The New York Times Company just released its first quarter results, and the news is not all good. It's not all bad either though! Here are a few things Hassan Elmasry and other Times finance critics will be using to bolster their anti-Sulzberger cases: earnings per share were $.14, compared to $.21 in the first quarter of 2006. We would call that a 33 percent decrease in earnings per share. Also, operating profit decreased to $54.5 million, as compared to $60.5 million in the first quarter of 2006. That's 10 percent! (Yay, pre-algebra!) But CEO Janet Robinson put a brave face to the numbers. Let's walk you through some key points.

Pity poor Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times, tasked with explaining the phenomenon of teen social networking sites in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Once a week, Ahead of the Times, everyone's favorite in-house New York Times newsletter, runs a regular column called After Deadline, in which errors are kindly mocked, word usage is criticized, display copy praised and the like. This week's is the choicest ever, most notably because Standards Editor Craig Whitney felt compelled to pitch in to decry repeated uses of "snarky"—six in the last month! Yuck. And the offending sections are exactly the ones you'd suspect.

The annual shareholder meeting of the Times Co. is just next Tuesday, and in preparation we're all reading the company's annual report. What delicious secrets lurked within, we wondered? Well we enjoy the "Risk Factors" section, where we learned the following: The New York Times does not like that the odd idea that blogs are taking away their business. (They are? News to us.) Also, all those layoffs might result in an inferior product!

• Nike uses the Don Imus controversy for an ad campaign it hopes "will spark continued conversation about race in America." And sell sneakers. [AdAge]
  

• Why isn't all TV like Atlanta public access TV? When we signed on to write stupid commentary about media, we were thinking media would all be like this. (Also Caitlin Flanagan and Camille Paglia totally had this conversation just last week.) Oh: NOT safe for work. [Viceland]
  

Ad Age notes in an afternoon email that the New York Times and "Inside Edition" (that's on TV, I think!) have bought up ad results for "Google key-word searches for the phrase 'Virginia Shooting.'" But don't get all stroppy and righteous about it! It's only because they hated "Sideways" so much and hope that horrible bitch Virginia Madsen never works again. Plus, she was born on September 11th, and she's probably in league with Uday Hussein or whatever. So the ad buy is probably just because they love America, just as much as we all do.

Trish Hall, who heads up the Dining In/Dining Out, House & Home, and Real Estate sections of the Times, has drawn the short straw: it's her turn to holler back when you Talk To The Newsroom. Already, a couple of people have asked the question that we pose several times daily: Is the New York Times totally just catering to the overclass more and more? Hall would be delighted to answer! "The question about what we cover, and why we cover it, is complex and always changing," she begins. Heh.

Here's the image that the Times got when it hired Bob Kessel to illustrate an article about "kantoku shou," the Japanese tradition of rewarding baseball players with gifts (including cash) for superior performance. It's pretty good: Rising sun? Check! Bowing? Check! Slanty eyes? Check! In fact, the only bit we're missing is a bowl of rice and a samurai sword. Nice! Click to enlarge.

More Than a Handshake Deal for Japanese Baseball Players [NYT]

1824 Joseph Fourier discovers greenhouse effect.
1949 Richard Gere born.
1960 Dr. Seuss publishes One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
1962 Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.
1972 U.S. passes Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. (Amended 1977.)
1994 Knight Center for Environmental Journalism founded at Michigan State's J-School.

Yesterday, as the news of the Pulitzer Prizes drifted out into the media, the mood at the New York Times was relatively somber. True, the paper had won a prize, for Andrea Elliott's series on an imam in Brooklyn, but had not turned up as the winner in any other category—which, for a paper that's grown accustomed to multiple awards over the years, must have been a bit of a sting. In fact, it kind of was. In a speech to the newsroom after the awards were announced, Bill Keller had the following to say:

"36 Hours In Portland, Ore" is climbing up the Times' most-emailed list, and it's not hard to see why: who doesn't have a "some other city with good public transit that doesn't have all these assholes in it?" fantasy? But sadly, this isn't the pack-your-bags-now! article that some people (ok, "we") were hoping it would be. For starters, it seems to position "niceness" as a good thing. And there's also this sentence: "With grunge fading into music history, Portland's nightlife scene has become a mixed bag — everything from jazz clubs to torchy lounges to high-decibel indie hang-outs. " Grunge... fading? Did this article fall out of a hole in 1997? Oh, wait, no it so did not! "Catch emerging groups like the Decembrists." So, more like 2004.

36 Hours In Portland, Ore. [NYT]

Well, look at that. The Pulitzers have been announced, and they certainly have spread the wealth: the Wall Street Journal wins two, but no other paper gets more than one, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which each win one. The Washington Post gets completely goose-egged, though the paper had finalists in several categories. (Complete list here.) Interestingly, the Daily News editorial board wins for editorial writing "for its compassionate and compelling editorials on behalf of Ground Zero workers whose health problems were neglected by the city and the nation." That's great for the DN and all, but it's a slap in the face to the newsroom, which, you'll recall, got slammed by the New York Times in February for not doing its due diligence on the story of a supposed "first responder" to the scene who later fell ill, which then led to some newsroom mudslinging as the news side felt abandoned by editorial. Look who's come out on top now!

So! Today at 3 p.m. the Pulitzer Prizes are being announced in an always-anticlimactic ceremony at Columbia. But we're hearing that the New York Times has won only one award this year, for Andrea Elliott's series "An Imam In America." Undoubtedly there are some grim faces on West 43rd Street this afternoon. No awards for Iraq or Darfur reporting, or that Pulitzer-bait series on ineffective hick judges in upstate New York? Complete list of winners TK shortly, of course.

A week after the New York Times spun a hefty cautionary tale on the dangers of buying a unit before it's built, they've gone and sent Suzanne Slesin to the as-yet-unbuilt William Beaver House, Andr Balazs's vaguely vaginal condominium on William and Beaver streets downtown. When Slesin gets "out of a cab at the triangular site," she's immediately invited to eat the fragrant lotus of the marketing mock-up and forget forever about returning home. And it seems, when it comes to unbuilt units, experience has no sway over love. Slezin immediately falls hard for the negging of architect Calvin Tsao's mixture of soft sell and hard-to-get pitch.

The New York Times trots out its trusty rewrite man Robert D. McFadden every time weather happens around these parts, and the current storm is no exception. Observe:

"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.

"My 22-year-old son, a humor writer who finds Imus an anachronistic and unfunny throwback to the racial-insult humor of the Frank Sinatra-Sammy Davis Jr. Rat Pack ilk, raises a complementary issue. He argues that when Sacha Baron Cohen makes fun of Jews and gays, he can do so because he's not doing it as himself but as a fictional character." That is such a good point in the Times op-ed pages! Gee, I would be interested to hear more of this precocious youngster's deep thoughts. But where to find them? I'll just look at Amazon under humor and... ah ha! Check that out! Simon Rich's book came out April 3rd. Proceeding to checkout!



Everybody Hates Don Imus [NYT]

• Just Asking: Which Ron Perelman has his publicist double as a matchmaker? Ron Perelman has his rep seek out and then screen his dates to make sure everything's kosher... [Page Six]
  

• David Patrick Columbia goes to the gym. [NYSD]