When News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch decided to sit down for a rare, on-camera interview, it was of course with two reporters from his own media empire, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. In this clip from the Journal's D conference in Carlsbad, California, Murdoch explains how he thinks the Journal and Times will be competing aggressively with one another on all stories — business, political or otherwise — within just "a few months." He also rants about how it's "ridiculous" that an average of 8.3 editors looks at a typical WSJ story, inevitable expanding it beyond reason. "People don't have time for it — there's not a story that you can't get all the facts in (within) half the space." Also: Murdoch confirms he was involved in the Post's decision to switch its allegiance from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.

Last week, Publishing 2.0 noted that the New York Times was finally using hypertext links in articles in a meaningful way. Welcome to the 20th century, Grey Lady! The Times invested in WordPress, which is used for the site's blogs, but the rest of the product? That required an expensive upgrade to CCI NewsGate, which comes with a $40 million price tag and is "very time consuming to integrate, especially across multiple properties," according to an editor at another major market daily.

Emily Gould, Day 9. The former Gawker editor turned New York Times Magazine covergirl (the article mentioned breakups and blogs) has childhood frenemies coming out of the woodwork! Second Skin interrupts their film's blog to let us know about a younger Emily, who was, not surprisingly, quite the little firecracker in middle school. Her antics occasionally resulted in backlash such as "An entire bottle of Sprite. Right on her head."

So. Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich has a sweet creative consulting deal with HBO. They give him a paycheck, and he will sometimes call them up if he has a great idea (and Frank Rich has thousands of great ideas every day). He will maybe read some scripts and give notes. Did we mention he gets a paycheck? We don't begrudge him this cushy gig, but he should BEWARE. Another respected cultural thinker once went down this road, Frank!

So. Remember how Harbinger Capital Partners is buying and destroying the New York Times and the very institution of journalism itself? Almost 500 of you should! While we've focused mainly on jocular idiot Scott Galloway, the marketing professor Harbinger forced onto the Times' board, we neglected to mention that the founder of Harbinger is a character in his own right. His name is Philip Falcone. He owns a hockey team! He bought Bob Guccione's house! Also: he and his wife donated the legal maximum to the Republican National Committee. His wife, by the way, is an aspiring novelist and Look Book participant. And a former "model" who maybe exposed her fake breasts in respectable Hollywood films. After the jump, embarrassing photos of the men who are destroying journalism and the women who are producing their babies. (NSFW!)

Remember how much you used to hate George Bush? Doesn't anyone want to call him a Nazi, for old time's sake? What if they bully the press a little? Sorry, guys. Outraged letters to NBC and the New York Times won't win you any more of the self-righteous liberal condemnation you crave. (The White House is mad at the Times because an editorial accurately described Mr. Bush's lack of support of an updated GI Bill.) [FishbowlDC]

Reggie Love is Senator Barack Obama's amusingly named "body man." He's a 26-year-old former college football and basketball player. Also he's really cool! The Times has a total crush on him, and they tell us all about how Mr. Love is totally good at sports and got Obama into hip-hop and fist-bumps reporters. (Or, as they put it, he "offers closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media.") He's with Barry all the time, and has pens and Sharpies and nicotine gum and stuff. He also makes sure no one ever tries to give the senator mayo or a second beer. And they play basketball! Soooo cool! No, seriously, he's really really cool.

When the Times shut down comments on Emily Gould's still-physically-unpublished magazine cover story Friday, we — OK, I — speculated the newspaper "might be having second thoughts" about the value of generating online buzz, "barring some kind of technical concern." Well, there doesn't appear to have been any technical concern, but, based on information from one Times source, it sounds more likely comments were closed to shift staff to newer stories.

So remember how, four days ago, everyone got upset because the Times magazine cover story was about some blogger, and there were more important things happening in the world? Well, now New York magazine has decided to take things a step further and publish a cover story about some blog commenter, because it's damned if it's going to be outflanked by the Times on cultural marginalia. And the magazine didn't trot out one of these fancy, gone-pro Manhattan media commenters, either: We're talking an anonymous, insult-spewing, death-wishing commenter on a blog about Brooklyn. Naturally, I read it to the end and loved every drop. The commenter in question is called The What and likes to post anti-gentrification messages on a site called Brownstoner. An excerpt!

It's a long holiday weekend, so perhaps by Tuesday there'll be nothing left to say about former Gawker editor Emily Gould's extensive New York Times Magazine cover story about sleeping with people and blogging about it and having panic attacks on bathroom floors? No? Well, in any case, The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, a Canadian, provides a tasty summary of the essay and the ensuing media cluster-fuck. "This was an extended blog post, an overlong 'Modern Love' essay, 7,937 words that did not venture beyond the author's own experience; for some perspective, the NYT's investigative expose on the Pentagon's purported ties to on-air military analysts had 7,486). And for what?"

The New York Times has learned a hard lesson: Say what you like about CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith — just don't criticize his duds. The bastion of class consciousness falsely claimed that he was wearing white shoes before Memorial Day — a big no-no among the ruling elite, where white shoes, seersucker and summer dresses are officially verboten except between the holiday that marks the start of the summering season and Labor Day, which marks the end.

Times editors are apparently tired of people saying mean things about Emily Gould and about their own decision to publish her meditation on blogging, because they've shut down the comments section attached to Gould's magazine piece. Some 727 responses flooded in before the shutdown, even though the article won't be physically published until the Sunday issue. Many called the former Gawker editor narcissistic, self-indulgent and a bad writer and said her story was a waste of space; there were supporters, including people who praised Gould for having moved on from vicious, inconsequential Gawker and for pushing them to reexamine their own online personas. Whatever was said, the decision to shut down comments is bizarre, because just yesterday Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati told FishbowlNY the story was worthy of his cover precisely because of the discussion it would spark:

Design blog Signal vs. Noise today reminded everyone of the 1997 Times infographic reproduced above. Nicholas Kristof, whose article on world disease featured the chart, declared in an old-but-recently-surfaced email that "no graphic in human history has saved so many lives in Africa and Asia." Apparently it persuaded billionaire Bill Gates to start donating his money to disease prevention instead of global internet access. Kristof said the Microsoft founder was too lazy to read the full, 3,500-world article:

Hey, bloggers! The countdown to the three-day weekend clusterfuck of examining and reexamining former Gawker editor Emily Gould's forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece may be cut short! Because The Observer has a copy, and it'll probably be online tomorrow. You are forewarned: there is a photo of a blogger at a laptop, blogging. It's just Emily's hands, though. According to Matt Haber, the piece is "heavily diaristic." Do you want to read about Julia Allison? Sure you do.

It would be too obvious as well as unreasonable to suggest that Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times's editor for interactive news, drag himself into the 21st century. Here's a more modest objective: understanding the mindset of his own colleagues. At this week's dire Mediabistro conference, Pilhofer scorned the "ridiculous" obsession of organizations such as Gawker with the popularity of individual articles: "I think we're a long way from reporters paying attention to page views." Wot?!

Avuncular Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich just signed a deal making him HBO's "creative consultant." Which means, according to Nikki Finke, "a consulting fee combined with payments for projects that get made." What it also means is that now he can get all his kids jobs on television too. (Zing!) [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

Which recently separated newspaper publisher has been seen regularly in the company of a woman from an even more famous dynasty? They're longstanding friends; she's still married; and she's too preoccupied with an illness in the family to think about the future. But that hasn't stopped the speculation. (Okay, so the newly separated newspaper publisher is pretty obvious: the New York Times' moose-loving Arthur Sulzberger. But the identity of his supposed lover is a surprise.)

Tech blogger Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft and now with Fast Company, spent some time hanging out in the Times' research and development division, which exists (really?), and filmed some of their wacky publishing experiments. One innovation, set to go online today, is a browsable interface to the Times' historic back issues, which have been available through search but which can now be viewed as a series of front pages through an interface called Times Machine. More interesting: A prototype newspaper rack with a digital window display and the ability to generate custom versions of the newspaper. Of course, newspaper companies like the Times have been imagining the future for decades, and have jumped in at the earliest stages of most technological leaps, from radio to satellite data transmission to the internet. But they've never known their customers well enough to lead in the application of technology, and it's by no means clear whether the Times can make itself the exception to that rule, geek lab or not. Judge for yourself after watching a video clip of the magic rack after the jump.

Shit, I know this one. Paul! No, wait... Bhudda! [NYT]

We won't have Katie Hafner (pictured here in a 2000 appearance on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer) to kick around anymore. Her former colleague Sharon Waxman, who left the paper in January, mentioned in an aside to an ode to fellow hacks hurt by the decline of the fishwrap business that Hafner had been laid off. If it were up to us, we'd have given "Blog 'Til They Drop" author Matt Richtel the pink slip. Just imagine: He might have to blog for a living, with all the perils implicit therein.