The Iraq War is over, according to the fake New York Times! This morning a cadre of volunteers has fanned out across New York City to pass out a remarkably good, faux-copy of the Times dated July 4, 2009. They've even set up an entire website with all of the liberal fantasy headlines. Universities to be free! Bike paths to be expanded! Thomas Friedman to resign, praise the Unitarian Jesus! It's not funny like The Onion, but obviously a lot of work went into this. Now we play "Who did it?" We already know!: We have done some sleuthing based on intelligence received yesterday. First of all, this stunt needed a lot of volunteers to distribute the papers. They were rallied online, via BecauseWeWantit.org. This email went out to the collaborators last night:

Jerry Portwood is the editor of the New York Press, and he does a lot of theater reviews. Like lots of theater reviewers, he gets free tickets for plays from publicists. But last week, he was abruptly disinvited and taken off the list for the play "The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents," just before he was scheduled to attend. The reason: the play's publicist didn't like a NY Press story that pointed out that the play's publicists were marketing it by hyping up the fact that Meryl Streep's daughter is a cast member. Losing a pair of free tickets isn't the world's biggest tragedy, but it brings up the interesting question: How are flacks supposed to handle bad press? Answer: a lot better than this. The shortest bit of advice that smart PR people can take about bad press is to just suck it up. Nobody likes a negative review, but you have to take the long view of things. Cutting off news outlets for one story you didn't like is the equivalent of selling all your stocks as soon as the market has a bad day; a panicky way to ensure that you get nothing good in the future. Jerry Portwood tells us that when he spoke to the PR guy in question,

Vivian Schiller, the General Manager of NYTimes.com, is leaving the Times to become the president and CEO of NPR. National Public Radio, people! This is a huge announcement for lovers of the liberal media. Schiller has overseen lots of evolution at the paper's website—including the rollout of comments—which is the single best thing the Times has going for it. She became famous for her weekly memos and her devotion to slideshows. The Times had better choose her replacement very carefully. Her going-away email to the staff is after the jump:

The FT, the Western world's last remaining respected financial paper not owned by Rupert Murdoch, has unveiled an early version of the redesign of its website's homepage. And we'll be damned if it doesn't look way more like a blog than like a traditional newspaper site. The clear messages: the online medium continues to assert its precedence over print; even the rich love blogs; and bloggers all deserve to be paid more money. Click here to peruse the prototype, or click through for a larger picture.

The financially-struggling New York Times should simply stop printing new papers and stick to 11/05/08 editions forever, as their endless pimping of the commemorative paper suggest that's the only one people want to buy. They've been running house ads which inform that we can buy an "actual New York Times newspaper on Nov. 5, 2008, which boldly reported Obama's decisive victory over John McCain. Price includes the full newspaper with a resealable plastic envelope." It's available for the low price of $14.95 (please allow two weeks for shipping.) In fact, they've cordoned off a section of their online store, nytstore.com/obama, in order for you to buy anything Obama-related. OMG—due to high traffic, the site's overloaded!

You just don't expect this sort of thing in small-town Tennessee: a columnist for the Murfreesboro Post has—we think it's safe to say—won the prestigious "Most Racist Newspaper Column About Obama's Election" contest (edging out Maureen Dowd). Columnist Stephen Lewis' "Ode To President Obama" keenly dissects our new commander in chief's ascension "To a deee-luxe pimp pad" in Washington, through the prism of The Jeffersons. Sing along, race-mixers!:

Britain's Guardian profiled Jared Kushner, and while the Observer owner makes some positive noises about his company, the salient facts are as follows: After two years and a purported 40 percent revenue increase, the paper is still losing about $2 million per year. Kushner said he is " definitely scared about newspapers" and compared the industry to "a falling knife." And despite having Ivanka Trump on his arm, Kushner was recently turned away from fading nightclub Bungalow 8:

One of the best parts of that juicy NYT story yesterday about all the infighting in the McCain- Palin campaign was the fact that a huge chunk of the story was given over to exploring who was leaking to sniveling conservative columnist Bill Kristol—a Times columnist! It's pretty unusual for a paper to start digging on its own columnist's confidential sources, but hey, it's Bill Kristol and nobody at the Times likes him, so they just went for it. That prompted some further review by the Daily Beast, which concluded, yep, Bill Kristol is basically just a lackey for political operatives:

Rember how Obama's election was the greatest thing to happen to the newspaper industry in a decade? People lined up across New York City to buy copies of the New York Times proclaiming his victory! And the smart ones put those copies right on Ebay. This chart shows the average of the five highest prices paid on Ebay each day for that November 5 issue of the NYT. One early seller fetched $400; today you can have your pick for less than $30. Oh, the metaphor.

Did you know there were stories in Wednesday's New York Times that weren't about the election? Mike Birbiglia, a fairly successful actor-comedian who got a great break—a profile in the Times for his new off-Broadway show. That profile ended up running on November 5th, the one day people actually wanted to buy newspapers. Remember that? People were lining up around the block to snag a copy of that day's Times. As he explains on 23/6, he couldn't even find a freaking copy to send to his mom!

Lynn Sweet is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times who led the outraged howling over the Obama campaign charging the press extortionate prices to cover his election-night rally in Chicago. Yet even she has been brought in line by the Obama charm! During the just-completed press conference Sweet stood up with a broken arm and allowed that she had broken it covering his rally, and Obama gave a sweet answer and flashed the biggest smile ever and in one fell swoop made Lynn Sweet America's most famous reporter for a day and also a lady who probably would like to smooch Barack Obama right on the mouth. Click to watch the exchange. [UPDATE: Bonus Observer story on Sweet too!]

The urge to draw, literally, a link between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama would have been irresistible to editorial cartoonists even if both men were not Illinois legislators, outspoken against a foreign military adventure and exploitive of their hardscrabble upbringings in the national hinterlands. Who better to juxtapose with the country's first black president than the commander-in-chief who emancipated American slaves (even if Obama's ancestors were not among them)?

A 67-year-old fella in Bellingham, Washington named Thomas Baldwin spent $1,700 buying up 10,000 copies of the Bellingham Herald's November 5 "Obama Wins" edition. Baldwin has a friend "who sells copies of newspapers that are decades old at trade shows," and he reckoned that there might be a profit in those there papers a few decades down the road. Let's leave aside the spectacle of the garage full of rotting copies of the Bellingham Herald that will inevitably be the inheritance of Baldwin's children and just point out to Mr. Baldwin—hey, the entire newspaper industry is on the phone for you with a very attractive price on several thousand copies of the March 26, 2003 "Troops trudge ahead" issue of the Anniston Star. Think about it. [Bellingham Herald via Romenesko]

How did fameballs get famous in 18th-century Britain? They died! Now that we have the Internet, you don't have to wait for your own death to get written up in the papers—you can publish all your career-killing overshares yourself. But back then, "research by the University of Warwick shows [that] death gave birth to the modern cult of celebrity, as the sudden rise in the popularity of obituaries of unusual people in the 1700s provided people with the... equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine," says Eureka Alert. It was often the eccentrics "from all walks of life" that people loved to read about, such as a man who would "hire himself out to impersonate a doctor and tell fortunes in a fur cap, a large white beard and a worn damask night gown." Hm, what sort of eccentrics would we write about today in those obits? Perhaps a girl from the Midwest who came to the big city, and whose quest for any sort of fame involved buying 180 candy bars, removing the wrappers, and stitching them together to make an eye-catching outfit:

We all know that print is dead and so forth but, darn it, nobody can deny that today is a great day to be a newspaper. Everybody wants a souvenir of Obama's victory, and you know what makes a great souvenir? That's right, a newspaper. This is a photo of a line outside the NYT building on 40th Street of people waiting—for a newspaper! Incredible. Reports of news stands from Brooklyn to Manhattan actually selling out are flooding into Gawker HQ!:

If you haven't picked up a copy of the Times today, don't bother. Vendors across the city report they sold out this morning as people snatched up multiple copies to keep as collector items. Let the Ebay sales begin! [City Room]

It was a mercifully brief presidential election night, if you consider the period effectively over once a clear winner has emerged. By 10 pm. Eastern, newspaper editors could put crisp, definitive headlines atop their front pages. Some European newspapers managed the same, either by way of special editions or the quaint tradition of afternoon publishing. Papers on several other continents also heralded the election results with some, such as Barcelona's el Periódico below and Diario do Comercio in Brazil, running high-concept covers emphasizing the election's deeper meaning for American culture. One briefly wonders what sorts of words and images they would have reached for amid a McCain victory. But it is much more satisfying, really, to feel the world gaze on America with approving eyes once again. A blow-up of the newspaper headlines is after the jump.

For screenshots from major websites, see here and here. [via kottke]

Before the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, when newspapers were read by everybody, the morning-after headers had much more urgency. (Hopefully we won't have another "Dewey Defeats Truman" debacle, though.) Newseum has a slideshow of post-election newspaper front pages. (Tomorrow's heads should read, "As you already read on the Internet/saw on TV, so-and-so won.) But hey, remember that great Chester County Times headline after Abraham Lincoln was elected? It was a "clean sweep!"

Has Rupert Murdoch made a terrible miscalculation? Michael Wolff thinks so! Wolff, Murdoch's newest biographer, says that the New York Post's uncharacteristically fawning Obama-centric cover today is Murdoch's way of apologizing to the future president (Obama) for the Post's endorsement of McCain. In fact, it's been widely rumored for months that Murdoch wanted the Post to endorse Obama. So what's going on here? Rupert Murdoch has always been canny about getting in good with those in power, even if they're from the party he opposes. He made nice with Tony Blair in the UK. And the Post did in fact endorse Obama over Hillary Clinton, once it was clear Obama would win. Besides that, Murdoch's pet paper the Sun in the UK pretty much deified Obama. And even Fox News managed to work out an Obama interview with Bill O'Reilly, when they weren't calling him "Osama" and such. So why didn't Rupert just get the Post to go ahead and endorse Obama in the general election? Two reason. One of those reasons is named "Sarah Palin." Murdoch flirted with her coyly, and ended up tentatively supporting her convoluted policy proposals in public. It may be that he fell in love with her personality (the same mistake McCain made), or just came to the conclusion that, dumb as she is, at least she wasn't likely to push for any more regulation of his business if she came into office when McCain keeled over. The second reason is more basic: a Post endorsement of Obama just wasn't practical. It would defeat the paper's very reason for existence, which is to be a rabid conservative voice in the midst of the liberal NYC media. So Rupert Murdoch just allowed them to endorse McCain, then set about sending every possible signal that he's willing to be friendly with Obama after he wins. Not that dumb after all.