What happened to Jared Paul Stern's blog post for the Times? Earlier this month, Stern got his byline back into the well-groomed paper for the first time since he was accused of trying to extort money from billionaire Ron Burkle while working as a Post gossip hound. His piece for style blog the Moment, on the old-money clothing of William F. Buckley, was linked from Gawker March 9 and gone from the Times servers by March 12. The piece was a bit substantive by the Moment's fluffy standards but not, to my memory, remotely offensive. Does anyone have the faintest clue why it was removed? Did the Times get cold feet about working with Stern? Stern said he has no idea what happened, and the Times did not respond to two requests for comment over the past five days. Tips to ryan@gawker.com would be greatly appreciated. After the jump, an excerpt from Stern's Moment post:

It is indeed like a letter in a porn magazine, but Penthouse is not the publication that comes to mind: "Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick, / A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise. / I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze. / I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob. / I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees. / I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job." [New York]

For modern actors who have long suspected the Times of having a classical theater bias, now there is irrefutable proof. A Q & A with a director and cast member from the Classical Stage Company was conducted by a freelancer who is also on the Classic Stage company's board. Rosemarie Tichler, the writer who did the piece, told the New York Times about her affiliation, which her editor didn't notice. God, The Times will go to any length to push their classical theater agenda. [Fishbowl NY]

Before Rupert Murdoch aimed the Wall Street Journal against the New York Times, the Australian media mogul dispensed some friendly business advice. At a Times retreat in 2002, he advised Howell Raines, then editor of the Times, on how to conduct a newspaper war. Urging Raines to compete with the Journal in hard business news, he argued: "You ought to hit them where they live." The Times did indeed poach Larry Ingrassia from the Journal to strengthen its business reporting. But it's another Murdoch paper that's being hit where it lives. As Murdoch's New York tabloid, the Post, discovered last week in covering the disgrace of Eliot Spitzer, the formerly dreary Times has developed a taste for sex scandals. (By the way, Raines' anecdote is the centerpiece of the former Timesman's first media column for Portfolio magazine. So he finally filed something usable!)

Times orgy-loving rich lady Alex Kuczynski is fascinated with wood. Not just any wood, you see, but fashionable wood, old and knotty, the sort of wood driven across the country at great expense and used to erect a new home by some jerk who tore down his old home for not looking old enough. The topic of "reclaimed" wood raises all kinds of potentially interesting issues around the environment, design and class in America, but of course Alex is interested in none of that. She is focused on the big strong man who will give her his wood if she pays him enough money:

Things are so F'ed at the Times. First the buyouts and now they're cutting their late night shuttle van service from the office to Penn Station and Grand Central. The Times says increased safety around Times Square made the cut possible. But gentrification can't hide the truth: The internet age has made shuttle buses irrelevant. Telecommute home! Full memo after the jump. [via Media Mob]

Back in more civilized times, the New York Times never once mentioned the name Jennifer Fitzgerald. That name, Times vet R.W. Apple famously explained in Spy, was "known everywhere, and it is not used." Fitzgerald was the woman who supposedly had a lengthy affair with former President George H. W. Bush. The Times never even looked into the story. "All you've got is sordid gossipy bits," explained another reporter. The first reports of Bill Clinton's alleged extramartial affair didn't name the "Arkansas employee" who made the allegations herself. (Not until the tabloid The Star used her name was it safe to also do so.) Before the Post broke the story of Judith Nathan, the Times coverage of the end of then-mayor Rudy Giulaini's marriage to Donna Hanover was obnoxiously winking. Elisabeth Bumiller only named the mayor's good friend after Rudy and the Post beat them to it. Basically, how insane is it that the Times broke the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the hooker who took down Eliot Spitzer? And how insane was the story that broke it, what with its links to her MySpace profile and bizarre criticism of her "rhythm and blues" music? Arthur Suzlberger truly is "the prophet of the high church of journalism."

Yes, the fashion industry is just like high school, and Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn not only said it but proved it this morning with an article detailing, in no less than 1,400 words, her own petty squabble with designer Giorgio Armani. Aramani appears to be, by far, the pettier of the two, having banned Horyn from his fashion shows over a rough review in January and having sent a bitchy letter to her bosses. But Horyn has also been catty, writing repeated melodramatic accounts of the feud and casting Armani as something of a 1980s has-been, even as she puts on analytical airs. Here's a quick summary, in Horyn and Armani's own words, of their hissy little slapfest:

The New York Times was the first to track down "Kristen", the high-class prostitute whose two hours with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer ended his career. Her real name: Ashley Youmans, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre. She's 22, she's from Jersey, and she's newly single. Her MySpace profile is still live, if you'd like to listen to her demo. Or check out her top five! The kind-of insane Times story pretty clearly just went live because they knew their scoop wouldn't last. It summarizes her MySpace bio, quotes her talking about how she saw the Rolling Stones, and criticizes her demo song's "dated slang." And that's about it for news. But still, good show! Ashley's blog entry from Thursday, August 30 is full of awesome advice, so we will reprint it, below.

We all want free news. But newspapers want this funny thing they call a sustainable business model. The New York Times, after a failed experiment in asking people to pay for Thomas Friedman's consoling mustache, finally decided to go all in with a free site. For a paper with mass appeal, being free means more page views, which means more ad revenue. The Wall Street Journal has the luxury of banks and brokerage houses that will gladly pay for its exclusive analysis. But under Australian tyrant Rupert Murdoch, the Journal now wants a piece of that general audience too. And as the Journal introduces more politics and sports into their coverage, they're still wrestling with the paywall question, and Rupert's taking a surprisingly conservative path.

Things are a little awkward at the New York Times lately. The 'McCain possibly maybe having an affair' story was a flop, they just lost all-star critic Kelefa Sanneh to the New Yorker and their foremost legal expert, Linda Greenhouse, is taking a buyout. But if the Spitzer story has taught us anything, it's that hookers are a waste of money and that the New York Times' Metro desk is becoming the paper's (unlikely) best asset in this new new media battlefield.

New York Times Co. executives are bragging about their website and talking about selling off pieces of the company, possibly in response to pressure from two hedge funds that now control around 19 percent of the company and are in talks about seating directors to the company board. Speaking at a Bear Stearns conference, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson said the paper launched 50 — 50! — blogs over the past 12 months and that the paper's crowd-leading Eliot Spitzer coverage drove a 60 percent Web traffic increase. Times CFO James Follo, meanwhile, "said the company frequently evaluates how it is allocating its resources and would consider any asset sale that would be prudent for investors," according to the AP. "'We love all our assets but we're not married to any one of them,' Follo said. The New York Times newspaper was the sole asset he said was off the table." The Times' selloff talk is probably related to investor questions about whether the company is focused enough, an issue raised in the Times on Monday by an anonymous "person close to" the hedge funds pressuring Times Co.:

Did you know that NYT executive editor Bill Keller has a new book out? That's OK, neither did anyone else! It's called Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela, and it's sold 926 copies, according to BookScan. It's a biography for children from ages 9 to 12. As Portfolio points out, it didn't really get any press. Except, of course, for two mentions in the Times. [Portfolio Mixed Media]

Times Domestic Disturbances blogger Judith Warner is going on book leave. And we would love to make a joke about how she's run out of insights about the complexities of the upper middle class. But she already went there: "I am officially Out of Ideas." And it would be fun to mock how all of her friends are tired of giving her material for a column, but she beat us to that, too: "I spent a chunk of Wednesday ... hoping that someone would say or do something that I could turn into a column. But no one did ... for precisely that reason." So fine, Judy. Go on book leave. But when you come back, we'll be here to make fun of you. [NYT]

The New York Times broke the Spitzer story. They learned of it on Friday and forced his announcement yesterday. But their editorial board, and their Sulzberger family, love the governor soooo much. They love him, but they are also self-appointed guardians of middle class morality! And honor! So what to do? Write the most ridiculously mealy-mouthed editorial ever? Sure! While every other New York paper howled for Spitzer's head, the Times felt that he probably should maybe resign, or at least that it would be perhaps a bad idea not to resign, or something. That is the argument of the lead editorial of the most influential opinion page of the Upper East Side.

Here's New York Governor Eliot Spitzer apologizing for, well, no doubt you've heard. The scandal hasn't yet brought down Spitzer, but it did lay NYTimes.com low for a while.

William F. Buckley, the dead conservative hero and crypto-fascist, had an "authentic WASPy style" of "frayed Oxfords" and "unpressed Brooks Brothers suits" that helped him look especially aristocratic, like he could afford to abuse his expensive clothes, according to Times blog the Moment. The post is a fun compression of weightier fashion writing, but is at least as interesting for who wrote it as for what it says. The post marks the return to the Times of Jared Paul Stern, the former Page Six writer accused of trying to extort money from a subject of his writing, billionaire Ron Burkle. Prior to the extortion allegation, Stern had contributed to the Times as well as to the Wall Street Journal and other publications. After the fracas, Stern said he had been trying to get Burkle to invest in his fashion business. Stern then parted ways with Page Six, signed a book deal that was later canceled and lately has been trying to break back into the news media with lifestyle writing, including recently on Style.com. Landing on the Times website with a piece about a highfalutin' intellectual will no doubt help Stern distance himself from the seedier image of his Page Six days. Try to imagine the following on Page Six:

Sure, the Times has a reputation for tending to offer jobs to young writers with the right pedigree, but the paper's NFL writer Karen Crouse proves that a reporting job at the highfalutin' paper can still be earned the hard way. Crouse said that, prior to a surprise call from the Times in 2005, she felt "as if I was flying so far under the radar I was practically invisible. I've never been a shouter or a self-promoter, and in a profession rife with both, I thought that being conscientious and doing good work would only get me so far, that to ascend any higher required politicking or some secret handshake or both." Crazytalk! Here's the list of all but one Crouse's nine different newspaper gigs over the course of nearly 20 years, cribbed from a very good interview with the writer on the Big Lead:

Times South America reporter Alexei Barrionuevo has been basically pasting other journalists' copy into his stories since at least 2005. Last week, the writer was caught by Slate's Jack Shafer lifting and barely rewriting two sentences from a 2006 Miami Herald article for a front page story on the drug "paco." Now Shafer has discovered a 2005 story on cattle import restrictions that borrows five sentences from a Bloomberg wire story published the day before. The Times responded with a shrug:

A reader asks, of the oft-incorrect Times TV critic, "how many more mistakes can Alessandra Stanley make before she loses her job?" But as Freud said, or was paraphrased as saying, there are no mistakes. We ask you, why does she fuck up so often, and so obviously? What can possibly make a person decide to remember Everybody Loves Raymond as "All About Raymond"? Her corrections are cries for help. Let's open it up to the floor: what's wrong with Alessandra Stanley?