Ha ha, the New York Times ran a story about how all Brits are drunken louts and when they go on vacations to Greece they fight and vomit and drink and cuss and cross-dress so much that Crete is like, wanting to ban British citizens altogether. Ha, unruly people. But for Times reporter Sarah Lyall, all this drunken madness coverage is familiar territory. We must ask, in all seriousness: has Sarah Lyall spent her entire career on the "Drunk-ass English people" beat? Look at this: NYT stories by Sarah Lyall, a selection: 6/2/06 "It's Springtime for Soccer, And For Rowdy England Fans" 1/11/06 "Ever Since Falstaff, Getting Sloshed Is Cricket" 7/22/04 "British Worry That Drinking Has Gotten Out of Hand" 9/2/02 "What is it About British Men? Cheap, Drunk, and Stiff-Lipped." 5/1/00 "Later Pub Hours? Europe Tells Britain It's Time." There's more!

Toby Young, the British exile and former Vanity Fair writer whose mildly amusing book How To Lose Friends and Alienate People is now being turned into a (doubtless middling) movie, is concerned about how hard it is for even famous writers to make any serious money in America these days. Except for Toby Young himself, of course, who is getting paid to write cute little missives back to the UK about how hard it is for even famous writers to make any serious money in America these days. "I'm currently in the Hamptons," he starts off:

New York Post sportswriter George King just can't get enough spanking! A tipster with plenty of time on his hands went back through King's baseball coverage and found that he takes every available opportunity to relate how the Yankees or Mets were "spanked." It's his favorite word! Just today King wrote about the "14-3 spanking administered by the Blue Jays." But that's just the beginning of his spankfest:

Ok we are BREAKING OUR OWN PLEDGE here and passing along two bits of fantastic News-Free Vice Presidential Speculation Updates. FIRST: Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal accidentally sent out a statement saying Obama chose Tim Kaine. Hah. So we know it's not him! Second: for some reason, everyone is now claiming totally obscure conservative Texas congressman CHET EDWARDS is a finalist. Yes, of course. Because this is the perfect season to roll out those OBAMA/EDWARDS lawn signs, right? Jesus Christ.

So Andres Martinez, the former LA Times editorial page editor who just sued his former flack girlfriend for her stunning betrayals of his confidence? Maybe totally crazy! As we mentioned this morning, Martinez's suit came after his ex, Kelly Mullens, filed a restraining order against him in DC for stalking her and generally being a psycho. According to her filing, Martinez (who now works for the Washington Post and the New America Foundation) spent months emailing her, her family, and her professional contacts, calling her mom a "whore," inventing a separate false identity, and threatening to kill himself. Yea. Here are some of the most salient allegations, which purportedly quote from Martinez's own emails: The two broke up. Then Martinez allegedly emailed Mullens over and over and over, moaning about his lost love and his bad mental state, and promising to stop contacting her (which she told him to do). But it just kept on, and got worse:

Former LA Times editor Andres Martinez's new lawsuit is a sad story of betrayal that should convince any journalist never to date a publicist, unless she can somehow find one who is not crafty and constantly scheming to leverage the relationship. Martinez left his job editing the editorial page amid scandal. He tried to have film producer Brian Grazer guest edit his section even though his girlfriend Kelly Mullens was flacking for Grazer. Dirty and stupid and unethical, right? Well, hold one one second: Martinez says in his suit that Mullens promised him she had recused herself from working with Grazer, a client of her firm, at least on this one project. This turned out to be an awful awful lie. Writes Matt Belloni at the Hollywood Reporter:

Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

So. Yesterday, Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones died. And just about every news outlet you can think of reported as much. Fine so far, right? Except that when they all reported it, she wasn't dead. And then once everyone corrected, she died, for real. It was all pretty macabre. CJR tries to explain the whole weird incident with another criticism of media practices-anonymous sources and me-tooism or something. What no one (we think?) has pointed out is that the news probably came from her own staff ("Based on information from a reliable Democratic source and stories from other news outlets..."). Which is a pretty unimpeachable source! Until it turned out that they were wrong about their own boss's death. And then they weren't, a bit later. Awkward. [CJR]

"The Instant New York Times Bestseller," trumpets the full-page ad for NYT reporter David Carr's memoir in the NYT today. We'll congratulate him for that, as we are fans of his brutally honest addiction memoir. However, it must be pointed out that Night of the Gun has only hit the expanded bestseller list, which is for the runners-up and isn't printed. (Update: that was the Aug. 24th Times bestseller list. We've just learned that Carr made the regular August 31st bestseller list, at #12 for nonfiction.)

Josh Wolf is a blogger who spent 226 days in jail for refusing to hand over his footage of a San Francisco anarchist protest in which a police officer was injured. That's because not handing over evidence like that is contempt of court, which we know thanks to the case of Judith Miller and that glamorous spy lady. But at the time Josh did not get as much credit from the "mainstream media" because he was just a blogger, and also possibly someone who hangs out with anarchists, and with the exception of Mumia Abu Jamal journalists generally try to avoid anarchists. Anyhow, Josh is now a free man, and get this…part of the mainstream media! Which is to say, he is a Real Mainsteam Journalists. And he has a message for his critics, according to the San Francisco Chronicle: "If the haters who said I wasn't a real journalist, are still lurking, I hope you don't have too much indigestion after eating your words." Ha ha yeah, Corrections. We'll let you grab a Nexium before we share the details of his important new gig.He is a cub reporter for the Palo Alto Daily Post. (We'd link, but it doesn't maintain a website!)

One sad milestone in a business' decline is when they come to find that the real estate they hold-once incidental-has become more valuable than the actual business conducted on the real estate. Wall Street firms collapse and sell their towering headquarters for liquidity. Nobody wants to eat at Ruby Tuesdays any more, but they sure have lots of parcels of land! And...cue segue to the newspaper industry. Gnomish tightwad and Tribune Co. chief Sam Zell wants to sell the Chicago Tribune's headquarters for condos. They're more lucrative than newspapers these days: First people thought Zell would just sell the Tribune's tower, then lease it back and keep the paper there. But no!:

Online advertising revenues declined at newspaper publishers Tribune, Lee Enterprises, and E.W. Scripps during the last quarter. While online newspaper ad revenue grew 31 percent in 2005 and 2006, it only expanded 19 percent in 2007. The problem? Besides an awful overall ad market, newspaper analyst Randy Bennett told AdAge that some papers don't build a enough of a wall between their Web sales and print sales. The temptation for many newspapers is to sell advertisers on print first and throw in online as a bonus. McClatchy newspapers, which managed to grow its online revenues 12 percent last quarter, only relies on its print advertisers for 50 percent of its online ads.

"The Mort Zuckerman-owned paper is looking for 25 volunteers in the newsroom to take buyouts as the paper copes with a decline in ad revenue." [Post]

Last month the New York Times announced it would be raising its cover price from $1.25 to $1.50, and there were several alarmed articles full of ominous grumbling. But the increase didn't actually come into effect until today, and there appears to be not even a peep of outrage online from readers who are short a quarter. Have we all grown 20% more appreciative of the Times in the last month? Or-more likely-is it just that no one who owns a computer has bought a copy of a newspaper today?

In these uncertain times for the newspaper industry, it pays to think "outside of the newspaper box" when it comes to coverage of breaking news events. So the Chicago Tribune is trying its hand at live-blogging! And they picked the perfect unfolding story: Droopy-eyed comedian Bill Murray's parachute jump at the Chicago Air and Water Show! Which we would make fun of, except that that is, sadly, the most important piece of news occurring in America at the moment (we've looked). Let's check in on the up-to-the-minute coverage of Capt. Zissou's perilous skydive:

Despite an absence of any "news," every political magazine and newspaper is rushing to publish special "St. Paul and Denver" editions for the political conventions. CQ, Roll Call, and The Hill are publishing on-site daily! Politico will be there! Local papers are throwing everything they have at the event! National Journal expects big things! Meanwhile, all the high-powered attendees will be getting drunk and occasionally checking the New York Times on their iPhones, and the smart reporters just stay home and make shit up. The real reason for the outpouring of journalistic effort:

BusinessWeek wonders if American newspapers could learn anything from the success of Europe's biggest newspaper, Germany's Bild. Which, you may recall, is the paper for whom resourceful journalist Judith Bonesky (pictured, and "heh") staked out Barack Obama at the gym. (Attracting the attention of Maureen Dowd, who got to ask the politician she once described as "diffident debutante" [and a butterfly! -ed] if he thought it "creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like 'fabric softener with spring scent.'") "It's tempting to credit Bild's double-digit profit margin solely to sensationalism," concedes BW. How entrenched-old-media; we would never do something stodgy and dismissive like that! Instead we sought out someone German-speaking, who explained the subtler points of the Bildstyle:

When a Hong Kong paper said earlier this week that it had gotten its hands on a 21-point memo from the Chinese government's propaganda unit telling the national media how it must cover the Olympics, the head of the Beijing Olympic committee scoffed, "There is no such 21-point document. Chinese media, according to the Chinese constitution, are free to report on the games." But then the Sydney Morning Herald got the same document, and published it in full. Witness the worldwide free press in action, propagandists! Highlights of the edicts to the proud nation's "journalists":

Gannett-the largest newspaper company in America and owner of USA Today-said today it plans to cut 1,000 jobs from its smaller local papers. That amounts to about 3% of the total workforce. Six hundred of those cuts will likely be in the form of layoffs. It's a rough message, coming on the same day that rival McClatchy announced a wage freeze, Cox announced its desperate newspaper fire sale, and Sam Zell's Tribune Company lost its daily $20 million. Nobody seems able to find a competitive advantage in their rivals' misfortune. A month ago, a rash of cuts at print publications made us declare Print's Black Wednesday; today, Black Thursday, has been even worse. Soon the newspaper industry won't have any days left.

Cox Enterprises announced today that the Austin American-Statesman is up for sale, along with 28 smaller papers across several states. This comes just after the Daytona Beach News-Journal was put up for sale, and the NJ Star-Ledger and Trenton Times have been threatened to be sold, and Dow Jones couldn't even sell the Ottaway chain of papers, though Tribune managed to unload Newsday, and not a second too soon. So who's the magical buyer that's going to step up and buy all these papers? Probably not would-be news mogul Sam Zell: Tribune Company's value has fallen by $20 million per day under his reign. Free Dunkin Donuts coffee with every newspaper business sold?