You're pretty glad you work at a newspaper or a network that doesn't have mice running every which way, like the New York Times does, aren't you? Not so fast! We took a look at Department of Health inspection records available for employee cafeterias at media companies over the last year, and some of you better lift up your feet, quick. The chart above shows the combined number of violation points each organization earned in 2007. Time, CBS and NBC all earned a failing score of over 28 on one inspection, which triggered at least one additional inspection, which they all passed. Eventually. Interestingly enough, though the Bloomberg cafeteria reportedly earned a disgusting 55 on its February inspection, the record available through the DOH's website says it landed itself a flying-colors score of 2! Now we wouldn't accuse Mayor Bloomberg of screwing with statistics on the city's website to favor his own ginormous company. Nor would we suggest it might be easy to get a mulligan on that nasty inspection if the company's CEO happened to also be the city's mayor. Someone else might suggest that, but certainly not us.

We totally missed this little gem in a Saturday's Times story about the oft-ignored plight of the rich New Yorkers forced to downsize in our current economic straits. A screenwriter interviewed for the piece describes her reaction to the sitch: "I'm a freelancer, so I'm like, ‘Oh, my God.'" Seriously. What else are people giving up? "The newspaper," says one guy, "I never buy it anymore." Why bother, really, when your neighbor's will do just fine? Far more moving though, are the sacrifices of this disposably-incomed damsel in distress: "Now she gets manicures at a less expensive salon, meets her friends at California Pizza Kitchen and sends her sheets and towels to a laundry service instead of the dry cleaner." We ourselves mostly just leave the linens to Olga and Maria. Did she say California Pizza Kitchen? Sakes alive.

[NYU Stern School of Business professor and Snatch-Buckler Scott Galloway posing at a Johnnie Walker promotional kilt fashion show in New York, 2006. Galloway is notorious at NYU and elsewhere for his brash, douchebaggy demeanor, something current Times chair Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has come to know well of late. Galloway, ever the corporate (and Highland, apparently) raider has, along with an Alabama hedge fund, a 4.9 percent holding of the New York Times and has recently set his sights on a position on the board of directors. Image via Getty]

Advertising revenues at the New York Times have fallen off a cliff. Even allowing for the short accounting month, revenues at the Sulzbergers' core news properties were down 13.8% in December compared with twelve months earlier. (For the year as a whole, the decline was "only" 6.1%.) So, what does this mean? First, the erosion of the Times' print business is accelerating. Second, the growth of the news properties' online advertising, which was up 20% in December, isn't nearly rapid enough to compensate. And, third, if other newspapers show these dismal results, take that as a sign that the recession has hit advertising spending.

As has been documented again and again and again, there is a mouse problem as the fancy new headquarters of the New York Times. So, when Gawker videographer Alex Goldberg found himself at an event attended by some of the architects responsible for that new Times building, he knew his muckracking mission: corner one of them and demand answers.

The News Corporation headquarters on 6th Avenue, the prospective home for Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, at least sounds like a building shabby enough for a newspaper. A spy on the 10th floor, which houses Murdoch's tabloid, the New York Post, describes the scene: broken chairs, redundant computer terminals never cleared away, old filing cabinets. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's main rival, the New York Times, has just moved into a shiny new building designed by Renzo Piano, the Italian starchitect. It's not natural: journalists were not meant to work under such fine conditions. In the form of a table, here's a handy guide to the new offices of the battling broadsheet newspapers.

Hedge fund founder Scott Galloway will be a New York Times board director if he has to hold up chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger's ego all by himself. Also, he has a pretty sweet Hamptons pad! Chicks dig it. A source tells us Galloway's screening room has "flat screens galore (with the stickers still on them), a volleyball court with bleachers, giant fire pit [and] outdoor showers." Dude, bet his parties are off the hook. Maybe that board seat would free up a little faster if Galloway would let Pinch into "The Snatch Bucklers," one of the many mufftastic nicknames Radar says he and his friends gave themselves in college. To be sure, hazing Sulzberger would entail some serious standard-lowering, but hey, business is business, right?

Uh oh...there's a high wind advisory in New York today! Gusts up to 50 mph! Use extra caution! Especially if you find yourself in the vicinity of the New York Times building in Midtown. Seriously, watch your head, that skyscraper sheds parts like no tomorrow. Send us reports of any injuries please! After seeking medical attention, of course. Ahem.

The New York Times has hired a bank in order to sell About.com, Silicon Alley Insider reports. The Times bought the site — a collection of bloggers posting Google- friendly content — back in 2005 for $410 million. SAI's Peter Kafka figures the Times will ask for around $450 million. And will be happy to get it. Makes sense. How much can a company full of permalancers paid by the pageview be worth, anyway?

A group of Silicon Valley investors is pressuring the New York Times to invest more in the internet. But they're a little late. Arthur Sulzberger, the newspaper's bumbling publisher, has hired bankers to sell the group's biggest internet investment, bland news-you-can-use site, About.com.

The Times let embittered and oft-inaccurate tv critic Alessandra Stanley write about something a little more weighty than Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles in today's paper. She gets to review the President's "State of the Union" speech, which happens on TV, yes, but it doesn't involve explosions and there are not really commercial breaks. Thankfully it's often transcribed and distributed beforehand, so Stanley doesn't have to sort of half-remember bits of dialog she wasn't actually paying attention to. But only the real journalists get to write about the bullshit in the speech itself, so Stanley instead babbles some sub-sportswriter-by-way-of-David Broder nonsense about "Dynasties" playing themselves out in some grand Wagnerian opera just behind the scenes (and also in front of the scenes, on stages and behind podiums and such). Because the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Clintons were all sorta there, in Washington, DC, where all of them spend most of their time.

I've excerpted the relevant parts of Harbinger Capital Partners' letter to New York Times management proposing four new directors and a more aggressive online strategy.

The digital barbarians are at the gate. Harbinger Capital Partners, a private-equity fund which owns 4.9 percent of the New York Times, has written a letter to the newspaper's management suggesting that it buy more "digital assets." Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners, an affiliated investment firm, is proposing an alternate slate of directors for the next board election. The newcomers include Galloway himself, a founder of RedEnvelope and aprofessor at NYU who graduated with an MBA from UC-Berkeley; Gregory Shove, a former AOL executive; and Allen Morgan, a venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund. Since the Sulzberger family controls the Times through a two-class stock structure, it's unlikely that Harbinger's efforts will succeed. But even the notion of the Times having its Internet strategy dictated to it by technocractic outsiders has to be galling.

"FYI: A mouse just jumped on the desk of a New York Times photo editor and gnawed its way through a packet of mayonnaise. (Not sure if the varmint brought its own turkey sandwich or not). People are freaking out."

Oh, New York Times Metropolitan Diary, how we do love thy exceptionally pretentious and mildly prejudicial ways so far this year, and really, every year.

New York Times rich people beat reporter, billionaire-marrier, possible orgy enthusiast, and over-sharing plastic surgery addict Alex Kuczynski is expecting! Expecting a surrogate mother to carry and deliver her baby, that is, according to Liz Smith. Alex and her ridiculously wealthy (and ripped) husband Charles Stevenson have reportedly tried "several times" at this child-having thing, to no avail. Stevenson has five children from other women, a set-up the Kucz has commented on with approval on other occasions. (All you have to do is cheer them on at graduation—no weight gain or unseemly marks or scars!) So, we ask you, the Gawker readership: who on Earth is currently feeding and growing the spawn of the Amazing Plastic Woman?

Two hedge funds are trying to shake up the Times, and while the paper of record is offering up only the most perfunctory coverage of the situation, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is tearing hungrily into a juicy story. The Journal shows how Scott Galloway, left, may be able to leverage his 4.9 percent of low-voting stock into four of 13 board seats and eventually split the Sulzbergers. It's a longshot scenario, but Galloway has a strong partner, Harbinger Capital, which wisely exploited the subprime mortgage fiasco, and is playing against a company trading at 15-year lows and whose shareholders mostly withheld votes from the board last year. If the Times wants to make the case for independent, family-run newspapers, it needs to step up its game, not only on the business side but at the business desk.

Whatever you do, don't try to boost BusinessWeek's web traffic! Turns out they don't want your stinking clickthroughs. As a recent story subject discovered, should you be inclined to push traffic their way via a direct "deep link" to a story, the McGraw-Hill magazine will even go so far as to ask you not to link to their site, and point you to their snooty user agreement. This is pretty much the dumbest thing we've heard in the last, oh, two hours or so, and after the jump, we'll tell you why.

Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley doesn't like that new Fox show with the lie detector. She dislikes is so much, in fact, that she reserved her trademark glaring inaccuracy for a statement about a game show on a rival network: "Before picking the correct suitcase to win $1 million on 'Deal or No Deal' Wednesday night, a contestant named Britney told the audience that her father was so nervous he placed Maxi Pads in his armpits." Oh, Alessandra. Britney took the deal and went home with $471,000. We can't verify the accuracy of the Maxi Pads story. [NYT]

Besides pledging their time to Hillary Clinton, the New York Times also endorsed John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate. Though they were suitably adoring of McCain (war hero, integrity, blah blah blah) the real reason might be found in the paper's furious and almost purifying rage against former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square." Oh snap! But it gets better/worse!