Will the Times end up like the Wall Street Journal, sold off by disgruntled, money-grubbing family members? To find out, New York investigated the fifth generation of the Times' controlling Sulzberger family. The good news, for those who want to see the Times stay in family hands, is that none of these young men and women (some shown in this handy PDF chart) would talk smack about their poorly-managed company to a reporter, in contrast to the Bancrofts who sold off the Journal. All family kids are being indoctrinated at special "orientation sessions," camps and annual business meetings, starting at age 10. Everyone stays connected on Facebook, including an 87-year-old Sulzberger grandmother. The bad news: No one knows if this unity will hold together when the company cuts unsustainably high stock dividend. Also, the family twentysomethings seem at least as unlikely to ever run the company as acid-dropping Pinch Sulzberger did 35 years ago. Here, for example, is what Judith Sulzberger's young grandson Alex Cohen recently wrote on his Facebook:

Oh nuts. Technology is ruining NYC. You see, according to the Sunday Times, no one will get lost in the city and discover awesome new "foreign" neighborhoods by accident anymore because kids have GPS on their cellphones and cabs have interactive touch-screens and the magic is gone, and that is really, really meaningful... For instance, never again will you get some of this crazy only-in-New-York-ness: "You go for a few blocks, unsure, your senses on the alert. In this fog of momentary disorientation, you are nonetheless aware of various clues: a whiff of halal spices, both foreign and familiar; a heated conversation in Polish in your left ear; a taxi driver cursing in Caribbean Spanish in your right." Wait. We'll all speak one language? It's Babylon! God will smite us!

Mike Nizza (pictured?), the biggest Wu-Tang fan in the history of the New York Times, is leaving the paper in order to bring da ruckus to The Atlantic's web projects. His boss, NYT digital editor Jim Roberts, closes the staff memo on Nizza's departure by quoting a Gawker comment. With his exit, the Times loses a rebel, who makes more noise than heavy metal. Nizza will be remembered for that old loco style from his vocals—Bill Keller couldn't peep it with a pair of bifocals. We saw this moment coming, though. Mike was a vandal. Too hot to handle. Now, he's saying Goodbye like Tevin Campbell. Full memo below:

Want to stay crucial moments ahead of your neighbors watching the vice presidential debate on a network feed? Try the Times' website . Not only is the old-media stalwart streaming live video of tonight's Biden-Palin faceoff with a surprisingly smooth interface, but it's a good eight seconds ahead of the likes of CNN and MSNBC.

Terrible celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz has been documenting the development of the innocent young New York Times Building, and tomorrow she is going to drape it in a sexy sheet and photograph it. So watch out! She's going to do this in a helicopter, flying well below standard FAA restrictions, and then she'll shoot some wolves. They had to write a letter to the neighbors apologizing in advance for having a famous controversial celebrity photographer hanging around in a helicopter all day while they're trying to work.

Remember the terrible story about the naked mentally ill guy whom the NYPD tasered, causing his death? Yes, well, if you thought that story could not get more awful, you were wrong. The cop who ordered the fatal tasering killed himself this morning. Also, the Times illustrated this story with a photo of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and every joke we could make about that fact is probably in terrible taste. [NYT]

The monster $700 billion plan to fix America's broken credit markets passed the senate by a wide 74-25 margin and is set for a House vote by the end of the week. How was the reviled, once-vanquished bailout resurrected? By becoming more bailout-ey! The federal government will still spend most of the money taking distressed mortgages off the books of poor, sad Wall Street firms like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. But also, as we mentioned before the vote, everyone with insurance now gets therapy and meds! The upper middle class gets an adjustment to the Alternative Minimum Tax. Corporations get a tax break for "research." Oh, and also, no big deal but probably companies don't have to play by basic accounting rules anymore (search for "mark to market" here). But the bailout became less bailout-ey in one regard: In the lead of the Wall Street Journal story (bottom example above), it's called a "rescue," the nomenclature preferred by the Bush administration. In the Times it's still a bailout. And what do you know, the papers have sharply diverging editorials (the Journal quotes Alexander Hamilton!) to go along with their positions.

New York Times music reporter Jeff Leeds, who had reported on stories such as Apple's behind-the-scenes fight with Universal last year, was given the newspaper's version of a layoff — a "buyout" — earlier this year. Leeds is now editor-in-chief of Buzznet, the music community site that also bought Idolator from Valleywag publisher Gawker Media. What we'll find out in the next few weeks: Can Leeds get the same kind of well-placed sources to talk to him now that he doesn't have the Times backing him up? Here's the full press release:

The New York Times is quite concerned about this economy and this "bailout" that is probably going to pass the Senate today in the most complicated form so far presented to the American People. They note, today, that its fate as political poison was probably set when it was labeled a "bailout" from the beginning. But just maybe, institutionally, as the voice of the moderate liberal establishment, the Times needs this bailout to work! So they spend a great deal of time trying to explain it, and they also seek to explain the effect of the bailout and The Crisis on You, the Little Guy on Main Street. And every other street! Join us, won't you, as we tag along on the Times Bailout Tour '08. First: it's not a bailout!

The New York Times launched its "social networking" feature TimesPeople months ago for no particular reason, and with no particular effect. Back then even top editor Bill Keller wasn't using it. But now he is! You know what this means, don't you? It's one more way for suckup Times reporters to track who the boss is favoring. Almost as good as looking at the front page! So what is Keller recommending? Let's see:

Wow, this is a proud mark of the global influence of the financially puny New York Times: a story it did in June has prompted one of the world's richest men to sue his own brother for more than $2 billion. Awesome! Anil Ambani says that his brother Mukesh (they each inherited half of the massive Indian conglomerate Reliance) smeared his good name in the Times, so he had no choice but to sue him, the Times, and two Indian papers for 100 billion rupees. Here's the offending passage that set him off:

The New York Times ran a huge (huge!) A1 investigative piece on John McCain and his weird gambling obsession and ties to the Indian Casino industry and Vegas and lobbyists and ten thousand other things yesterday. It was well-reported, historical in focus, and fair. It ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, which reaches almost half a million more readers than the weekday edition. But, you know, no one is talking about it. It didn't really stick! Did anyone read the whole thing? Were there bombshells? Who knows! What happened? The Times sabotaged itself, either intentionally or through ineptitude. Allow us to explain. Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash. But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs. But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression. The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up. Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing. Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

For the most part, it would seem, Eliot Spitzer lives a remarkably palatable life, given that he was humiliated and forced to resign as New York governor just six months ago in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer's marriage is intact; he has plenty of well-paying work to do at his father's real estate firm; and he is able to run through Central Park and walk around the city because " he hasn’t gotten a lot of negative stuff out in public," an old friend told the Times. Spitzer has even received well-wishes from former vice president Al Gore, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. But still: People laugh at him. The Times investigated exactly who:

Simon Hammerstein, co-owner of downtown burlesque theater The Box—which pretty much everyone in the neighborhood wants shuttered—is sort of defending himself—mainly via proxy—against charges that he's a grunting hog who sexually harasses his female employees. And he's doing it in the pages of the Times' Sunday Styles, natch. First of all: he could never be untoward. Because he's engaged to a lady! "Mr. Hammerstein said he had recently become engaged and would marry 'in Decemberish.' He did not elaborate. Mystery, he said, is really the core of his business." As for charges that he regularly slapped female employees on their asses hard enough to leave bruises and that he coerced the Porcelain TwinZ, Amber and Heather Langely, to dirty up their act so that he could rename it "Twincest"? Oh, pooh-pooh. He's an artist!

All those years in the theater on Broadway among catty drama types didn't thicken the skin of New York Times technology writer David Pogue much. Geek Out New York blogger John Teti wrote a clearly satirical piece wondering just how technology-savvy Pogue. His latest column described how you can use Google to search individual websites. Teti didn't even point out the misspelling of Facebook as "Facebok!" (Which I hear is the leading social networking site among South African antelopes.) The pile-on-Pogue post was clearly facetious, but that didn't stop Pogue from emailing Teti to complain. And then emailing again. And again. Pogue's initial, angry missive in full after the jump.

(Disclaimer: Spoilers related to the Philip Roth novel Indignation ahead.) Oct. 2, Philip Roth will jump readers to the end of his new novel Indignation. On WNYC, the writer will explain how, if you read to the end of his book, you find that the narrator Marcus Messner is not, in fact, dead, but merely in the midst of a morphine hallucination of his own death. This contradicts both reviews of the book in the Times, one by Michiko Kakutani, the other in the Sunday Book Review. In so doing, it begs the question: Did those reviewers bother to read the book all the way to the end?

Late-night host David Letterman—who dropped his usual Midwestern bonhomie to drub John McCain yesterday evening—is not the only national institution to be overtaken by partisanship this election season. If only in jest, the New York Times crossword makers are being accused of favoring McCain's Democratic rival. While "Obama" has appeared as an answer several times, the Republican candidate hasn't been honored once. What's the Times' excuse? "It is because ‘Obama’ is a five-letter name that alternates vowels and consonants," a spokeswoman tells Politico. "It’s got three vowels out of five letters, starting and ending in vowels. So it is much more crossword-friendly than ‘McCain,’ which is a harder word to put in a crossword." And that explanation will do precisely nothing to mitigate conservative suspicions of a newspaper so rooted in New York that even the crosswords are liberal.

"Because of a production error, a passage from this correction was merged in some editions on Tuesday with an International correction, above, about the Moscow Journal." [Times]

This really weird ad decrying "The New Communism" ran on A17 of the Times today. It was paid for by some plutocrat in Houston named Bill Perkins who supports Obama. I think it advances my general contention that some of the fiercest critics of the Washington-Wall Street complex are actually beneficiaries of that whole scam, because Perkins's firm Crystal Energy LLC would appear to be precisely the sort of outfit to which God instructed Sarah Palin to fast-track lucrative contracts decimating the environment in pursuit of cheap energy.But I don't actually know because today's Senate hearing cut his CNBC interview down to about one and a half seconds. In any case, I hope the Times still has a Houston rep who can take this guy out to dinner. Who knows, maybe he can rustle up some other likeminded rich guys with money they'd be wiling to give newspapers now that capitalism as we know it has been suspended.

When John McCain goes to war, he goes to war to win. When he got shot down in Nam it was because he went back to make goddamn sure that civilian power plant got bombed. Even after the war, he was pretty sure that a few thousand more bombs would've defeated those commies. So when he went to war against the New York Times and every single major network, we were confident he wouldn't rest until 30 Rock was reduced to rubble and CNN renounced their anti-American ways. But no, he's cutting and running. Before, it was was reported that not a single reporter was going to be allowed to cover Sarah Palin's crazy UN meetings. Now, though? Oh look, CNN gets to send in one producer for a pool report. That's not change we can believe in! What's next, cooperating with the hated New York Times? Funny you should ask! John McCain's war on the Times was going very very well, for him. His campaign was trashing the New York Times and accusing Politico reporters of being "in the tank" and all that, but then some Politico people kept writing about how McCain's campaign kept lying about everything in the world. Then they wrote a story about how McCain actually pretty much lurves everyone at the hated New York Times. Like all of them!