This week, motorcycle enthusiast Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, said that his department is starting a new blog, "The Board." It'll join the paper's 14 other Opinion section blogs, including the Opinionator, which discusses the op-ed pages of other newspapers and will benefit from being freed from the Times now-dead paywall, TimesSelect. The Times looks to be the newspaper blog leader—they have 40 active blogs, not counting seasonal blogs like David Carr's movie awards season craziness, beating the Guardian with 18, the New York Daily News with 22, the Wall Street Journal with 16 active blogs, the Los Angeles Times with 27, the San Francisco Chronicle with 26, the Miami Herald with 31, and the Chicago Tribune with 33, for a random sampling. But. Do you read any of these blogs?

We like to take stock of the journalism job market through the most obvious raw data: Job listings! This week, the Chicago bureau of the New York Times posted an ad for a reporter/office clerk/stringer. You should have: a minimum of a "few years" experience at a newspaper, and should be able to order office supplies while reporting other people's stories—and you should know that the "right applicant will care more about getting good stories and learning the craft than about the paycheck." So we're going with: The job market unrelentingly sucks.

While doing a bit of research today, we were guided to this delightful essay from over the winter by new Mediabistro-selling millionairess Laurel Touby's dad, Frank Touby, who's a columnist up in Canadia.

This morning's opening session of the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention at the Marriott Marquis did not, for the most part, stray from the now-tired narrative about newspapers and their modern troubles. The publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, the rather improbably named Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., said that newspapers are preserving something called youth-oriented content. (Think of the children!) Journalism, he reminded the crowd, advances a great value to the nation. The crowd seemed to totally agree! John Sturm, who is the president of the Newspaper Association of America—whose board has five women among its 35 members, including Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson—made a joke about the Broadway play Spamalot, which some conference attendees are attending tomorrow night. Synergy! He also said that the Internet is the future. "When you add everything together, our audience is increasing!" he promised the crowd.

• Oprah Winfrey endorses Barack Obama. Hell, if she can move copies of The Road she can probably sell anything. [NYT]
  

Just in: Rupert Murdoch and his fleet of News Corp. flying monkeys have made an unsolicited offer for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, for $60 a share. This morning, shares in Dow Jones were trading at around $36. The shares shot up to nearly $55 by 11:15 a.m., and trading has been halted. (Note nifty Yahoo finance graph!) Hold on to your hats! And pants! And mostly wallets!

News Corp. Bids For Dow Jones [CNBC]

• The rumor that Anderson Cooper showers in his underwear at the gym? Decidedly untrue. Anyway, who does that? That's crazy! The gym men would have been staring at him and pointing! [Towleroad]
  

With newspaper redesigns happening every other week—and more and more of them being conducted by fun-loving text-haters like Mario Garcia—readers are getting more strident attempts at impact shoved in their faces. This guy's gone through the fairly new LA Times and counted 22 font uses (not, probably different fonts, as he says, but definitely different stylings) above the fold.

• Maer Roshan, the "battle-scarred veteran" of the "buzz-intensive media hothouses" that are New York and L.A. is back, and this time "the buzz seems to be moving back in his favor." That picture can't hurt. [WSJ]
  

Here's how the big three local papers covered the tragic passing of Anna Nicole Smith (that'd be the Times at right, of course. Damn you, Keller, show some goddamn respect!). But what about the rest of the country? We took a quick look at the front pages of some random American journals.

If we were a newspaper cartoonist drawing a cartoon about the state of the newspaper industry, we would currently be sketching another nail being driven into a coffin that we had helpfully labeled "newspaper industry." E&P reports:

We're at a loss to send up this column by the Seattle Times' Danny Westneat on small-town-paper nostalgia, primarily because Westneat's laundry list of recollections already seems to combine equal parts treacle and David Lynch:

The release of the newspaper circulation number has been a revelation, and it's not just the kids over at News Corp who are giving each other fives. James Boyce of the Huffington Post does a little dancing on the grave, picking on his hometown Boston Globe, whose circulation fell 6.7%, and touts the emergence of blogs, sounding much like the G.O.P with its "mandate" about two years ago.

• The news is still big; it's the newspapers that got small. [Slate]
• David Carr asks: Is CNN news or entertainment? What, it can't be both? [NYT]
• Pissing off Dick Cheney was not, in fact, the Times' reason for running its financial-records-spying story, says Bill Keller. [NYT]
• As we already told you, WWD media man Jeff Bercovici is going to Radar. WWD media woman Sara James, however, is not. She's leaving Women's Wear — we're sure of that — but it's just unclear where she's going. [Jossip]
• Roger Ailes thinks with Fox Newsies aren't working hard enough. [B&C]
• Wednesday will be Charlie Gibson's last day at GMA, and his feeling will be hurt if he doesn't get as many video tributes as Katie did. [USAT]
• Spiers steals David Lat from slutty sister Wonkette for her nascent juggernaut. Next time, she'll just twist Denton's nipple directly, without the intermediary. [WWD (second item)]
• Bigshot VCs give people like Rafat Ali — proprietor of the distressingly capitalized paidContent.org and, years ago, an intern where we used to work — money. [WSJ]

• We did not go to Slate's pre-party panel discussion last night on the future of newspapers in the internet age, as we long ago decided we'd never attend another print-vs.-web panel. Others have a more flexible stance on this issue. [E&P]
• Speaking of The Note, Eric Boehlert kind of hates it. [Wash. Monthly]
• Lauren Weisberger's eye-catching title, The Devil Wears Prada — by which we mean the actual four words of the title — perhaps wasn't even her own coinage. The horror! [WWD]
• Look, mom! We're in Nexis! [Media Mob/NYO]

A reader writes of the latest marketing stunt, occuring on the corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street:

Avenue publisher Manhattan Media annouces today their plans to publish Our Town Downtown, a spin-off of ancient uptown mainstay Our Town. Oh, good — we were just recently lamenting that there weren't enough free newspapers blowing around the streets these days.

• Fortune editor to co-write Alan Greenspan's memoir. He's say he's excited, but that might be viewed as irrationally exuberant. [NYT]
• And Ted Turner will likely have a memoir coming, too. [NYP]
• More and more newspaper advertising is shifting to web. Um, duh. [NYT]
• Elizabeth Vargas needed that anchor chair like a fish needs a bicycle. Honest. [Phil. Inq.]

Oh, sweet baby Jesus, it's here: the Times of London has crawled off the Mayflower and hits New York and New Jersey newsstands today. Priced at a steep $1, the British import assumes the role of Rupert Murdoch's "classy" paper — but, just like lots of classy things, we're not sure we want any part of it. If we're going to buy a daily piece of News Corp., wouldn't we want to buy the Post? We'd rather put our quarters towards a paper as endearingly disreputable as New York itself.

There's interesting ad in this week's Advertising Age. (Click on it to enlarge.) It might even be unprecedented, as some have suggested to us. It's from the Daily News, and it touts the tab's dominance over the Post. More New Yorkers read the Daily News, the ad brags. More buy it. It has more ads. Its online audience is growing. A cynic might point out that the accompanying charts aren't nearly to scale, but, even so — and nothwithstanding the atrocious grammar in Point 3 — the claims seem to be entirely true. Which would make, at first glance, this ad seem like endorsement of the News's great success over its rival.