The New York Times will make all its employees feel better by installing $110,000 worth of trees in the lobby. Seriously! They announced today that they're building an "open-air birch and moss garden" on the ground floor of their fancy new building. An open-air birch and moss garden. So maybe this season's $15 million in staff cuts ("certainly not the largest that we've had," says the Times) were just to pay for the 50-foot trees and several tons of moss (moss!!) that they're shipping in from Jersey this weekend. Some intrepid citizen journalists should go document the sure-to-be-astounding installation (cranes hoisting trees over a 70-foot glass wall in the middle of midtown!). Maybe all the people laid off from their printing plants should go into the tree nursery business? Or maybe they should talk to the Sulzbergers about building them the world's largest wooden aero-plane!

The 'Times' Can't See the Forest for the Trees [NYM]

New York Times writer Brad Stone was on the phone with a pair of Comcast execs and experienced some technical difficulties. First, he was disconnected suddenly. Then, two minutes after calling back, the call was interrupted and Stone was inexplicably connected to the wife of another Comcast employee, who was trying to call her husband at work. After sitting in silence talking nonstop for 15 minutes, figuring the lack of response was just the Stone-cold Timesman's attempt to make them sweat, the Comcasters called him back and lamely theorized that maintenance was being performed on their phone system. This must be part of the "best broadband experience" that Comcast works so hard to provide. [Bits]

New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis wouldn't disclose today where the $14-16 million in staff cuts will take place during the next three months. She did say: "Nearly every quarter we do have buyout expenses, this is not unusual—certainly not the largest that we've had. For every quarter, I have in front of me a chart that goes back to the first quarter of '06 and we've had buyouts in place in every quarter over the last seven quarters. We have an ongoing program of focusing on costs and efficiency. What we've said is we'll continue to focus on reducing costs, improving the efficiency of our business, taking into account our long-term goals, the quality of our journalism, and making sure our operation functions smoothly." Update: Ms. Mathis now says that "most of the reductions are associated with the consolidation of the two printing plants in College Point and Edison, NJ." But we don't understand why that would be the bulk of reductions in Q4; for one thing, the sale of the Edison plant closed way back during Q2.

The New York Times got another one from the LA Times: San Francisco-based housing 'n' biz reporter David Streitfeld, who will be the NYT's Chicago biz-section correspondent. "Most famously, [at the Washington Post] he outed Joe Klein as the author of 'Primary Colors' after tracing his handwriting on a galley of the book that David found in a secondhand shop," says the memo from Business editor Larry Ingrassia.

Um, whoa! Buried in the bottom of the 3rd quarter statement from the New York Times is this: "The following expectations are for the fourth quarter of 2007.... Staff reduction costs - $14 to $16 million. This range can vary significantly based on seniority and the timing of implementation." Hey what now? In the first quarter, when they shuttered the Boston Globe foreign bureaus, giving buyouts to 125 workers or so, they reported "Staff reduction costs of $7.8 million." In the second quarter, when workers were eliminated at the Edison, NJ, printing plant, they reported "staff reduction costs were $5.0 million." So presumably a good chunk of people are about to get canned. But who? Update: The Times claims that "most" of these costs are associated with the sale of the printing plants—one of which, as we already noted above, closed half a year ago. Hmm!

Today's Science Times special section is all about this crazy new thing that all the kids are trying—"sleep." Maybe you experimented with "sleep" in college, one crazy unremembered weekend? Hell, maybe you skipped work once and spent a whole day trying it? While reliable numbers are hard to come by, most New Yorkers have tried sleep at least once. But as the Science section proves, none of you are doing enough of it which is why you're all such miserable bastards all the time.

This morning the New York Times reported the same third quarter earnings-per-share as last quarter; this was up over same quarter last year, just as last quarter's was down over the previous year. (Stupid metric!) Circulation money was slightly up; that's due to higher prices for some papers offsetting what they call "volume declines." (Fewer papers!) There hasn't been significant recent growth in online income—while it's definitely up over last year, it's about the same as their last quarter, a bit over 10%. Mention obviously goes unmade of their stock price and its ten-year low. The upshot: in year-to-date comparisons versus 2006, we don't think 2007 is going to come out a winner over last year, though ad revenue was up (yay!) this quarter; October has already stalled a bit. Finance people should please chime in to see what we missed amid all these numbers! [NYTCo]

Okay, so we love ourselves some Stephen Colbert, we're only human. However! There's something seriously amiss when NBC' s major Sunday news show get is the Comedy Central performer, who is "running" for President in character. "Meet the Press" anchor Tim Russert devoted nearly half of his broadcast this weekend to a fake back-and-forth with a fake candidate.

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

Each Friday, New York Times General Manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on webby advances at the paper. This week, reporters file stories from these things called BlackBerries! "Ben Shpigel made the best out of a ridiculous situation. While staking out the Yankees complex in Tampa, Ben sent short updates from the scene on his Blackberry as he and dozens of other reporters and photographers waited for a glimpse of Yankees executives (any Yankees executive) there to discuss Joe Torre's future.... In truth, there wasn't much news. And Ben was without a functioning
Internet connection. But he still kept readers informed and entertained." Blog blog bloggety blog!

Our story so far: Kurt Eichenwald wrote some stories for the Times a while back (then he left the paper and went to Portfolio then left that mag!) about all the pedophiles on the internet and their multi-zillion-dollar-a-year business selling child porn and exploiting kids. And, well, beyond feeding the current "your children are at risk!" hysteria, some of his methods were kinda creepy and weird? Like donating money to his source before he was a source (a pornographer that he helped "free" from the kid's own porn ring) than he revealed to the Times, and, uh, also signing up for "an illegal porn website as a member and administrator." When asked why he didn't disclose any of this, he claimed to not remember the PayPal payments. Sketchy! Except that Kurt's finally going on NPR today to make everything about this story even more uncomfortable and terrible. Because his epilepsy has become so severe that, "according to his neurologist, he suffers from 'significant memory disruptions.'"

[Xerox hardware designer Chuck] Thacker revealed the real origins of the term [WYSIWYG]. He said it was coined by his wife, Karen, who upon seeing an Alto running Bravo, turned to him and said, "You mean, what I see is what I get?" Mrs. Thacker is a true technophobe, he said in a phone interview Thursday, one who believes the best computers are the ones we don't see, like the ones in ATMs and in cars. NY Times: Bits

"Because of an editing error, an obituary yesterday about the photographer Ernest C. Withers, who documented life in the segregated South in the 1950s and '60s, from the civil rights movement to the Memphis blues scene, misidentified the person he photographed arm in arm with Elvis Presley at a Memphis club in 1956. It was B. B. King, not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." [NYT]

Sometimes, you know, you don't want to have breakfast meetings. But? Dinner meetings sometimes aren't fun either! And you know what? Lunch meetings? They are so irksome! Working itself, particularly when it is coupled with food, verges on the undesirable. Also, eating? Eating is so gross and over.

Listen, Kelefa Sanneh and Ben Sisario and Jon Pareles are out at CMJ shows every night and blogging about it for the New York Times and none of you care! There's not a comment on the Arts Beat blog. Go on over! Today they taught me that I had to go buy both the new Dragons of Zynth ("frenetic"!) and the new White Williams (hello, "like a color Xerox of an old Tom Tom Club song"), and that was useful. Although: When you compare Idolator's coverage with theirs, where's the famous Times innovation web crew influence? Where's the videos—heck, where's the photography? [NYT]

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — "I'm happy to say I'll have a job for the next two years," says Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with conference organizer John Battelle and his boss, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, confirming widespread rumors that he and MySpace cohort Tom Anderson had renewed their contract to run the social network for another two years. "I had to go from the nickel-and-dime newspaper culture, to the magazine culture ... to Hollywood and the Internet culture," says Murdoch, nodding to the reported — but unconfirmed — figure that DeWolfe and Anderson would make: $30 million over two years. More live coverage, after the jump.

Looks like the New York Times's decision to kill off TimesSelect, its inexplicable subscription offering, is already paying off. A month after freeing its op-ed content and archives, the Opinion section reportedly doubled its readers since September 15, while NYTimes.com as a whole grew 10 percent. The Gray Lady couldn't have done better pulling a Marilyn Monroe over a subway grate. Details and a pretty graph after the jump.

The New York Times launched their 500th blog today. This one's called "The Board" and it's written by the Editorial Board, those oft-imitated, oft-equaled authors of liberal conventional wisdom. "The Board" will be the first of the Times' dozen Opinion blogs without bylines, though you can always tell Associate Editor Robert Semple's posts by his use of adorable Japanese emoticons. America needed yet another place to read the thoughts of liberal old white people, and who else but the Times editorial board can provide the opinions of Paul Krugman without the passion, or the arguments of Bob Herbert without the hilarious, disarming wit? The commenters are thrilled! "This is the most exciting thing I've heard in weeks!"

New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's column this weekend took on Times magazine Q&A'er Deborah Solomon in response to a recent New York Press cover story on Solomon's editing antics. (Solomon's penchant for refashioning the responses of her interview subjects for her 700-word weekly column earned her the serious ire of NPR host Ira Glass, columnist Amy Dickinson and the LA Times critic Christopher Knight.) Solomon doesn't make much of an effort to come off clean in Hoyt's column, calling Dickinson "boastful," (mean!) and misplacing the tape of her Ira Glass interview (whoops!). Solomon also told the Times' internal watchdog that she was just joking when she told a Columbia Journalism Review reporter in 2005 to "Feel free to mix the pieces of this interview around, which is what I do. There's no Q. and A. protocol... you can write the manual." Hold your horses, Deb, Hoyt writes. "In fact, there is a protocol, and 'Questions For' isn't living up to it," he says. Oh snap. The take-away point here may be, however, that Christ, the New York Press had a story with legs! One with tormented prose that could easily have been cut in half, but nevertheless! You don't have a story until the New York Times says you do, so by all means, congratulations.

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.