The Observer reported tonight that the Times is going to be taking a sharp-edged tool to its stable of blogs, in keeping with more general cost-cutting measures. Whether this tool is a scalpel or an axe remains to be seen, but based on what executive editor Bill Keller told his staff earlier this month, some cuts are pretty much guaranteed:

One thing we are doing is taking a close look at our long roster of 70 or so blogs and our online verticals, as we call our focused packages of online content. We think we can save some slots there. Many of our blogs serve a valuable journalistic purpose... But if we find instances where a blog or a vertical is consuming considerable effort and expense with little reward, we're prepared to do some pruning.

So he's using a pruning knife!

The Observer made a pretty good list of blogs sure to make the cut: Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook, the Well Blog, Bits, The Caucus, City Room etc. But what about those poor blogs churning away in the more obscure regions of the Times' bloated blogosphere? Here are eight that could more-or-less conceivably not make the cut, along with a helpful point system to aid you in your office Fantasy New York Times Blog pool:

And the Pursuit of Happiness
DESCRIPTION: "Maira Kalman's illustrated column about American democracy."
FREQUENCY: +1
There's only one a month! Good for a calendar: bad for a blog.
COMMENTS: +6
Sure, her posts don't garner that many comments. But almost every single one is something like: "Wow, beautiful." or "Beautiful." or "Wow." or "Beautiful, wow."
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +4
Kalman has illustrated more than 18 books and a bunch of New Yorker covers. She's as big time as an illustrator can get.
TILT: +5
One of those was an illustrated version of Strunk and White's "Elements of Styles," which every newspaper editor has basically internalized.
TOTAL: +16

Stanley Fish
DESCRIPTION:"On education, law and society. "
FREQUENCY:+2
~3 posts per month. Not bad for the World's Oldest New York Times Columnist.
COMMENTS:+9
It's not unusual for a Fish post to break 1k comments. He writes about stuff that really gets Times' readers riled up: What their kids might be learning at their fancy liberal arts schools.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY:+9
So he's no celebrity chef, but he's got another kind of cred: Academic. Dude has written 10 books and is the "Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities" at Florida International University. But you can just call him "Stan."
TILT:-5
The ancient Fish must be used to scrawling on papyrus scrolls or something, because his posts are WAY TOO LONG.
TOTAL: +15

Judith Warner
DESCRIPTION:"On the politics of everyday life"
FREQUENCY: -2
Anywhere from 2-5 posts a month. Sort of sparse for a blog about "everyday life".
COMMENTS: +5
Warner's posts frequently break triple digits
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +2
Like Fish, Warner has written a bunch of books. But two of them were about people who lost presidential elections. (Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton). Way to pick 'em, Warner.
TILT: +3
She wrote a post about "Mad Men" linking it to the Way We Live Now. (Plus, she's a woman. Women love that about her!)
TOTAL: +8

Formula One
DESCRIPTION: "The competition, gossip, politics and technology of Formula One racing."
FREQUENCY: +3
Formula One? Posts are more at a go-kart pace: 3 per week.
COMMENTS: -5
Nobody likes to talk about F1 on the Internet, apparently.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: -7
This guy, Brad Spurgeon, is a Formula One journalist. 'nuff said.
TILT: +10
We just can't bear the thought of what will happen to the readers for whom Formula One is their favorite blog on nytimes.com if it's cut. They'll be so sad!
TOTAL:+6

Pogue's Posts
DESCRIPTION: "Quick hits from the technology columnist David Pogue."
FREQUENCY: +3
Pogue's Posts come at a rate of about 3 a week
COMMENTS: 0
Pogue's Posts rarely break double-digits. Maybe everyone's tweeting at him.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +1,000,000
David Pogue is not just a journalist; he's a visionary.
TILT: -1,000,005
Does Pogue really need a larger presence on Nytimes.com? Seems like he and members of his extended family are covering some new portable fingerprint reader or whatever every day in a video on the front page.
TOTAL: -2

In Transit
DESCRIPTION: "The Times's travel staff answers questions about the ever-changing world of traveling, from the modern hassles of flying to perfect vacation spots."
FREQUENCY: +10
Multiple posts a day (12 today alone!)
COMMENTS: -10
Not a single one of today's posts had a comment
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: -10
Can you name one person on the travel staff?
TILT: -4
"In Transit" is probably the most boring name for a blog ever.
TOTAL: -14

The New Old Age
DESCRIPTION: "A focus on the elderly and the adult children who struggle to care for them."
FREQUENCY: +2
This old person's blog posts at an old person's pace of about 2 per week.
COMMENTS: +1
Solid double digits.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +5
The Blog's founder, Jane Gross, was the first person to use the phrase "anal sex" in the pages of the Times!
TILT: -1 billion
Old people don't read blogs!
TOTAL:-1 billion, give or take a few.

Slap Shot
DESCRIPTION: "News from the world of hockey"
IS IT ABOUT HOCKEY?: -3,000,000,000
Yes, it is about hockey
TOTAL:-3,000,000,000

There you have it. Place your bets!

The (enemy) WSJ's Katherine Rosman overheard this exchange:

And there was the inevitable shop talk: As Times executive editor Bill Keller slid into a row of seats, an acquaintance asked, "So, are you parent of the year now at Dalton?"-a question that presumably referenced a story that ran on the front page that day about an incident at the student newspaper at the Dalton School. "I'm not sure how they feel about me," he responded and then took his seat.

That, of course, was the story this week about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy making Dalton's school newspaper run its copy by him before it published. How outraged must the Dalton mafiosi be that the lowly New York Times dared to publicize the secret inner workings of their school paper! Remember:

Editors at The Daltonian either would not comment for this article or did not respond to requests for an interview, although a staff member provided a draft of The Daltonian's article.

The high school editors of The Daltonian can hardly be expected to make time for the sleazy tabloid lurking of the New York Times! Kudos to Bill Keller for having the courage to stand up to the Dalton Mob, putting his own family at risk for the sake of journalistic ethics. Your fancy Manhattan Media daily topic of discussion, ladies and gents.

NYT editor Bill Keller told Clark Hoyt that the paper is "within weeks of a decision" on the long-discussed question of whether, and how, to charge for its online news.

So here is what their decision will be: You will have to pay for their online news. One way or another! Maybe you will pay a $5 per month subscription fee, or maybe you will pay micropayments for every story, or maybe they will roll out tiered membership packages with fancy extras designed to get hardcore fans to pay more in exchange for more access. Probably a certain level of news will be free, and a better level of news will not be free. Or maybe someone there has actually come up with an elegant solution to this mess! Though we doubt it.

But somehow we will all have to pay something, because if we don't, the New York Times is totally going to go broke, bit by bit, by giving its product away for free. Which is something that it and every other newspaper have now come to realize. A more interesting question: Will any of the NYT's star columnists flee the paper if they're shoved behind a pay wall, like Newsday's Saul Friedman just did?

They might! These same NYT columnists sat through the Times Select fiasco and watched their readership drop precipitously. Things are different now though! Because somebody like, say, Thomas Friedman, or David Pogue, or Maureen Dowd, could legitimately decide that their own BRAND would gain more by going off on their own than by sitting behind a paywall at the NYT. Thanks for the help with everything, Times, but we're off to be A Brand Called Me-s! Fewer readers could hurt their speaking fees. Can't have that.

This result would bring in some much-needed fresh blood and get rid of Thomas Fucking Friedman, so let's all pray it goes down exactly like that. We have our (employer's) credit card ready, Bill Keller.

Just witness the position Apple is in with the New York Times. After we pointed out that Times editor had casually mentioned "the impending Apple slate" at an off-the-record confab, the newspaper's editor clammed up. When Peter Kafka of All Things D Keller asked him to elaborate, he got a stern quote via PR: "I ain't sayin'" anything about Apple's rumored device. But the horse was already out of the barn. One can only imagine what sort of conversation Keller might have had with Apple's famously caustic CEO Steve Jobs after that slip.

It's a clash of cultures: Keller specializes in publishing information as quickly as possible; Jobs in keeping in secret, for long stretches of time. It's also an unavoidable situation for Apple. To get beautiful content to show off the capabilities of the tablet and its (presumed) sharp color display, Apple has been meeting with magazines, newspapers and book publishers, who have lots of glossy, high-resolution content. There's no way Apple executives would talking to these guys about a forthcoming device if it didn't feel they absolutely had to.

It must be a painful situation for Apple. At least the company has lots of practice in manipulating the media. Just not usually from such an uncomfortably close distance.

Earlier this year a stealth team from the newspaper was rumoured, along with magazine and textbook publishers, to have met with some of Steve Jobs' representatives.

Last week the Keller gave a speech that was apparently supposed to be off the record, but that was posted by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. He said that he now reads the Times online himself and some other stuff that can best be summed up with: pay versus free, integration, more efforts by the print side, why can't we all just get along:

But then, at about 8.30 in the video, he includes the Apple tablet as part of a specific list of platforms they're working on bringing Times content to, saying:

"I'm hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate..."

Maybe he just reads other tech-related parts of the internets, as well as the Times, believes the rumours and doesn't know anything we don't. But if the paper of record is engaged with Apple in developing the savior of journalism it seems hard to believe no-one would have informed the boss.

Colleagues,

I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I've been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don't want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won't happen, but it might.

Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.

In recent years, we've managed to avoid the disabling cutbacks that have hit other newsrooms. The Company has chosen to protect the journalism by cutting production and other business-side costs, and the newsroom itself has managed its resources frugally. These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world.

I won't pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we've been looking hard at ways to minimize the impact — in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won't promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organization on earth.

I doubt that anyone is shocked by the fact of this, but it is happening sooner than anyone anticipated. When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year. But I accept that if it's going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on.

In my absence, Bill Schmidt and John and Jill have volunteered to take your questions this afternoon. Feel free to bring additional questions to me as soon as I'm back, or check with Bill Schmidt or John or Jill privately, or save them for the next Throw Stuff at Bill session, which is in a couple of weeks.

We often — and rightly — voice our gratitude that we work for a company and a family that prize quality journalism above all. I hope you know that the company and the family, and I, feel an equal debt of gratitude to all of you whose sacrifice and loyalty have kept us strong.

Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.

Bill

"I think it will come down to a gut call," editor Bill Keller tells the Observer. But the Times' gut has been notoriously wrong about the Web in the past. Remember that time the paper passed on the chance to invest in a little startup called "Google?" Or "Amazon.com?" Or "Yahoo?" Good times.

Is there any way for the Times to maybe ask the guts of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Evan Williams (Twitter, Blogger) and just go with that, somehow? Their guts just seem smarter, about the internet.

(Pic: Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger at the unveiling of Amazon's Kindle DX in May. Getty.)

The Observer's Gillian Reagan makes the case that Drudge is losing his mojo among his main constituency, the media. And she has a point—his influence seems to have shifted away from the pointy-headed self-loathing media types who worship him like some sort of magical animal and chase down his wildest speculations to a more direct-to-wingnut, populist beacon of craziness. He's still the assignment editor for Fox News, but Mark Halperin didn't even talk to Reagan for her story, so that says something right there.

But Keller and Edsall—who is HuffPo's political editor—did respond, and they both claimed that they don't even read Drudge.

Keller: "It's probably been a year since I looked at the Drudge report, or felt its impact in any way."

Edasll: "I don't check [Drudge] to speak of."

We're sure they don't masturbate, either. If Keller doesn't read the Drudge Report at least occasionally, it would constitute a professional incompetence of such proportions that we're confident he's lying in order to project a delusional fantasy of a pre-internet media environment in the desperate hope that it will come true. Matt Drudge exists—he is an engine of right-wing paranoia and launcher of 1,000 bullshit stories, and whether Keller likes it or not, he's a part of the political world that Keller's newspaper purports to cover. He's an unpleasant part of that world, but for Keller to even claim that he ignores him is like a pilot ignoring bad weather. More likely Keller reads Drudge and then smugly dismisses what he sees, which is why his managing editor just acknowledged being "a beat behind" on the Van Jones story that Drudge started hyping a week ago.

And Thomas Edsall? He's just lying. Tom Edsall reads the Drudge Report. Every day. If we were to walk into his office, go to his keyboard, launch his browser, and type in "D-R", it would autocomplete "drudgereport.com."

"Maybe he wasn't the phenomenon trend-watchers thought," Keller haughtily told the Observer after briefly pulling his head out of the sand. "Maybe he was just a fad-digital-age hula hoop."

Yes, Bill. A decade-long fad. Airplanes are a fucking fad, too, as you can see from the fact that railroads still exist and the airline industry is struggling. You know what really was a fad? About.com, which your newspaper paid $410 million for in 2005.

Cintra Wilson's column has been a topic of much discussion! Basically, the entire thing went like this:

...Herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy's). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It's like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of "Roseanne."

There's so much more out there, but really, if you have yet to read it, you should, as it's one of the funniest things the Times has run in a while, and only a small minority of the reasons it's so funny are intentional.

Wilson's kinda kooky! She has been described as:

The new Amanda Congdon, as played by Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein.

which still kind of rings true from a strictly editorial standpoint. Cintra apologized a few times. She called herself a Buddhist and felt bad for doing harm (take that, Elizabeth Gilbert), and had to shut down her email from all the bad stuff her column hath wrought.

There was much hand wringing and crazy talk about Wilson's piece! She was right! She was wrong! Comments got so downright nasty on the Times site that they shut them down. Finally, Hoyt — quickly becoming my favorite writer at the Times after firing shots at the Weddings & Celebrations section, Alessandra Stanley, and crazy texting/driving pictures — two weeks after it all went down, keeps the flames well tended to. Observe:

• You do NOT talk shit on Bill Keller's momma, son: "Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, was unhappy, too. The column, he said, 'would make a fine exhibit for someone making the case that The Times has an arrogant streak.' Keller said his mother was a Penney's shopper for much of her life, and she would have found the review 'snotty.' He told me that he wished it had not been published." Oogh. Burn.
  
  
• Basically, our editors failed again: "Wilson's editors should have saved her, themselves and the paper from the reaction they got from readers, who concluded that the humor was at their expense, not for their benefit." Wonder how many people this thing went through before it got to print, no?
  
  
• You also made corporate monolith JC Penney haz a sad: "Darcie Brossart, vice president for communications at J. C. Penney, said, 'We found the review very offensive to our customers.'" Nothing on whether or not they're going to continue to advertise with the Times.
  
  
• Her editor, Trip Gabriel, called her out for being inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory. Like the liberal, funny, Manhattan elitist version of Glenn Beck! "'She's a sharp-tongued writer whose columns are only to a secondary degree service journalism,' Gabriel said. He said she is more of a social critic whose 'style is to quite exaggerate things. She goes over the top.'"
  
  
• The best part. Watch as yet another Styles writer displays complete and utter ignorance of both (A) the Times' readership and (B) the way in which she puts her cards out on the table as a Times writer. This is, as some stupid celebrities would say, major: Wilson told me she usually writes about "obscure stores that don't exist outside of Manhattan," and she thinks of her audience as "1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan." She said it was "kind of provincial of me" not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney's. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. "It was dumb on my part not to see this coming," she said. Well, yes.
  
  
• Finally, the kicker, as given to us by Times editor Bill Keller: "Keller said, 'I'd like to think this will be, as they say, a teachable moment.'"

First, can we retire the term "teachable moment," please? It's a dumb euphemism for "foreseeable fuckup," and also, it just peaked. Second, Clark Hoyt: my Times mancrush. Third: maybe the New York Times wouldn't be worried about being owned soon by a Mexican Dude named Slim if they looked at instances like this — and most of the Styles section, as well as T Magazine — and crunched some numbers on how this kind of thing marginalizes newspaper readers around the country who were maybe on the fence with the Times, who were just thrown off of it. Just an idea.

Finally, of all the conversation Wilson's article generated, much of it missed the greater point, which are the reasons JC Penney's actually deserves to be shat on:

1. If New Yorkers wanted to shop at JC Penney's, we'd probably live somewhere other than New York.

2. What's next, Friday's in Union Square?

3. Also, yes the clothing there is cheap and accessible, but so is the clothing at, I don't know, the Gap. The clothing at JC Penney's is meh.

Last night, media mogul Steven Brill sent us—unsolicited—his thoughts on the possibility of the New York Times charging for its website, which we wrote about yesterday. We will reproduce his thoughts in full, because how often do you get free, unsolicited musings from a media mogul on the area of his expertise (his new gig, Journalism Online, is all about this), even after you have derided him as usually wrong? Brill writes:

1. We have found in creating models like this for our newspaper and magazine affiliates that one of the other key advantages for them is that charging for online will actually enhance their PRINT revenues and circulation. There are two reasons: First, it allows the paper to "bundle" a discount offer for both, so that a would-be print subscriber or renewer can be offered a discount on his online subscription if he or she takes the print edition. (As in "Save 50% off the online subscription if you renew your print subscription.") You can't do that if you're not putting any value on, and not charging for, the online version. Second, if you keep giving one version (online) away for free, then you increasingly undercut sales of the other (print) version, not to mention your ability to raise the price on the newsstand, something most newspapers and magazines are trying to do. The long and short of it is that where papers have charged online in Europe and the U.S. they have enhanced their PRINT revenues. Indeed, the list of newspapers in the U.S. that have not suffered losses in print circulation lately looks like a list of those that are charging for their online versions.

2. In the models we are developing with affiliates, we show that you really needn't give up much if any online ad revenues when you charge online, because you really don't reduce your traffic much. That's because you can use a variety of methods to maintain most of your current (free) page views, such as: only charging readers who visit online more than, say, five time a month; only charging readers who visit frequently and who are outside your geographic base (locally-based online advertisers aren't paying to reach them anyway; or allowing readers to sample the first two paragraphs of a story before asking them to pay. We have created about 15 such varieties of free visits/sampling/charging methods. All of them contradict the notion of some kind of magic "pay wall" suddenly coming down and charging everyone for everything.

Rebecca Dana, reporter for the WSJ's Speakeasy blog and subject of the august paper's sultriest headcut ever, is leaving to take a job with the Daily Beast—her "dream job," she says. "I'm going to write about culture for them, with a focus on fashion. Will also do some editing and some general entertainment/media stuff," Dana tells us. She adds, "You won't have this stipple-portrait to kick around any more!" Oh?

The Claremont, NH Eagle Times folds, leaving the town without a newspaper. The Washington City Paper brushed off criticisms from witless Marion Barry fans who could not recognize the unadulterated brilliance of their latest cover. And other papers continue to try to fashion some sort of overarching editorial philosophy for the Huffington Post. Hint: It doesn't exist.

Do not expect Bill Keller to laugh and chuckle the next time a satirical cable news show comes calling! He says about his Daily Show experience: "Well, that's the last time I try to be a good sport. Even my wife told me that I looked faintly ridiculous, and she was trying to make me feel better. Among the people who would miss us most would be the wise-guy pundits and scriptwriters for satirical TV shows, because they riff on the news we produce." Bill Keller will punch Jason Jones right in the snoot, on sight.

John Koblin points out that in the past two weeks Bill Keller has been talking and talking and talking to the media about various weighty issues, which is good! Better than not talking to the media, at least. From the (rest of) the media's perspective! Let's review:

• Bill Keller graciously gives a sit-down interview to the Daily Show and is made to look like a fool, of course. He narrows his gaze and spits at the ground; Bill Keller will make this up to the world.
• Bill Keller goes to Tehran to do some reporting. Some people say it is not "cool" for an editor to parachute into a foreign revolution and commence writing front-page stories which could have been written by his correspondents. Bill Keller is forced to refute this assertion, with the NYT version of scoffing.
• Last Friday, NYT reporter David Rohde escapes his Taliban kidnappers after seven months. Everyone kept the whole thing a secret, thanks to the pleadings of Bill Keller! Bill Keller has to explain this all to his own paper, then to other papers, then finally over the weekend he has to go talk about everything on CNN's Reliable Sources and then there he is on Sunday on George Stephanapolous' show on ABC as some sort of chatty talking head and of course he has to tell the kidnapping story again, and by now the past two weeks probably feel like some sort of neverending cocktail party to Bill Keller, where he just tells the same three stories over and over again like a stump speech and smiles and wait to go home and play with the dog.

The New York Times managed it with expert precision and a delicate hand. In their release, Times managing editor Bill Keller noted that "the prevailing view among David's family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David's plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support." So did the Times explicitly ask news organizations to simply not report the story for the safety of their writers?

Yeah: that's actually exactly what happened. According to a comment left by Gawker's managing editor Gabriel Snyder on the earlier post, two things of pretty fascinating substance: (1) "it had been widely known in the Times newsroom and media circles almost as soon as he was taken hostage," which, even with their reporter's life on the line, is surprising given the fact that there was virtually nothing heard regarding this story and (2) Gabriel had contacted the Times regarding a piece on the kidnapping. The Times - or specifically - Cathrine Mathis, SVP of Communications at The New York Times Co., emailed Gabriel to ask that Gawker not run the story out of safety for their reporter's life. "Put that way, it was hard not to agree," Snyder writes. And that's why it happened: the competing obligation between having to write the news and being sensitive to a possibly fatal situation. And the Times, thankfully, chose Rohde's life. They also did an unbelievable job at shutting down the story elsewhere.

So who did report on David Rohde's kidnapping? Combat reporter Michael Yon asked about it while embedded in Iraq: "In December, during a trip with Secretary Gates, I asked a New York Times reporter if she knew the status of the situation. The story had been kept so quiet that she didn't actually know the kidnapping had occurred. The information came to me from several sources some weeks after the kidnapping in Afghanistan. I sat on the information, but there are a growing number of snippets on the web..." A conservative American blog called Infidels Are Cool linked to Italian wire service AKI's story on it. Conservative forum/quasi-hate mongers Free Republic did a little dance on it. Sensing a pattern? What's out there around the time of the kidnapping are things like that: fringe reports.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Meanwhile, Gabriel brings up an interesting final point: while the Times has every resource to understand and execute strategies regarding sensitive issues like this one, he (A) walked over a wall - Rodhe's words, and (B) the Times ran an article patronizing smaller institutions sending reporters into dangerous territory without being able to provide safe cover for them, the most pertinent example of which being, of course, Euna Lee and Laura Ling from Current.TV, who're being held in North Korea right now after being sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. But Rohde was there for over seven months, and he managed to get loose all on his own. So much for big institutional power in that regard.

In the statement the Times released, it was noted that Keller wasn't going to be commenting on it. But the issue's over. Rohde's safe, and each instance something like this happens is unique, so the Times' protocol can't be exactly the same each time (and thus, "compromised" by commenting on it). Is Keller going quiet because - for all the Times' money and strategy and power - their reporter ended up hopping a wall to safety? Or because - despite being proud at the securing of Rohde's life - Keller might be a little uneasy with the fact that his news outlet was so successful at shutting down every other major news outlet's reporting of their story?

Times Reporter Held by Taliban Escapes [NYT]
A World of Risk for a New Brand of Journalist [NYT]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.New York Times editor Bill Keller's back from his weeklong reporting stint in Iran, and he's a little miffed about the haters out there! In an email to E&P, he writes: "I've had a few bizarre vibes from people outside the NYT who are puzzled by my presence in Tehran. Do people in the media crit game really think editors are supposed to be desk jockeys who never go get a sense of the story?...Or is the idea that when a big, exhausting news breaks visiting editors should hole up in the hotel and let the reporters do all the work? Weird." Bill Keller, you are a decorated foreign correspondent and an honorable editor and really people just didn't think it was fair your stories were all over the NYT front page, cause you're the boss, and also you have lots of reporters who can do that stuff already, anyhow. Friends? Okay, we're friends.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Jon Stewart made fun of CNN for all its Twitter-mongering and whatnot, which makes it look like Rocketboom or something. Big mistake, Jon. You've earned the wrath of CJR: "Stewart's broad-brush treatment of CNN amounted to not only a rare misstep for The Daily Show's normally trenchant media criticism, but also a missed opportunity." BURN.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Weather Channel is determined "to draw an audience in primetime, one of its lowest-rated time periods." Maybe it would be easier for the Weather Channel to just have three total employees, each covering an eight-hour on-air shift that consists of them standing in front of a big weather mad, while local weather forecasts crawl on the bottom of the screen, so people could watch for five minutes to find out what the weather's like, which is really their "core competency"? Also TV network ad sales are getting even worse, so there's not much to aspire to. NBC Nightly News' solution: having Brian Williams walk around.

In a new poll, a majority of Americans say that if they could have just one news source, it would be the internet. TV, newspapers, and radio were all well behind. Sure, it all sounds great until the electricity goes out. Then it's back to town criers.

Minutes after The Daily Show's segment on The Times aired last week, some in the Times newsroom voiced their sentiment that correspondent Jason Jones' "report" went just fine. "That was awesome," said one staffer to us on the night of the show. "We're good sports!"

Haha, presumably "one staffer" was neither Bill Keller nor Rick Berke, both of whom got embarrassed. But no Jason Jones revenge takedowns have been published yet, so maybe they really are good sports! John Koblin also finds out that the Daily Show cut out interviews with David Carr, Sewell Chan, and others, probably because they did not stare quizzically at a proffered paper with a deer-in-the-headlights look for a suitably awkward period of time.
[NYO]

Keller, in addition to running the paper, came up at the Times as a star foreign correspondent, having won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Soviet Union's collapse. He's no stranger to descending into the mean streets of a strange place in a safari vest and ferreting out the story. Keller's decision to go to Tehran might be an indication of his rumored boredom at the top of the Times, overseeing the once-great paper's demise and humiliating himself on the Daily Show. He told us that rumors going around the newsroom that he would be stepping down were "bullshit," but a jaunt back into the exhilarating streets of a foreign capital could be a sign of restlessness.

The front page of the Times' web site right now shows why:

We've got a photo of a massive demonstration in Tehran in defiance of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a headline reporting that Iran's Supreme Leader is wavering in his support for the president next to a "news analysis"—which should presumably reflect and bear some relation to the news—telling us how Ahmadinejad has emerged from all this "with a stronger hand." Really?

That piece, datelined Tehran, is by Keller and Michael Slackman. Keller's view is premised almost entirely upon the fact the Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayotollah Khameini, has thrown his support behind Ahmadinejad, calling the election results "a divine blessing." He argued that—irrespective of the legitimacy or lack thereof of his re-election—Ahmadinejad has consolidated power and outmaneuvered his reformist opponents.

Whether his 63 percent victory is truly the will of the people or the result of fraud, it demonstrated that Mr. Ahmadinejad is the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical, military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution.

As president, Mr. Ahmadinejad is subordinate to the country's true authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who commands final say over all matters of state and faith. With this election, Mr. Khamenei and his protégé appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said.

That analysis is, as they say, no longer operative. Not long after it went up on the Times web site last night, Khameini dramatically reversed himself and called for the country's powerful Guardian Council to investigate the election results. That's not a definitive shift, and it may well be an empty gesture designed to humor the aggrieved reformists. But given Ahmadinejad's forceful claim of victory in a clean election, and his comparison of the protesters in the street to poor losers after a soccer game, Khameini's decision to publicly lend credence to claims that the victory was fixed is hardly an indication that the men share a "unified and emboldened" alliance.

It's obviously difficult to pick out the right thread from a moving and complicated story, and Khameini's apparent reversal certainly was a surprise. So we shouldn't fault Keller for getting it wrong so much as fault him for insisting on being the one to get it wrong. Let your reporters stick their necks out on shoddy analysis peices. That's one of the perks of being top dog—kings get to guide the battle from a horse on a safe hill somewhere. They're not supposed to get muddy on the front lines. When you get your hands dirty like this, it kind of makes us wonder if you really know what you're talking about.

And given the cognitive dissonance generated by the conflicting headlines on the Times' front page right now, you'd think they'd replace the news analysis with something fresher. Wonder why they haven't?

On Sunday, Keller filed a "Memo From Tehran" summing up reaction to the vote. And he quoted people anonymously, a practice that the Times regularly engages in because it is almost always necessary to report true things, but also sanctimoniously distances itself from because some people think it's bad:

"They didn't rig the vote," claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. "They didn't even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."

That passage was refreshing in that it didn't include the pedantic and forced recitation of the anonymous source's reasons for demanding anonymity—"said, the source, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the matter"—that is actually required of the Times' sourcing guidelines:

We should avoid automatic references to sources who "insisted on anonymity" or "demanded anonymity"; rote phrases offer the reader no help and make our decisions appear automatic. When possible, though, articles should tersely explain what kind of understanding was actually reached by reporter and source, and should shed light on the reasons and the source's motives.

"Pleaded not to be named" isn't quite as "rote" as "insisted on anonymity," but it doesn't really tell us too much about the understanding that was actually reached, Bill, between you and your source as you assiduously worked to live up to the sourcing guidelines that you impose on your reporters.

UPDATE: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty gave freelancer Erik Maza a statement on Keller's trip. Turns out he just wanted to get the hell out of the office:

He went because he had long wanted to visit Iran and the occasion of the election seemed like a great time to do so, accompanying our reporter, Robert Worth. Bill had not planned to write articles but when the story got so big, he did so.

The slant of the Daily Show's skit was that the paper is sad old relic from a bygone era, or a "walking Colonial Williamsburg" as Jones put it, and he basically breezes around the place making fun of everyone and everything for being old and outdated and on the verge of death, culminating in interviews with executive editor Bill Keller and assistant managing editor Rick Berke.

It's to Berke that Jones poses the question, "Why is aged news better than real news?" When Berke contends that the Times doesn't sell "aged news" Jones counters by pointing to a copy of the paper and asks, "Show me one thing in there that happened today." Berke then spends the next few seconds looking utterly befuddled while trying to come up with an answer.

But it's Jones' sit-down interview with Keller that was the most wince-inducing part of the whole thing. Jones queries Keller about the paper's revenue stream, asking "Does it make Huffington Post money?" Keller responds by saying he doesn't know how much money HuffPo makes, but then adds, "The last time I was in Baghdad I didn't see a Huffington Post bureau or a Google bureau or a Drudge Report bureau...it's a lot easier to stay home and riff on the work that somebody else does." Jones' nodding response—"Much easier and more fun to read."

And finally Jones tells Keller an old newspaper joke with a twist in the punchline: "What's black and white and read all over?...Your balance sheets." Keller laughs but squirms around in his seat quite a bit, and we were squirming right with him the whole time.

Timesman-in-chief Bill Keller shilled for the Gray Lady.

Mahalo funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis offered a metaphor for his career.

AllThingsD daddyblogger Peter Kafka experienced technical difficulties.

Rachel Nixon discovered there are media jobs to be had in Canada. (Let's all move north!)

Videoblogger talent rep George Ruiz blended in with the suits better than he thought.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

New York Times editor Bill Keller has been practicing his jabs and left hook for some time. He called Murdoch's Journal "New York Times lite" at a staff meeting in February. This month he was quoted in the Nation musing on the rival paper's "identity crisis:"

If the paper has made up its mind what it wants to be, it's not clear to me... I really miss the long, well-told narratives and ambitious investigative projects. [The Journal's editor] decries that kind of journalism as a self-indulgence...

The Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson is feuding a bit harder, edging toward the bare-knuckled combativeness of his corporate siblings at the New York Post and Fox News.

Here's a memo he sent to staff earlier today. Along with the chart above, it's supposed to prove the Journal caters to the sort of active, engaged readers who pick up the paper on the newstand. USA Today and the Times, meanwhile, are for the non-sentient.

If this all reads like something out of a reality television show, well, maybe that's for the best: young people seem to pay far more attention to those types of programs than to newspapers. To change that, the industry might just have to borrow some tactics.