Dowd's style—sarcasm, cutsey nicknames, and, most importantly, countless gag-worthy pop cultural references—was, we are expected to believe, revolutionary back when she made the jump from "serious journalist" (whose legendarily/allegedly unorthodox style of story-getting was chronicled in Chris Buckley's book Thank You For Smoking and the film of the same name as the star reporter character who fucks sources) to influential columnist, back in 1995. She won the Pulitzer in 1999, and is as responsible as anyone else at a major newspaper for framing the old narrative of the 2000: unlikable wonky smug technocrat fabulist Al Gore vs. genial idiot George W. Bush.

By 2004, she'd become one of the rising liberal blogosphere's prime targets for mockery. And her style was easy to parody. (Have you ever noticed how Sex & the City might conceivably relate to politics? It writes itself!)

By the time of the inescapable publicity circus for her book Are Men Necessary in 2005 (the Observer called it "a very odd, occasionally entertaining mish-mash of politics and sex, biology and Cosmopolitan-ology, gravity and wit, insight and carelessness" which seems pretty accurate), well, we all just got sick of her. But it wasn't just the book. There were other problems!

First: "hip" writing about politics? Making pop culture funnies about candidates? Maybe revolutionary in the satire-deprived mid-90s, but then came blogs! (And also The Onion, The Daily Show, and The 9/11 Commission Report, obv.) Blogs did it funnier, faster, wittier, and hipper than Maureen could. (Seriously, her pop culture references sound strained to everyone but 80-year-old shut-ins who secretly titter while dropping their monocles at Don Imus wisecracks—which is to say, the media population of Washington DC) There was this lady named Ana Marie Cox whom this guy named Nick Denton hired to run his brand-new politics blog—she turned out to be the funny Maureen Dowd! Plus Cox wrote about assfucking.

But maybe more importantly, Dowd was fucked by her bosses. Timesselect put her column behind a paywall. Bloggers stopped linking, reading, explicating, and damning it. Dowd recognized the effect this could have on her waning influence: by some accounts she "boycotted" the extra features promised subscribers. But as the great experiment dragged on, she faded into internet obscurity, more or less. The paywall went up in 2005, after the heady Dowd-hating days of the '04 elections had ended. By the time they lifted it, two years later, no one quite remembered why they got so upset when the crazy red-haired lady called their candidate a pussy.

Generation Q [NYT]

The TimesSelect Effect [Odd Numbers]

From: NYTimes. com
Subject: Important Notice About TimesSelect

Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,

We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.

The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.

Why the change?

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

Beginning today, we will issue refunds to our TimesSelect customers for the unused portion of their subscriptions. (The refund may take a few weeks to appear on your credit card, so please be patient.) If you need to update your billing information, please click here:

https://select.nytimes.com/commerce/jsp/purchase_history.jsp

To thank you for your loyalty, we are offering you complimentary access to Times Reader from now through December 31, 2007. Times Reader is a digital version of The New York Times that looks just like the print version. It is normally offered for $169 annually, and is free to home delivery subscribers. (Please note that Times Reader is available for Windows only, though a version for Macintosh is planned.) For the duration of this complimentary offer, you also have access to our Premium Crosswords as well as the full online Archive, back to 1851. To download Times Reader, click here:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/timesreader.html

We thank you for your support of TimesSelect, and hope you continue to enjoy The New York Times in all its electronic and print forms.

For more information, including answers to frequently asked questions, click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts

To contact Customer Service, please send an e-mail to ordercs@nytimes.com.

Sincerely,

Vivian Schiller
Senior Vice President & General Manager
NYTimes.com
________________________________________________________________________
ABOUT THIS E-MAIL

This is a one-time e-mail about your subscription to TimesSelect.

NYTimes.com
620 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Ad revenue for the New York Times Media Group decreased 2.9 percent from July 2006—which is actually not bad. Take the New England Media Group, where apparently the Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus in the Natick Mall have yet to open and save the world: Ad revenues are down 4.9 percent compared to last July. The bad news came from the Regional Media Group, whose ad revenues are down a cringe-worthy 10.9 percent, "mainly because of softness in home furnishing, home improvement and department store advertising. Classified advertising revenues decreased due to weakness in real estate, help-wanted and automotive advertising." Hi, Craigslist!

All of those numbers are marginally better than the June results, when the Times was down 3 percent, the New England Media Group was down 11.8 percent, and the Regional Media Group was down 12.2 percent.

The bright spot, as always, is Internet revenue, which grew 19.3 percent over last July. But while impressive, the rate of Internet growth is also slowing. In the second quarter, Internet revenue grew 23.4 percent; in June, Internet revenues were up 22 percent over last year.

We assume that a lot of that growth came from the About Group, whose ad revenues rose 34.7 percent in July (About's ad revenues are bundled into the calculations for the Internet group, but also broken out separately, presumably because they're a spot of good news). It seems that as the months go by, the company is looking for other, mostly online-based, ways to make money to support its sinking newspaper business. Bill Keller doesn't work for free, ya know! But now his salary is being paid by stuff like "What Not to Play At Your Wedding."

New York Times Company: Press Releases [NYT Co.]

n+1's latest e-blast (ha!) also plugs editor (and Dalton graduate!) Marco Roth's memoir in progress. Here's some out-of-order sentences from it: "[L]ight pouring from the East River through the bank of windows overlooking Central Park... I hate myself for writing a memoir and I hate most contemporary memoirs... [The living room was] large enough to seat 30 people for the chamber music concerts my parents hosted two or three times a year... a magnificent, pre-war, two-story temple to neo-classicism... the kitchen was about the size of the one-bedroom apartment where I'm writing now." There, done!

Finally, there's a genius plan to send out copies of their mag all over the world using traveling lawyers. That's just funny.

From: Editors of n+1 < subs@nplusonemag.com> Date: Aug 3, 2007 2:31 PM Subject: n+1 reading on the Hudson Pier To: subs@nplusonemag.com

Dear Beloved Subscribers,

Greetings from n+1 headquarters, where the air-conditioning is not what it is in your standard major New York publisher, to put it mildly. But we do have Microsoft Word, and email, and the hardiest
band of interns in n+1 history.

Some news:

READING NEXT WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8. At the Hudson Pier, Manhattan, 7 pm. Rebecca Schiff, who appeared in the Issue 4 Fiction Chronicle, will read her dark, comic tales of post-industrial love-seeking in New York and Boston. We will also inaugurate, on the Hudson Pier, our first experiment in having a trained actor read a piece from n+1—in this case, Eli Evans's "TV Diaries," from Issue 5. We'll see what
happens. Please come if you can. Afterward we will go over to the [SITE OF PARTY REDACTED, TO AVOID ANNOYING EMAILS] which happens to serve an excellent burger, if you're hungry, plus beer.

*Note*: We don't yet have the exact pier assignment from the Parks Department. To avoid incessant emailing of everyone, we're going to post the location at the top of our website (www.nplusonemag.com) as soon as we have it, we hope by Monday at the very latest.

PAMPHLET #2: We are making another pamphlet—this one about what we wish we'd known when we were college freshman, and what books we wish we'd read. "What We Should Have Known." Is that too cumbersome? We'll be slipping it under the doors of incoming first-years at select universities this September. Really. It will also be on-sale to non-college students, just in case. But anyone who can prove college first-year status is entitled to a free copy.

RENEW: Please renew if you haven't! There will be many more n+1s, and renewals keep us alive.

www.nplusonemag.com/renewal.html

(Note: The pamphlet referred to on the renewal page is the PS1 pamphlet on the avant-garde. We'll make the second pamphlet available for purchase as soon as we send it to the printer.)

NPLUSONEMAG: Continues to produce high-quality internet-only web gems, recently featuring the work of the beloved crazy German-Swiss writer Robert Walser:

www.nplusonemag.com/newnovel.html

Also, Nikil Saval on Bobby Seale at BAM.

www.nplusonemag.com/seale.html

and Carlene Bauer on how Sassy didn't actually change her life:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/sassy.html

Elsewhere on the internet, we're proud to recommend Marco Roth's continuing series of memoirs at Nextbook.org. They're really quite remarkable:

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=554
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=571
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=597
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=652

And a bonus treat:
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=464

Finally, while we're at it, Rebecca Curtis's book of stories, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money is now in bookstores. "The Near Son," which appeared in Issue 5, is in it; it's a very good book.

AND, our good friends at Paper Monument are now putting the final touches to their first issue, and threaten to throw a large party in September. Be sure to subscribe here:

www.papermonument.com.

NEW INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION SCHEME: Remember how we called on people to contact Greg Jackson, International Distribution Tsar, if they were going abroad? Well, that did sort of work—heroic
subscribers lugged issues with them on vacation to Beijing, Berlin, Barcelona, and Bogota (seriously). But now we've added a whole new dimension: lawyers. All across midtown New York, boxes of n+1s are now
sitting in prestigious law firms, ready to be toted by lawyers who need to fly to Europe or South America for two days in order to read through a single foreign document. But we need people to meet the
lawyers. So: The old offer—bring n+1 on vacation—still stands. The new offer: If you're already *in* a foreign city and think n+1 could sell three or four copies there, we'll send a corporate lawyer out
there as soon as—well, as soon a major corporation in your country gets sued. So let us know you're there.

WEST COAST TOUR: We're doing a West Coast tour in the late fall. The n+1 informational blackout on the West Coast must end. There are entire communities in California that have never even heard of the
magazine. And yet every day they die a little for lack of what they'd have found in Issue 5. "TV Diaries," for example. "The Blog Reflex." "The Meaning of Life, Part 2." More on this later. And if you happen
to be attached to a university in California, Washington, or Oregon, please consider inviting us to speak.

Speaking of Issue 5...

ISSUE 6: We've entered production on the issue. Poetry from an unknown poet, fiction from an admired literary critic, the definitive history of the cubicle, and also the first-ever world-wide appearance
of the new novel by the incomparable Helen Dewitt, author of the Last Samurai. Seriously. Estimated shipping date: October 1. If you plan on moving between now and then—please let us know your new address. Issue 6 is not to be missed.

Finally, a very short but militant story by the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev:

"In Praise of Evolution"
The owner of a factory—his underworld nickname was Toothache—sat in a cafe wondering how he was going to destroy the union. For a while this was the most important thing in his life. He was working up some ideas about it now, when all of a sudden a group of comrades walked by the cafe bearing a red flag. The factory owner decided that the revolution had come, and he began to repent, and shed tears, and share his profits with the workers. But it turned out this was just a slow evolution, and there was still plenty of time to exploit, crush, and kill.

As ever,

Keith Gessen (for n+1)

Carla Blumenkranz

Mark Greif

Chad Harbach

Ali Heifetz

Benjamin Kunkel

Allison Lorentzen

Marco Roth

Nikil Saval

"I read an excerpt of Neal Pollack's book and felt sorry for his child," writes "Fran." "It was all about Neal ... [It] saddened me and in no way did I connect with it emotionally as a parent. I think it might have more to do with parenting styles than gender." Sounds about right!

Other commenters, though, are far less... sane. "Come on Fran how funny it is that you read only an excerpt and condemn the entire work as narcissistic and purely self-centered? ...You still married - or was your ex-narcissistic too?" hisses "Fo3."

And: "Undertaking the responsibilities of fatherhood is close to insane in today's anti-male society with easy divorce resulting in crushing financial burden falling on men and the almost certain loss of day-to-day contact with the children," says "MARK KLEIN, MD." Yikes. (He comments a lot on Times blogs, by the way! Weird!)

More yikes! "All I can add here is that these past four years of being home when the kids get home from school have not been what I expected. I find myself irritable a lot of the time, looking for a place to hide in the house so I can get one train of thought headed in the right direction. We added on to our house to give me a home office/retreat, and that was a struggle between me and my wife, who doesn't understand my need for solitude," says "CHE," who then continues on at length. Attention, publishing industry! Is this guy your new dad-memoir superstar? It sure seems like he needs an outlet.

Or maybe there isn't a market for CHE's whining, after all: "Hi CHE, Invisible is good. It teaches you that you are not the center of the universe. It's a kind of enlightenment, all too rarely experienced by alpha males in our society. Count yourself fortunate that you are learning to live with it. In time you will even embrace it," says "Shannon."

Is it just having children that makes people bonkers, or is it something to do with Neal Pollack? We're going to have to go with "both."

And for every blog and essayist, it seems, there's an editor: George Kalogerakis, Mary Duenwald, Carla Anne Robbins, and David Shipley all have new roles. Shipley in particular has a well-defined mission that highlights the Times' fine grasp of this emerging online medium: "David's been given a big mandate to do Internet stuff," says Rosenthal. Well welcome!

But what of the regular OpEd columnists, who were so famously resistant to being walled off during the initial imposition of TimesSelect under Rosenthal's predecessor Gail Collins? Collins, soon to resume columnist duties, can finally see the other side of it: "I'm in that grumpy-but-understanding state the columnists were in," she says. But hey! More and bigger!

Even though TimesSelect is a failure by almost every metric, even though the pay-for-content model reeks of Web 0.5, even though it's shockingly inferior to almost any advertising-based revenue plan, even though it might actually be worse than Salon's SitePass, the paper plans to continue its surge, consequences be damned.

Finally, a small note of clarification. Rosenthal claims that Gawker "insists it never reads TimesSelect." Not true! We never said we don't read TimesSelect. We just said that we think it's a horrible, hideous idea. —balk

Times' Rosenthal Is Glutton For Opinion [NYO]

• Hey, ladies, Sheryl Crow reads the Wall Street Journal. Shouldn't you? [NYT]
  
• Is Rebecca Dana going to the Times or is she staying at the Observer? [B&C]
  
• "If the Times Co. planned to unload the Globe, they'd have done it before telling the world the paper wasn't actually worth all that much." [Boston Phoenix]
  
• More Bartiromo analysis: If you let women into the financial services industry, of course guys are gonna try and fuck them. [MarketWatch]
  

• TimesSelect will work until its current subscribers die, at which point there'll be no one left who has ever read it. [MediaPost]
  
• The Tribune sale is never, ever, ever going to end. [AP]
  
• Nikki Finke's no Dean Baquet fan. [LAWeekly]
  
• Rupert Murdoch is a driven professional newspaper man. Also, evil. [Forbes]
  
• "Insiders" are "abuzz" about the "complete diss" of "some guy" who didn't get an award at his company's picnic. [WWD]
  
• Former Italian P.M. Silvio Berlusconi likes the ladies; is sorry for liking the ladies. [Guardian]

"Johnson is currently spending a month writing for TimesSelect, an online commentary service of The Times."

UPDATE: Hey look, here's a shiny advertising check buying all these banner ads today for this very promotion, right here on Gawker. To reiterate: Go read those op-eds! And consider purchasing an excellent Philips consumer electronics product. Drive carefully now.

TimesSelect Holds an Open House [Ad Age]

Somehow, Bucky got logged onto the NYT website as user "dinyah" with a non-functioning Binghamton University email address. He was able to cancel the mystery account. but not before checking out the user's reading habits and accessing all the David Brooks a boy could ever want.

TimesSelect Not So Selective [Animal New York]

Update: A reader writes in:

I was weirded out to read about Bucky Turco's dinyah experience....I had the same one. I went to the NYT site on my home laptop - I check it at least twice a day from home — and found myself already logged in as 'dinyah.' I just logged out immediately, freaked out that someone had hacked into my (trial) TimesSelect account.
But this makes me wonder...could 'dinyah' be a bug? A virus? A ruse? I know the word 'dinyah' means "world" in Arabic.

Under Gail's direction, The Times's editorial page has grown in its journalistic scope and its physical scale. She has seen us through the horror of 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a time of great political turmoil. Her lasting legacy will be the expansion of the Sunday editorial pages from two to three, her supervision in the creation of Times Select and the development of editorial pages for each of our Sunday regional sections.

Also supporting this administration's duplicitous march to an unpopular war that is closing in on its 3000th dead American soldier, but, hey, more Frank Rich! It sort of evens out, right?

Replacing Collins is Andrew Rosenthal, current deputy editor and son of former homo-hating executive editor Abe Rosenthal. We'd make some joke about how these kind of dynastic successions at the Times are almost never a good idea, but let's be honest, it's the editorial page, who gives a shit? Also, we're pretty sure that David Brooks' kids are writing his columns right now, so there's plenty of precedent. Congratulations, Gail and Andy!

Times Announces Change in Editorial Page Editor [NYT]