"TMZ seemed to be straining to find material" when it posted video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week, the New York Times reports today. A week later. Then reporter Maria Aspan cites a Valleywag commenter at the end of the article. Clearly, we're witnessing the decline the of an old media dino — Wait. The New York Times quoted a Valleywag commenter? OMFG! JediTilo, you got quoted in the freaking New York Times. Count me impressed. Me and your mom.

Don't forget to enter our Gay Modern Love essay contest, detailed here! We've been getting some great entries so far. The deadline is February 13th at midnight, and we'll run the best ones on Valentine's Day! [Gay Modern Love]

While we're on the subject of emotional restaurateurs, who've already got their hands full dealing with Times food critic Frank Bruni, let it be known that they don't give a damn what the foodbloggers say. You might already be familiar with celebchef Mario Batali's "Why I Hate Food Bloggers" manifesto on Eater last summer. Now he adds, in Jay Rayner's forthcoming book The Man Who Ate the World, that said bloggers can "suck [his] dick."

A New York Times scoop on a possible $1 billion settlement between drug company Eli Lilly and federal prosecutors was triggered when a lawyer for Lilly accidentally sent reporter Alex Berenson (left) an email intended for his second cousin, lawyer Bradford Berenson. Portfolio, the Conde Nast business magazine, broke the story Monday and, in the days since, the Times has bent over backward minimize the role of the accidental emailer. It knocked Portfolio's scoop on the incident as overblown and wrong, and, after stonewalling that magazine, granted interviews and issued a statement to several blogs that likewise knocked Portfolio's reporting. Now Alex Berenson has appeared on NPR to discuss the incident at some length and, guess what? It turns out Porfolio wasn't so wrong after all!

Is Deborah Solomon going soft? The Times Q&A queen's weekly interviews usually involve verbal water-boarding and creatively bitchy editing, but in her column today, she practically asks ex-Daily Show producer Ben Karlin if she can give him a big fat fucking hug. "Do you have any dating advice for your children?" Solomon asks him. What? What happened to "How do you sleep at night?" which she asked an opposition research guy last month, or "I found it a little basic," her response to money guru Suze Orman's new book? Two weeks ago, she asked Sheryl Crow if she "felt valued enough!" Next week, a heart-to-heart with Karl Rove, in which Solomon tells him she's always available to talk to him about his pointy-headed inner child.

You hoped the cover of Time Out was the pinnacle of Julia Allison's inexplicable celebrity? Tough. The Star magazine talking head is letting slip that she's being profiled for the New York Times. (Allison gives a little oops to indicate that she really should be more discreet. Yes, she should.) The former dating columnist was to have been subject of a piece in New York magazine, until editor Adam Moss determined she was "over-exposed". And that was before the Time Out magazine cover, and the vast output of drivel on Allison's personal blog.

The influence of Maureen Dowd, formerly important New York Times opinion columnist, is dead, at the age of 13. The Pulitzer-winning columnist is still blamed, in some circles, for killing Al Gore's shot at the presidency with her relentless, belittling, emasculating, and most importantly media consensus-shaping columns. She used to be inescapable—on the Times home page, on Sunday morning politics shows, in every political blog on Earth—but now it's hard to gin up outrage about her scrubbing negative quotes from columns or mistaking black women for other black women. In 2004, those stories would've been all Atrios talked about for days. (Maybe they still are, does anyone read Atrios anymore either?) In 2000, they wouldn't have been outrages at all, because everything she said was immediate conventional wisdom. So what happened?

Continuing our obsession with Modern Love, that guilty-pleasure landmark of Relationships Today in the NYT's Sunday Styles section, we present some evidence. The Gay Recluse explains the column's Problem with the Gays: "In what is arguably the 'gayest' section of The Times, more women have written about gay men than gay men have... openly gay writers almost never appear, and even less frequently describe a romantic relationship." And he's done the math! Click for the tally.

From Maureen Dowd's column yesterday: "Even though Obama stopped smoking when he started running for president, he has lost five pounds racing around the country. Just like Hollywood starlets, he works out religiously and he can make a three-course meal out of a Nicorette." We'd link, except that it's not in the online version. Weird!

If you are fortunate enough to have your overlong, overshared essay of thwarted l-u-v chosen for the NYT's Sunday Modern Love column, you might very well land a book deal. That's what Doree Shafrir finds in the Observer this week—no fewer than nine have been signed so far. (Not everybody finds the column an irresistible recruiting opportunity, however: "I read the Styles section religiously, but my eyes glaze over the Modern Love column," said an editor at Random House. "I assume it's going to be a woman getting over her divorce.") But those make the best books! [NY Observer]

Eeesh. The New York Times is celebrating black history month! How? Why, with a special culinary theme in their fancy new cafeteria! An in-house flyer promises appropriately festive spreads each Tuesday in February at the café's International Station. So what kinds of foreign and exotic delicacies awaited hungry Timesers today? Watermelon slices, for starters, according to one. Also! Pulled pork, ribs, coleslaw, corn bread and hickory baked beans. Sweet tooth? Wait until Thursday, when the weekly February Chocolate Festival gears up again. We couldn't make this shit up if we tried. Menu after the jump.

Marc Andreessen savages the New York Times Co.'s board for their lack of Internet experience: "So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you're pretty much set. Go team!" [blog.pmarca.com]

Five years ago, daddy-blogger Dave Winer bet NYT president Martin Nisenholtz that by 2007, blogs would be more relevant sources than the Times in Google search results for the year's top news stories. (Obligatory brag: The bet was my idea.) The Long Now Foundation has handed down its final decision on the bet. The Times came out ahead on the mortgage crisis. Blogs won on the other four topics — the Iraq war, Virgina Tech's shootings, oil prices, and Chinese exports. But you need to know that the Long Now panel blamed the bet's terms for its lopsided outcome:

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]

David Cay Johnston, the New York Times tax reporter most recently heard calling Wesley Snipes a coward, is already upset about something else! Seems that his own paper published a less-than-loving review of his new book, and Johnston is desperate to correct the record. He does not love lawsuits! He does not hate corporations! He's a registered Republican, for chrissakes! Google it, why don't you? To be fair, we haven't read his book, so he may be making perfectly legitimate points. The thing is, Johnston does the "How could you possibly criticize a genius like me?" routine all the time. He got in an identical argument with the National Review over his last book, and then got one of the most hilarious reamings of the past decade from that magazine's media critic, Catherine Seipp, for being a sanctimonious ass. Even Dan Okrent, the NYT's first public editor, basically called Johnston an "asshole" (as commenter Seeräuber Jenny noted). Maybe he should learn to let some things slide. DCJ's full letter after the jump [via Editor & Publisher].

Is this generation of teens the first to grow up completely online? Hardly. Highbrow TV critic Virginia Heffernan was a MySpace teen before Myspace teens even existed, she reveals in this week's NYT mag. The year was 1983. The nascent online world: "primitive computer network" XCaliber.

Oh come on now, again? The CIA has subpoenaed Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, to get the name of a source from the journalist's blockbuster 2006 book State of War, in which he disclosed all sorts of things about U.S. intelligence shenanigans and said some mean things about President Bush. Maybe Risen can get some fashion tips from his former colleague, Judith Miller-it's so hard these days to figure out what goes with a public stockade.

Everybody knows The New York Times' newly-erected skyscraper home has been plagued by falling glass, ice and vermin. In December, the Department of Buildings dropped by the place to investigate after what we thought was the third time debris was reported to have fallen from the building. Not so! A look at records kept by the Department of Buildings shows that people have been complaining about flotsam and jetsam raining from the Renzo Piano building since construction began in 2005-18 of the 33 complaints on record about the building are related to material flying off of it. Screwdrivers, bolts, steel, glass, i-beams, what have you. There was the time that wet concrete fell on to some NYPD cars below. Oopsies! And the time an entire window fell from the sky onto a car below. Then there's the succinct complaint from July 31, 2007: "Something fell off the building." You don't say? Yikes. After the jump, peruse the records.

After holding in failure screams for months, Times "Domestic Disturbances" blogger Judith Warner is about to snap, but it's going to make for awesome copy: "I'd had a feeling for some time that there was something worth writing about coffee. My attachment to it. My desire to draw my children into it... My husband, Max, worried that it would read like the worst sort of foodie feature, but I knew that I was intending something very different." So very, very different.