• Gannett's profits have "slumped." To blame: newsprint, lack of political ads, oppressively high reading level of USA Today. [Yahoo]
• Newspaper readership is down! Again! And average reader age is up! Again! [Strib]
• Is Yahoo Public Enemy No. 1 For Big Media? [MediaChannel]
• Related: Will Google Kill News Media? [PC World]
• Jack Shafer on how no possible good can come of this Plame business. [Slate]
• That Freilich — what a card! [Romenesko Letters]

Radar sold out! Radar sold out!

The newspaper business has been reeling from exposes of circulation fraud for more than a year — drastic overstatements of copies sold everywhere from Long Island's Newsday to The Dallas Morning News to the Chicago Sun-Times. Now a new round of subpoenas have gone out, this time targeting magazines. Even worse, they're targeting what was formerly the staid, Presbyterian stalwart of magazine publishing, Time Inc. Ad Age breaks the news:

Today's Times has a report on the intense competition amongst the celebrity weeklies, which are a stark contrast to the otherwise festering circulation figures for newsweeklies and men's magazines. The figures, taken since the first half of 2004:

• God bless Jack Shafer, who writes what most journalists know but don't say: That readers are two-faced nincompoops. [Slate]
• BusinessWeek gets hammered by new circ rules; other pubs likely to follow. [NYP]
• Natalee Holloway's Aruba disappearance is, while bad for Natalee, very, very good for Greta Van Susteren. [AP]
• Explaining the baby-mag boom. [Mediaweek]
• Esquire announces five-year-plus series on building the Freedom Tower. [NYT]
• More proof of Simon Dumenco's very strange fantasy life: An imagined Thanksgiving at the Murdochs'. [Ad Age]
• Mediabistro's Elizabeth Spiers doesn't like women's magazines. Also, she is friends with people who are friends with Christopher Hitchens. [mb]
• On the recently wrapped MTV reality show Miss Seventeen, 17 girls compete to win an internship from Atoosa. [WWD, second item]