Ring the alarm: the paper of record is treating rappers separately and unequally! In a surprisingly fresh piece of analysis, the Columbia Journalism Review unearths the NYT's sneaky tendency to "birth-name" rappers more than other musicians. (They also coin the term "birth-name," which I like, although for the sake of hip hop consistency they should say "government-name"). That means, for example, that RZA gets second-referenced as "Robert Diggs," but Marilyn Manson gets to keep his stage name throughout Times stories. That is so foul! Government names are nerdy. Plus, culture editor Sam Sifton gives a nonsense nilla explanation for the discrepancy:

The NYT values their super-smart readers! Or do they? "I got this back from the Times after I complained about a mistake in Alex Witchel's article on [the television show] "Mad Men,'" in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, says a reader. "Looks like somebody hit "Reply To All" once too often! Both [writer] Witchel & [research editor] Alani called me a know-it-all."

Times columnist Maureen Dowd is irrelevant, yes, but is she also insane? The Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a column about how everyone was sexist all the time to Hillary Clinton. Which is true! But oddly, the most sexist coverage at the Times came from Maureen Dowd, who is a lady. But! Dowd's defense! "'I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,' Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns." See the funny thing about that statement is that it is amazingly wrong.

"Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year." That is from Brian Stelter's remarkable story in the New York Times which is actually entirely about Lara Logan's appearance on The Daily Show. So. No one cares about the war(s) anymore! Until a hot lady shames us in a sexy accent.

In his "On The Street" slide show for the Times Style section today, longtime fashion photographer Bill Cunningham (pic) can't get over the kids today and their saggy jeans. In fact, Cunningham keeps waiting for a pair of low-slung trousers to fall off someomne's torso, yet they refuse, and the whole thing is a tragedy. Said Cunningham: "I have waited and thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to get one right now, his pants are going to fall off. And it hasn't happened. It's just terrible. I've waited and waited." But he'll probably get his coveted "saggy jeans fall off some kid" shot soon enough since, according to Cunningham's theory, male waistlines seem to fall in sync with the ailing stock market. Video excerpt after the jump.

So the New York Times has a Twitter account. (Twitter is the internet thing that tells everyone in the world what you're doing so they can make fun of you properly.) And it's an embarrassment! More embarrassing is the Twitter account for "The Moment," their new... blog-thing that is tied to T Magazine, the content-free style supplement to the Times Magazine. This Twitter is weird and aggressively friendly! But... who is behind it? Whose far-too-casual first-person Tweet are we even following? (Probably "Jonathan S. Paul," who posted about Twittering about posting this Art Party.) Whoever it is got drunk at an Art Party last night and peed next to Sean Lennon. Right now T twitter is following all the other Times Twitter accounts that just link back to things at the Times. If they really wanted to get all Webby they'd start a Tumblr that bitched about Gawker. [Twitter via Radar]

If TheEroticReview.com is "Amazon.com for prostitutes" (as dubbed by Matt Richtel in the New York Times), do customers get "free delivery for orders over $100", asks Salon.com's Broadsheet. We agree with Salon's assessment — TER is really more like Yelp — unless there's some exciting new feature to Amazon Prime that the Times was briefed on under embargo.

With Firefox browser plugin TimesPeople, the venerable gray lady will now allow registered users to connect, adding "friends" and recommending articles to each other. You can follow recommendations through a drop-down menu that presents a feed of recommended articles from other users, or subscribe via RSS. It's not a social network, strictly, but a social layer. And while I poke fun at the times in the headline, there's certainly one way this could be used to drive revenue — by targetting ads based on a reader, and a reader's contacts, interests as determined both by the user's demographic information from their registration and the topics they browse. And unlike Facebook, advertisers don't have to worry about advertising against content they might deem unacceptable. Unless the Times starts doing photo essays of keg stands and college-age women experimenting with homosexuality.

Intimate look at the New York Times alert! The paper has launched a social networking feature called "TimesPeople," which is a little like Facebook for Times employees (and the public!). But without any of Facebook's drunk pictures or other interesting features. Pictured, what editor Bill Keller is up to: not a damn thing. The only useful aspect of TimesPeople is that newsroom brown-nosers can track the Times in-crowd by keeping tabs on Keller's list of friends. He only has seven now, but one of them is Batman:

Times' Campbell Robertson "said he'll go once the Tonys are over!" [Observer]

The New York Times, ever ranged against the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, hosted a fascinating symposium in May called "Jews and Power." If this is how the Sulzberger clan distances itself against nasty but enduring rumors, then Times, Inc. stockholders might consider now a good time to sell. Bad PR! The event — sort of like the New Yorker Festival, except way more open about who's in charge — borrowed its provocative title from Ruth Wisse's well-regarded intellectual history of the subject, published by Shocken Books a year ago as part of its series of volumes dealing with explicitly Jewish themes. (Also not to be missed: David Mamet on why anti-Semites are limp-dicked liberals who can't close). Some of the conversational pairings were rather inspired: Shalom Auslander, the smashmouth Spinoza of upstate New York, kibitzed with Rebecca Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, on what it's like to give up Orthodoxy and any chance of not being hounded to an early grave by your parents. Also, Washington Post journalist Warren Bass, reconstructed lefty Paul Berman, and Mideast analyst Aaron David Miller partake in this fruitful discussion:

Last April, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Benoit Denizet-Lewis that seemed to be about how lots and lots of young men were getting gay married. 700 men age 29 or younger got hitched in Massachusetts. Trend! Or, as Choire Sicha put it in his excoriation of the story, "what else can the story be when an author points out a small group of people that are united by a common activity?" Now, California offers the gay marriage as well. So surely this trend of so many of the young gay men getting gay married must be rising still! Not according to today's Times!

With Fake Steve Jobs on sabbatical, Fake Jerry Yang has picked up the slack to chime in on Joe Nocera's scathing open letter in the New York Times. Shortly before the vulgarities is this little gem, which says more about the New York media landscape than it does about the Microsoft-Yahoo-Google three-way:

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera's open letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang over the weekend nicely captured Yahoo shareholders' rage over the whole Microsoft mess. But will they stop fuming long enough to read all 1,500 words? A version they'll be able to finish before their lawyers get done filing the next shareholder lawsuit, and Yang will be able to finish before the next top executive's resignation letter hits his inbox, below.

On Monday night at the Webby Awards, New York Times staff accepted their prize with the words, "Eliot Spitzer we thank you." Covering hooker drama went well for the paper last March, and the obsession still moves them. For the last three weeks, the Times has been investigating the complaints of escorts, first reported on Valleywag: that Dave Elms, the now-jailed founder of TheEroticReview.com, extorted sex from them in exchange for reviews on his popular site. According to a series of leaked emails, the story is currently stalled, as reporter Matt Richtel and his stringers can't find women who will speak on the record about their dealings with Elms. We verified the San Francisco-based Timesman's interest from Internet-working escorts, who are reluctant to give the paper interviews that will only further expose their business to scrutiny for all the wrong reasons. They have, however, offered Valleywag their preemptive corrections. Here's the story they hope the Times won't write:

There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so readers didn't get the idea that it still had, you know, integrity. But journalists are as much to blame as the business side for the fact that their work increasingly sounds like catalog copy. Here's ink-stained wretch Rob Walker in his most recent "Consumed" column for New York Times Magazine:

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is much better at heroically rescuing orphans from warzones than he is at writing a regular political column, has a very great and original idea. He thinks that Barack Obama, who is now the Democratic nominee for president, should write and deliver a speech about gender, much like he did about race, that one time. What a great and original suggestion! We loved the idea when some HuffPo lady suggested it back in April, when Slate ladies suggested it for Hillary in March, when Ellen Goodman suggested it in May, and we love it now. Unlike all those ladies who suggested it, though, Kristof has manly suggestions for a manly speech on gender issues.

After a long search, the New York Times Co.'s About.com has a new CEO, former Digitas exec Cella Irvine. We heard rumors the last one, Scott Meyer, was forced out in February; the management team, we were told, had threatened to quit if he wasn't. Commenters, including several claiming to be About.com employees, disputed the story. One, however, hinted at why Meyer really left:

Note to restaurateurs: spilling wine on Frank Bruni's dining companions is not the fastest way to his heart. That's what we learn from the Bruni's hilariously abusive zero-star review of Ago, Robert De Niro's Italian restaurant in the Greenwich Hotel. Said downpour of sauvignon kicked off his train-wreck of a meal. But this wasn't any old spill—"I'm talking about the "Poseidon Adventure" of wine spills. Shelley Winters could have done the backstroke in it." And this happened before Bruni was even seated. Somehow, some way, everything went downhill from there. Other amusingly terrible aspects of his dinner:

According to MediaMatters, irrelevant New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has a nasty habit of calling male Democrats fags and female Democrats mannish. Quelle surprise! [MediaMatters, Related, Related, Related]