There's a limited number of ways you can make "election day" a front page, above the fold headline. Because, you know, nothing will be "news" until tomorrow. So you can "report," as many papers do, that people will choose someone (YOU DECIDE, YOU CHOOSE, IT'S UP TO YOU), today, with a big splash featuring both candidates' headshots. You can try to make some actual "news," as the Times and the Wall Street Journal do with stories on how historic everything is and what the winner will inherit. You can report on all the boring campaigning of yesterday, or predict electoral chaos, or, as the New York Post admirably did, just pretend there isn't even an old white Republican in this race. The papers in the attached image chose almost exactly as you might predict. A couple papers across the world went a different direction.

There's so much bad news in the print media world these days that we just have to roll it all up for you in one convenient post that you can read here, on the internet, where we are responsible for killing print. Today in the Death Of Print Daily: Big layoffs at Rodale and the Seattle Times, the death of Out Traveler, and a tipster describes just how poor the Village Voice is these days:

Now is the time when campaign reporters file their last, wistful dispatches of this hellbound two-year horse race. There is an absolute mess of these things! They all serve to fill space on the final, news-free days of the campaign, and also to remind readers of the invaluable role that the true heroes—political reporters—play in our democracy. We've slogged through the morass of remembrances today in order to answer the meta-question that really matters: what did this campaign mean to the media? You have to remember that for a lot of reporters, today is the last gasp of glory. By the end of this week the campaign will be over, and there will be far fewer opportunities to go on TV and be "experts." There may also be far fewer opportunities to be, you know, reporters; some percentage of these people are bound to be laid off in the coming year. We already know that the LA Times will be laying off the bulk of its Washington bureau. And most ofl those plucky young embedded reporters from TV networks are preparing to be fired when this thing wraps up. Everybody wants to make sure that you know that they were on the inside. Just because you, the consumer, didn't get all the colorful anecdotes in your morning paper doesn't mean that they didn't happen. Reporters have all types of fun memories from the campaign that they would like to share with you now that the campaign is over! Most of these fall into two categories: the "God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication," and the (more popular) "I made friends with important people!" Some key examples of each: God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication Michael Scherer from Time went to some Republican retreat in Michigan where politicians "came there to speak to state party activists, serving up stump pomp while waiters in white-tie tuxedos served drunk diners with pecan-coated ice cream balls." Then he finds a regular lady who says everyone in town is not like that. He rejoices. HuffPo's Sam Stein was set upon by a gang of disgruntled Hillary supporters in a Washington bar. "And soon the denizens were letting me have a piece of their mind. 'HuffPost sucks! HuffPost sucks!' they chanted, as I bit into my now-arrived Reuben. 'Fox News, fair and balanced! Fox News, fair and balanced!'" Although he does not say so, he hates them. Marc Ambinder from the Atlantic recalls watching Obama's little daughter Sasha talking to her daddy on stage at the Democratic convention; it "was very cute, but it also revealed how staged even Obama’s campaign had become." The thought of a little girl talking to her dad now makes him want to absolutely vomit. Politics has ruined him. I made friends with important people! Wacky old Dana Milbank from the Washington Post remembers Mike Huckabee "taking reporters hunting, taking them jogging, taking them to the barber for a face massage and shave." Dana Milbank would not object to being asked to appear on Mike Huckabee's teevee show, if Mike Huckabee so chose. Ana Marie Cox from Time had fun singing karaoke with McCain campaign hacks Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt. Salter even sung Dylan tunes! Later they went back to figuring out how to oppress black people. Adam Nagourney from the Times liked nothing better than sharing his Christmas dinner with failed Hillary flack Howard Wolfson: "We were quick to discover that there aren't a lot of restaurants open in Des Moines on Christmas night (or bars, but that's another story). But what was open was sure to warm the heart of two displaced Jews from New York: A Chinese restaurant." Aw! Then they made passionate love. You see, just about everyone on the campaign trail goes a little crazy. It's classic Stockholm syndrome; trapped on buses and planes for months on end, reporters come to regard their captors as friends. Just to get a fact-free look back at the election season to fill a hole in its Week in Review section yesterday, the NYT had to turn to Frank Bruni, who's spent the entire campaign eating brains at Manhattan's finest restaurant. But they needed an outsider who could say about this godforsaken campaign, presumably with a straight face, "that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times." Had they put Adam Nagourney on that story, the editors would have had to spend hours rewriting his knowing asides about Howard Wolfson's bewitching cologne. For the media, the campaign means life. It means purpose, and employment, and attention, and a sense of self-importance. It's an unparalleled opportunity to cast oneself as an expert with no qualifications whatsoever, and to profess to speak for millions of "real Americans" without any factual basis. In reality, campaign reporters have a far less objective view of the Presidential race than a fat, laid-off auto worker sitting on his ass playing XBox in the ugly part of Toledo. It takes a rare breed to remain sane during the ordeal. And we should salute those who do. So Joshua Green of the Atlantic, we salute you; you alone have found a moment that appropriately embodies American democracy:

Here's a new ethical conundrum for Randy Cohen, advice columnist for the New York Times magazine's Ethicist: is a letter-writer obligated to tell an advice columnist that their ethical dilemma has already been dealt with by the same paper? We were wondering if the Ethicist stole a letter from the Social Qs column that runs in the Sunday Styles—after all, they printed the same question this week that appeared in the Styles in September. Well, we heard from Beth Rose Feurstein, the woman who sent the question to both columns, which involved a blind date who turned out to be a serial blind-date-canceller who kept invoking the same "got hit while riding my bicycle and ended up in the ER" excuse. And she says when the Times fact-checker called, she didn't bother to let them know that the question had already run:

How's that going? They're grooming the Trump daughter to marry boy-mensch and 27-year-old New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. But first they've got to beat the Gentile out of her! Of course the YNet's Jewish World has something to say about it, declaring Kushner the "perfect match" and informing us that " following her husband-to-be's request, Ivanka has begun the conversion process at the Kehilath Jeshurun Synagogue in Manhattan's Upper East Side." Has she been turned away by a rabbi three times, as is the custom? Update: But Kushner & Trump are not engaged as this article suggests, says Robert Sommer, Observer Media Group President. Apparently, they're just really seriously going steady.[YNet]

Lydia's Halloween costume is what's killing print. The publishing heiress and model referenced her recent little scandal of quitting her "column" in Page Six magazine by dressing up as the tabloid for a party last night. Cute, Lydia—but Britney Spears wore this exact same costume years and years ago:Update: "I am Lydia's PR. don't you get it? She is being Britany !!!! that was her costume? can't you tell that they are wearing the same outfit? Duh Gawker!!!!" (When we finally get the juice to hire a PRgay, we're gonna go with one who uses periods and questions marks properly?)

The salacious title of the Weinstein Co.'s new Kevin Smith flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno is proving to be a bad decision. It's already screwed up the movie's marketing efforts. Must it lead to stilted reviews as well? "And so it will hardly be shocking that 'Zack and Miri Make a Porno' is about two people, named Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), who make what my copy editors would prefer that I call a pornographic movie," writes A.O. Scott in the Times today. To be fair, the Times is full of pussy-ass hoes.

♦ What does Bravo have in the works to replace Project Runway if it moves to Lifetime? There's a Runway ripoff called The Fashion Show. There's also Celebrity Sew-Off, in which "celebrities" will compete in a competition for their own clothing label, which should be totally awesome because we've always wanted to buy jeans designed by Jill Zarin. [THR]
♦ The sponsors for Bravo's fifth season of Top Chef? Campbell's Soup, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Quaker. [AdAge]
♦ Because you haven't heard enough about Bravo today, the NYT magazine profile of Bravo boss Lauren Zalaznick (left) is now online. [NYT]
♦ More details on the cuts and layoffs at Condé Nast. [NYP]
♦ Condé Nast's glitzy Fashion Rocks show is no more. [AdAge]

The LA Times has a videotape of Obama at a luncheon with known Arab Rashid Khalidi. They say they won't release it because they promised their source they wouldn't. We said that somebody there should release it just so they can claim the $150,000 bounty offered for it and buy essential office supplies, such as toilet paper. Times are tough. But National Review's mongering blog The Corner has figured out that this conspiracy is way bigger than $150,000; $14.685 billion bigger! Break it down, crazy man: See, they figure it like this: LAT is owned by Tribune, which is $14.7 billion in debt, and the incoming Obama administration is gonna have $500 billion of government bailout funds to dole out, and $14.7 billion is "a very small proportion" of $500 billion (this is actually included in the reasoning) and if you keep Hussein Obama happy now then, hey, who's to say he won't give Tribune Co. $14.7 billion when he gets on the inside? Read the signs, people, they're all around you. The Corner also points out:

What do average Americans count on for comic relief in these troubled times? Salvia clips on YouTube and G-spot enlargement injections, right? No, those are elitist coastal pastimes. Readers of Denver's Rocky Mountain News have a keener funny bone: "More than 2,000 readers wrote, e-mailed and called our comics hot line after the strip was dropped. Many Garfield fans told us that in these troubled times, they counted on the comic relief of their longtime favorite strip." Huh. And just the other day someone was saying that there were smart people in Denver. [RMN via Westword]

If you can find a bunch of loosely-connected references to a certain subject floating around the zeitgeist, you can write a trend piece! Today's "Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here" in the NYT's Styles is the pitch-perfect example. A truly bad, meaning typical, trend piece can be broken down into pure science. The first thing you need? A contrarian question or statement! ("Is ugly the new pretty?") Got that? Here's a step-by-step checklist to writing the rest:Now that you've got your contrarian question or statement, the Times editors are going to be on your ass about getting facts and "proof" of this trend existing. Not as highly anecdotal as the Observer, though—you'll have to call in all sorts of experts. Ask yourself:

Everybody in the media fucks up once in a while. Sometimes the fallout is bad. Remember when Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs' obituary while he was still alive? Then shortly afterward they mistakenly ran an old headline about United's bankruptcy as if it was current, and temporarily destroyed the company's stock price? Both are very bad errors, but at least Bloomberg apologized for them. Which is more than you can say for Dow Jones, which handily fails to mention its own mistake that crushed GE's stock price yesterday: With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

When Robert Thomson's Wall Street Journal ran a story labeled "EMBARGOED!" in June, we held out hope the tag referred to the paper's in-house lingo for an exclusive to be kept off the Web until the last possible minute, not to the sort of embargoes where sources dictate when information may be published. But alas, it appears former managing editor Marcus Brauchli's noble defiance of public relations choreography is truly abandoned, as evidenced by the screenshot above and the factually identical stories in the Times and Journal this morning (about a Netflix-TiVo deal). Sometimes, even the Journal will submit to a flack's rules. And even add a slammer!

One of the newspaper industry's great hopes for the last several years has been that one day, technology geniuses would develop a flexible, paper-like display screen that people could roll up and put in their pockets. Then newspapers could beam their content to your magic screen daily and, voila, print survives, in a way! Well now Wired says that such flexible displays could be a mere two years away, thanks to a generous research investment from the US Army. And by then the Army Times will be the last newspaper left, so everybody wins! [Wired]

It's probably safe to say that Howard Kurtz is the most prominent member of his disreputable clan, the media critics. He analyzes the press full-time for the Washington Post, one of the few national papers left, while the Times has no one regular press critic. Kurtz also has a tv show of his very own! How did he swing such a cushy job? By regularly producing the kind of trenchant media analysis on display in today's column, about a magical fantasy world in which Barack Obama is losing. In this bizarro universe, the Obama campaign is poorly managed, beset by gaffes, and the candidate is a national joke. It's really useful thought exercise, if you're into thinking about things that don't relate to reality. This is his thesis:

You may have heard that the Commie LA Times has in its possession a video of Barack Hussein Obama giving a speech in 2003 in which he declares his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor and Palestinian activist who, clearly, probably knows some terrorists from the Middle East. The LAT says they won't release the video because they promised their confidential source they wouldn't, which is pretty ironclad reasoning. But the truth about these two Muslims and their plotting must come out—and be available on YouTube!—according to the McCain campaign. Luckily there's a way for the layoff-plagued newspaper to appear heroic and score some much-needed cash at the same time: A guy allegedly actually named Aston Grimaldi II, of Dune Capital, is offering $150,000 for a copy of the tape. So why doesn't the LA Times just sell theirs to him? They're a Tribune paper. The company's strongest asset is a parking lot, for god's sake, and that's up for sale. They need every last penny they can get. Plus you would bring a smile to the twisted visage of John McCain, American hero! The only losers would be Hussein Obama and the paper's secret "source," a terrorist. U no U want 2 sell it LAT, LOL!

Wow: The Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected 100-year-old paper with a circulation a lot smaller than its reputation, just announced that it will stop printing issues for good in April of next year. It will continue to publish online only. In doing so, the paper essentially gives up the cost—and "prestige"—of its money-losing print edition in exchange for being able to hold onto more of its reporting staff, including several foreign bureaus. The CSM is by far the most important paper to take this step. Do you know that this means? That the CSM is very smart:

The man who shall save newspapers is back with another newspaper-saving memo! Possibly written while under the influence of ibogaine! This time Tribune's Chief Innovation Of New Ways To Make Bongs Officer Lee Abrams is doing what he does best: showering a far-flung newspaper with ideas about how they should do their job, according to none other than career radio man Lee Abrams. "What does Pravda say about our economy?" "Poker is the 21st Century Bridge." Think about it, newspaperpeople! This is hands-down the BEST LEE ABRAMS MEMO YET: And now, Lee Abrams' suggestions to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

New York Post attack columnist Andrea Peyser is a vocal fan of both cocks and pussies (but not whores). Why is it always about sex, Andrea Peyser? "With kabbalah, you learn how to turn on the 'light force' - kabbalah-speak for, say, taking out the garbage without expecting sex from your husband in return." Hm. I'm sensing a theme in your work, Andrea Peyser:

Despite the economic meltdown, and despite having its debt downgraded to junk status, the New York Times Company does not plan any more layoffs, Times editor Bill Keller told staff. There had been rumors of a 20 percent headcount reduction, but according to Keller's prepared remarks, as presented by the Observer, the paper thinks it can get by with some extreme belt-tightening. "There will be no luxuries and little comfort," Keller said rather darkly in the midst of a sugary pep-talk. That still doesn't explain how the Times Company will pay the half-a-billion dollars it has coming due over the next couple of years.