Word emerged Tuesday on Rupert Murdoch's handshake deal to buy Newsday, and there was talk about Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman dropping out of the bidding for the Long Island tabloid. But the Times today said Zuckerman is expected to make a counteroffer next week, while Jared Kushner's Observer Media Group may submit a joint offer with Long Island television provider Cablevision, which had dropped out of the running. "People in both the News and Observer camps say they were shocked to learn of the handshake deal with Mr. Murdoch... because they had been assured by Tribune's bankers that they had until next week to submit offers," said the Times. Perhaps Tribune chief Sam Zell, who like Zuckerman is a real estate mogul come to media later in life, understands instinctively that Newsday is best off in the hands of Murdoch, the deep-pocketed lifelong media mogul. Here's how Lloyd Grove compared Zuckerman to Murdoch as he was leaving the former's employ as a gossip columnist in 2006:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is about to buy Newsday for close to $580 million, and pull off a neat trick in the process: bringing profitability to Murdoch's other, cash-bleeding tabloid, the New York Post. By combining the Post and Newsday into a joint business venture, Murdoch stands to "wipe out as much as $50 million in annual losses News Corp. now incurs on the Post, with the combined Newsday-Post operation earning roughly $50 million," according to a Wall Street Journal source. The sale price represents a significant premium over the $350 million to $400 million price put forward by one newspaper analyst. The whole transaction is dependent on regulator approval, which is no sure thing. Assuming the deal goes through, it will be interesting to see how Newsday's headlines, front page and overall tone evolve, since the joint venture is not limited to back-end business operations but includes editorial resources as well. [WSJ]

A redesigned Wall Street Journal launched this morning and is described a juicy Newsweek story on Rupert Murdoch, which includes a nugget about how the News Corp. chief has been working overtime, including on Easter. He has become "a regular and jarring presence in the Journal newsroom" and scared staffers are working Sundays to keep him happy. Murdoch is no doubt motivated to live up to a somewhat bitter letter he sent a chagrined Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at the Times, which included the phrase "Let the battle begin!" Here is quick list (modeled and partly based on this one) of current and planned changes to the Journal, which basically amount to making it less business focused:

Oh no, now you've gone and encouraged Michael Bloomberg again: Newsweek reports that "the mayor's confidants and closest associates are, in fact, encouraging him to explore the idea" of buying the Times. And to bolster their case they've no doubt assembled clips of others saying the same thing in the press over the past few months, including Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, shouting head Jim Cramer and former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. Despite frightful working conditions at Bloomberg's financial information company, his buddies imagine him shielding the Times newsroom from intense financial pressures:

An outraged Iwo Jima veteran said that whoever designed Time's April 21 global warming cover (pictured) is "going to hell... to stick a tree in place of a flag on the Iwo Jima picture is just sacrilegious." His veteran buddies are also upset: "[W]e'll stick a dadgum tree up somebody's rear if they want that and think that's going to cure something." Wait, so people actually say "dadgum" outside of King Of The Hill? [Business And Media]

Robert Downey Junior is portraying a newspaper reporter in a movie for the second time in as many years, for some reason. The troubled-but-admired actor is either going to get people to read newspapers again and save the industry or generate a new wave of sad, unemployable journalism school graduates. His latest project is The Soloist, now filming, in which he plays a Los Angeles Times columnist who discovers a brilliant but schizophrenic musician living on the street. The movie follows 2007's Zodiac, in which Downey Jr. played an alcoholic but brilliant San Francisco Chronicle reporter, a role that agreed with him. Despite the movies, the real-life inspiration for the actor's Soloist character sounds pretty depressed about newspapers:

Apparently no one can just deliver the damn news any more, straight, everyone has to try and be funny. First it was the Daily Show, then Colbert Report, then Fox's attempted conservative news satire and most recently CNN's planned comedy news show. Now the Economist, the starchy British magazine, has launched a site in collaboration with Chicago's Second City improv troupe.

Radio people tend to be very weird, and over at struggling Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell is putting them in charge of everything, so the whole place is turning into some kind of clown show. There are batshit crazy emails, bizarre newspaper makeover ideas, pinball and an actual buzzer, like on a morning zoo radio show, used during meetings. Put on your LSD glasses and take a Hunter Thompson-esque ride through the freaky new Tribune Co.

Cyprus is an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, Cypress is a kind of tree, and the Times' Rome bureau chief doesn't know the difference. Well, he probably does, and makes the same sort of dumb spelling mistakes as the rest of us, but it's still fun to laugh at the copy editing notes shown above, which made it into the Web version of the chief's story on immigrant Italian chefs. Fun, that is, if you're an enormous dork like me. (Related: The "Old Country For Old Men" gaffe.)

"Both men share what could be called 'Economist-envy.' In 2007, the Economist newsmagazine, published by U.K.-based The Economist Newspaper Ltd., saw an 8.5% increase in advertising pages compared with 2006, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. By contrast, Newsweek's advertising pages dropped 6.7% and Time's fell 6.9%." [WSJ]

Today's Observer contains a smart, if depressing, package of stories on the fading glories of the magazine industry, but the weekly saved its cruelest cut for the front page, where appeared the parody at left of Vogue's infamous LeBron James cover (click for larger version). The message: if anyone deserves to be compared to a crazed monster it is the notoriously demanding Wintour, with her ostensible boss Si Newhouse along for the ride. The illustration, by Victor Juhasz, capped a rough few months for Wintour, who was publicly dissed by fashion's priesthood during a recent trip to Europe, then faced uproar over her recent weight-loss outreach to two female designers and is now grappling with fallout from the James cover. After the jump, a large version of the parody cover, and the object of said parody.

The latest rash of blogger book deals includes, from the Skull-A-Day blog, a tome with "images of the skulls [made] from candy, sparklers and other bric-a-brac." Literary agent: "If I contact [a blogger] or [a blogger] is put in touch with me, chances are they've already been contacted by another agent. Or they've at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project." [Times]

The Sunday Times included an essay on how certain books can be major turnoffs while dating, and already 162 people have posted their own "literary dealbreakers" to an nytimes.com blog post. There's also a follow up blog post, a follow-up column and of course blogger reaction (former Gawker Emily Gould has two posts up so far). Consensus turnoffs include anything by Ayn Rand (huge among business executives, in my experience), Da Vinci Code, Bridges of Madison County and the Harry Potter series. Also, no one seems to be making allowances for gifts from parents and friends and, hello, book sales, which might be the only reason some of us have David Guterson, Barack Obama, James Frey and, uh, maybe Imus on our shelves, OK? Not that there's any need to be defensive; listening to other people try and justify their literary chauvinism tends to be more entertaining than threatening, especially if they're strangers. After the jump, some of the best posts, and some of the most insane posts, from the Times' literary turnoffs discussion thread.

Arianna Huffington doesn't quite deny the possibility she'll sell the Huffington Post in a story for tomorrow's Times, saying only that she hasn't discussed a sale. One source told the Times that HuffPo executives investigated possible sale prices and figured the site is worth around $200 million, or $50 for each visitor. In the meantime, HuffPo is going to help put your local newspaper out of business - and probably undermine in its own value - by metroblogging:

Can't be right: "Atlantic owner David Bradley has nabbed Wired Publisher Jay Lauf as publisher of the culture and politics magazine... 'In the second half of 2007, we increased our ad prices by 390 percent,' said Atlantic President Justin Smith. 'I felt our ad pages were underpriced compared to some of our competitors.' So far this year, the Atlantic has slipped 12 percent in ad pages." [Post]

I was getting kind of sick of the calculators and clocks that come with my other subscriptions. How will any of that stuff ever make my heart explode? [JTA]

To publicize the re-release of teen fiction series Sweet Valley High, Random House Children's Books sent a letter to journalists highlighting the changes made to the content of the 1980s paperbacks. New cover girl Leven Rambin (pictured) was not mentioned, but just to make sure preteen and teenaged girl readers are sufficiently insecure about their bodies, the publisher made the "perfect" clothing size a couple of notches more restrictive. It seems kids in the 80s lived by totally fat standards. Also, Sweet Valley High students now have their own anonymous blog, presumably to hatefully bully the fattest of their classmates. Here's a helpful chart from the Random House letter, followed by the letter itself:

It can cost more than $30,000 per month to keep a reporter on the presidential campaign trail, so cash-strapped newspapers like USA Today, the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News are no longer on the road with the Clinton or Obama campaigns, at least not on a consistent basis. The changes have thinned out the chummy pack journalism depicted in Timothy Crouse's "Boys On The Bus," and that's probably for the best. Campaign trail stories can be told more cheaply using wire services, YouTube and cable news, while seasoned reporters can spend their time on stories they think are important rather than being held captive by agenda-setting campaign managers. The Morning News, for example, took a look at how hispanics in California and Texas were voting differently. The upshot is that the country is less likely to choose its next president on the basis of who people would rather have a beer with, as was the case with Bush. After the jump, Bush shows how charming he could be on the campaign bus in a very brief preview for Alexandra Pelosi's 2002 documentary, Journeys With George.

"This morning's New York Times scoops the Journal with a... Page One piece about JPMorgan negotiating to quintuple its offer for Bear Stearns. [Rupert] Murdoch can't be happy about getting trounced on the month's biggest business story. By softening the Journal's editorial focus, isn't he making this sort of humiliation inevitable?" [Slate]

Last week, British the Office star Ricky Gervais posted a video to his personal blog that both mocked his Office character and had fun at the expense of an entertainment column in the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun, paper for a town where Gervais was scouting locations for his new movie. Since then, the Sun columnist in question has replied to Gervais' video, seemingly in soft, celebrity-friendly tones, but also with some sentences that could be read as vaguely threatening: