"Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?" Yes. DUH. [NYT]

Television comedian Stephen Colbert raised the most astute (and amusing) critique to date of the New York Times' failed investigation of presidential candidate John McCain for suspected canoodling with a lobbyist: If you are going to smear someone, McCain or whoever, at least do so properly, effectively and to devastating effect. Don't be all wishy-washy like the Times, whose boring headline on the McCain investigation read, "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk." The word "sex" never appeared once in the article, even thought it was basically about sex; the dirtiest the Times ever got was the word "romantic." The Times is clearly outmatched in its newfound spurious scandalmongering hobby by right wing media, which have perfected the art of escalating mere rumors into mainstream news stories, from Hillary Clinton murdering Vince Foster to Barack Obama being a Muslim extremist. Here is the best chunk of Colbert's bit:

About.com's Scott Meyer was forced out as CEO of the New York Times-owned website after his senior staff threatened to quit unless he left, a tipster tells us. NYT CEO Janet Robinson had wanted to keep Meyer on, even though his reports ridiculed him as a biz-dev type who was clueless about the Web. That he left without a replacement indicates how deep the revolt went. For NYT Digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, who's running About.com for the time being, the gig is temporary, and involuntary. "Martin definitely doesn't want to run About," says our source — though he also pressed Robinson to do something about Meyer. As for replacements? Ron McCoy, the company's chief digital architect, and an early pioneer of search-engine optimization, is the heavy lifter at About.com, but he's not a candidate for the CEO spot: He flies in from Atlanta, and is said to be uninterested in management.

I tried to send an email to New York Times columnist David Pogue, but I failed. It appears that Google's Gmail has been blacklisted by the Sorbs spam-blocking system. At the moment, Sorbs claims to be in a "maintenance period." Pogue's email provider could be blocking all mail because it can't reach Sorbs — but why would it be down for maintenance in the middle of the day? See the full error message after the jump and tell me if you can figure it out. In the meantime, David, call me? Everybody sing! Let the sound of your voice turn winter to spring.

About.com, the '90s-vintage mess of protoblogs the New York Times Co. paid $410 million for three years ago, has lost its CEO, Scott Meyer, left. The departure is characterized as "amicable"; the circumstances, curious. The Times has been rumored to be shopping About.com, though the company denies it. Regardless, Meyer is not being replaced. Instead, Martin Nisenholtz, the digital chief at the Times, right, will run it directly. There are two interpretations here.

Newspaper people are impressed (and terrified) by the size of the stake that a pack of hedge funds has built up in the New York Times. The 19% stake now controlled by Harbinger Capital and scary-sounding Firebrand Partners is now roughly equivalent to the ownership of the Sulzberger family. Here's what's amazing: not that another great American media institution is (snore) at the mercy of ravening capitalists; but that the newspaper is so frakking cheap.

Michael Kinsley's column about the reaction to the Times' story about John McCain's alleged lobbyist romance is annoying, because it is a Michael Kinsley column in Slate, but it is also pretty spot-on in its parody of New York Times Kremlinology: "I may be creating the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that I have created the appearance of suggesting that the New York Times has created the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that McCain has created the appearance that some people might worry that other people might think that there could be an appearance that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist." Funny cause it's innuendo! Meanwhile, Michael Isikoff's Newsweek story on same suffers from having its most newsworthy scoop sacrificed to the web last week, but it has a couple entertaining details:

Oh noes! A Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, along with other society women, "were insultingly spoken to by beggars while driving in Fifth Avenue," according to the NYT's "Times Machine." Mounted policemen (that means they rode horsies) vowed to keep the peace. Mrs. Oelrichs was "grossly insulted" by said beggars, who also "spat upon her." Did society ladies get special protection from police after that? Definitely, maybe!

The New York Times recently put together a really interesting graph showing the "Ebb and Flow of Movies". It charts box office receipts from 1986 through 2007, and does it in a sexy, undulating, almost topographical way. And look at last summer! Width is longevity, color denotes how many bajillion bones each movie made. [NYT via Kottke] Click for larger.

Clark Hoyt can work on a deadline. Unlike the public editors of yore—Daniel Okrent, cough, cough—Hoyt tackles this week's controversy in this weekend's Sunday Times. In case you forgot, and lucky you if you have, John McCain may or may not have bonked a lobbyist, is definitely a liar, but most importantly to McCain camp, the Times is a liberal no-good paper.

After a college, a bunch of kids I knew abdicated the whole "get a job and health care" scene and moved to Argentina. Down there, the beef is good, the rent is reasonable and the dollar is strong. And get this: the low cost of living even extends to recreational and/or habit forming drugs. Low grade coke is cheaper in Buenos Aires than bottled water is in New York.

Reporter Michael Isikoff's story of John McCain's unethical relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman is up at Newsweek! It's been speculated that news that Isikoff was working on the story is one of the many factors that prompted the New York Times to "rush" their version into print earlier this week. Isikoff's story comes with a nice little mini-bombshell: proof that McCain already lied in his "sweeping denial" of the Times story!

New York City's Off-Track Betting parlors, the seediest places left in Manhattan (next to those secret Chinese gambling dens, anyway), are all set to close following an order from noted fun-hater Michael Bloomberg, who's surely done more than any previous mayor to rid the city of its amoral, filthy character, but everyone still loves him anyway because he's not Giuliani and the newsmedia is controlled by and made up of the well-off bastards he's delivered New York to on a silver platter. The Times investigates the wacky, Damon Runyan-esque characters who throw their lives away at the OTB, including the dapper old "retired actor" who says that should the parlors actually close, he'll "probably just stop betting and go to the theater more." We can't let that happen. [NYT]

Part of 45th Street was closed last night because of falling glass, a periodic risk among the media towers of Midtown. Was it Viacom coming apart, this time? The once-hip media conglomerate, controlled by crotchety octogenerian, Sumner Redstone, is on the corner of 45th and Broadway.

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.

Young brides are choosing sluttier wedding dresses these days, reports the NYT Styles. Damn right! You spend that many hours in Pilates, and damn if you don't want to show it off with "plunging necklines and negligee looks." Also, "women now are looking at their wedding more like a movie premiere." How incredibly annoying! Next, we show you the slutty wedding outfits of our favorite stars.

HuffPo Political Journalist Extraordinaire Sam Stein wants to know why the New York Times ran their odd story on alleged lobbyist-fucker and MAVERICK presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain now, of all times. Popular conspiracy theories include: they wanted to wait until the story wouldn't affect McCain's stunning primary victory, because they love him, or hate Rudy Giuliani; they wanted to dump it when it would be least effective against McCain, in the long winter between the end of the GOP primaries and the start of the bloody general election battle, because they love McCain; they wanted to wait until the Dems could use it against him and not maybe have to face a Republican candidate without an embarrassing cheat-y past, because they hate America and love Democrats; finally, they ran it now because after it had been killed twice, they finally cleaned it up and hedged its claims sufficiently to meet their standards of publication, just in time to beat a New Republic piece about how they killed the story. Our money, more or less, is on the last one.

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.

Boy, an s-load of corrections in the NYT today! Not the least of which include the admission that in the frenzy of their breathless dork-out about the perfect use of a semicolon on an MTA placard, they messed up on comma usage.

In re. the Times getting cute about grammar: did you know that while they run one of the very few regular columns in a major publication on language and usage, the New York Times is guilty of ignoring the en dash? It's shocking, but true. In fact, we received a huge and comprehensive letter to the Times about this disgusting display of grammatical ineptitude, in response to a recent William Safire column about the slow death (or evolution!) of the hyphen. It is amazing, it is long, and because the Times would never print it in its entirety, it is after the jump. NB: We have no clue how to use an en dash.