New York Times Associate managing editor William "Bill" Schmidt just sent an email around the paper begging people to accept buyout offers, for the good of everyone else. "Each buyout we record before next Tuesday reduces the number of layoffs we will have to seek." Retire! Earlier today, Radar media critic Charles Kaiser named a couple people who might take buyouts, but none of them were people we want to see leave. None of them are responsible for Thursday Styles, after all. Though we suppose the idea is for old people to leave, right? Can Clyde Haberman take one? Wait, is Clyde Haberman still alive? Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Dan Barry can stay as long as he goes back to investigative reporting and not writing columns about quaint happenings in quaint places. Oh, and COUGH COUGH ALESSANDRA STANLEY? Your further suggestions are appreciated. Full memo after the jump.

The late, ferocious writer Norman Mailer will be honored at Carnegie Hall tomorrow at 4pm. Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Tina Brown, and, um, Sean Penn will speak. The tribute is free and open to the public, and you can pick up a ticket starting at 11 a.m. (This event brought to you by Random House.) [Norman Mailer Society]

A full list of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners follows. A few surprises in there: did we know that Bob Dylan got a Special Citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power"? And that the Editorial Writing award went to... no one?

Maxim publisher and very rich man Felix Dennis is an eccentric throwback to the old-school journalism of yore: he also writes poetry and is trying to recreate an ancient forest in England. In an interview with the Times of London, he talks about his old crack habit and how he spent three years trying to "save a young prostitute." Then, a couple of bottles of wine into the evening, he confesses to killing a man, 25 years ago:

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz takes on Rupert Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal today, in Kurtz's inimitable "not actually taking anything on" style. Some say Murdoch will push the paper to the right or destroy its essential character! Others say he won't! What's indisputable, though, is that Murdoch's Journal is trying to establish (or re-establish) itself as a national paper, maybe a tough sell in a media landscape where only the New York Times really holds that title. But Murdoch's got lots and lots and lots of money! Fun facts: the newsroom staff is up to 750, from 600 two years ago. They are adding Washington and foreign reporters. Madness! It's almost as if no one told Rupert that print is dead. But the irreparable damage to the paper's character! What about that?

"Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people's rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J." [NYT] A slideshow of Pran and his work is available here.

Back in more civilized times, the New York Times never once mentioned the name Jennifer Fitzgerald. That name, Times vet R.W. Apple famously explained in Spy, was "known everywhere, and it is not used." Fitzgerald was the woman who supposedly had a lengthy affair with former President George H. W. Bush. The Times never even looked into the story. "All you've got is sordid gossipy bits," explained another reporter. The first reports of Bill Clinton's alleged extramartial affair didn't name the "Arkansas employee" who made the allegations herself. (Not until the tabloid The Star used her name was it safe to also do so.) Before the Post broke the story of Judith Nathan, the Times coverage of the end of then-mayor Rudy Giulaini's marriage to Donna Hanover was obnoxiously winking. Elisabeth Bumiller only named the mayor's good friend after Rudy and the Post beat them to it. Basically, how insane is it that the Times broke the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the hooker who took down Eliot Spitzer? And how insane was the story that broke it, what with its links to her MySpace profile and bizarre criticism of her "rhythm and blues" music? Arthur Suzlberger truly is "the prophet of the high church of journalism."

Click to viewWe count six recording devices in the hands of the woman on the right. Why? Is she covering for five colleagues on a smoke break? Is she presenting them as an offering to Press Corps God Barack Obama? Do some of the devices pick up secret messages spoken in registers too high for normal humans to hear? Is one of them a tricorder? And what's up with her arms? Can human fingers even do that? Please speculate wildly in the comments. [Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images, Via]

"It is a fact that corporate overlords working in secret collusion with the powers in Washington are intruding far too often in far too many newsrooms." -Dan Rather [After the jump, we play "this thing sounds like that thing!"]

The Moonie-owned right-wing-allied Washington Times has changed its editor, and now its styleguide. Some of the seriously loaded code languge is no longer the Times standard! So long "homosexual 'marriage'"! Farewell "illegal aliens"! We thought we'd be in the cold ground before the Washington Times recognized the term "moderate." Alas, times change. White supremacist-sympathetic editors-in-chief get ousted. Times newsroom email, via CQ, after the jump.

The New Republic's story-of-the-story of the New York Times' story of how John McCain might've fucked lobbyist Vicki Iseman is up, and, as could probably be predicted, it's the story of Bill Keller being a total pussy and not letting his reporters go with all the awesome juicy stuff they were totally sure they had nailed down, provable or not. It's also the story of how now, basically, the standard for publication at the Times has slipped measurably closer to, say, ours.

The Wall Street Journal's lifestyle magazine, Pursuits, has a brand-new name! It will be called: WSJ. Note the period... the period is part of the name. OK? WSJ (period). Wow, that's even more annoying than Yahoo! or OK! "Its understatedness suits the personality of the Journal and avoids the pretense and artifice of many bad magazine names," says a WSJ(.) spokesperson. "The three letters happen to be typographically quite pleasing." Not as pleasing as WTF! (We think the period stands for Rupert Murdoch symbolically putting his foot down: "No, srsly, guys, I am in charge now. PERIOD.") [WWD]

Magazines are dying and the web is surging, but maybe there is a web ad bust on the way, and also maybe the web is what is killing magazines, or maybe no one reads anymore, and (former Gawker managing editor) Choire Sicha is trying to figure it all out in today's Observer. He's also trying to figure out Rolling Stone's Britney Spears cover and New York's Lindsay Lohan cover, the two most important magazine covers of this century. But, about that Rolling Stone piece—we all saw the good bits, because they were leaked, by RS, to Perez, but maybe we mostly missed the more "important" thinky bits of Vanessa Grigoriadis' story, because RS only put the first 606 words on their website? Regardless, Rolling Stone had their "best week ever in the history of the Web site," even without the story. So maybe all they needed were the photo galleries? "Until the people on the business side are sure they're going to replace that revenue, that's how it's going to be," says an editor. Maybe we don't actually need content anymore, just the idea of content? That will save everyone a bit of time and money!

Alt-weekly crusader and Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple wrote the definitive story on the battle between traditional newsrooms and their web counterparts, where "definitive" means "extraordinarily long and often forgetting to make a larger point in its various attempts to embarrass the Washington Post." It's still entertaining though, as a case study in precisely how, over and over again, one should not roll out and maintain the web side of a major publication.

The George Polk awards—described by blogger Will Bunch as the "Golden Globes of American journalism"—were announced early this morning. One of them went to a blogger who blogs! Far out! An army of Davids has stormed the gates! Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo (a blog!!) won the Polk Award for Legal Reporting, for his role in exposing the US Attorneys scandal that eventually brought down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. On a blog! A blog that follows the rather traditional journalistic model of "hiring" and "paying" "reporters." Brave new world! [E&P via Attytood]

For some odd reason the only media outlet to report that President Bush introduced Al Sharpton's wife as his daughter was the Baltimore New York Sun. So they do something right every now and then. (Update: Punchline hilariously still stands.) [FishbowlNY]

How can journalism schools encourage the entrepreneurial instincts of would-be journalists? The University of Southern California's Online Journalism Review wants to know, and I can think of no answer except this: close. Maybe you'll be more constructive. Questions, after the jump. I'll forward the best of your responses.

The Times' City section today gives its cover over to a long, knowing meditation by a lifelong New Yorker about all the changes the city has gone through since its darker, more edgy days. "I have vivid memories of 1980s Times Square (my parents worked in offices there), but I never got to experience the distinct pleasures of all-night grind-house double features or live sex shows," says the author. His name is Nathaniel Rich, and he's the 27 year-old son of Times columnist Frank Rich. Wow, those Rich kids sure are good at getting published! [NYT]

Slate's TV Club was worried about a scene from The Wire in which an editor is chastised for cursing in the newsroom. Is that even possible? (It's getting that you can't even tell a female coworker she has a nice rack anymore!) Romenesko solicited swearing-in-the-newsroom tips, and reporters and former copyboys everywhere responded. What the fuck did they say?

No one may get too close to Barack Obama. He's nervous—Hillary's killed before, after all. But The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg was dissuaded by Obama staffers from questioning their volunteers on three separate occasions in New Hampshire last Sunday. The video proof is on The Guardian's site. It's chilling, if your idea of chilling is petite 20-something women nervously telling people not to film in a high school gym. Which is, we think, a plot of an upcoming feature from M. Night Shyamalan. [Guardian]