My musing on why it took Forbes so long to reach a deal with its own editor, Dan Lyons, to bring his Secret Diary of Steve Jobs to Forbes.com, raised a question in my mind: How do we know the outing of Fake Steve Jobs wasn't an inside job? There's one very close link: Damon Darlin, the recently appointed technology editor at the Times who edited the story, used to work at Forbes. I have the utmost respect for the reporting skills of Brad Stone, the Times reporter who broke the story, and believe he discovered Lyons on his own, the old-fashioned way, through hard work and shoe-leather reporting. But is it possible Forbes insiders, to create buzz for both Lyons's forthcoming Fake Steve book, Options, and the arrival of his blog on Forbes.com, fed the Times just enough tidbits to help Stone land the scoop — or, at the very least, decided to play along once they learned he was on the hunt?

From the mailbag: "Newspaper printing technology is better than ever. So if the NYT is going to shrink the paper, why not shrink point sizes of story text a little bit too?!? (I mean, the words like huge on those new pages.)" Well, at least two reasons we can think of. One: Print designers are crazy and say things such as "There's NO WAY this is legible below 8.7, are you a MONSTER?" and the like. Two: Only old people actually read newspapers, and the mailboxes would literally overflow with hand-written complaints if the Times shrunk their type. If you think the type is huge, that's only because you're under 50.

The best piece of the weekend concerning Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones came from former Journal employee Joseph Nocera, who wrote (behind the TimesSelect wall, naturally) about how the takeover happened through the lens of a disgruntled Bancroft family member and Murdoch himself. Essentially, the Bancrofts were too divided and dysfunctional to ever stand a chance against the rapacious Rupert. "I just didn't realize that they were so disorganized," says Murdoch, who promises not to fiddle about too much with the paper ("I won't meddle any more than Arthur Sulzberger does."). Nocera buys it. But oh yes there is more!

A Drunk Finally Gets A Chance To Whine
NEW YORK

"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.

Virginia Heffernan will pick up her blog, Screens, and move it from the New York Times to the... New York Times magazine, where she'll also do a column about "home entertainment." From the Times memo: "Virginia Heffernan plays a role at The Times not unlike that of Russell Owen, the correspondent who nearly 80 years ago traveled literally to the end of the earth to cover Richard Byrd's pioneering expedition to the South Pole. Except that Virginia does the bulk of her exploring from Brooklyn, in front of her computer...." Heh.

Above: Today's NYT placed atop yesterday's wider version.
No, it's not your imagination: The Times is an inch-and-a-half slimmer this morning, putting the paper at the "national newspaper 12-inch standard." While the decision "cuts newsprint expenses" ahead of a larger redesign, we have to believe it is part of a long-term plan to shrink the Times to its inevitable and ideal size of 3.5 inches. Will the shrinkage have any effect on content? Well, there will be "somewhat fewer words per page." As a tipster notes, "A friend who writes a column for the Times tells me that she's been instructed, as of this week, that her 800-word column must be cut to 725 words from now on." We've seen claims that none of the op-ed columnists will lose any space, but that's a decision they might want to revisit: If MoDo has to do one less joke comparing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to Samantha and Miranda, it's sort of win-win, right?

The most fascinating bit in Brad Stone's exposé of Fake Steve Jobs? For commenter davidu, it was the revelation that real Apple CEO Steve Jobs was interviewed by instant messenger. Impressive: Someone at the Times — most likely John Markoff — has Jobs's iChat screenname. And editors at Gray Lady consented to the inclusion of notes from an IMterview. We sent our crack reporters on a digging mission and they discovered this exclusive transcript. Must credit Valleywag!

A year ago, Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, promised "the most expensive iPod" to the first person to identify Fake Steve Jobs. It took Brad Stone of the New York Times a year — or an afternoon, depending on how you look at it — but he's now in a position to collect. (We're deeming Karlgaard's prize to be a $599, 8GB iPhone, since the real Steve Jobs likes to tout it as "the best iPod ever.") Stone, of course, unmasked Karlgaard's own employee, Dan Lyons, as the writer of the faux Apple CEO blog. One small hitch in calling Karlgaard to account, however: I doubt Times ethics policies would allow Stone to accept the reward. Update: Karlgaard apparently reads Valleywag. He now proposes that he auction off a $599 iPhone in Stone's honor instead.

Front page user-submitted photo captions, ladies and gentlemen! It's Arthur Sulzberger's LiveJournal!

Last week, we tried to analyze the dust-up over the (alleged!) homophobic comment (allegedly!) made by New York Times photo director Michele McNally at a Times party to an employee. As her defenders like to note, she is the first photo editor to be named an assistant managing editor and therefore get her name on the big, fancy NYT masthead. And we didn't want to rush to judgment; after all, innocent until proven guilty and the like, and we speculated that maybe there were also some culture/gender clash issues at work. Well, the photographers, in addition to the gays, have now mobilized, and they're not exactly rushing to McNally's defense.

Michael Grynbaum—Harvard boy, former New York Observer intern, former New York Sun intern!—spent the last five weeks tailing Mayor Bloomberg. And guess what? Everyone's favorite subway-taking, straphanger advocating, public-transportation loving mayor is a total fraud. Yes! Is crazy! Two big-ass S.U.V.s wait outside his house every day, and sometimes then they drive him 22 blocks to an express stop, passing two locals. Also? He only takes the subway twice a week at this point. The N.Y.P.D. pays for the cars and drivers, and no one's quite clear on why he needs two. Unless his giant head is detachable from his little short body?

Over time, we get to know our commenters fairly well. There are some we know and love! Some we know and find mildly amusing. Some we don't know and are afraid of. Then there are the ones—or, the one—who seem to arrive only to defend the New York Times. Let's meet our commenter Urnidiot! Is s/he—we're kinda going with he!—a Times employee? Married to a Times employee? Let's go to the evidence!

Over at Modern Art Notes, art writer Tyler Green takes umbrage with something Times reporter Sharon Waxman wrote recently on her blog. (Waxman, on book leave, is keeping a blog in the course of writing a book, which is about museums and antiquities.) Waxman wrote a passage about former Getty antiquities curator Marion True, who's on trial in Italy for conspiring with antiquities dealers who trafficked in looted antiquities. Nice! But Green points out that Waxman seems to equivocate about True's guilt.

Among the pissing and moaning in the wake of new Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's gentle suggestion that the paper might want to cover the saga of the Sulzberger family and its struggle to maintain control of the paper, reader Daniel Waitzman sends a missive that we think encapsulates the mindset of a huge swath of the paper's demographic. An excerpt:

"An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by 'Feb. 30.' The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol '— 30 —' typed at the bottom of the reporter's article and combined it with the last word, 'February.' It is actually a notation that journalists have used through the years to denote the end of an article. Although many no longer use it or even know what it means, some journalists continue to debate its origin. A popular theory is that it was a sign-off code developed by telegraph operators. Another tale is that reporters began signing their articles with '30' to demand a living wage of $30 per week. Most dictionaries still include the symbol in the definition of thirty, noting that it means 'conclusion' or 'end of a news story.'" [NYT]

The history of the Weekly World News' angriest fictional columnist. [NYT]

The New York Times glossy quarterly T is expanding! And, according to this morning's memo from T Queen Stefano Tonchi (pictured!), there will be more and more T in your life in the coming months. (Also: a special food issue of the NYT mag in November 2008, edited by Mrs. Latte herself.) Q Princess Horacio Silva will be heading up the T website! Omg omg omg. Gay! We love! Anyway, at this point it's basically T and the New York Times Magazine keeping the rest of the paper afloat, so it's no wonder that they're trying to turn everything into a giant T dance. (Sorry!) Memo follows.

Brian Stelter, the wunderkind who used to blog for millionairess Laurel Touby's Mediabistro as TV Newser, was hired last month by the Business desk at the New York Times to "cover the media world." When the hiring was announced, it also came out that Touby would enforce Stelter's non-compete clause, and so he's not allowed to write about cable news in blog form for six months. Covering "the media world" is a pretty broad beat—it could mean anything, really! So we wonder how Times TV alter kocker Bill Carter feels about Stelter's maiden effort today. At first glance, it seems like Stelter's treading awfully close to Carter's turf!

This week's New York Times Modern Love column is by Thomas Anthony Donahoe, who donated to a Boston-area sperm bank "30 to 40 times over a couple of years." Now, surprise, he's got kids appearing left and right. It's full of circuitous locutions and meaningless extraneous details like "A young waitress with a soft-spoken accent (Portuguese, I think) briskly delivered us cups of coffee." He also talks about how he doesn't want his college-age sperm-donee kid to know that he made a living, basically, from donating sperm. Guess what? Now he does, because you wrote about it in the New York Times! "The nurse at the donation center said my recipients showed positive inseminations," Thomas discloses toward the end of the article. Awesome! If indeed Thomas "made" this first kid "what he is"—and we're sure that bit of biological b.s. got the kid's lesbian moms all riled—then we're gonna pass on the kid's inevitable, terrible memoir.