Page Six gossip Paula Froelich's first novel is concerned with a certain set of New York ladies in crisis, Mercury in Retrograde (she may be among them, as a "composite"). So surely other "composites" were in attendance at her book party last night.

The Daily Show relegated its Times mockery to Twitter; Glenn Greenwald has had it with all of you poseurs covering the Obama Administration and Susan Orlean has maybe had it with everything, period.

Blogger In Other News caught this somewhat unfortunate screengrab on the New York Times website tonight of Apple's ad stars, John Hodgman and Justin Long, gazing lazily at a soon to be executed Missouri man.

Professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff is starting another beef! It's just what he does. Today's target: NYT media columnist David Carr, who Wolff says "I've never personally liked very much." We know why, Michael!

In January, the New York Times' standards editor issued guidelines about how editorial staffers are allowed to use Facebook and other scary online tools. Is reporter Twittering making a mockery of those guidelines? Let's explore!

In the '90s, the Web cognoscenti joked about doing crack. But New York Times columnist David Carr actually did crack! Which might explain his befuddlement in this clip from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.

• The Wall Street Journal's new glossy mag, WSJ, will remain a quarterly and will not be going monthly as planned due to "market conditions." [WWD]
• Amazon is launching a program to let you read books by iPhone. [WSJ]
• Fox is ahead in the ratings with 18 to 49-year-olds thanks to the success of Idol, but CBS is gaining ground and is now No. 1 among total viewers. [LAT]
• As expected, Julius Genachowski has been nominated as FCC head. [AP]
• Cablevision will soon start targeting TV ads based on "income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets." [NYT]
• WNBC's new digital channel, New York Nonstop, launched Monday. [NYDN]
• David Carr's Carpetbagger blog will not be a year-round thing. [NYT]
• Good news, unemployed TV journalists: Dan Rather is hiring. [NYO]

As David Carr's enjoyable New York Times awards column, The Carpetbagger, winds down for the season, he leaves us with two unanswered blind items. Who are the 20-year-old-eating showbiz mogul and the benevolent-turned-slightly-wicked producer?

In today's NYT Book Review, media critic David Carr kinda savaged Michael Wolff's Rupert Murdoch bio. After the jump, see Wolff's vicious response via Facebook status line. Aren't media nerds cute when they fight?

New York Times reporter David Carr's alter-ego the Carpetbagger has come out to offer movie analysis in the long, loooong runup to Oscar season, which seems to last for approximately four months. Now, it isn't that these year's movies are bad; they're "solid efforts. And all the other things you would say to a shiny class of first graders who are all very special in their own ways." However, they're all the same, he argues.

Good news for Katie Couric: the ongoing psychodrama at MSNBC has caused people to forget entirely that she was widely considered a unhappy failure as the anchor of the CBS evening news. Remember how she hated the job, and the criticism, and was going to quit after the elections and take over for Larry King or something? That was a long time ago, and the spectacle of Chris Matthews versus Keith Olbermann versus Joe Scarborough versus NBC News brass versus viewers has basically taken all the negative attention off of poor Katie. As a result, now it is time for people to decide they like her again! First up, Times media person David Carr. David Carr got in trouble for being all sexist about Katie last time he wrote about her, and in this piece he once again reminds everyone that she is "perky" (almost!) and "America's Sweetheart" (almost!). But he also says: "Ms. Couric is a highly skilled interviewer, and people tend to tell her stuff." Of course CBS is still in third place and the fact that MSNBC has sucked all the coverage away from Katie is good, sort of, but also means that no one is talking about Katie and CBS. So she can do all the surprisingly good work in the world, but it won't attract the attention of a Chris Matthews meltdown on a third-place cable network. In other words, we figure she's enjoying herself as anchor for the first time since she started, mostly because she's still going to quit soon, so why not have fun. (Of course she still needs to make sure she's getting that payday before she hands the reigns back to Bob Scheiffer.) [Photo: HuffPo]

Geez, not two months after potato-loving NYT reporter David Carr was declared the next big thing in druggie memoir publishing, the literati is already turning its attention to Bill Clegg, the next druggie memoir star. Which we note mostly so that we can use this picture that we took with our cameraphone last night: David Carr underneath a Barnes & Noble banner with his very own picture on it! Ain't that a kick? Click to enlarge.

The New York Times announced today that it's (finally?) starting a dedicated Media desk. The beat has been split between the Business and Culture sections, but now the paper is pulling a dozen reporters together and moving them to the third floor—the floor between the other two sections, and where the top Times editors now sit. Symbolic! It's all about "convergence," they say. But why now? And, look who's not going to be assigned to the Media desk: The Times' most visible media writer and newly minted authorial rock star, David Carr! We've emailed NYT Culture editor Sam Sifton for an explanation. Regardless, this has to be interpreted as a move that assigns more importance to the media beat. The Times currently gives over the bulk of its Monday business page to media stories, and there's no indication that that will change. The selection of that page's editor, Bruce Headlam, to head the new desk is a major promotion for him. A united media beat, though, will presumably be better able to coordinate its coverage so that it's competing every day of the week—which will become ever more important as the Wall Street Journal continues its own transition into a general-interest, business-friendly paper. The WSJ's media coverage is heavy on marketing, but it is naturally the Times' biggest competitor for the most important media stories. The full memo from the Times:

Bonnie Fuller isn't employed at the moment, which means she should have plenty of time to celebrate her birthday today: the tabloid queen is 52. Maybe she can share a birthday cake with the New York Times' David Carr: He turns 52 today, too. Others celebrating: Real estate mogul Howard Lorber is 60. Food writer Amanda Hesser is 37. Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Bobby Kennedy and ex-wife of Andrew Cuomo, is 49. Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann is 48. David Arquette is 37. Pink is 29. Swimsuit model and former E! host Brooke Burke is 37. And '90s teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas turns 27.

There's no news in Denver. At least, no news that couldn't be reported by watching it on C-Span from the comfort of home. So what to do? Report on what all your fellow journalists are doing! So far, the single greatest example of this is HuffPo's constant reportage from their own "HuffPost Oasis" in Denver. At left, an unretouched screengrab from their front page today. The Oasis is remarkably popular with journalists, considering that we have no idea what goes on there but we don't think it involves free booze. Wait, maybe we do know what's going on there! "'I feel relaxed!' said a particularly refreshed Eric Alterman as he stepped away from a complimentary facial for a minute. 'I'll tell you this—everyone should add facials to their lives.'" Oh, wow. That quote is from John Koblin's piece in today's Observer. It's got more gems: Adam Nagourney couldn't find a seat at his own paper's workspace, then bitched about having to cover the convention with so many other, lesser reporters. Fox's Greta Van Susteren, though, was more than happy to be there.

• NBC says 211 million Americans tuned in to the Beijing Olympics, making it the most widely-viewed Games in television history. And merchandise sales were way up, too. [TV Decoder, TV Week]

Earlier, we snarked that being on the "extended" NYT bestseller list doesn't really count, re: David Carr and his August 24th showing on the extended list. But we've just learned that he made the August 31st "regular" bestselling list—at #12 for nonfiction.

"The Instant New York Times Bestseller," trumpets the full-page ad for NYT reporter David Carr's memoir in the NYT today. We'll congratulate him for that, as we are fans of his brutally honest addiction memoir. However, it must be pointed out that Night of the Gun has only hit the expanded bestseller list, which is for the runners-up and isn't printed. (Update: that was the Aug. 24th Times bestseller list. We've just learned that Carr made the regular August 31st bestseller list, at #12 for nonfiction.)

The National Enquirer is having an amazing week thanks to its coverage of John Edwards' philandering, but the supermarket tabloid is probably still going to die along with troubled parent company American Media Inc., the Times' David Carr reports for tomorrow's paper. It doesn't seem to matter that three of the best papers in the country all ran stories about how the Enquirer was right about Edwards and they were wrong or that the tabloid still owns the probably-not-finished scandal. AMI is so deep in the hole — nearly $1 billion! — that most analysts aren't even keeping track of the Edwards coverage or anything else about the company because they've written it off. One gave this fairly devastating quote to Carr, anonymously: