"By late yesterday, Time, which published more than 100,000 extra copies, had already gone back to press, while Newsweek, which also added 100,000 to its print run, was very close to doing the same." [Post]

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

I'm glad Dan Lyons has landed a high-profile gig at Newsweek. But the newsweekly format crushes everything I love about Dan's writing. Look at his latest: He starts with a provocative question — why is Jerry Yang still in charge? — but doesn't answer it in the cutting manner we've come to expect. "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently made an off-the-cuff, public comment that seemed to indicate to some he might still be interested in Yahoo." Dan, this is the kind of writing Fake Steve used to shred with his bare hands. Namaste, but please forward us some of those canned layoff leaks companies send you now that you're a checkout-stand hero.(Disclosure: Sigh. I write for Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, which sometimes runs Slate articles, but never any of mine that I know about. Happy now? I wish Murdoch would hurry up and buy us all.)

In Dan Lyons's Fake Steve Jobs blog, he played the Apple CEO as a cynic who borrowed the cult-creation techniques of old-world and new-age mystics in order to more efficiently exploit a workforce and market products. But the actual Dan Lyons, now a bloggin' Newsweek reporter, has a heart. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Lyons apologized for not being as funny as his avatar Fake Steve Jobs since leaving Forbes and starting his new blog, Real Dan Lyons. So why did Lyons give up the ghost of Fake Steve? He confirmed for the crowd what Valleywag had reported:Lyons couldn't bring himself to mock a cancer sufferer who's wasting away.

With its crack team of arrows, Newsweek makes sense of this week's natural disaster for you. After the jump, the verdict. Ike=Fail. "Houston, you have a problem. And so might Bush/McCain. Will FEMA redeema?" What? Also, only the hurricane and the Department of the Interior get down arrows. Biden, the Clintons, Obama, Palin, McCain-even 9/11-get sideways arrows. And the arrows point both ways. It seems that if you can't make a judgment using simply an arrow, you're in trouble. Or maybe, the situation is too nuanced and varied to be summed up with an arrow. In which case, go back to words. The Economist doesn't use arrows. The Economist uses words. [Newsweek]

"I’m starting at Newsweek tomorrow and Fake Steve was supposed to be part of my job. So we’re going to discuss whether to revive the blog." — Excerpt from an email message from semi-retired Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons to Mac Soda blogger mykbibby. Contrary to speculation by certain people we could name but won't, Lyons didn't kill the blog to curry favor with Apple for Newsweek. It was more personal.Dan saw His Steveness in person at Apple's developer conference in June and had a sincere personal crisis over Jobs's obvious illness. He felt wrong mocking a guy who might not be alive the next morning. Because in case you can't tell, Dan Lyons is one of Jobs's biggest fanboys. Huge. (In photo: Dan getting his own fanboy love at Macworld Expo 2008 from stock analyst Charlie Wolf.)

Because when we bit into the newsstand bait of that crazyass Newsweek cover we positively chortled to ourselves upon viewing the table of contents!

Two weeks on the newsstand with this one? WTF… But how does it READ?MOE: also have you seen the new newsweek "what bush got right"?????? PAREENE: uggh yeah MOE: i feel like we should do something but PAREENE: i mean just saw the cover would like to see "What Fareed Zakaria got wrong" feature instead but what can you do MOE: yeah i'm going to smoke will check it out i feel like it is the newsstand equivalent of a "neg" PAREENE: haa 10 minutes MOE: ok just skimmed 6 minutes MOE: it is like, "Ha ha ha, just kidding, actually everything he has done has been a colossal fucking nightmare but thanks to that spyplane thing and our dependence on Chinese sweatshop workers he had to sell out Taiwan and thanks to our dependence on Pakistan's torture spies he couldn't very well object to India having nukes and thanks to the global disaster wrought by his first six and a half years in office some of the most superevil people in his administration finally quit their jobs. Also he admitted AIDS was bad. PAREENE: haaa right i mean based on zakaria's own writings i feel like we could've written this piece on our own. like: they fucked up but then half-heartedly corrected themselves sometimes later on MOE: exactly! oh also he says it's nice that Bush isn't pretending like he wants to go to war with Iran anymore even though as that pretty homewrecker CBS lady pointed out in the recent Men's Vogue we are already fighting a de facto war with Iran in Iraq so… MOE: When you think about it, nearly all of the most mendacious ideologues to ever harbor sinister ambitions to rule civilization have gotten their chance to fuck everything up, and because they did, most of them will never work again! For the next few years anyway Oh oh yes AND PAREENE: hahaha MOE: he has drastically lowered his expectations for what can be achieved in the iraq. see he's a pragmatist! PAREENE: hahahaha pragmatism is so handy once you have made a huge fucking error MOE: (Too bad we can't say the same for John McCAin!) haha did you just see our tip re megan asha?? PAREENE: hahahaha yes What Bush Got Right

The supposedly liberal news media hired talking heads like George Stephanopoulos and James Carville from Bill Clinton's presidential administration, but they were even more eager to Hoover up "talent" from the conservative Bush White House two elections later. In the image at left, our Photoshop wizard Steve Dressler shows which top Bush staffers have landed job as commentators, and with whom. Hint: It's not just Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page hiring these Republican operatives. Click through to see the full-sized image.

Is Dan Lyons working open mic nights at comedy clubs in San Francisco? If true, it adds a whole new layer to the conspiracy theories about his new job at Newsweek cutting into his blogging habit. I can hear the editor now: "Son, this is Newsweek. If you want to be funny, go tell jokes at a nightclub." We're skeptical of the rumor, though, because Dan usually calls us before he comes to town to set up time to drink. Dan, you sneaking around on us? That aside, I'd pay to see Fake Steve Live at least once. (Photo by Mark Coggins)

So remember how Gawker became obsessed with the Montauk Monster, and everyone was like, "Ho ho ho, isn't that funny and delightful, let's laugh at the 'monster' all summer until it kills us all in our sleep, LOL'?" And then CNN did a story but even Wolf Blitzer had trouble maintaing his usual humorless melodrama because he was about to bust out laughing? Well, no one's laughing now because monsters are eating the Main Stream Media alive. The terrified reports keep coming: Newsweek, as we just reported, launched a panicked, desperate effort to claim the Montauk Monster is a Photoshop hoax. CNN aired video of a Chupacabra in Texas. And now multiple cable news networks have picked up on a Bigfoot discovery that even we laughed off initially. BUT NO ONE IS SCOFFING NOW OH NO NOT ANYMORE.

Traditional media acted with predictable arrogance for ten months in ignoring tabloid and blog stories about John Edwards' philandering. Also utterly predictable: The self-flagellation now occurring on how the story was missed and what it means for the future of newspapers. Yes, if there's one story the public eats up more than a sex scandal complete with love child, it's yet another navel-gaze at media ethics and economics! Reporters for the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all shared their thoughts on the matter. But the fact that they waited, or had to wait, so long to do so hints that their bosses are missing the point.

Earlier today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that it's cutting almost 200 jobs-8% of its total workforce-due to "tough economic times." This afternoon, the Wall Street Journal sent out a staff memo saying that the paper is eliminating 50 editing jobs for "strategic" reasons. Less than an hour later, word came that Greg Osberg, president and publisher of Newsweek, is stepping down with no clear successor. (Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's crusade to appeal to the youth apparently hasn't taken effect quickly enough for Osberg, a digital advocate). This has been an extraordinarily bad day for print media by any standards. But take a look at the chart above-an illustration of newspaper industry stock prices over the past five years. There will be many more bad days to come.

Hah. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is upset about that New Yorker cover. Because he knows the power of images and of repeating smears, even for satirical or debunking purposes. Which is why, after he derides the cover, he then presents a list of every anti-Obama smear he can think of, all listed in bold text. Whoops! To help reverse the damage this column will cause, we present here another pro-Obama photoshop. In this one he is athletic and virile!

In humor, timing is everything. And death just ain't that funny. That's why Dan Lyons is quitting the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog. True, he's planning to turn his Fake Steve Jobs schtick into a second book. And his new job as Newsweek's gadget columnist may require more decorous relations with Apple — note that Newsweek, usually the object of favored treatment by Apple PR, didn't get an early iPhone 3G to review. But the real reason why Lyons is dropping Fake Steve? Because the state of the real Apple CEO's health had Lyons scared.

Hey, Newsweek readers! Why not spice up your sex life with a vacation? Or go wild in Las Vegas! And hey, while you're feeling lucky, why not consider a fun trip to beautiful Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the city that is conveniently located entirely underwater for all your travel needs. [Newseek]

Newsweek, along with Time, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is on the short list of publications that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will actually deign to meet and speak with. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, is taking over as the lead tech reporter at Newsweek. That leads us to a tantalizing conclusion: It can't be long before Fake Steve Jobs and Real Steve Jobs meet in person. Like the attempt at discovering the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, the unintended consequences could involve the earth folding in on itself. We wait with bated breath.

He invented The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Have you friggin' heard of it? Dan Lyons, the Apple CEO impersonator whose identity so bedeviled us until he was outed last year, is leaving Forbes for Newsweek, taking the place of Steven Levy as Newsweek's house technophile. So much for a brave leap into the unknown world of the Web. Lyons had made no secret of his discontent at Forbes, where the website is run separately from the print magazine and the two sides hate each other; high-level strongarming was required to get Forbes.com to link to Lyons's blog, which he will now take with him to Newsweek. (Photo by Mark Coggins)

In this week's cover story about Barack Obama, Newsweek distills the conventional political wisdom into a bitter tonic of condescending campaign advice. The Democratic presidential candidate is praised for having "wisely taken to often wearing and American-flag lapel" and advised "it would help to be seen venerating your white mother and grandparents as well as your black father" and that "whites resent being accused of racism for remarks they regard as innocent," in case the black politician hadn't learned that yet. To illustrate this cynical lesson in realpolitik, the magazine had originally planned to run the suitably stark cover above and on the left, according to the person who supplied us with a copy. But that cover was "killed" late Friday night, we are told, and replaced with the bright and sunny front at right — a bizarre choice given the gritty lead article and stark collection of supporting pieces on racial division. More outlandish still is the purported reason for the cover switch:

Doree Shafrir has a bone to pick with Newsweek. The former Gawker editor recently scored a book deal from her blog of mom emails, and now Newsweek is asking whether she or any other blogger can even write books, much less sell them. "Many bloggers just repackage what they've already done," the magazine said, citing Gawker's book as an example. But the Gawker book did not contain any content from the site at all, so it can hardly be called "repackaged." And there are all kinds of other problems with Newsweek's blogger book slam: