• Martha Stewart's next mag, Blueprint, will cater to 20-somethings buying their first homes. God, might we actually have to read it? [AdAge]
• Talking Points Memo'er Josh Marshall hires two bloggers to report for him. Bloggers who have to report?! Huh? Wha? [NY Sun]
• Craig of Craiglist to launch journalism project. Which is good, because he's slowly killing newspapers by taking their classifieds, anyway. [Guardian]
• Total mag ad pages up ever so slightly in 2005. Woo-hoo! Not dead yet! [MIN]
• Disaggregated media content confuses Simon Dumenco, who generously offers to disaggregate his column. [AdAge]
• Greg Mitchell says John Tierney is full of shit. [E&P]
• NBC Universal to close Trio, leaving one fewer cable network you don't watch. [Hollywood Reporter via MSNCB]

Poor Kate Lee. By all rights, he should have been hers. When David Lat, the male federal prosecutor who'd masqueraded as a female corporate lawyer on Underneath Their Robes, a deliciously gossipy blog about the federal judiciary, allowed himself to be outed as the blog's author in last Monday's New Yorker Talk of the Town, it seemed obligatory that a book deal would soon be in the offing. And who better to rep him than Talk of the Town-certified agent-to-the-blogstars Kate Lee?

A new Nastie reports:

• Is Judy Miller now a right-wing hero? Wait, what was she before the war, then? [NYM]
• Andrew Sullivan to move his blog to Time.com. Sellout! MSM! All those other things we're supposed to say! Yada yada yada. [NYP]
• Bob Schieffer to stay longer as CBS Evening News anchor. [NYT]
• Times to launch quarterly sports mag. [NYP]
• Esquire likes undulating apartments. [NYT]
• Google considers offering book rentals, sort of. [Reuters via Yahoo]
• Ruth Reichl reads The Bruni Digest. Bruni doesn't. Or so he says. [AP via Yahoo]

• After Blairgate and Judygate (and with Wen Ho Leegate and Stephen Hatfillgate pending) Times cancels J.T. LeRoy piece for T after New York convinces them he may or may not exist. [WWD]
• Is People the new Us Weekly? Keith Kelly seems to think so, saying that Time Inc. celeb title is up while its competitors are down. [NYP]
• Bill and Cathie at ASME: Buckley and Hearst's Black to receive lifetime-achievement awards from the mag group. [AdAge]
• Tokion sold, as if that makes any difference to your life. [Folio:]
• Taking a cue from his pals' pal Judy, Bush, too, should take a severance and a letter to the editor and just retire already, says Greg Mitchell. [E&P]
• It seems the kids like the blogs. [News.com]

We were realizing that it's been far too long since we checked out the e.e. cummings dadaism of Rosie O'Donnell's blog, so we reset our expectations to free verse and navigated our way to Rosie.com, where we were shocked to find this:

We pointed you to a looming disaster at AdAge.com on Thursday, an online poll that potentially could have suggested that reading blogs on company time is a bad idea. Clearly it's not, and we needed to make sure no one was misinformed. So we asked for your help, and you — God love ya — delivered:

We're not sure if we feel worse for professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney, who gamely sat through a Public Eye non-interrogation, or Public Eye, the new CBS News non-ombudsman non-blog, which had to suffer through Rooney's charmingly dismissive responses. This exchange was our favorite, simultaneously an apotheosis of Public Eye's bushy-tailed earnestness and of Ronney's lived-spotted cynicism:

A disaster awaits at AdAge.com:

• Major investor in Knight Ridder newspaper chain demands the chain be sold "to increase shareholder value." Because 20 percent profit margins at KR papers — or whatever astronomincal number the company demands — clearly aren't enough. [NYT]
• CBS News's new Roone Arledge learned at the feet — literally — of the old Roone Arledge. [TV Guide]
• More tsuris for the hip-hop bible: The Source is $156K behind in rent. [Radar]
• Unsurprisingly, Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, is obnoxious — and successful. [NYO]
• After last year's bout of excitement, bloggers have not overtaken the White House briefing room. One imagines because bloggers chose not to waste their time being stonewalled and lied to. [E&P]
• Mother Nature for Time's Person of the Year, campaigns Jon Friedman, who is clearly hoping his weekend place — if he has one — will be spared when the next Nor'eastern hits. [MW]

The cover story in this week's edition of Forbes is an ever-so pertinent examination of the innate evil and danger of blogs, especially when they attack your business (far be it from Condé to do such a cover). But, before the evil blogosphere destroys that crisp pile of millions upon which you're resting your gilded bum, be sure to protect your brand with the following easy steps:

Speaking of which: Get clicking, people. Numbers ain't looking great today, and if you don't step up we'll have to get someone else fired.

2:50 PM ET. Still no indictments.

• Former Voicers react to New Times deal; one actually likes it. [Boston Phoenix]
• Barely competent magazine publisher Primedia sacks CEO, explores plan to further break itself up. [NYP]
• Some bloggers would be protected under proposed federal shield law. And thank God for that. [E&P]
• Um, yeah. So it turns out actually Diane Sawyer isn't gunning for the World News Tonight job. [AP via USAT]
• Tom Masland, Newsweeker who reported from Mideast, Africa, war zones, and elsewere, is hit by SUV on West End Avenue. He's at St. Luke's in critical condition. [NYDN]
• Bob Wallace, erstwhile Wenner Books chief, takes a walk. [Media Mob/NYO]
• In fact, so few people want to work for Wenner that no one wanted to run Men's Journal. "It's like going to work for George Steinbrenner," said one uninterested candidate. [WWD, second item]
• Apparently, Andrew Krucoff lost a job yesterday. [NYT]

We write lots of mean things about lots of people we'd love to see get some comeuppance. We run lots of leaked memos and internal communications, some of them rather embarrassing to the company from which they were leaked. What's truly remarkable is that someone was just moments ago fired — and it's someone we very much like — over an item that wasn't mean, that didn't attempt to deliver any comeuppance, and was in no way embarrassing to the company from which it was leaked.

From Advertising Age today:

Nothing certifies a hot new trend like a mention in a fledgling trade pub, so now it must finally be true: "It's safe to say that the blog-to-book phenomenon has gone mainstream," reports The Book Standard today. "Two more well-known bloggers scored book deals this week."

Never having had a reason to visit CBS.com, we had no idea that the crown jewel of Les Moonves' growing empire of pain had embraced the blog format, and in the process, sowed the seeds of the online medium's inevitable destruction:

Yes, yes, yes; we know.

And why could Elizabeth Spiers afford to walk away from Laurel Touby's boa'd embrace? Because she has herself a book deal.