• Hachette is shuttering Home magazine. [Mediaweek]

As first noted by the tenacious John Edwards-hounders at Deceiver.com, it seems Times readers are mighty interested in the philandering Democrat, even though many journalists said they simply shouldn't care about the scandal. As shown in the screenshot above, "John Edwards" is the most popular search term over the past week on nytimes.com. If the newspaper was crass enough to actually shape coverage around such reader-interest metrics, it might admit as miscalculation the assertion by the Times' campaign coverage editor last week that while the Edwards scandal was "fair game for journalism," it wasn't a "high priority" because "there are a lot of big issues.... and we have finite resources." After the jump, CNN congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin on why her viewers neither wanted nor needed Edwards scandal coverage:

Did you read Sunday's Times piece about how people are getting their news from Jon Stewart these days? Because I sure as heck didn't! I don't need the Times to tell me to stop reading the Times and turn on my cable box — mainly because I was pretty sure I had read that same exact story in the Times before. But this morning, as the story was still carrying the top of the "Most Emailed List," I decided to go find that old Times story I remembered. Well, it wasn't easy. There are 102 stories listed in "Past coverage" of Jon Stewart (the original Michael Phelps!), about nine of which employ the phrase "get their news from." And yet I could not for the life of me find the one I remembered actually reading. Turns out it is because, like the former "young people" who started this whole "getting news from the Daily Show" trend, I am now very very very old…Because they've been doing this story since September 2000.

Last month the New York Times announced it would be raising its cover price from $1.25 to $1.50, and there were several alarmed articles full of ominous grumbling. But the increase didn't actually come into effect until today, and there appears to be not even a peep of outrage online from readers who are short a quarter. Have we all grown 20% more appreciative of the Times in the last month? Or-more likely-is it just that no one who owns a computer has bought a copy of a newspaper today?

"There's a new Star Wars movie, and no one cares," announced New York Times Opinionator blogger Chris Sullentrop in a Friday afternoon post, about which we would not have cared if it hadn't been closely followed by sixteen ominous words: "(Warning: if you click through the link there will be language that The Times frowns upon.)" (Warning: Spoiler alert: "Fuck.") Okay so: every newspaper has anachronistic decency standards, but the Times is the most stubbornly prudish. One time, for instance, they refused to print the name of the bar The Cock. Another time, Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to "Fuck off" on the Senate floor on the same day the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act" and everyone printed the word then — except the Times. One special historical figure has been directly quoted uttering those four letters in the Times's database-searchable history and it is:Monica! Duh. Remember the Starr Report? Bet you never thought you'd look back on that era as one in which the mainstream media seemed less disingenuously pious.

The National Enquirer is having an amazing week thanks to its coverage of John Edwards' philandering, but the supermarket tabloid is probably still going to die along with troubled parent company American Media Inc., the Times' David Carr reports for tomorrow's paper. It doesn't seem to matter that three of the best papers in the country all ran stories about how the Enquirer was right about Edwards and they were wrong or that the tabloid still owns the probably-not-finished scandal. AMI is so deep in the hole — nearly $1 billion! — that most analysts aren't even keeping track of the Edwards coverage or anything else about the company because they've written it off. One gave this fairly devastating quote to Carr, anonymously:

Today, the Times printed one of those "op-art" things they do sometimes. This one was in the form of a "mad-lib," those "fill-in-the-blanks with a specific part of speech" things the kids are so into these days. As everyone besides possibly the Times knows, Mad-Libs are only fun for terribly immature kids, as they present an excuse to fill them with swears. Which we did, today, while we were supposed to be working! Click through and wonder what the hell the Times was thinking.

Heading to the Republican convention? You could do worse than follow the advice proffered in today's Times "36 Hours in" column on the Twin Cities, penned by Minneapolitan David Carr. It's full of good advice for restaurants, culture, and entertainment. And bars. There are really just a couple of our favorite places that he missed: you can get a good (for the midwest) pizza and a cheap pitcher of Summit at Pizza Luce on Lyndale Ave. If the lot's full, there's usually street parking readily available a block away on 32nd and Garfield. Just make sure to lock up! [NYT]

The precious Times has finally condescended to do some original reporting the John Edwards scandal, pulling from the tabloidy muck a scoop establishing that Edwards loyalist Fred Baron, who can't quite recall these things clearly, admits he maybe set Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter and Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young up with two separate lawyer buddies of his, and also maybe paid their legal fees?? All this happened right before one of the lawyers announced that his new client Hunter was not carrying Edwards' love child, and then the other lawyer announced that her new client Young was the father of the love child. And you know, funny thing, both of the lawyers forgot to mention their ties to one another via Baron. Here are some great quotes where swaggering genius lawyer Baron (pictured) pretends he's an Alzheimer's patient, to the Times:

Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. looks increasingly backed into a corner. Bloomberg yesterday marshaled a wide array of evidence, including quotes from analysts and the mounting cost to hedge against a Times Co. bond default, to establish that the company's bonds are close to falling to junk status. The already-bludgeoned stock quickly fell another 6 percent. Implicated in the credit deterioration: The company's decision last year to hike its dividend payout 23 percent, a move no doubt popular with Sulzberger's stockholdling relatives but one that is gobbling up nearly all the company's free cash flow. The family has already conceded board seats to the corporate marauders from Harbinger Capital Partners and an affiliated partnership, and Harbinger now controls nearly 20 percent of the company. Sulzberger faces some unsavory choices — cut the dividend, slash costs (probably via layoffs) or flirt with selling junk bonds — all of which carry the whiff of defeat. He is running out of room to maneuver.

In a post a few hours ago about the Times's 32 reporters in Beijing for the Olympics my colleague Hamilton estimated that each reporter sent to cover the event was writing one story per day for an average of two weeks. Industrious! But somewhat akin to estimating that smelting everyone's rusty pots and pans in the backyard is going to yield a dominant steel industry. Reporters need to get over their jet lag! Collect their thoughts, and convert them from hackneyed touristy "Ha ha ha they weren't kidding about that smog!" thoughts into publishably learned-sounding "Smog? You should see it when the GDP is in working order!" ones! A more realistic Olympics output has been generated by Gawker's favorite media gay couple, Timesman Andrew Jacobs and his freelancer boyfriend Dan Levin, who have in two or three weeks in the Middle Kingdom…Two stories, a man on the street scene piece about…uh, men on the street, and one piece about foreigners who live in nice houses that resemble the old houses that average Chinese used to live in before they were all bulldozed except they are nice and that's why they get to stay. We checked out some other people we knew in China, including our Times reporting friend Nick Confessore, who is actually in town on vacation, and reports on Facebook that he recently ripped off the idea of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti and climbed the Great Wall, which was "more effective against the Mongols than against the Japanese." (Not to mention opiates and naval warfare! ) Our former Beijing correspondent friend professed to be "not doing much of anything," saying she'd write more when it was more timezone-appropriate. Oh yes, and Gawker legal counsel Gaby Darbyshire is in Beijing right now, "doing a deal." Sure. Finally we received this email from a friend at Paris Review who is also in Beijing:

• Nightline's exclusive interview with John Edwards on Friday night? It didn't pose much competition to the Olympics on NBC. [THR]

The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!

The Times published two amazing corrections this morning, starting with one stating that the newspaper had erroneously called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "fighter pilot" on Sunday and in "numerous other Times articles the past dozen years." Wow, a correction that spans more than a decade! When McCain was famously shot down over Vietnam, he was flying his usual plane, a small jet aircraft known as the A-4 Skyhawk, which the Times now refers to as an "attack aircraft." That's a safe and widely-agreed upon label for the plane pilots dubbed "Scooter" (heh), but the newspaper needn't have apologized for calling it a "fighter." Many in the aviation community regard it as precisely that, starting with the military's most famous training program, Top Gun.

David Malone wasn't scared of climbing the 52-story Times building last month. "It was like climbing a ladder and I knew I could climb a ladder," the 29-year-old anti-Al Qaeda activist told the Daily News, referring to architect Renzo Piano's inviting ceramic rods. But, with a court date looming Tuesday, he does sound nervous about New York City prosecutors, calling the climb "the biggest mistake of my life... It caused a public disturbance and put police officers potentially at risk." One wonders if Malone realizes the other two climbers got off with basically parking tickets. And one would assume the Times isn't putting any new pressure on the court, given its own passion for breaking certain legal directives in the service of free expression. Malone even showed an almost Times-esque caution in his civil disobedience:

In a roundup of every current media-wonk topic — the Olympics, YouTube, TiVo, and the Philadelphia Inquirer's boneheaded move to keep its hottest stories offline — David Carr of the New York Times has deftly buried a hint to his employer's Web strategy: "The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off." Carr's not just speculating. He's alluding to a move already being made at the Times:

Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the John Edwards affair, detailing the circumstances behind the meeting of Edwards and Rielle Hunter in a Beverly Hills hotel that ended up getting the ex-VP candidate caught by the National Enquirer. The story includes various bits of background info on Bob McGovern, a new-age friend of Hunter who set up the meeting. Just about all of that background appears to have been taken from a post more than a week earlier on Deceiver.com-although the Times didn't credit them at all. That's stealing. Full comparison of the Times story and the blog info, below: Deceiver, July 31:

Let's just put it out there: copy editors are vaguely creepy. There they sit in their corner, poring over pages while all the reporters and (other) editors are doing the real, sexy work of journalism. What makes someone want to be a copy editor in the first place? Could it be... sexual perversion? (Kidding of course! We love copy editors, platonically). Charles Cretella, a veteran New York Times copy editor, is now going to court over a sexual harassment case that centers on-you guessed it-a fellow copy editor, who was masturbating at work. Goodness. The strange details: Cretella says the Times didn't give him a promotion because he was falsely charged with sexually harassing a new 33-year-old copy editor that Cretella was training. Very enthusiastically:

"Mr. Stelter's wonderful article on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience." [Times]