• Meredith fires 75 staffers it inherited from Gruner & Jahr in its purchase of Family Circle, Parents, Child, and Fitness. Among those let go: Susan Ungaro, editor-in-chief of Family Circle for 11 years. [Mediaweek]
• The peacock folks are considering merging the operations of NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC and putting them all under one roof in — gulp — New Jersey. [NYP]
• Alessandra Stanley plants a clickety stiletto right between Tucker Carlson's eyes. [NYT]

• MSNBC.com is "defying gravity." Its cable sister (and her bow-tied new boytoy), on the other hand, know gravity all too well. [OJR]
• Despite lack of any actual news — no changes in plans, sacrifice "worth it," course must be stayed, post-9/11 world, yada yada — all the TV networks ultimately decide to carry Bush speech. [WP]
• Not just circ cheats at Newsday, but alleged pedophiles, too. [Newsday]
• Is Judy feeling lonely? Time might turn over docs to keep Matt Cooper out of jail. [E&P]
• No, she's not! An appeals court upheld a contempt ruling against her fellow Timesperson James Risen, in this case for refusing to reveal Wen Ho Lee sources. [NYT]

• Miss America, dumped by ABC, gets picked up Country Music Television — an obvious home for "the queen of femininity." [Hollywood Reporter/Reuters via NYT]
• Conde Nast to custom-pub a Harrod's mag, and we're sure Anna is disgusted to be even indirectly affiliated with such a middlebrow retailer. [Brand Republic]
• Here's a way for our beloved TiVo to solve its business problems: Hire the man who destroyed Primedia to run the place, naturally. [NYP]
• New poker column is a smart bet for the Times, says Jon Friedman. [MW]
• Tina and Harry to sail on the Queen Mary 2! (And for free, we presume.) [PRNewswire via Yahoo]

• Remember sweet, earnest, hardworking, nebbishy Jim Romenesko, toiling away in his Evanston, Ill., studio apartment? Turns out he makes $150K. Who's the nebbish now? [Mediacrity]
• Steve Florio's management book-slash-memoir is no more. We're sure you're heartbroken.[NYT]
• What kind of pinko socialist bastards would expect to get more work without more pay? Oh, right: The Wall Street Journal. Hey, it's all for the good of the collective. [NY Mag]
• Fast Company and Inc. deal finally gets done. [NYT]
• People continue to not like the press. [Pew Center]

• How bad must your anti-Hillary book be when even Bill O'Reilly, Peggy Noonan, and John Podhoretz are attacking it? It must be very, very bad. [NYT]
• Jon Friedman's lists his top 10 media stories of the first half of the year. No. 1: Deep Throat speaks. [MarketWatch]
• That Gruner & Jahr sale? Still hasn't happened yet. Don't worry, Fast Company and Inc. kids. Mommy and Daddy still love you very much. They just need to figure out who you're going to live with. [Folio:]
• Eureka moment at CBS News: What if we put news on — this is gonna sound crazy — the web? [The Corsair]

• Finally, media industry set for solid financial growth, says PricewaterhouseCoopers. Oh, wait. Newspapers and book publishers are still in trouble. So cancel that celebratory lunch at Michael's. [IHT]
• The TomKat whirlwind violates all the rules of celeb journalism — and could therefore spell the end of celeb mags. God forbid. [Slate]
• More high-ranking folks out at the News. Or, as the Post's computer system calls it, "shift-F4." [NYP]
• Syd Schanberg endorses sharing profits with sources in some cases — and is promptly banned from the crusty-old-media-critics clubhouse. [VV]

• Gruner & Jahr is set to close today on a deal to sell Inc. and Fast Company for $40 million, a fraction of the $550 the publisher bought the two titles for five years ago. It suddenly seems very clear why these people should not be publishing business advice. [Folio:]
• The New Yorker's cartoon contest gets 7,000-10,000 entries a week. For a winner, cartoon editor Robert Mankoff suggests: keep it short, don't combine elements, don't overthink. Because they hate overthinking at the The New Yorker. [Newsday]
• Ed Klein's Hillary book goes on sale today; 350,000 copies have been printed. [WP]
• And you thought PBS was boring? Ha. Secret spies, partisan intrigue. Also, Big Bird worked for the Russians. [NYT]

• Joe Mansueto, founder and chairman of research firm Morningstar, emerges as likely purchaser of Fast Company and Inc. See, FastCo guys, isn't it fun being a free agent? Moving from company to company, boss to boss? Not having consistent health insurance? Oh yeah. [BusinessWeek]
• Alternative Newsweekly Awards announced. Shockingly, all Village Voice can muster is one third-place finish. Even more shockingly, New York Press doesn't wins anything. [AAN]
• Oh no you didn't: Details picks a men's-mag catfight with GQ. [GQ]
• NYT Escapes and WSJ Personal Journal not fully satisfying your vehicle-for-high-end-advertising needs? Don't worry: The Saturday Wall Street Journal is on its way. [NYT]

• Michael Schiavo, the coroner just proved you were right. Where are you going? To New York, to get a fat book deal. Hopefully fatter than Mark Felt's, which is worth a lot less than you were told. [NYP]
• The ghost of Tom Rogers: Something else goes wrong for Primedia. [Folio:]
• But don't they miss inky hands and lots of paper to recycle? One-fifth of newspaper-reading web users prefer the online versions. [Reuters
• Cross-marketing between Fox News and The WB? You can't get anything past those CJR Daily kids. [CJR Daily]

• After all these years, Deep Throat finally gets to cash in. Or, at least, now-senile Deep Throat's family gets to. [NYT]
• At church service marking end of journalism on London's famed Fleet Street, one journo in attendance passes on opportunity to kill Rupert Murdoch. [Guardian]
• Elsewhere in London, Archbishop of Canterbury blasts web media for "paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry." So much for loving the sinner, eh, Rowan? [The Times]
• Jacko journo Diane Dimond knows you hate her. [NYT]

• If this gets any more incestuous, we'll be forced to move to West Virginia, redux: We love Choire's column on going party reporting with Elizabeth.* [NYO]
• Page Six calls out Today show's media ethics. With a straight face, even. [NYP]
• Wall Street doesn't like tabloid powerhouse American Media any more than Cameron Diaz does. [NYP]
• And Russ Smith doesn't like The Twins of TriBeCa. Of course, we can't remember the last time he liked anything, so that's not really very helpful, is it? [N.Y. Sun]

• Us Weekly announces it won't use any photos "obtained through reckless means." Uberpublicist Ken Sunshine is skeptical: "Now let's see if they follow through." Strangely, we find ourselves siding with the flack. What an odd feeling. [NYP]
• Supreme Court lets stand FCC rules that prevent one company from owning absolutely everything we see and hear. Time Warner, Viacom, et al. will have to content themselves with only owning nearly everything — at least until Bush gets to appoint some new justices. [NYT]
• Like Simon agreeing to tour with Garfunkel a few summers ago, Woodward lets Bernstein attach himself to forthcoming Deep Throat book. [E&P]
• Don't get to hear enough from grumpy old former journalists? Thank God for the Internet. [From Hot Type to Blog via Romenesko]

• Was the winning entry in The New Yorker's new cartoon-contest feature really just a recycled Far Side? [NYT]
• We're shocked, shocked to learn that Jon Alter, the leftie Newsweek columnist, and Roger Ailes, the GOP operative turned Fox News Channel chief, don't much like each other. [All sorts of links, all via FishbowlNY]
• Also shocking: Celeb gossip is hot! [NYT]
• Yesterday, NYT discovered blogs. [NYT]
• Not that Jarvis liked what the paper had to say about them. [BuzzMachine]

· Landesman gives Shafer 26 words in response. Sadly, none of them are "poop." [Romenesko]
· CNN decides that, you know, it needs a personality. [MarketWatch]
· University of Illinois j-school graduates ponder just how they got it wrong. (And "not going to Medill" is not the answer.) [Chicago Reader]

· Daily News staff all angry-like at new EIC. Post setting world record for most consecutive cartwheels. [NY Post]
· Uh, anybody out there see this Downing Street Memo? Anybody? Come on: Somebody had to read it? Anyone? Hello? [Salon]
· Apparently, they give out awards for journalists. Where are the red carpet shots? Joan Rivers? At least some dude without pit stains? [National Press Club]—WL

· Daily News EIC responds to Post's allegations, but not really [Editor and Publisher]
· Wait ... why do we have a Newseum again? [Flak]
· Conde Nast does something with real estate, not really sure what. [NYO]—WL

· Radosh to Landesman: Jack Shafer is on my side. So there. Bring it. Freak. [Radosh.net]
· Look at what would happen if Deep Throat happened today, and then commence weeping. [VV]
· David Sedaris, gone horribly wrong. [TMFTML]—WL

· Hey, the Wall Street Journal did one of their creepy woodcut pictures for Michael Jackson. Something about "pushing the edge of the envelope" too. [WSJ]
· For those of you who haven't had your fill of Times-bashing today [Boston Phoenix]
· Fairly boring letter accusing Columbia Journalism Review of bias is too hot for Romenesko [Mediacrity]

· Herbert Klein is still not Deep Throat [State Journal-Register]
· Ben Stein — also still not Deep Throat, but still very much a Nixon apologist [American Spectator]
· And the rest of the slimy old bastards weigh in [LAT]

· Everyone quit making fun of Fast Company! They know what blogs are and how to comment on them! [Jossip]
· Nora Ephron knew allll along who Deep Throat was — in fact, she hid clues throughout her screenplay for Sleepless in Seattle [Huffington Post]
· Jacob Bernstein knew too, but he won't say how. He even turned down GMA! [NYO]