Ironically, it's the same overweening tendencies Murdoch displays now to such apparent delight that got Evans sacked from the editorship of the British Times in 1982 after only a year's tenure (he complained about the lack of editorial independence — sound familiar?) But even prior to that, Harry skirmished with Rupert and came away defeated and bruised.

He'd tried to lead a management buyout of The Sunday Times, which Evans edited to great acclaim for 14 years, only to find, as he later recounted to Forbes's James Brady, "we were outwitted by Rupert. My colleagues thought he would better handle the unions, and they were right. He did." That may be read as faint praise for the better businessman, but Evans still thought of Murdoch as a force of true evil in news publishing. As he wrote on page one of his memoir Good Times, Bad Times, "I knew that Murdoch issued promises as prudently as the Weimar Republic issued Marks." Much of the remainder of the book explains why and how this is so.

Evans must really despise the Cheltenham mountain face to sound so generous now.

As Silicon Alley Insider discovered, some 14 of the site's top 20 most popular movie clips are basically soft-core porn (well, maybe not that Reno 911! clip). The reigning champ? That would the scene "Topless Pillow Fight" from legendary party flick Animal House. There's a (obviously NSFW) clip below, but be prepared to sit through a couple of ads, because that's how NBC and Fox make their money. REVOLUTIONARY!

[Silicon Alley Insider]

"The paper's editors are being urged to think more about how they can use the front page to boost newsstand sales — not something that has traditionally been a major focus."

Those instructions conjure visions of the parody tabloid Journal published in April (pictured), which included a topless dot-drawing of Anne Coulter and a garish, Post-style promotion for NYSE lotto. Today's front page story on the dramatic suicide of a "flamboyant" real estate developer could certainly be given the tabloid treatment, although the headline, "Real-Estate Financier's Death Hints At Trouble for Lenders," would need to be sexed up (possibly with ALL CAPS and a slammer!).

As if orders to tart up the paper weren't disorienting enough, staffers are also on edge about 50 job cuts at the South Brunswick New Jersey offices, reports Keith Kelly at the Post.

It could be worse, Journal-ites: At least you're not getting paid by the page view (yet)!

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and News owner Mort Zuckerman have yet to have their first meeting on the deal, but it shouldn't be particularly awkward — as shown in the picture above, the two moguls are comfortable chatting socially, in this case at internet publisher Arianna Huffington's May book party.

More difficult, for sure, will be the merging of the papers' fiercely competitive circulation groups. The Post has lavished coverage on Daily News circulation scandals, and the rivalry trickles all the way down to deliverymen, who have been known to trash bundles of rivals' papers. Perhaps, before any partnership goes through, a study of sectarian rivalries in Iraq is in order, if only as a cautionary example.

[Times]

Olbermann called Snow "optimistic, funny and courageous," adding, "While we could not have disagreed more on policy, we were in frequent contact, even during his days as Press Secretary."

The temerity!

...a true friend of Snow's says Olbermann had "no relationship with Tony, at all." In fact, Olbermann named Snow his "Worst Person in the World" on Jan. 9, 2007, accusing him of lying about President Bush's 2003 "mission accomplished" speech. Olbermann hissed, "You're just baldfaced lying. You were hired to lie . . . We're not all third-graders out here."

Clearly, Olbermann's parting words for Snow should have focused on their bitterest moments of disagreement rather than on what Olbermann admired about Snow. In fact, Olbermann should have included in his eulogy the phrase "worst person in the world," if only for the sake of consistency.

[Post]

The Time piece is livelier that the Journal's, but guess what shows up in it: that's right, all the exact same facts! 4chan was started by a 15-year-old kid. It is dirty. Memes. LOLCats. Big audience, small money. Porny! Hard to sell ads! But "moot," the founder of the site, does have the right idea, PR-wise:

He wouldn't be above cashing out for the right price, which is $580 million, which is what Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005. "I try to work Murdoch into any interview I give," he says. "Rupert Murdoch? moot@4chan.org."

My shirt right now is as wrinkly as Rupert Murdoch. Meme!

[WSJ, Time]

Name: Sumner Redstone
Age: 85
Position: Chairman, National Amusements (Viacom, CBS, MTV, etc.)
What kind of old man is he?: Befuddled
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with daughters.
Key quote: "I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else"
Health threat: Face of porcelain

Name: Rupert Murdoch
Age: 77
Position: Chairman, News Corp
What kind of old man is he?: Vindictive
Trick in staving off old age: A much younger wife.
Key quote: "You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place."
Health threat: Enveloped in skin folds.

Name: Sam Zell
Age: 66
Position: Owner, Tribune Company
What kind of old man is he?: Gnomish
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with his employees.
Key quote: "Fuck you [OLD AGE!]"
Health threat: Balding

Name: Barry Diller
Age: 66
Postion: Chairman and CEO, IAC
What kind of old man is he?: Angry
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with fellow businessmen.
Key quote: "I thought they were talking about eye charts. I don't see anything full-blown." [On being called a "visionary"]
Health threat: Tooth gappage.

Name: Hugh Hefner
Age: 82
Postion: Owner, Playboy Enterprises
What kind of old man is he?: Desperately youthful
Trick in staving off old age: Parties, hordes of women, pajamas.
Key quote: “In many ways, I'm younger than I was 20 years ago."
Health threat: Priapism.

Who is she?

Briganti is Fox's VP of media relations, and #2 in the PR command structure under Brian Lewis. But if Lewis sets the tone, Briganti is the one who carries out the executions. Here's a very abbreviated list of her all time hits:

• When Anderson Cooper chided Fox for running with a false report of Obama going to a Muslim school, Briganti responded with, "Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper.”
• Briganti attributed Keith Olbermann's attacks on Bill O'Reilly to his "personal demons, and said "In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”
• When Christiane Amanpour said CNN and Fox were intimidated by the Bush administration and practiced self-censorship in the run-up to the Iraq war, Briganti responded, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

How did she get so notorious?

Briganti's real reputation was not earned by zingers about famous cable talking heads; it was earned with a conscious, longstanding policy of publicly bullying average beat reporters who wrote straight news that was not to Fox's liking. She once insinuated that a WSJ reporter wrote a story about Fox that the network didn't like because her hormones were acting up (the reporter was pregnant at the time). She and her colleagues routinely complain to reporters' bosses and try to get them in trouble with their editors for the crime of not praising Fox well enough.

She's famous for blacklisting reporters who do not cover Fox the way it wants to be covered. Whereas most media operations strive to present a professional face even if they hate a certain reporter, Fox does the opposite. One reporter told me that Irena blacklisted him and even turned him down for a requested tour of the Fox studios because she felt his coverage was negative. Also blacklisted in the past were an AP reporter and a Baltimore Sun reporter. The notable thing is that these are not commentators that Fox disagrees with; these are regular, run-of-the-mill TV reporters, reporting fact-based news, who were blacklisted because said facts disagreed with Fox.

Strangely, nearly everybody who's met Briganti in person says she's nice and personable. One reporter heard that when Irena first started going to Fox press events in New York, she was outed to reporters as a rather bubbly person. That undermined her queen-of-mean persona, and she had to cut back on her events schedule—or at least be a bit less nice. Others say that Briganti was in fact a nice person before she got to Fox, and that being there has turned her soul dark.

That may be because she is the mouthpiece of Fox chief Roger Ailes, the former Nixon hatchet man who loves to run Fox and its PR operation as if it was locked in a nasty political campaign. Since the golden rule of PR is that a flack is only as evil as her clients, it makes sense that Briganti would develop a reputation as a rare, unvarnished attack dog in media flackdom. She learned from the best.

When I worked at PRWeek a couple of years ago, I tried to write a profile of Briganti. This, after several people who had dealt with her assured me that she was the single meanest flack in the entire media world (which is true). I sent emails out to a list of people in the media that Briganti had publicly insulted. And what happened? Some turned me down, citing fear of her. Some didn't respond, out of fear. And one, in what I still consider to be the biggest bitch move I ever saw as a reporter, ran straight to Irena, telling her that a PRWeek reporter was out to smear her. This—from a reporter who had already been publicly smeared by Briganti—is akin to the kid whose response to being bullied is to grovel and try to please the bully further.

Briganti expertly strung me along for months, promising interviews in the near future and then pushing back the date continuously. Eventually the profile fell apart and never got written. She's good at what she does. She is still quite willing to offer negative tidbits about her competitors to this day.

Here's some more Briganti insight, culled from my own experience and what other reporters have told me:

• She is the single most blatant horse trader for stories in the entire media business. That means she will tell a reporter, "I'll give you this tidbit of news, but in return you have to write a negative story about this or that element of our competitors." When a reporter takes the tidbit but doesn't do Fox's bidding with the other fluff or nasty story (as no respectable reporter would), that reporter goes on Fox's shit list, and is subject to have a negative item about them planted by Briganti. This kind of blatant favor trading and retaliation would make PR people from, say, the Times or MSNBC laugh or shudder. Fox is the only practitioner of this level of media PR bloodsport.
• Some PR people have decided not to apply for jobs at Fox—jobs they could use—solely because of Briganti's bad reputation.
• Briganti and Fox routinely refuse to participate in any news story that also mentions CNN. They try to convince reporters to cut CNN out of television stories entirely in order to get quotes from Fox.
• We hear that even some within News Corp's corporate PR department (separate from Fox's specific PR department) dislike Briganti, because her bloody-hatchet reputation frankly makes the entire company look like a bunch of crazy people. Which doesn't go over well in corporate boardrooms. But Briganti, as Ailes' mouthpiece, seems to be untouchable.

Does it work?

This is the real question: does Fox's fixation on retaliation and fear tactics aimed at the working press actually benefit the network? Well, they certainly work in the sense of making reporters fear them; David Carr himself writes about the "series of alarms" that go off in his head when he writes any story about Fox News. One tipster asked about Briganti eagerly volunteered information (and called her a "cunt,") but added, "I can't be attached to this in any shape or form. Or she'll get me."

But does fear equal good media relations? In the short term, it can serve to temper negative stories about Fox. But it also serves to temper reporters' enthusiasm for any good items about Fox. And long term, it creates a press corps united in its hatred and resentment of your company.

Fox News'—and Briganti's—main mistake is attacking the normal, workaday reporters with such angry gusto. It's one thing to go after Keith Olbermann. It's another to go after beat reporters at trade magazines and newspapers who are simply doing their jobs. Ever so slowly, despite their skittishness and fear, media reporters will coalesce against Fox in a seething mass, just waiting for the chance to get their revenge for Briganti's slights.

And though one of Briganti's favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she'll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of "denied access." And even papers like the Times are getting salty these days, as you can tell by Carr's piece. Smart PR people have found, with long experience, that it's better to try to treat people fairly and take negative stories in stride. Karma can be a bitch.

[And if you've dealt with Briganti and have some stories to tell? Recorded one of her tirades? Have emails to forward? And for god's sake, does anyone have a picture of this woman? Email us.]

Here are some other instances of Murdoch getting slammed, culled from an exhaustive list at io9 that you should read as well:

• Planet Fred—a movie about a tiny little alien who lives on the head of a media mogul who resembles Murdoch. Hard to believe this one isn't yet a classic.
• Max Headroom—a character named Grossman is an evil network boss who makes people's heads explode from too much advertising. True to life.
• Cold Lazarus—the book by Dennis Potter includes a Murdochian figure named Stiltz, who pushes fake, virtual experiences as a replacement for real ones. Eventually he gets killed. Draw your own conclusions.

Go read the full list at io9! And anyone who reads this book, please submit a report.

[Mixed Media]

Five ex-WSJers have ended up at Portfolio, and three at the NYT; the rest are scattered amongst other financial news outlets (Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, the FT, etc.) and the higher-paying fields of PR and finance.

Here's the problem: not a single one of those outlets that is scooping up the Journal's castoffs is doing better than the Journal itself. The paper is the only one in America actually investing in financial news; elsewhere, it's simply a shrinking field. The big three financial magazines are all in more or less perilous positions. The Economist's upper ranks are a good gig, but only for a chosen few. Of the prospective upstarts in the field, Portfolio has thus far proven itself to be only a black hole for Conde Nast's money, and Slate's proposed new business title will employ only a relative handful of journalists (and is no sure success itself). FiLife.com, IAC's new money matters site, has morphed into a user-friendly community site based on personal finance that no skilled business journalist would have any use for.

Newspapers? Even worse. The Times can't afford to pick up all the business reporters qualified to work there. Nor can the FT, even if it wanted to. Reuters and Bloomberg are viable employers (for now), but neither offers the type of prestige the WSJ does for an ambitious reporter.

The point: The number of decent US jobs in business journalism is shrinking. Those who leave the WSJ face the very real prospect of not finding anything nearly as good as the position they left. And the problem will only get worse for the foreseeable future. So those who bailed out for PR and Wall Street will end up with a lot of old WSJ colleagues sending resumes their way.

May 2003. This, according to Jack Shafer, is when Keith Olbermann instigated the NBC/Fox War. In a throwaway wisecrack at the close of his show, Olbermann compared Fox Blowhard Mascot Bill O'Reilly to Joe McCarthy. By 2006, the two hosts were fighting with each other almost nightly.

January 2006 Bill devotes his nightly comment to attacking NBC itself—and not Olbermann by name. "But 'Talking Points' is troubled by the behavior of NBC, which cheap shots FOX News on a regular basis and has been doing so for some time." He then takes it to the next level by going over Keith's head and pinning the blame on NBC President Robert Wright! (Keith responded by declaring O'Reilly his Worst Person in the World.)

October 2006 Fox's NBC war was expanding beyond Olbermann and O'Reilly. Fox gossip Roger Friedman turned a benefit report into an odd swipe at NBC's ratings, blaming Wright for the failure of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

January 2007 The O'Reilly Factor presented a fair and balanced report on The Decline of NBC News. "As we reported NBC News has taken a sharp turn to the left under executive Jeff Zucker and Robert Wright with elements at NBC News now actually using propaganda from far left web sites as primary source material. Unbelievable." He went on to gleefully report on the supposed misdoings of Maria Bartiromo, bringing in a financial analyst willing to publicly trash CNBC.

April 2007 As the odious Michelle Malkin hosted his program, O'Reilly appeared via satellite to blame the Don Imus affair on Jeff Zucker. Meanwhile, Fox business correspondent Terry Keenan gleefully reported that NBC's parent company GE wanted to unload the network.

January 2008 The war heats up! O'Reilly does one of his patented ambushes of General Electric head Jeffrey Immelt! Supposedly because of some deal with Iran, but mainly because GE owns NBC and NBC employs Keith Olbermann and Keith Olbermann makes fun of Bill O'Reilly.

And so the feud widened. From Bill versus Keith to Fox versus NBC to News Corp versus General Electric. It went as high as Immelt and Rupert Murdoch! Fox News head Roger Ailes called NBC head Jeff Zucker personally to complain about Olbermann and threaten to take the battle to the New York Post. Murdoch called Zucker to ask that the network not play a video of a blogger harassing O'Reilly.

Page Six, the Post's gossip arm, constantly runs embarrassing stories about Olbermann. Which often leads to Olbermann naming some News Corp or Post-related figure his Worst Person in the World. And then the cycle begins anew! Over and over again!

Post columnist Andrea Peyser overhears Keith bitching about Connie Chung, Keith calls Peyser the worst person in the world, a few months later, Page Six reports that Olbermann is bad in bed! Then column editor Richard Johnson gets the first of his Worst Person in the World awards. (The second would come when he threatened to rape Vanessa Grigoriadis.) It's fun!

But the involvement of Murdoch? The harassment of Immelt? As GE decides whether it wants to keep its toes in the broadcasting business, this ego-driven bullshit might help convince them it's not worth it. Bill might win this one, sort of!

As in most things Murdochian, Rupert doesn't dirty his hands. While it's fun to pretend to see his fingerprints on each Olbermann smear in Page Six, the truth is Johnson and Post head Col Allen do indeed call the shots. They just know which shots they're supposed to call. Just like Roger Ailes at Fox, all the way down to Bill.

Would that GE and NBC/Universal had a message machine so in tune? They've got the cable blowhards warring with the broadcast newsmen and it all ends up publicized by one News Corp outlet or another.

The real winners, as always: us!

The insider said, "They're cable. They're far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they're about seven letters short."

Even more than the opinionated Matthews, Olbermann, with his long "special comments," has forced open a wedge at NBC News between the cable and broadcast side. (The division was explored, among other places, in this week's New Yorker profile of Olbermann.) It appears as though Meet The Press is the latest battlefield in this civil war, which in turn implies that, though Olbermann lashed out at longtime enemies Murdoch and Page Six over the Russert memorial gossip, the stories may very well have originated not with anyone from News Corp. but from a fellow denizen of 30 Rock, the NBC headquarters.

[Post, Previously]

Update: So the Post has posted the Page Six item Keith Olbermann was so worked up about yesterday, and it does indeed say Hardball host Chris Matthews "seemed" to be talking about a strategy for landing Tim Russert's job at a memorial event for the NBC personality, and that Olbermann is threatening to quit if he doesn't get Russert's Meet The Press job. (On Countdown, Olbermann denied issuing an ultimatum for Meet The Press and said Matthews shut down talk of him replacing Russert when an acquaintance brought it up.) But the gossip item also quotes a source, ostensibly from the traditional broadcast side of NBC News, who claims that Russert himself wanted NBC News political director Chuck Todd as his own replacement, and that the network will never install someone from MSNBC on the show. The insider said, "They're cable. They're far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they're about seven letters short."

Even more than the opinionated Matthews, Olbermann, with his long "special comments," has forced open a wedge at NBC News between the cable and broadcast side. (The division was explored, among other places, in this week's New Yorker profile of Olbermann.) It appears as though Meet The Press is the latest battlefield in this civil war, which in turn implies that, though Olbermann lashed out at longtime enemies Murdoch and Page Six over the Russert memorial gossip, the stories may very well have originated not with anyone from News Corp. but from a fellow denizen of 30 Rock, the NBC headquarters.

Update: Paula Froelich of Page Six responds: "I am honored and chuffed that someone with such a severe case of malignant self-obsession as Keith Olbermann would say I am the Worst Person in the World for June 19, 2008. Apparently I, by writing a true story about his ambitions, trumped the atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe, Than Swe, Boris Boyarskov (he wasn't in the news yesterday but I generally think he's a pretty bad guy and assume he did something bad), Ratko Mladic, Hugo Chavez, and his own beloved Dick Cheney. (Notice I didn't say what these people do — Olbermann will have to expand his scope beyond his own being to figure it out. Heres a hint, darling: one is the vice-president of the United States of America). Perhaps Keith, who is as infantile as he is narcissistic, should preach to his viewers about things that actually matter to them, rather than himself. But then again, there are only 300,000 of them. The FLDS has more members."

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

• Even if Friedman's performance was bad, why not ease her out like Jack Romanos at Simon & Schuster or give her a few weeks like Peter Olson at Random House?
• Why did people in the "highest echelons" at HarperCollins seem to know nothing about Friedman's departure Wednesday night? Why are her "closest friends" still baffled about what happened?
• If Friedman was pushed out for performance reasons, why install her chosen successor and longtime underling as the replacement?

Still, Friedman's replacement Murray sounds a lot like the sort of publisher that's so hot these days: "Mr. Murray is a skilled businessman with a knack for administrative strategy and little interest in the literary aspects of publishing." Perhaps Murdoch, who seems to be the only one who saw this change coming, simply decided he wanted one of those.

[Observer]

Murdoch-friendly Money & Investing section chief Nik Deogun is said to be poised for promotion to deputy managing editor for foreign coverage. There is also speculation cold-hearted DC bureau chief John Bussey may get a promotion.

The full email from our tipster:

Watch for announcement today or soon that page one staff - what used
to be the backbone of the WSJ and its strong features - will be merged
with news desk and current editor Mike Williams will be roving feats
editor; that nik deogun will move up to run foreign and become a
deputy ME; bussey may get something big too. So the post-revolutionary
shakeout continues to be revolutionary. Lots of confusion and
uncertainty inside paper. Olf guard... bemused by three column lead stories about wachovia ceo's and Libor
studies and disappearance of stories that appeal beyond the circle of
murdoch's friends in the global elite

The Page One change, at least, would be perfectly in line with the newsy but less polished — and, arguably, far less analytic — direction Thomson is taking the paper. Can anyone shed more light on this rumored re-org? ryan@gawker.com

Michael Morrison, now president of HarperCollins' North American books division, told the Times Friedman had been talking about moving on from HarperCollins for "several weeks," indicating she either knew what was coming or left of her own volition. He brushed aside a theory, floated by a Gawker source, that Murdoch held some sort of grudge over Friedman's role in the squelching of an OJ Simpson book and the departure of Judith Regan, although the Times said others in the company wondered Thursday about the Regan incident.

But statements by Murray in the Journal hint that money, ultimately, may have been at the root of Friedman's departure, just as it had been for her peer Peter Olson at Random House. Murray said Murdoch assured him News Corp. wasn't looking to sell HarperCollins, but "that he wanted to see new growth." And that is now Murray's top priority:

In the interview, Mr. Murray said that his primary task will be to add revenue growth, the same challenge now facing Markus Dohle, the new CEO of Bertelsmann AG's Random House publishing empire. "We're looking to invest in the business, we're hiring, and we're looking to identify new opportunities," said Mr. Murray. Areas of interest include children's publishing, where Mr. Murray said he expects to make additional investments.

[Times, WSJ]

(Thanks to RavingRabbid and Anthony for the tips.)

And last night Mr Obama promised Americans they could propel him into the White House on a wind of change in November.

He is now a step closer to realising the ambitions of Martin Luther King, the black civil rights leader assassinated in 1968.

It was in August 1963 that King famously declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’."

‘America, this is our moment ... tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the start of another’

Illinois senator Mr Obama finally swept to victory after pocketing an unstoppable majority in the number of nominations needed from Democrat supporters.

The last time the paper loved a liberal so much was 1997, when it suddenly supported Britain's Labour party for the first time since Murdoch took over the tabloid. Because ideology takes a back seat to power, and Murdoch does not like to be seen backing losers. Once the liberal's in power, Murdoch can hopefully use the power of the press to encourage a little political realignment. Say, fighting the Euro and backing Iraq, in the case of Tony Blair. And would you look at that, the portion of Obama's speech that the Sun seemed to like the most was the saber-rattling against Iran:

He vowed that as President he would do "everything" in his powers to stop Tehran getting its hands on a nuclear bomb.

He told a 7,000-strong crowd: "The danger from Iran is grave and my goal will be to eliminate this threat. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

He added: "I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world." Mr Obama has already vowed to pull US soldiers out of war-torn Iraq.

And last night he insisted it was right to force the country’s own military to take charge there.

He went on: "Keeping all of our troops tied down indefinitely in Iraq isn’t the way to weaken Iran, it’s precisely what strengthened it."

Murdoch still isn't quite as influential in the States as he is in Great Britain, but what a difference four years could make!

Of course, Murdoch is correct that virtually any story in the Journal, or in any other newspaper, can pack in the same amount of fresh information in half the space. But that begs a follow-up question: Aren't newspapers, and the Journal especially, differentiated from newer media by precisely the sort of context and analysis that would end up on the cutting-room floor? Mossberg, intervie