The New York Times recently investigated the internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling—the fun-for-all-ages game of tricking people into clicking on a link that takes them to a Youtube clip of unlikely pop star Rick Astley singing his greatest hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up"—but they didn't do a very thorough job, considering that they were unable to track down Mr. Astley himself for comment (the LA Times found Rick and ran a lengthy, entertaining interview). They were also duped by a hoax clip of a "prankster" interrupting a college basketball game dressed as Astley and lip-synching the song. That performance, it turns out, happened before four different games, none of them the one the Times identified, and was not a halftime prank. And so, today, the Grey Lady runs a Rickrolling correction:

Arthur Sulzberger's bonus, now tied more closely to performance targets at his family's newspaper, the New York Times, rose 113% last year. Meanwhile, advertising revenues at the group were down 13.8% in December, compared with 12 months earlier.

New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier is unhappy that the New York Times printed an article about how sharia isn't so bad but they'd never print an article about how awesome the Torah is. We weren't crazy about the New York Times running that Styles piece about hipster farmers but you don't see us writing 1,000 words on it, Leon. [TNR]

A French media blog built a map of the world (well, a cartogram) according to how much each country gets covered by different news outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist, and Slate (shown). Below, a high-res version of the world according to the Times. [L'Observatoire via Boing Boing]

"This morning's New York Times scoops the Journal with a... Page One piece about JPMorgan negotiating to quintuple its offer for Bear Stearns. [Rupert] Murdoch can't be happy about getting trounced on the month's biggest business story. By softening the Journal's editorial focus, isn't he making this sort of humiliation inevitable?" [Slate]

Fort Greene is not gentrifying fast enough! At least that's the experience of cultural critic and dude about town Touré. The single-named author was living right across from a crackhouse on South Oxford street in Fort Greene, only a block away South Portland, Time Out New York's most desirable place to live in 2006. But even with a sushi place on the next corner, there was still a crack house across from his apartment. After a bout of black liberal guilt, Touré tried to get the po-po to clear the streets, but they ignored his calls. We don't judge Touré's conflicted anti-neighborhood crack house stance—since the advent of Google Maps, Mole Edition, we are all snitches now. [NYT]

Without fresh updates on the "constant gubernatorial sex scandal" front or the new and improved recession 2.0, the news can seem a bit slow. Maybe that is why New York Times This Land columnist (and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter) Dan Barry wrote eleven hundred words on a kid getting beaten up on the regular in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Exhaustion with scandal and financial ruin is the most charitable explanation for Barry's piece today on "A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly." You may wonder if this article talks about the larger trend of bullying or even a "Sordid Online World." But such hope would be lost on an article about a random kid, Billy Wolfe, who gets knocked around a lot.

"It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up," Dowd writes. "Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams." The "Hillerator" image was created by Gawker's Richard Blakeley, who notes, "Yes, I'm that bored today and no it didn't take me THAT long." [NYT]

In an otherwise humdrum piece on the death of mainframe computers, one print journalist took a moment to assure himself and his colleagues that the Internet was in no way a threat to their profession. "The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer," writes Steve Lohr. "But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media." So that whole issue? Just a bunch of alarmist hoo-ha all along. [NYT]

Oh former models like Veronica Webb. Please stop going around saying and writing things. Know why? You're dumb and people don't like you. Ms. Webb was blogging about how she would give Ashley Dupree, one of former Governor Eliot Spitzer's many call girls, a makeover when a bout of the very-stupids overtook her. For instance, saying that Dupree's "almond-shaped blue eyes are her best feature." Dupree, of course, has smokey brown eyes."Every king eventually meets his Beowulf," Webb observes. "Some survive and some don't." What do you suppose the commenters did with this?

The crap economy and the internet are turning America's super-stores into haggling dens where savvy shoppers and retailers negotiate sales without regard for sticker prices, according to today's New York Times. "'We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we're willing to look at that,' said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot." Haggling at Home Depot? That'd be kind of neat if it happened. But it doesn't-at least not anywhere in the article.

I recently reported on blogging secrets of the stars. But as a Valley worker, you may end up blogging on your company's site, not your own. Corporate blogging is very different from personal blogging, regardless of what The 250 will tell you for a small fee. So I created this stack of product-managerese slides on how to write a company blog worth reading.

What was that loud noise just now on the upper floors of the New York Times building?

San Jose Mercury News business and technology reporter Vindu Goel is returning to the New York Times, where he once interned as a young cub reporter, to be the new deputy technology editor. The Michigan and Harvard alum likes fine wine and long walks in the woods. The Times is hoping to boost its technology coverage, while the Merc loses yet another veteran from a once-esteemed tech-reporting staff.

One thing I like about being part of generation X, or generation Y or a millennial, or whatever the fuck we're called now, is that we're superficial and we know it. There's no pretense about caring about what's on the inside. That's why top doctors are going into dermatology and plastic surgery. Doctors want to make a "rewarding salary," just like patients would like "rewarding" breasts. [NYT]

Midtown Lunch, a food blog devoted to finding Midtown cuisine, tips us that New York Times writers were lining up with Port Authority staffers for free food at Sophie's Cuban on 40th Street between seventh and eighth. They're starving! And they probably even had to walk there! I'm still banned from Whole Foods for taking too many samples. Nice to know that part of me will never change. [via Midtown Lunch]

Last year, the Times canceled take your daughter (or son, both genders enjoy a day off from school) to work day. But they had an excuse: Children are annoying. Just kidding, the company was moving. This year, the Times is once again pretending that children are the future. Full memo from one of the first beneficiaries of the program, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., after the jump.

Yes, the New York Times sometimes accidentally lets a freelancer conduct an interview at a classical theater where she is a member of the board. And other times, the paper omits a divorce from the vows section under pseudo suspicious circumstances. But today, the New York Times explains, at depth and in language suitable for liberal arts graduates, the whole subprime mortgage situation. I think it has something to do with collapsing interest rates, a housing bubble and a domino effect? But the point is, I'm ready for a dinner party with rich people. Thanks, guys! [NYT]

You might remember the article about sex workers in the Sunday New York Times, "The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls," that interviewed a Williamsburg artist and "part-time prostitute," an internet escort raising money for her uninsured father's operation, and a dominatrix. The article appeared calm and fair, and didn't identify the working women as victims. However, one of the women profiled, the artist/part time prostitute "Faith O'Donnell," was unhappy with how she was represented. The article described her as "25, is a hipster with entrancing blue eyes who carries an NPR tote bag and might offer up a few pleasantries on the Whole Foods checkout line before turning back to her Junot Diaz novel." But that's not what irked her! On the sex workers' blog Bound, Not Gagged, she tells us "How the NYT Got an Interview Wrong: For one thing, basic details were wrong, but too many identifying details were included, despite my request to the contrary (I wish I had paid off my student loans!)..."

New York Times city reporter and author of new book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles Jennifer 8. Lee is sad. As she notes in her blog, "Someone added my Chinese name to my Wikipedia entry in simplified :( form." Oh, the perils of fame! "I have never in my life used the simplified character," Lee adds, "even when I was in Mainland China, I always wrote my name out with the traditional character... In case you are wonderig, my Chinese name means competitive. It's an unusual name for girls, and very striking. In traditional character it looks like two men running side by side (competition, get it?). You lose that in the simplified, sadly." Sad! (Click for offending entry.)