This week Susan Edgerley, an assistant managing editor, is answering questions from the public on the New York Times' website. Her job, according to her, is "to listen to the career aspirations of the people in the newsroom and help them realize them," and to help the paper integrate its web and print operations more closely. But according to a tipster with a grudge, Edgerley's real title at the Times should be Shouter-In-Chief!:

Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor responsible for publishing the controversial Muhammad cartoons that caused a global Muslim fundamentalist uproar in 2006—and which still threaten the life of one of the artists, who has been condemned by Osama Bin Laden— has a message for all the American papers that refused to publish pictures of the cartoons even as they were writing news stories about them: thanks a lot, pussies.

Our hard-partying reporter has no trouble finding bedmates among his media colleagues, but he plays fratboy when trawling for one-night stands on the notorious Manhunt. "I'm a writer, runner, ex-football player and Zeta Psi brother, bar-hopper, people-watcher-and I'm a blast," he writes. There's nothing that shocking in the profile: he lists the usual menu of kinky gay sex; and he's not the only person to have been caught out with an online ad. Here's the mystery: this journalist is on the biggest and most sensitive story of his career, and he's been rooting around in other people's personal lives. How on earth does he have time to trawl gay hookup sites? And why would he leave so many clues as to his real identity when he's so much in the public eye?

Sure, the current dicey economic climate has reduced America to nation of terrified food hoarders. But more importantly, it has cost us some of our annoying and unnecessarily strange advertising icons: Applebee's Wanda Sykes-voiced talking apple, and a bunch of guys running around in bizarre red pigtail wigs on behalf of Wendy's. Take a moment to mourn them. "Both campaigns were meant to attract younger diners," the Times reports. But they failed, because kids aren't doing as many drugs these days, I guess. The companies' new advertising strategy? "Hey, look at our food."

David Carr is a charming and competent media reporter, commuting to the New York Times from bourgeois Montclair where he lives with wife Jill and three children. But once he was in his own words a fulminating crackhead. Here's a sample from his forthcoming addiction memoir, obtained by Daily Intel: "Both of us were chronically, psychotically high, and I was spending all of my time lifting the blinds and peeking out at a world that I was increasingly scared to venture into."

Steampunk! According to the NYT's Thursgay Styles, it's a "subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives." They describe steampunkers as fusspots with a taste for gaslight-era style: "he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass." But steampunk's been around for a while, of course. Despite the length of the piece, glossed over is the fact that this hot new movement started with a book called the Difference Engine—in 1990!

There are several ways for reporters to sneak opinion into the supposedly hallowed news pages of the New York Times. The opinion can be dressed up as a "point of view"-which is different, somehow, executive editor Bill Keller recently explained in an interview with the newspaper's public editor. Or, in time-honored fashion, the reporter can simply find an academic or other expert to parrot the sentiment. But there's a third way: don't bother finding a real authority, which is so tiring; just make up the source, as the newspaper's John Broder just did, in today's article on Hillary Clinton's bitter-ender campaign: "A pop psychologist might say that Mrs. Clinton was showing symptoms of denial or of being divorced from reality, but she has said for months that she will not quit as long as there remains a mathematical possibility that she could capture the nomination."

The Post's Keith Kelly has been keeping close watch on the Times' recently-completed cull of 100 editorial staffers. He puts the number pushed out involuntarily at 15. Meanwhile the Newspaper Guild has filed a grievance over the way the cuts were carried out, and offered to negotiate better severance for older laid-off newsroom employees.

When Microsoft's bid for Yahoo fell through, hotshot reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin produced a scathing analysis of the deal-making skills of the Redmond software giant's boss, Steve Ballmer. 'Microsoft has tried to spin its reversal as a show of "discipline" and "self-control." But what it really shows - painfully - is Mr. Ballmer's indecisiveness about this deal.' Ouch! And fun! But you won't find Bill Keller and his fellow editors boasting about Sorkin's punchiness: because they're still in denial about the blurring of news and opinion, and so much else.

Denver Post columnist Al Lewis is on a crusade. A cranky Starbucks crusade! "How 'bout a slice of lemon to go with that $2.10 iced tea?" he asks, rhetorically. Because there is no lemon! Other places, they give you lemons. But fancy-schmancy Starbucks? No lemons. Don't blame Al Lewis. He's written (multiple) columns! He's sent his concerns all the way up the chain to the CEO! And now he knows why Starbucks' stock has lost half its value in a year: because they can't get Al Lewis a freakin' slice of lemon:

Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008.

We get all types of PR pitches around here, and, as you might imagine, many of them suck. So we're going to list the three worst ones we've gotten so far this week, and ask for your considered judgment on which is the worst of all. The winner may be specially ridiculed in a future post! Our three entrants: The aforementioned New York Dance Parade pitch, urging us to publish a story on "socialdancing" lest we lose our job; a pitch for Time Out New York's sex issue, which opened with "Feeling hot and bothered? So are we, and we've got the boners to prove it," and touted its "interactive pole, I mean poll"; or a pitch from the Brooklyn Paper promising "Breaking News," reading "Here we go, folks — a hot one (with video!). Enjoy." Which was, disappointingly, for this inane video of two dudes sitting in an office discussing marginal news. Don't overpromise! Cast your vote below:

Oh, the possibilities of technology! They're just too much. Brooklyn Paper editor (formerly of the NY Post, Newsweek, and a book about male-pattern baldness) Gersh Kuntzman and senior reporter Mike McLaughlin made a totally nerdy "breaking" podcast about law-firm lies, filmed in front of file folders in a glamorous flourescent-lit office. Gersh is pretty cute in that editorial sort of way, but this vid (sorry, "podcast") is silly, guys. Just write an article about it or something. Update: Gersh replies, "I object strongly to being called 'pretty cute.' Clearly, you should have referred to me - as other media do - as 'Clooney-esque' (though they may have been referring to Rosemary Clooney)." Don't push it, mate. [Brooklyn Paper]

The New York Times-reeling with the rest of the newspaper industry as advertising dollars and readers shift to the web-has completed its first ever newsroom layoffs. Editor Bill Keller told staff this morning that the newspaper had completed the cull of about 100 reporters and editors it began earlier this year.

The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."

Each time Sam Zell's Tribune Company lays off journalists, puts a title on the block and bemoans the economics of news publishing, his ebullient new innovation czar ups the change rhetoric. Lee Abrams' latest memo, after a visit to Zell's Los Angeles Times, takes incoherent optimism to the level of prose poetry. "BE the city...in 2008. Look forward. Combine Passion with character and muscle. Operate with a sense of swagger that YOU are the city...on today's terms. ...and getting in sync with the speed of 2008 with fast, medium and deep options... and STIMULATING THE EYE."

Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative rarity. More common—and more threatening, if you happen to be a US newspaper employee—is the large-scale outsourcing of advertising department work. People in India can assemble newspaper ads just as well as people here, and "many sources agreed that a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that metro newspapers can realize a savings of about $500,000 a year when ad production work is offshored."

A crazy man may be videotaping YOUR crotch. And putting the footage on the internet for all to see! The Post, in what is (trend alert) almost surely another story developed solely by poking around on YouTube, alerts the city to a man known only as "househead7d5." He enjoys taping men's crotches—at a phone booth, on the bus, on the subway—and posting the videos online, with clever comments like, "guy on the phone showin a little......gay sweatpants bulge phonebooth NYC," or, even creepier, "I love it when they fall asleep! not the biggest basket but he was a cutie pie nonetheless!" So who is this penis-peering multimedia madman? After the jump, we will investigate!

"Jack Flack" at Portfolio.com is one of a small handful of bloggers who writes things that are interesting and intelligent about corporate PR. One of his trademark constructions is "Parsing XYZ," where he takes some statement or speech or press release full of corporate doublespeak and decodes it. I identify him so closely with that stuff that I even gave him credit the last time I used the word "Parsing!" But not so for the Wall Street Journal, which ran a column last weekend with a premise virtually identical [see update also, below] to an earlier Jack Flack column: