Should Time Warner shed Time Inc.? David Carr seems to think it should, suggesting that Time Inc. prove itself quickly or be sold. "A very large boat," says Carr, "will have to be turned around very quickly with little additional investment." It's an industry-wide problem, and not just in print media: As Les Moonves recently told the Times, "we are changing our tires on a car going 80 miles an hour." Still, when one's employer has been likened by its own employees to an "ocean liner that turns slowly but with great power," we can understand a good transportation metaphor's appeal.

David Carr, explaining the secrets to his success as a media critic in the current Rake:

Did David Carr and Paul Farhi see the same movie? Using Scoop as a jumping off point, they both wrote pieces on the image of reporters in film. Back at the end of July, Fahri had the following in the Washington Post

We are not shy about our interest in Vogue editor Anna Wintour, whose mystery, influence, and frigid thighs always entertain our fascination with the macabre. But everyone has a limit, and the Devil Wears Prada-inspired scrutiny of Wintour may be ours. Case in point: David Carr (in a column that could only be explained by a daughter dragging him to the film) reminds us today that the editor depicted in Prada is not like Wintour; that Wintour is powerful and has powerful friends; that you can't kill her, you only make her stronger. And if you can handle it, add to these surprising revelations one more epiphany: "Powerful women in the media always get inspected more thoroughly than their male counterparts." Sigh. Hence the column, David?

• Jeff Jarvis thinks everything's about the web. We're as shocked as you are. [Guardian]
• Dana Priest, John Harwood, and Bill Safire gang up on William Bennett. Maybe Bennett can head down to A.C. to console himself. Oh, right. [E&P]
• Shreveport paper concludes Ann Coulter "more about entertainment and self-promotion." Also plagiarism, allegedly. [Shreveport Times]
• In a loft on Spring Street some dude checks his e-mail, doesn't bother to pretend he's paying attention to David Carr. [NYT]
• Edger Bronfman, Jr., won't be happy until he pisses his entire family fortune into the ground. And not in the good, Warren Buffett kind of way. [Guardian]

Hot on the heels of her recent morning show widow-bashing, Ann Coulter makes an appearance in today's Times, where media explicator David Carr takes a look at the New Canaan Natterer. It's a wagging finger piece, complete with fanciful line art, and it allows Carr to get off a few good ones at Coulter's expense: She's cynical, "all knuckles and know-how", her pronouncements are "uninterrupted by conscience, rectitude or logic," and she lies about her age (45, if you're scoring at home). So how does a venomous harpy who doesn't even believe the hate that she spews continue to play a part in our national conversation? Carr digs deep to reveal the shocking formula behind her success: controversy causes sales! More in sorrow than anger, Carr concludes "the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us". We agree, we're all to blame. Particularly those of us who spend over one thousand words in the nation's Paper of Record perpetuating her publicity.

• Ted Turner sells his memoir for $4.5 million; David Carr sells his for $300k. [NYP]
• You shall bow before Katie and Anderson, because they are royalty. [National Journal]
• Brad is Esquire's October cover. Brad doesn't want to talk about whether he cheated on Jen. Did Esquire agree to restrictions? [WWD]

• Ian Spiegelman tells Simon Dumenco that Page Six is in fact like the Mafia, that its writers at least feel bad writing homophobic items, and that China and Nicole Kidman are off-limits. Also, though his novel's protagonist takes cash for good coverage, he does not believe the JPS charges. [Ad Age]
• Sulzberger apologizes to graduates for not stopping war, achieving equality, and protecting Roe, and legalizing gay marriage. Next week, he'll apologize to his reporters for giving right-wing anti-Timesers a huge trove of new fodder. [Daily Freeman via Romenesko]
• Things suck at ABC News. [LAT]
• Newspaper people — even David Carr's young friends — worry how much longer they'll have jobs. [NYT]

It's been a year since Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post (and, of course, the same amount of time since noted media analyst Nikki Finke described the site as, "the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one."). David Carr takes a look at HuffPo and finds the site to be an overwhelming success, proving that a model based on dodgy celebrities, no-name web-types, and the siblings of even-less impressive bloggers is certainly sustainable as long as you also provide a space for ineffectual lefties to rant in the comments against anyone who fails to share their blinkered, doctrinaire world view. Huffington takes a bit of stick for social climbing ("with the finesse of a ballerina and the ferocity of a fullback") but if your alternatives were hanging out with Peter Daou and Nick Denton, you'd be kissing Condi Rice's ass too. Carr concludes that Huffington "has introduced the sparkle of celebrity to the frat-house world of blogging," which is the best explanation we've seen so far for why reading Greg Gutfeld makes us feel like we've been date raped. Thanks, Arianna! We'd always wondered what the dude who does Mr. Burns' voice on "The Simpsons" thought about the Army Corps of Engineers; now we know!

• Starting next week, Hearst begins its move into their new W. 57th Street digs. While we expected an impeccably organized move, we certainly didn't expect moving phases to be divided into color-coded teams, complete with "team captains." After the move, will there be a giant game of capture the flag? [Jossip]
• David Carr, clearly having never worked at a doughnut shop, is wrong about employees consuming the very goods they sell. [The Daily Transom]
• Vanessa Grigoriadis is hiring a new mule. [Columbia]
• We've always maintained that the fervently athletic are intellectually feeble; triatheletes competing for a new bike by touching a bike frame for 70 hours straight seems to support that notion. [Big and Sharp]
• The Marcel Hotel at 24th Street and 3rd Avenue flooded yesterday, forcing 130 travelers to be relocated elsewhere. In case you were wondering, they're still all booked for tonight and tomorrow. [WCBS]
• The Department of Justice presents Your Vagina: A Gateway to Information. [Video Dog]

• Nick Lemann has 5,000 words on Bill O'Reilly. Which we'll get around to reading soon. [NYer]
• David Carr thinks VF, underneath all its bullshit, is actually a pretty good mag. [NYT]
• And Jon Friedman thinks that all the other magazine editors are ganging up on poor David Remnick. [MW]
• We always thought Bill Beutel was kind of a little crazy, but that's probably because we only really watched him in his later years. He helped invent Eyewitness News, and he died Saturday. [NYT]
• Bloggers "are the new media darlings," and — shockingly — many hope to get paid gigs with traditional media. [Newsday]
• More breaking insights: An attractive grad student who is raped and murdered makes for great tabloid fodder. [Baltimore Sun]
• No Hachette mags were among the Ellie finalists. Again. [WWD]

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Deep down, we all just want to be loved. Everyone. Even a bigshot New York Times writer with a weekly column and an Academy Awards blog and amusing new video clips and the freedom, it seems, to write about nearly whatever he wants, whenever he wants, from wherever he wants, for the world's leading newspaper — Mr. Run Amok, but in a good way — just wants to be loved.

Two weeks ago it was written by Keith Kelly, and today is it sealed by David Carr: Arthur Carter, tired of losing $2 million each year on his delightful and beloved but congenitally money-losing New York Observer, wants to sell the paper.

It's tough to complain about The Carpetbagger, the Times's just-launched Oscar-season blog by David Carr, mostly because it's a pleasure to read David Carr on just about anything, especially when he's given some extra leash to be un-Timesianly light and clever. But we wouldn't feel like ourselves if we didn't at least try to complain, and so we've come up with this:

Around the Gawker water cooler a month or two ago — about the time Judy Miller was getting out of jail and barely, grudgingly talking to her Times colleagues about what got her there — we were discussing how David Carr, who we'd previously believed to be a media writer for the Times, an impression we gathered from little things like his weekly column called "Media," now seemed to write about anything he wanted for the paper. Michael Flatley's return? OK. Chris Noth's feelings about his Law & Order return? Sure. Indie rock in Atlanta? Go for it. And so, around that cooler, a nickname was bestowed: Mr. Run Amok, the equally uncontainable yin to Miller's sadly unfortunate yang. We had a brief chuckle, and then we forgot about it.

We've asked our favorite media personalities what they're thankful for this year, and they've actually answered. Three from the Times, starting with Arts-y gal Ginia Bellafante:

In practical terms, no, of course not. Google is still the best, fastest, most useful, and most verbed search engine out there. But it's also been the recipient of glowing press coverage for nearly as long as it has been around. And you have to imagine that the good media fortune will eventually run out. (The press? Mercurial? You think?)

Maer Roshan's new mag, Radar, is set to hit newstands on April 22nd, and the press blizzard is just starting. The NYT's David Carr has an extensive review and Page Six offers a few excerpts from an article titled "Monsters, Inc.":
· On Dave Eggers: "Thin-skinned exhibitionist is so paranoid about his image, will communicate with press only via e-mail. Claims to loathe big imprints, yet is published by Penguin in the U.K."
· Wall Street dilettante Jim Cramer "gave surviving employees of his beleaguered financial Web site thestreet.com autographed copies of his blustery post-bust tell-all, 'You Got Screwed!,' in lieu of bonuses."
(We snagged a copy, too, so you'll get more excerpts later.)
New magazine has the sound, not the budget, of the late Talk [NYT]
Radar tracks boldface boors [Page Six]

According to the NYT's David Carr, Vogue Editor Anna Wintour is down with the people. His evidence? The breaks with the tradition on recent Vogue covers (the April issue will feature a very pregnant Brooke Shields) and the increase in ad pages sold. Both factors have worked well for Vogue, but I'm not sure they're particularly indicative of a more democratic magazine. When Vogue starts featuring The Gap instead of Galliano, we'll talk.
Anna Wintour steps toward fashion's new democracy [NYT]