are the days when the Wall Street Journal newsroom left brutal attacks on other media outlets to the Journal's rabid editorial page. Rupert Murdoch bought the paper to wage war, and it's happening.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has updated his staff on the cuts he's making to the newsroom budget. There had already been word that the City and Escapes sections — both largely produced by freelancers — were being scrapped. But today's memo makes it clear that the paper is looking to trim its freelance budgets everywhere, including ending the weekly fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine.

In your temporarily de-Nolanated Friday media column: Hearst learns that investigations don't require ink, a lefty New York radio station gets locked out, Bill Keller's irony goes unappreciated, and Andrew Sullivan gets some help.

• Bill Keller says that New York Times readers have offered to donate money to keep the paper alive, which is both very sad and very sweet. [Politico, NYP]
• Hearst has asked all of its newspapers to reduce costs by 20 percent. [BN]
• The launch of Oprah's cable network has been pushed back to 2010. [NYP]
• Eliot Spitzer will hit the Today show on Monday, presumably to talk about the financial crisis, not about his personal life. [NYO]
• Tensions are reportedly running high at MSNBC after the network decided to give Ed Schultz a show and bump Norah O'Donnell and David Shuster. [P6]
• Breaking! The media appears to be rather fond of Michelle Obama. [WaPo]
• Last night's series finale of ER generated big ratings for NBC. [NYT]
• Is Google about to acquire Twitter? Not so much, says Kara Swisher. [ATD]

In recent weeks, the New York Times started punching back at many of its critics, breaking with a longstanding tradition of staying above the fray. Today, that new strategy backfired.