After a series of character-sapping changes over the past 10 years, the Wall Street Journal is contemplating yet another makeover, this time of its Marketplace section. Owner Rupert Murdoch is looking to replace many of the columns and feature stories on the front of Marketplace with hard news, the Times reports in tomorrow's paper. Page One has already undergone similar changes. Stories have been shortened. Murdoch is adding some truth to the lie uttered by Charlie Sheen's character Bud Fox in 1980s movie Wall Street: "having sex with her is like reading the Wall Street Journal, 'cept the Journal don't talk back."

Following in the footsteps of the Times, the Wall Street Journal now offers back-door access to its $79-per-year subscription content for those smart enough to know the tricks. According to Salon, they are: search for the article on Google News and click through from there (only works on some stories), or install a plugin for Web browser Firefox that lets your computer pretend it was referred to WSJ.com from digg.com or news.google.com. The first trick, at least seems to work in a quick test on this article.

Since when is Newsday so hot? The paper consistently publishes the most boring front page of any of the Gotham tabloids, but the publication is clearly stirring the passions of corporate tycoons. Rupert Murdoch's interest emerged yesterday; now it's clear that the News Corp. CEO and Post owner must queue with other suitors interested in winning Newsday from money-hemorrhaging Tribune Company. Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman wants the paper for largely the same reason as Murdoch, which is to merge business-side offices and cut costs enough to drive the remaining, unaffiliated tabloid out of business. Long Island cable operator Cablevision Systems Corp. is bidding, perhaps so it can cross-sell ads from its cable system and local news channel into Newsday. It's not clear that the other two bidders are as serious as Murdoch, or can afford to be, but broker Citigroup is apparently planning a "soft auction." Newspaper analyst John Morton estimates Newsday could fetch $350 million to $400 million, down about half from its value five years ago. Kind of sad for what Morton described, in the Times' retelling, as "probably one of Tribune's more lucrative papers." [Times, WSJ]

The former full-time Newsday columnist on the paper's owner Sam Zell: "I know he rides a motorcyle, don't he? Fucking bullshit." On reported Newsday suitor Rupert Murdoch: "What the hell do I care? The fucking days are gone when you can worry about who owns what... I've been critical of him... But that doesn't mean my copyreader is supposed to go broke." [Portfolio]

Who doesn't have exclusive naughty Ashley Dupre content at this point? The Eliot Spitzer hooker appears topless (and nipple-less, thanks to silly photo editing) in the Orlando Sentinel this evening after the paper discovered it photographed her while preparing an article on video series Girls Gone Wild in 2003. The Sentinel follows in the Dupre-scooping footsteps of Us Weekly (non-nude photos), Girls Gone Wild (nude video), the Post (various, including a nudie cover photo), the Times (non-exclusive but quickly reposted MySpace pics), Daily News (cocaine allegations), Larry King (interview with an alleged Dupre pimp), nightlife impresario Steve Lewis (Dupre's celebrity boyfriend), and Gawker (cell phone video). There is surely more Dupre content lying undiscovered in laptops, cell phones and photo stashes across the country, not to mention social networks, magazine archives and random websites. Find your own EXCLUSIVE Dupre material and publish it to the world before the rest of your friends and relatives do likewise and Dupre finally and mercifully becomes passe, if she hasn't already. An oh-so-sexy sample from the Sentinel's EXCLUSIVE 16-photo gallery is after the jump.

Ricky Gervais, star of the original British version of deadpan TV comedy the Office, just started a personal blog and has already resorted to that old blogger standby, local media criticism. But Gervais' video sendup of the Lowell, Mass. Sun is, as you'd expect, far more entertaining than the local press commentary most internet cranks churn out. The comedian's short skit is delivered in the deceptively gentle tones of Gervais' Office character and mocks the character's own pomposity. At the same time, it nails the defining pitfalls of community journalism — the typos, excessive attribution, bizarre story placement, awkward prose — as Gervais dissembles the Sun's page-11 coverage of pre-production on his new movie, This Side Of Truth. Any hack who earned his stripes at a small-newspaper city desk will cringe in sympathy. Video after the jump.

Late-night TV host Conan O'Brien was surprised to read about his "St. Patrick's Day Stew" in Good Housekeeping given that he doesn't cook, has never tasted the dish and has no idea how the recipe got into the magazine. O'Brien devoted three prime minutes of his show, immediately following the monologue, to the recipe. He said the Hearst magazine "completely made this [recipe] up" and made a jokey statement about feeling "a little exploited." Well, Conan, just imagine how the rest of us feel: First we lost any faith in the accuracy of personal memoirs, now we can't even trust that celebrity magazine recipes aren't totally fabricated? Video after the jump.

Al Gore's minions at cable network Current just revisited the story of Harvard porno H Bomb, which debuted four years ago. Current posted an interview with H Bomb co-founder Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg, but neglected to mention that Baldegg, class of '06, was hired by Current to solicit content after her gig running H Bomb. It's not clear how new Current's interview is; according to this page, it was recorded earlier this month, but Baldegg is identified like she's the still the editor, which she is not. Anyway, the video, excerpted after the jump, includes a nice pan across the magazine's famous orgy centerfold and the impossibly-named Baldegg sounding off about how her magazine was not porno but high-minded art.

Newspapers aren't what they used to be, what with their declining circulations and evolving missions, and old-school, hard-drinking writers and editors like the Post's Steve Dunleavy are retiring and dying of liver failure in droves. The exciting new "journalists" of the internet like to talk about how much they drink and sometimes actually do booze it up with sources and each other, but really their pageview quotas and intense competition usually keep them from becoming true barstool jockeys. The pansy new era of journalism has resulted in a wave of sad bar closures, which MarketWatch ambitiously documents in five cities and two continents in the video after the jump.

It sounds like Glamour is losing more than its awful womanizing blogger: An emailer tells us about five editors and a senior celebrity writer who have all left the women's magazine within the past few months, some without other jobs lined up. Crisis! Articles about "men's new sexual needs" and "the 10 greatest catfights" do not conceive, assign and massively rewrite themselves! Names and details after the jump.

Remember zines? They were basically, like... personal, esoteric blogs xeroxed on paper, from way back in the 1980s and 90s. Critical Mass has an obituary of zines today. Cause of death: internet. But they're wrong! Zines are only, like, half-dead. (I even have one! On paper, yes.) There's a handful of people who still make them, similar to vinyl record enthusiasts in their weirdness. The Portland Zine Symposium, which happens every August, is still going strong. After the jump, a list of my favorite, current zines — and where to find them!

New York Times Co. executives are bragging about their website and talking about selling off pieces of the company, possibly in response to pressure from two hedge funds that now control around 19 percent of the company and are in talks about seating directors to the company board. Speaking at a Bear Stearns conference, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson said the paper launched 50 — 50! — blogs over the past 12 months and that the paper's crowd-leading Eliot Spitzer coverage drove a 60 percent Web traffic increase. Times CFO James Follo, meanwhile, "said the company frequently evaluates how it is allocating its resources and would consider any asset sale that would be prudent for investors," according to the AP. "'We love all our assets but we're not married to any one of them,' Follo said. The New York Times newspaper was the sole asset he said was off the table." The Times' selloff talk is probably related to investor questions about whether the company is focused enough, an issue raised in the Times on Monday by an anonymous "person close to" the hedge funds pressuring Times Co.:

In covering Gov. Eliot Spitzer's love for quality prostitutes, the New York tabloids all went with Spitzer's "look of contrition" as their cover art, but none seems to have quite nailed the headline. Sure, the Post's "Ho No!" is punchy and clever and probably the best of the bunch, as you'd expect. The Daily News' "Pay For Luv Gov" is slightly more literate but lacks the all-important slammer. Newsday's headline... well it has an ampersand, which is nice. But when the governor admits to diddling high-class hookers is this really the best the city's scandal sheets can do? Here are our suggestions, follow with your own:

From Wired editor Chris Anderson's big cover story/book excerpt on how most products will soon be free: "Externalities [is] a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always know about but have only recently been able to measure properly."

The New York Times ensnared John McCain in one of the worst-timed and most pointless scandal stories ever written last night, quoting two anonymous sources who claim McCain confessed to never-specified but vaguely "inappropriate" behavior with a female telecommunications lobbyist, rode with her somewhere on a jet, and then his twitchy, neurotic aides supposedly decided the lobbyist had to be kept away from the senile old man. This all happened nine years ago and was outlined on Drudge Report two months ago, when there would have been some kind of point in the Times running even this tepid story because the Republicans had not yet rejected slimy philanderer Rudy Giuliani in favor of straight-talking maverick of integrity John McCain. But now McCain is the nominee in all but name, and this sad, toothless scandal story will be long forgotten by the time the general election rolls around eight months from now. What was the Times thinking?It was probably thinking about how its editor Bill Keller is developing a reputation for spiking stories when powerful people ask him to.

If there were any justice in the world, at all, Gimmick book writer AJ Jacobs would be ashamed of his article in the latest Esquire because it would suck. The article goes like this: Jacobs gets permission from his wife to screw his young hot nanny, drools all over her, pushes the innocent girl into the scuzzy world of online dating, uses her account to flirt with and extract information from suitors and then actually sets her up on dates with a few of these guys, all no doubt so he can write a big article about it in Esquire. The problem is that the article emphatically does not suck, it's actually kind of an awesome read. And Jacobs arguably does his mostly male readers the service of illustrating how disturbing their behavior toward hot women is:

The Daily News had the perfect story on its hands: an exclusive about a lost animal, with a name, being rescued, from the dark scary subway complete with picture. In case you missed the six News stories on the practically (suspiciously!) made-for-media topic, adorable little "Georgia" here jumped out of her owner's cat carrier and scampered into the subway tracks, where she remained for 25 days. Then, OMG, the cat was rescued yesterday by heroic trackworkers, who are named and interviewed, and NYPD officers, who are named and interviewed, and the NYC Transit President called everyone heroes, apparently in some kind of emergency weekend interview. The News nearly had a perfect story, but then they had to make two puns involving "nine lives" and end on this quote from owner Ashley Phillips: "I can't believe she's going to be in the paper tomorrow." Still, well played. [Daily News]

Time writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen thinks her publisher is obnoxiously proud of its Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which it slipped into everyone's office in the dead of night, and which contains, gasp, pictures of young women in various states of undress. The women don't even look real, and the bikinis are of no interest to Cullen because she's pregnant, so Cullen shouldn't even have to be bothered to throw away what she accurately describes as "porn." But she'll happily cash her paychecks every few weeks, even though they come from the annoying porn; according to Time Inc. and Cullen's own blog post, the "Swimsuit Edition franchise... is the most profitable of any single magazine-branded franchise." Basically, the Time writer doesn't want to have to come face to face with how her publisher makes its money. And who can blame her: if she took a hard look and started engaging that topic a bit more closely on her blog, there would be no office to come back to. [Folio]

Spy magazine is to the media set what Sassy is to twentysomething girls: everybody loooves it and reminisces about how good it was even though those days are dead and gone. It was pretty great, although you can barely kick a dog without hearing about it. Now Folio asks, what about Wigwag mag? It launched around the time Spy did, but isn't nearly as well-remembered. Why not, certain media geeks want to know? (It could be noted that these influential magazines, appealing to a fairly small, elite circle, were both financially inviable).

The LA Times had to explain blogs all over again while reviewing a new anthology of the web's best blog-writing, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web. "It's clear that, to come up with these gems, [editor Sarah] Boxer must have combed through thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of blogs." Sounds hellish, but Boxer was the NYT's first "web critic," so perhaps she's used to it. The reviewer has a bit of a problem with the format of this book, however. It is a book, not a blog; as such, it does not include links. This proves to be a problem.