• Jann Wenner is no longer interested in selling Us Weekly. [NYP]

Suck it, NPR! If anyone listened to you they'd surely have voted you most biased. Against not being boring! BAM. [Via Fark]

• Is Eurotrash social networking site ASmallWorld.net running low on cash? It seems employees weren't paid on time last week. [Gawker]

Were you reading the Times this morning, wondering why there weren't more sexual stories up in there? Were you thinking some sex would fit particularly well in the metro section, squeezed between reports on rent control for VIPs, that Harlem neighborhood photographer and that guy who died in the triathalon? Well, then, you're in luck, because Joe Sexton (ahem), leader of the metro section's scoop ninjas, is saying the paper will likely deliver more discourse on intercourse. Apparently their Eliot Spitzer hooker exclusive was just the beginning! Here's what Sexton wrote on the Times website today, responding to a question about the newspaper's plans to expand New York City coverage:

Hey, here is a thing John McCain should go to! New York Times Opinion Page Editor David Shipley, the man who politely asked that Senator McCain rewrite his little story and turn it in again, will be at the 92nd Street Y in January to discuss "The Art and Science of Opinion Pieces." Of course, by then, it'll be too late to win the election, but it will still be very useful for every other time McCain feels like writing a cranky letter to the editor, as most senior citizens frequently do. [92StY]

This is great. The McCain campaign is crying bias and went running to Drudge because the New York Times wouldn't print their stupid editorial. See, the Times printed an editoral by Barack Obama called "My Plan for Iraq." So McCain "wrote" an editorial about how Obama's plan for Iraq was to lose just like we lost Vietnam and John McCain's plan was to win the war. So the Times said, hey, why don't you try another draft of this where you articulate what "winning" means? The McCain campaign took this as a rejection and now they're all whining like the embittered nation of recession-imagining whiners they hate.

New York Times publisher and genial buffoon Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger is not worried about how his newspaper's circulation sucks and the share price is at a historic low. You know why? Because Craig Newmark, the guy who invented Cragslist and destroyed the newspaper revenue stream, just got a Times subscription! So hey, no worries, Times staffers. If there's one thing Pinch has learned since he took over as publisher 16 years ago, it's to always mention the moose in the room. But not to bring an actual moose with him anymore.

"Mr. Ledger's death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive... He's just a clown painted on black velvet, but he's also some kind of masterpiece." [Times]

How does David Carr pull this off? The Times media critic writes in his forthcoming memoir of drug addiction that he kidnapped his children, smacked around his girlfriends and left two babies in a near-freezing car on the street for hours while he got high. This in addition to dealing drugs and fathering crack babies, which we already knew about. It's all in his book excerpt from next Sunday's Times Magazine. And yet, after reading the account, it's remarkably hard to detest the guy.

"The feeling at 4 Times Square is that [Si] Newhouse isn't retiring anytime soon... But those close to Newhouse have heard of a possible succession plan that involves the creation of a committee of several top Newhouse family members." [WWD]

June ad sales at USA Today were 27% lower than a year earlier. That's a decline even steeper than reported by the Tribune Company papers and the New York Times.

Alec Niedenthal is the 17-year-old Alabama novelist who became suddenly prominent thanks to a cheeky letter in the Times Book Review last month. The missive promised a new wave of fiction from a "MySpace-addled" generation, called out well-known older authors and included many large words. This attracted interest from publishers HarperCollins and Grove/Atlantic and an inquiry from Jonathan Franzen's literary agent. But of this group, only one party, HarperCollins, deigned to meet with Niedenthal on his trip to New York this past weekend, and the ambitious young writer left town with a tote bag rather than any deal. He'll presumably have a more fruitful tour after finishing his own edition of the collective "manuscript" alluded to in his Times letter. Until then, the hordes of older novelists struggling to get published have no reason to gouge their eyes out with a fork. After the jump, Niedenthal recalls for the Observer his HarperCollins meeting.

Oh, hey, Times political reporter Adam Nagourney, we hope you're reading! Because someone is trying to use this site to reach you regarding your relations, or possible relations, who bestowed you with the genes necessary to write that blog you used to keep, that insane story about being a tourist DC and, most impressively, your widely-noted columns for the "Google" News. Wait, do you even work for the Times anymore? Click the thumb to read the email.

How does Fox News' vicious PR department respond to charges it smeared a Times reporter as a drug addict, blamed a pregnant Wall Street Journal reporter's hormones for unfavorable coverage, and that chief Irena Briganti blackballed, bullied and threatened virtually all the reporters she came into contact with? By distributing to TV critics a button with pictures of kittens and hearts, reading "Hugs & Kittens from Fox News Media Relations." Ha ha, get it? It's funny because reporters who can't take Fox's hardball PR tactics are babies who expect to be coddled. Instead, they will be devoured by Fox News chief Roger Ailes, with kittens and human hearts as the appetizer. [TVNewser] (Image via TVNewser)

The New York Times standards editor Craig Whitney recently saw something strange and terrible while out "on the road," as they say: "bumper stickers." These are like tiny billboards, affixed to automobiles, that feature sayings, jokes, or even brief political arguments. They're on display for everyone to see! And, according to a memo he sent out, they're inappropriate for Times staffers.

Thank you, everyone who is awake right now, for emailing us about the nytimes.com headline pictured at left. I hope you don't feel bad when I tell you that it's not a "major fuck up," as one tipster put it. The headline is, in fact, "[headline about unlikely broadway musical]", which is kind of meta, un-Times-ian joke title for a story about a real play called "[title of show]." Even one Gawker editor, who IMed me, hysterical, was briefly fooled. Please, Times, it unnerves and confuses everyone when you put on these airs. It's like an old person trying to talk like a teenager. [additional point about Times trading onetime air of unimpeachability for presumption of error!] [Times]

Patti Smith; who doesn't love her? (Even though the last time I saw her show, she forgot half her lyrics onstage and appeared totally stoned. Rock and roll!) Thing is, however, is that the media has been tremendously unimaginative in the last twenty or so years when writing about a lady who is equal parts artist, rock star, and stay-at-home mom. "Punk poet" and "godmother of punk" are the standard descriptors that have been in use since 1977. Deb Solomon mostly sidesteps that trap in this week's New York Times Magazine, asking instead: What's up with her hair?

Did you enjoy the lengthy "in defense of" Rush Limbaugh profile in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine? Then you'll love the friendly profile of MSNBC token independent conservative Joe Scarborough in Monday's New York Magazine! We haven't read the piece, but we imagine it will explore his crazy trip from Gingrichian Congressional Republican to funny conservative that liberals love, all because he took over Don Imus' TV slot, started doing an entertaining morning show, and basically revealed himself to be totally in the bag for Obama. (As we learned last month in the Times.)

You know that prayer that begins "God grant me the serenity" etc. etc. (surely it rings a bell among the alkies in our audience)? It was composed in the 1940s by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Everyone knows this! Except some Yale librarian has found records of people (all ladies!) quoting the prayer back in the 1930s! So now there's this argument about it, because Niebuhr's daughter has apparently been eating out on this Serenity Prayer thing for years (she wrote a memoir and everything). That daughter is editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton, as today's Times story on the controversy notes. What the Times story does not note is that Elisabeth is the mother of New York Times culture editor Sam Sifton. [NYT via Doree]

Renzo Piano, the much-hyped "starchitect" who designed the Times building, is very upset at the extremely naughty people who have been using his building as it just begs to be used — as an urban climbing wall. Now that three people have ascended the ceramic rods on the structure's facade in less than 90 days, Piano decided it was time to administer a scolding, telling the Times, "I'm frankly quite worried about this new fashion of going up on buildings... This is what I call an inappropriate use of the building." Ha ha, funny how this new "fashion" is sweeping exactly one building in New York, Renzo. Anyway, while failing to think about climbers was clearly a design screwup, Piano and the Times are hoping its a minor one that can be easily fixed: