How did Stephen Colbert end up writing Maureen Dowd’s most-emailed column last week? Colbert was duped, he admits to Frank Rich at an interview last night at the 92nd street Y:

She didn't know I was going to run for president when she called me up. She said, 'How would you like to write my column this weekend?' And I said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Why did Tom Sawyer want that boy to paint his fence?"

That just might be the funniest Maureen Dowd anecdote of all time.

If you buy into the Washington logic that a flawless campaign is one that doesn't make gaffes, never goes off-message and never makes news, then this analysis makes sense. The Clinton machine runs as smoothly and efficiently as a Rolls. And like a fine car, it is just as likely to lull its driver into complacent coasting and its passengers to sleep. What I saw on television last Sunday was the incipient second coming of the can't-miss 2000 campaign of Al Gore.

–Excerpted from Frank Rich's Op-Ed column in Sunday's New York Times, entitled "Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?" [NYT]

Page Six magazine will debut re-debut next week, in an purported effort to compete with low and highbrow culture.

Says optimistic Post editor Col Allan: "The New York Times is as much in our gun sights as the Daily News."

When reached for comment, Times' disheartened Sunday op-ed columnists Thomas L. Friedman and Frank Rich promptly conceded defeat by immediately bursting into tears, burying their heads in their hands and quietly sobbing, "We're finished."

Was it Sheryl Crow and Laurie David's tiff with Karl Rove that put Arthur Sulzberger & Co. over the edge? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But either way, after Frank Rich announced in his Sunday column that the Times would no longer attend the White House Correspondents dinner, the media bubble has entered analyzation mode.

Why is the Times choosing this year to cease its RSVPs? Was it that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was mostly focused on snapping a photo with Sanjaya? Or that the post-dinner debate has mostly focused on whether there was spitting involved in that Crow-David-Rove incident?

CONTINUED »

• Thank the media for blowing up Borat. [Post I.T.]

• Outdoor advertising firms are lining up to sue the city over unfair restrictions on where they can place semi-nude Calvin Klein models. [AdAge]

• The only time Frank Rich got flack for his stance on the Iraq war on his book tour, he was in Manhattan. [Radar]

• Sometimes a reporter looking for sources is just a reporter looking for sources. [DI]

• Kate Moss' drug habit is blowing up Colombian children. Or something like that. [Queerty]

• Even if Steve Wynn couldn't unload that Picaso, a new record artwork sale goes down, courtesy David Geffen. LAT acquisitions war chest grows deeper. [NYT]

• NBC's turmoil has the vultures circling. [TVNewser]

• Starbucks ain't the only shop adept at pushing products outside its core offerings. [NYT]

(Image: Curbed)

We're sure you noticed the recent ridiculous uproar over this photograph that was taken on September 11, 2001 by Thomas Hoepker.

First, Frank Rich wrote an article about it in the Times … which we read and found to be somewhat full of BS. Then, David Poltz wrote a counter-piece in Slate, and we found his assertions to be a little less full of bull, but still speculative.

What's the point of debating about "what were these strangers thinking about in this picture?" Jossip's editor was eating french toast in her dorm room when the second WTC tower fell. Who cares? The entire city was a God Damn mess and we highly doubt the first thing on anyone's mind was "what are people going to say about this picture in five years."

But, as usual, people did have something to say. Only, naturally they were all saying things we didn't really care about. Until today.

CONTINUED »

Just what we needed to hear this early in the morning: While penning her Bush bashing blog posts, Arianna Huffington is getting moist between the legs. As Frank Rich punches his keys to spell "quagmire," he boxers are getting stained. And we won't even tell you what's going on at Cindy Adams' desktop. Says a new University of San Francisco study of columnists, a good portion of them compare their job influencing the opinions of others to a romp between the sheets.

When asked "what writing a column is like," 26% of salaried columnists called it a job and 17% likened it to sex. But Robertson explained that this wasn't necessarily a positive thing; he said some columnists feel like they're "married to a nymphomaniac" because they have to start working on another column as soon as they're finished with the previous one.

While others compared their work – penning one column among many printed in the same newspaper – to a gang bang.

Survey Shows Some Columnists Get "Hot" While Writing [Dave Astor. E&P]

By "Classic," they mean "Cargo's readership demos."

• News people behind the camera are just as important as those we see (despite what you may think based on the media coverage of Bob Woodruff's cameraman.) Jossip remembers Arthur Bloom, the director of 60 Minutes who died of cancer yesterday in his home upstate. [NY1]

• When Ariana Huffington’s not doing yoga, she takes boxing lessons in prep for her face to face with Tim Russert. [HuffPo]

• Well, New York magazine's re-designed website is supposed to launch today, but all we can see is the issue from two weeks ago — this is majorly phunking with our Monday round-up of the mag. [Media Week]

• However, the new Village Voice seems to have gotten their re-launch working just fine. [Gawker]

• Rachel Sklar goes one-on-one with Frank Rich. Oh, we so bet she has a TimesSelect account. [Fishbowl NY]

• The staffers over at The Onion long for the old days on the fat farms of Wisconsin, before sushi and walking Nicole Richied all their reporters. [NYT]

• Fresh off the book beat, media darling Elizabeth Spiers is set to launch her new blog. The next Nick Denton? Oh so much cuter, though. [Page Six]

• Google to China: we will, we will block you. Sometimes we heart living in America. [Reuters]

• If you haven't laughed your ass off yet today, read Columbia Journalism Review's profile of Pajamas Media. [CJR]

• First Kurt Andersen, now Pinch? Jon Friedman, what is up with these three star interviews? [Media Web]

• We like to champion for the underdog, so we have our fingers crossed for a Diane Sawyer win, in the race for CBS anchor. Actually, as long is it isn't Katie Couric, we'll be happy. [NYO]

• It's so hard to get a book deal. Unless your dad is Frank Rich. He's TimesSelect people. [NYO]

"All the news that fit to print" doesn't actually fit into the New York Times. Hence, the desperate need for the TimesSelect.

You know the TimesSelect. It's like the orange light district of online articles, with the oh so very catchy headlines and "please buy me" decks that reveal, like a whore's leg in Amsterdam, just a little peak at what one can get for $7.95.

As if taking away the really great articles on bagels and talking to animals weren't enough, now you have to pay to e-mail someone at the Times? Oh, hell no.

[Times spokesman Toby Usnik] denied that the limit on e-mails was an effort to get readers at newspapers syndicating the columnists to pay for TimesSelect instead of their local paper … when asked what those newspaper readers should do to be able to contact the columnists, he urged them to sign up and pay the additional fee.

Here at Jossip, we believe in freedom of the press, even for the impoverished interns, bloggers, and EA's who don't make enough money to afford a Times Select membership. You wanna email "Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Frank Rich or any of the Times' regular Op-Ed columnists." You just have to be a Jossip reader.

We snuck into TimesSelect and ripped out the necessary HTML code to produce the following email forms. Attemps to send email through them while not signed into TimesSelect seemed to be successful (we made it to the "thank you for submitting" page), but so far we haven't heard back from MoDo & Co. Perhaps we should've tried dowd@nytimes.com just to be safe?

So we offer to you, dear readers, the slightly better than shot-in-hell chance of being able to email your favorite roped-in Op-Ed columnists. Just click the links below to reach the proper forms.

• Maureen Dowd
• Tom Friedman
• David Brooks
• Bob Herbert
• Nicholas Kristof
• Paul Krugman
• Frank Rich
• John Tierney

Obviously, because you are the wittiest and most well read of blog readers, you won't be emailing David Brooks about your cat. Why don't you ask Maureen Dowd about selling Barbie collections on eBay? We bet Bob Herbert has some interesting thoughts on Hillary Clinton's recent public comments. And, while you're at it, just tell Frank Rich we say "what up."

Want to e-Mail a 'New York Times' Columnist? Better Subscribe to TimesSelect [Joe Strupp, E&P]
Related: What is Times Select?