Political journalist Ron Fournier took his lumps recently for an ill-advisedly friendly email he sent to Bush brain Karl Rove back in 2004. Today, the Politico reveals that Fournier was this close to getting a "senior advisory role" in the McCain campaign, probably as some sort of fancy flack. He turned it down and went back to the AP instead, but now this has been reported and it's fueling the anti-AP fire. They're in bed with McCain! It's like there are these two gigantic beds in DC and everyone in the press is lying down on them with a candidate. Or it's like bullshit. This story, and the last one, are pointless except as part of some weird campaign to embarrass Ron Fournier. Fournier quit the Associated Press a couple years back to start something terrible called HotSoup.com, a sort of message board social networking political blog thing that was supposed to revolutionize everything ever. A couple weeks later (at least it felt like a couple weeks) he was back at the AP as their online political editor. (He's now the Washington bureau chief.) He's actually done a little bit of good work at the AP, stripping away some of the obtuse house style and inserting some liveliness into wire reports, but now all the liberals will decide the AP is a den of McCainiacs and boycott them or something. We ask you: why is a job offer from two years ago news? That's all this is. A declined job offer. Politico even twists the knife further:

Reporters are scrambling all over the place in LA right now to find out just what "went down" in the Great Shake Of '08! Newspapers are pulling first-hand accounts off Twitter! Websites are quoting other websites! But the LA Times is already taking ownership of the official reaction-angle to the disaster, by tracking down Southern California's most scaredy-cat government officers to describe exactly how they cowered in fear when the quake struck an hour ago:

"My editor said that she can't, with a good conscience, tell us to go into the newspaper business." [NYO]

The story we're about to bring you is sad on so many levels. Well, two levels. First, it illustrates the disappointing and kind of disgusting decline of a legendary civil rights institution, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), former home of Martin Luther King, Jr. Second, it shows what a farce half of the things you see on editorial pages are, if they come from public figures. We'll give you a condensed version of this ongoing media vs. advocacy group vs. PR firm controversy-as you read it, ask yourself whether MLK would have found himself caught up in this crap. Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees-a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees). Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele. Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen. But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

When extremely important news breaks at any hour of the day or night, we here at Gawker receive a BREAKING NEWS ALERT from the web liaison at the New York Post. They are a paper packed with pavement-pounding journalists that never sleep, and they want to ensure that we, the internet nerds, are able to communicate important news items to you, the other internet nerds, in a timely fashion. So we have to apologize for any loss in civic informed-ness that you may incur because of our lateness in bringing you this story, which the Post urgently emailed to us just as it was filed late last night. But better late than never, we're excited to tell you: "GYM MACHINE HURLS LARGE WOMAN." Three (3) Post reporters managed to track the down the details of this occurence:

"It's something we're looking at and trying to determine what's there... [Edwards] remains a very newsworthy guy because of who he's been in this state and where we are." [Portfolio, Previously]

Sometimes it's the big mistakes that are the easiest to miss. Especially when half the editors are out on summer vacation and you've outsourced production to interns, who have outsourced it to drunken monkeys. The abject correction is after the jump.

It seemed strange that the Wall Street Journal-so concerned about beating the competition in hard news-would choose for a Page One story today a piece on business people who do yoga. Really, WSJ? It's a pretty standard, low-hanging "take a trend, and add business angle" story that might have more rightly been in the back pages. But their work had this added benefit: a WSJ editor owns her own yoga studio, and one of her employees gives great on-the-money quotes: Tina Gaudoin was brought over to the WSJ from the UK early this year to edit the paper's upcoming "lifestyle magazine." She's also the owner of Triyoga, a chain of yoga studios in the UK. And she used to tout that fact over and over again in her column! Which tends to go over less well in the US than in the UK. Still, it was so hard for the WSJ to find a good yoga-as-business quote that they ended up using this one, from Claire Missingham (pictured):

Andrea Peyser, the Post's fire-breathing outrage columnist and dedicated cock-looker, spends her entire column today saying, essentially, "I don't even care about your stupid party." It seems Peyser went to attend a press conference for "YouTube divorce troll Tricia Walsh-Smith," and they wouldn't let her in! What's the reason for this lack of graciousness? Peyser thinks it's because she wants to fuck Walsh-Smith's elderly, gray "smoking hot" husband:

Look! Those Gossip Girl ads the whole world is talking about (or at least the part of the world that lives in New York and probably "curates" a "linklog" or something) made the front page of am New York, a free tabloid daily owned by Tribune Co. You know what's funny? Gossip Girl airs on the CW, the network most people still mistake for the one that failed after canceling Homeboys in Outer Space. Also the CW has something called a "ten-year affiliation agreement" with—wait for it!—Tribune Co! Which also owns the CW affiliate WPIX, right here in (am) New York. SYNERGY. [Maura] (Related: watch Mad Men! It's a show about men in suits who smoke or something.)

Food critic Giles Goren, who writes for the London Times, has a history of enraged letter-writing. He must be feeling silly this week, as a past blowup—over a line edit of one of his articles—was leaked to the Guardian. "It occurs to me it can only have been leaked by one of four Times staff. God, they must hate me," he told the Guardian's media blog. A sample: "This is someone thinking, 'I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and I know best.'" Clearly!

"Analysts say that 2008 is shaping up as the worst year for the newspaper business since the Depression, and the second quarter is clearly worse than the first." [Times]

Minneapolis Star and Tribune "gossip" columnist (there is no gossip in Minneapolis) C.J. has a kind of hilarious "item" about how Times media columnist and addiction memoirist David Carr is now feuding with Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz. How does she manage this? She quotes a Kurtz column in which Kurtz sums up Carr's assesment of himself as a lousy junkie, then calls Carr to ask if he'll be on Kurtz's show. Carr, probably befuddled at receiving a call from C.J., says something kind of confusing about how they are not that close. Then, FishbowlNY picks it up? Best entirely nonsensical made-up feud ever! Team Junkie! [Strib]

What's up with recently laid-off, fired, bought out, or increasingly squeezed print journalists—and what are they thinking as the newspaper business continues to nosedive? Columbia Journalism Review's website has invited them to rant. New parting thoughts—or shots—are being added daily. Most recently, 38-year newspaper veteran John Sugg writes, "...For four decades, newspaper owners consistently have sacrificed integrity and watchdog reporting in favor of one grab-the-cash scheme after another." Don't even think of blaming the Internet for all of this:

Crackhead-turned Times reporter success story David Carr is loved by media types for being a cool guy, and is basking in the generally positive public attitude towards his upcoming memoir. But everything is not well in Carr's world. Oh no. Just as Carr has found the strength to open up to the world about his past drug use, an even bigger scandal threatens to overwhelm him: his incurable fondness for potatoes.

Rupert Murdoch and his deputy Robert Thomson are eager to get the Wall Street Journal's new magazine off the ground. The publication, WSJ., is to get the Journal in on a consumer-glossy bonanza that now nets the Times' T magazine $46 million in annual revenue and helped it grow 12 percent last year. Murdoch and Thomson are so keen on this concept that they're racing ahead with WSJ. even though it was conceived under the Journal's prior owners, the Bancrofts' Dow Jones. So convinced are the News Corp. executives of the magazine's future success that, the Observer reports in today's paper, they are making staff sign a "code of conduct" to ensure they will not be swayed by the inevitable mob of overeager advertisers. But to hear one reliable inside source tell it, WSJ. will be lucky to launch without embarrassing itself on the editorial side, to say nothing of selling ads.

Newspapers are using the midsummer doldrums as an excuse to run more bogus trend stories than ever. It's a growing—and troubling—phenomenon. [Slate]

The multi-tentacled jellyfish menace is loose in New York waters and nothing you can do will stop it! Quickly, swim, swim for shore, damn you! The floating blobs of fury are breeding as we speak. A swimmer died during the New York triathlon last weekend, and while doctors say there's no evidence a jellyfish sting was involved, the media is doing its part to keep you safe; no fewer than four newspapers today run stories about jellyfish, and how you definitely should not PANIC about their invertebrate invasion. They're replacing sharks as the media darlings of the sea!

Wills to the rescue! That means Britain's Prince William was pretending to rescue victims of a knife-wielding hurricane as part of a Royal Navy exercise. No one was actually rescued by anyone. Except the black guy on the far left of the boat, who was rescued from this photo op by the editors of Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper. Thanks to the magic of photoshop! As some commenter on Photoshop Disasters said, "you can take out the black man, but you can't take out the black man's lower torso." (And the Sun found fit to shine on the the guy in the online version of the story.) [Photoshop Disasters]

Were you reading the Times this morning, wondering why there weren't more sexual stories up in there? Were you thinking some sex would fit particularly well in the metro section, squeezed between reports on rent control for VIPs, that Harlem neighborhood photographer and that guy who died in the triathalon? Well, then, you're in luck, because Joe Sexton (ahem), leader of the metro section's scoop ninjas, is saying the paper will likely deliver more discourse on intercourse. Apparently their Eliot Spitzer hooker exclusive was just the beginning! Here's what Sexton wrote on the Times website today, responding to a question about the newspaper's plans to expand New York City coverage: