"Based on all this information and research, hopefully you can stretch the standards to allow 'Bitchassness' to be printed." [Daily Intel]

Hey, so, a little bit of news came out of the historic Bush/Obama handover transition secret White House surprise meeting. Details of what the president and the president-elect talked about were leaked to the press: apparently Obama tried to convince Bush to bail out the auto industry, and Bush said he might if Obama supports CAFTA. Hey, you know what the real news is, here? Someone in Obama's camp leaked this info to the New York Times, which led someone in the Bush camp to leak a "we're not very happy with that" story to Drudge! Whee! We think we know who's responsible, and he's a dreamboat. Let's closely examine these two paragraphs from the New York Times exclusive on the Oval Office meeting:

♦ Following a small incident yesterday, MSNBC is reportedly planning to institute a tape-delay on Morning Joe beginning on Monday. [TVNewser]
♦ Vivian Schiller, the head of NYTimes.com, is leaving to join NPR as its new CEO. [Gawker]
♦ NBC political director Chuck Todd is co-authoring a book called How Obama Won that will be published by Knopf before the inauguration in January. [NYO]
♦ Ted Turner doesn't have too many good things to say about Time Warner as he hits the trail to promote his new book. [Portfolio, Gawker]
♦ Why was Cindy Adams so furious about her Wikipedia entry a few weeks ago? It says she's 83 when she's actually 78. [HuffPo]

Vivian Schiller, the General Manager of NYTimes.com, is leaving the Times to become the president and CEO of NPR. National Public Radio, people! This is a huge announcement for lovers of the liberal media. Schiller has overseen lots of evolution at the paper's website—including the rollout of comments—which is the single best thing the Times has going for it. She became famous for her weekly memos and her devotion to slideshows. The Times had better choose her replacement very carefully. Her going-away email to the staff is after the jump:

The financially-struggling New York Times should simply stop printing new papers and stick to 11/05/08 editions forever, as their endless pimping of the commemorative paper suggest that's the only one people want to buy. They've been running house ads which inform that we can buy an "actual New York Times newspaper on Nov. 5, 2008, which boldly reported Obama's decisive victory over John McCain. Price includes the full newspaper with a resealable plastic envelope." It's available for the low price of $14.95 (please allow two weeks for shipping.) In fact, they've cordoned off a section of their online store, nytstore.com/obama, in order for you to buy anything Obama-related. OMG—due to high traffic, the site's overloaded!

If her column today is any indication, ancient op-ed mariner Maureen Dowd is not overly familiar with black people. Sure, living in Washington D.C., a city with a high concentration of African-Americans, she has noted the occasional "cute black mailman," but generally, this week was the first time she had ever seen whites and blacks speaking to one another. If this is the kind of analysis Dowd will be delivering twice a week in the Obama era, there may be no need for any other president-elect related comedy to exist.Maureen's pre-election columns were generally ghastly enough. Not to be outdone by rival condescending op-edders, she breaks out the big guns today with a column that begins, "I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week." It gets better:

One of the best parts of that juicy NYT story yesterday about all the infighting in the McCain- Palin campaign was the fact that a huge chunk of the story was given over to exploring who was leaking to sniveling conservative columnist Bill Kristol—a Times columnist! It's pretty unusual for a paper to start digging on its own columnist's confidential sources, but hey, it's Bill Kristol and nobody at the Times likes him, so they just went for it. That prompted some further review by the Daily Beast, which concluded, yep, Bill Kristol is basically just a lackey for political operatives:

Rember how Obama's election was the greatest thing to happen to the newspaper industry in a decade? People lined up across New York City to buy copies of the New York Times proclaiming his victory! And the smart ones put those copies right on Ebay. This chart shows the average of the five highest prices paid on Ebay each day for that November 5 issue of the NYT. One early seller fetched $400; today you can have your pick for less than $30. Oh, the metaphor.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd spent a decent chunk of this campaign trying to paint Barack Obama as another effete faggy Democratic wuss, as she did to John Kerry and Al Gore, just because, hey, why not. OBambi was all her, remember? Also she called him a "butterfly." Now, today, she's thrilled Obama won, and certain he'll restore dignity and grandeur to Washington and the White House. Obama "has the chance to make the White House pristine again." Yes, because Washington DC and the White House were certainly pristine before all this, right? Dowd explains how rough the last 16 years have been:

Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of Thomas Friedman paints the Times op-ed columnist as a driven, hyper-competitive workaholic. But, like, a useful one. The full text of the article can be viewed in The New Yorker's new digital reader, where you can get the full details on Friedman's crazy operation: his manic work habits, his everlasting love of buzzwords, and the hate he holds in his heart for fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman's Nobel win.This anecdote about Friedman's massive ego is joke fodder at the Times' D.C. office:

Yesterday's gigantic New York Times headline—"OBAMA"—was only the fourth time in history that the newspaper has used the 96-point type. (The others, in case you're curious: "MEN WALK ON MOON," "NIXON RESIGNS," and "U.S. ATTACKED.") Also: Copies of the paper are now going for as much as $100 on Ebay. [E&P via kottke]

Celebrity chef Thomas Keller will not deign to acknowledge the existence of Yelp. But the New York Times has. While individual writeups on the user-written restaurant-reviews site may be goofy, biased, or contrafactual, on the whole they give potential diners a good idea of what to expect. And they are vastly more prolific than the pros: Megan Cress, a Yelper, has written 300 restaurant reviews in three years. Times critics take twice as long. We wonder: Did the editors think the beancounters who are eyeing the Times's dwindling cash balance wouldn't read this article? (Illustration by John Hersey/New York Times)

We all know that print is dead and so forth but, darn it, nobody can deny that today is a great day to be a newspaper. Everybody wants a souvenir of Obama's victory, and you know what makes a great souvenir? That's right, a newspaper. This is a photo of a line outside the NYT building on 40th Street of people waiting—for a newspaper! Incredible. Reports of news stands from Brooklyn to Manhattan actually selling out are flooding into Gawker HQ!:

The Times wants to know how you're feeling, today. Are you hopeful? Or scared? Type a word, and say who you support in the election, and the word will fly by on the screen, magically. What we learned: McCain supporters are scared, patriotic, worried, determined, tired, depressed, upset, anxious, terrified, and, yes, hopeful. Obama supporters, in calm, soothing blue, are hopeful, happy, ready, tired, relieved, and, of course, nervous and anxious. Everyone in America needs a damn nap. [NYT]

♦ Election returns may set TV viewing records tonight, assuming there's some "suspense." [AP]
♦ What's been on cable news channels all day? Mindless talk and speculation, for the most part. [TV Decoder]
♦ It's possible the networks will call the election before the polls close. [THR]
♦ Some of the high-tech wizardry in store tonight: CNN plans to feature 3D "holographic images" of the network's remote correspondents in its New York studio. [WSJ]
♦ More trouble for tabloid kingpin David Pecker: John Miller, AMI's chief operating officer, has resigned. [NYP]

Officially, the New York Times Company isn't commenting on tech executive Jason Calacanis' claim that it is shopping reference site About.com in an effort to shore up its financial position and perhaps go private. But two anonymous sources poured cold water on his statements, according to Peter Kafka of All Things Digital, denying that the profitable property is on the block. Perhaps a rogue banker is trying to drum up interest in a (hypothetical) deal before taking it to the Times, hoping to score some business. Or maybe Calacanis just got his wires crossed. But lack of any dealmaking will hardly tamp down speculation over how the Times Company will pay down its junk-rated debt. If anything, it makes the situation an even more tricky puzzle.

Here's a new ethical conundrum for Randy Cohen, advice columnist for the New York Times magazine's Ethicist: is a letter-writer obligated to tell an advice columnist that their ethical dilemma has already been dealt with by the same paper? We were wondering if the Ethicist stole a letter from the Social Qs column that runs in the Sunday Styles—after all, they printed the same question this week that appeared in the Styles in September. Well, we heard from Beth Rose Feurstein, the woman who sent the question to both columns, which involved a blind date who turned out to be a serial blind-date-canceller who kept invoking the same "got hit while riding my bicycle and ended up in the ER" excuse. And she says when the Times fact-checker called, she didn't bother to let them know that the question had already run:

The troubled New York Times Company is running out of options. It owes more than $1 billion, close to half of it coming due in the next two years. But it just ruled out layoffs for the foreseeable future and will probably try to avoid cutting the $132 million annual dividend, since doing so could spark a boardroom revolt by high-living Sulzberger family members. So it would make sense if the company has been trying to sell About.com, as Jason Calacanis, CEO of search engine company Mahalo, said on the This Week In Tech podcast last week. (Audio of his remarks lies after the jump.)

In his review today of the Atlantic Theater Company's production political comedy Farragut North — soon to be a film from George Clooney — NYT reporter/heartthrob Patrick Healy can't resist getting in a few jabs about his many months covering the Hillary Clinton campaign. The play from former Howard Dean staffer Beau Willimon characterizes the interplay between campaign officials and the reporters who cover them, and Healy isn't shy about putting the blame somewhere specific.Since the play concerns itself partly with the interplay between campaign flacks and reporters, Healy is able to offer a look at the reality of the fiction:

Neocon Times columnist Bill Kristol was of course acting smug and cute last night on the Daily Show, since that's basically his gig: Smarmy right-wing fish in left wing ponds. But he just didn't seem to have it in him to truly bait the other side. He declared John McCain would triumph on Tuesday but, wait, ha ha, it's just a joke of the make-a-Daily Show-audience-heckle-me variety, and Kristol admitted as much (and did succeed in getting booed).