It's so refreshing to see a happy newsroom, for once. Pictured here, under a headline acknowledging the Washington Post's six Pulitzer prizes, cheering journalists. Except the photo is from the Post's rival, the New York Times, which only won in two categories. Graciousness has its limits.

Should we be worried that The New York Times, Newsweek and The Washington Post are buying out their old seasoned writers and leaving behind a bunch of young reporters who possibly don't know what they're doing? "No!" says Jack Shafer. According to Slate, these voluntary buyouts (also known as "If we pay you a large sum of money, would you please leave already?") are going to end up revitalizing journalism.

"Under the terms of his bail, [Barry] Bearak was released to a clinic; he suffered some injuries to his back as the result of a fall from the concrete bunk in his dark, crowded cell to the floor, seven feet below, Mr. Nkomo said. Mr. Bearak's passport was confiscated, and he was required to put up 300 million Zimbabwe dollars as bail, about $10,000 at official exchange rates but only about $7 at black market rates." [Times]

"The Gawker is the modern day version of Playgirl, a 'straight' publication gay men feel good about buying because they're tired of low quality faggy stuff the pink media puts out." That's former gay porn star and current conservative blogger Matt Sanchez's take, and no facts will get in the way of his analysis! We asked Sanchez, who believes all contributors to Gawker are homosexual, to comment on today's post about all the gays working at the New York Times. And the former Freshmen magazine cover model blows the doors off liberal media lies such as "the Gawker's stance that it is a non-gay website"!

America's newsrooms are in a state of excitement: the Pulitzer prizes for excellence in journalism have been awarded. Washington Post, winner in six categories, is said to be particularly febrile. "It's a pretty amazing atmosphere over here right now," one reporter told Media Mob. "The big editors are roaming around with big smiles." (Update: this is what counts as jubilation.) Too bad the payout is only $10,000 per prize: the Pulitzers aren't going to finance American journalism; in fact, one can make the argument that these self-congratulating awards, and the attention devoted to them, are symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.

Like all good cabals, the New York Times' contingent of gays has some known members-and other figures who remain in the shadows, the uncertainty adding to the paranoia of homophobic right-wingers.

Cyprus is an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, Cypress is a kind of tree, and the Times' Rome bureau chief doesn't know the difference. Well, he probably does, and makes the same sort of dumb spelling mistakes as the rest of us, but it's still fun to laugh at the copy editing notes shown above, which made it into the Web version of the chief's story on immigrant Italian chefs. Fun, that is, if you're an enormous dork like me. (Related: The "Old Country For Old Men" gaffe.)

Did you hear? Doing business in coffee shops is all the rage in San Francisco! Especially at this trendy little spot in the Mission you may not have heard of, Ritual Coffee Roasters. Seriously, if getting a table at Ritual wasn't hard enough already, you can thank the Times for making it that much harder — now every wannabe in khakis and a biz-dev-blue shirt will be jostling with the skinny greys set arriving on fixies for prime seating real estate. Since the Times seems to love reusing blog posts from 2006, I'll throw them a bone and present "The four cafes Times readers can be expected to ruin by 2009":

Remember the Howard Kurtz piece about how the New York Times and the Murdochifying Wall Street Journal have a little war going on, or something? As usual, Kurtz missed/buried the story. The Times refused to comment on bitchy things said by British-import Journal publisher Robert Thomson. But a "Timesman" apparently called up Toronto Life's Spectator blog to give his side. Huh. Maybe he thought his unauthorized comments wouldn't be noticed in a Canadian publication? "Whatever it says on the masthead, Thomson's the editor," Mystery Timesman reports. "He's moved his office next to the news floor." Murdoch will destory journalism!!! There's more off-the-record sniping and gloating, below.

Amid the jailing of Times reporter Barry Bearak, news organizations are rightfully getting scared shitless about covering the nation of Zimbabwe, where elections are believed to not be going well for the ruling government. So CNN took the unprecedented step of concealing its reporter's identity. The BBC blurred the face of its reporter. Huge credit to the networks for filing from a country where they are formally banned; apparently people in the streets are "absolutely thirsty for information" and get most of it from foreign outlets. CNN's anonymous report:

Times reporter Barry Bearak was frightened enough of authorities in Zimbabwe that he at first withheld his byline from today's front-page story about declining support for the ruling party there. But he later changed his mind and added his name online and to some print editions. He was promptly arrested by police in Zimbabwe, who have now said, according to AFP, he was "detained on suspicion of reporting without press accreditation. Zimbabwean authorities, who barred most foreign media from covering last Saturday's general elections, warned a week ago they would deal severely with journalists who sneaked into the country and were caught operating illegally." [via Radar, HuffPo] (photo via HuffPo)

Oh no: yet another macher proposing mayor Michael Bloomberg step in to save the New York Times. This time it's Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff who, like the Wall Street Journal's former managing editor and that shouter from cable, believes the besieged newspaper could do worse than seek rescue by New York's billionaire mayor.

Newspapers, now suffering a technological inferiority complex, weren't always so apologetic. The New York Public Library has a wonderful collection of confident posters, promoting newspapers such as the Sunday Herald and the New York Times, from the turn of the century. The issue of the Times here featured offers a selection of stories with a definite air of its current Sunday Styles section-except for a fascination with British aristocracy now superseded by Hamptons plutocrats. The pitch for a story about the market for heiresses in Britain-A Matrimonial Slave Mart-is more lascivious than the uptight Times would now allow. After the coverlines comes an awesomely cocky pitch: "Many Other Features Equally Good."

Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners scored a coup recently: The New York Times Co. agreed to nominate him and a fellow activist investor for a seat on its board. Did the Times do any due diligence on him? Galloway's chief accomplishment online is cofounding RedEnvelope, a San Francisco-based online retailer.

Boy is the Times ever surprised to hear that Richard Mellon Scaife likes Hillary Clinton now! Background: Scaife underwrote the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons that made the 90s so much fun. He gave The American Spectator two million bucks to create something called "The Arkansas Project," a fishing expedition that sought to uncover and publicize everything bad the Clintons ever did, ever, even the things they didn't do, and the things that weren't actually that bad. Then Bill Clinton was impeached for killing Vince Foster after their torrid sex affair, or something. But yesterday, Scaife announced that now he likes Hillary Clinton, quite a bit, because she sat down for an inverview with him and his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The Times notes how well this meeting went and how much of a surprise it is to hear Scaife say nice things about Hillary Clinton, but they don't note that they wrote this same story in February of 2007, the last time Scaife claimed to have totally come around on this Hillary Clinton character after a full decade of doing everything in his power to destroy her life. [Via Radosh, who suspects vast right-wring trickery.]

"There was an article in the Times about homeless people taking the bus to Atlantic City, and I was totally inspired," Rebecca Aronauer said from her Brooklyn apartment the other day. The inspiration was for Inconvenience Day, Aronauer's bi-annual birthday celebration, and the idea was to take a bus from Chinatown in Manhattan to Atlantic City in New Jersey. For everyone she knew, the trip would be a huge inconvenience. "I have friends from Jersey, and even they say Atlantic City is a pain to get to."

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz takes on Rupert Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal today, in Kurtz's inimitable "not actually taking anything on" style. Some say Murdoch will push the paper to the right or destroy its essential character! Others say he won't! What's indisputable, though, is that Murdoch's Journal is trying to establish (or re-establish) itself as a national paper, maybe a tough sell in a media landscape where only the New York Times really holds that title. But Murdoch's got lots and lots and lots of money! Fun facts: the newsroom staff is up to 750, from 600 two years ago. They are adding Washington and foreign reporters. Madness! It's almost as if no one told Rupert that print is dead. But the irreparable damage to the paper's character! What about that?

Even at a quarter, the New York Sun is tough sell. The paper is such a joke we don't even make it fun of it. At best, it's like an animal shelter for unemployed New York writers. But even if it's a bizarre Zionist vanity project, someone needs to move that paper. So it falls to the telemarketers to sell the paper's lies. A tipster sent a recording of the pitch. We've dutifully transcribed the absurd stuff, after the jump.

Back in the early aughts, moving to Buenos Aires was the totally hip thing to do. But now everyone's doing it. God, it's like you can't drop "independent studies at Brown" without 12 people turning around. And it's just like that in the media, too. First the Times plagiarizes, and worse exaggerates the coke situation in Argentina, and now the paper is lifting articles from Newsweek about the artist scene. Well, maybe. The Times ran a travel piece on Buenos Aires by Denny Lee two weeks ago that featured similar passages as the January Newsweek story. Lee quotes many of the same people, but seriously, those 12 Brown kids represent the entirety of the ex-pat scene there. Most egregiously, one of the people Lee quotes had moved to the U.K. in Spetember and claims that Lee never interviewed her. Ugh, Argentina is so tired anyway. Let's all move to Santiago, Chile and start news scandals from there. [via Mediabistro]

Researchers have figured out how to play back a rare audio recording from 1860 of what they insist is a person "singing" a "song," though it sounds suspiciously like someone abusing a pigeon. The discovery predates Thomas Edison's phonograph by almost twenty years, and it was produced by "a little-known Frenchman," so there's one more entry to the list of things Edison didn't invent that you were lied to about as a child. The Times piece on the discovery is by Jody Rosen, music critic for Slate—which could maybe possibly be a hint as to who will replace critic Kelefa Sanneh now that he's jumped ship to the New Yorker. (We've embedded the "Phonautograph Recording" after the jump. It's not very good.)