It must have cost the New York Times some extra dough to print so many copies of their historic Obama cover. Especially in ink: for the third time in the history of the paper, the largest font possible, 96-point type, was used to create the headline. The other two times were September 11th, and Nixon's resignation.

If they are really strapped for cash (and we know they are) the New York Times should stock up a couple extra copies and sell them on Ebay, where a 10-paper bid for the Nov. 5th cover just sold for $750. If only everyday was Election Day, there wouldn't be an industry-wide financial crisis right now.

Curling up next to the fire with a glass of Malbec, a calculator, and copies of Elle and Vogue, Times fashion writer Eric Wilson delved into the underbelly of "price upon request," that obnoxious line that comes after a designer credit in a fashion glossy, which normally signals that you, a mere mortal, cannot afford the lavish item for which they will not reveal its cost. Except actually, that's completely inaccurate. "Price upon request," while sometimes a designer-requested stand-in for an inflated price, is actually most often used when a magazine simply cannot find out how much the dress, bracelet, or shoes they're featuring actually costs.

How come? Because right after designers unveil their runway collections, magazine editors request those garments to be shot for upcoming issues. Those issues are closed months in advance, well before the designer completes orders with stores on individual garments, and thus, they haven't priced the item yet, which means when the magazine asks for its price, it receives no answer. So the magazine goes ahead and prints "price upon request," and directs readers to call a store (like Barney's or Saks) for the information, after the designer tells the magazine that is where they should expect the garment to be on sale. But what happens when too few stores buy an item? The designer might choose not to even produce it, letting it live and die on the runway. This means the magazine shot and printed that frilly dress, praising it in front of their readers, and the designer never actually made it, which leads to angry readers with maxed out credit cards struggling to buy a garment that doesn't exist.

And this has always been standard in the industry.

You would think Wilson, with his meticulous counting and notation ("price upon request" appeared "104 [times] in the October issue of Elle") would know that. Or that because Wilson is the Times fashion scribe who's been penning away from the newspaper for a handful of years, and before that enjoyed stints at such fashion-y places like Women's Wear Daily.

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The New York Times printed an extra 35% percent of papers yesterday, to deal with the expected increase in demand after Obama won the presidency. But even that wasn't enough, as people lined up around the block for the most monumental moment in American history since 9/11, and later the Times reprinted 75,000 copies.

So people could immediately put the issues in a plastic bag and post them on Ebay. Ah, change.

The New York Times, which is meeting its expected influx of web traffic with a revenue generating interstitial ad, is also celebrating another victory: incredible sell-thru. Visit any newsstand, bodega, Starbucks, or executive's desk in New York City, and you'll notice all the Times have been picked up, snatched, and hurried away to places unknown. Everybody wants to keep a keepsake announcing Obama's election win, the same way they wanted a 9/11 paper (or rather, a 9/12 paper), a JFK assassination paper, or, for the truly obsessed, a "Spitzer resigns" paper. Many of you are snapping these up thinking, one day, you'll be able to sell them on eBay for huge returns. Except that's the funny thing about milestone newspapers: Everybody grabs extra copies, which inevitably end up in a box in their basement. But when the time comes, in a year or 10 years or 20 years when you're ready to sell your stash to meet your mortgage payment, the supply will be great, and the demand low because everybody who wanted a copy already has a copy, and the newspaper you thought would fetch $250 goes for less that it costs to pick up that day's copy of the Times. On the bright side, in 20 years the cover price of the Times will probably be $5, if it's even around at all. So go ahead, keep hoarding.

"The former chief risk officer at investment bank Bear Stearns, which nearly collapsed in March, is now a senior official of the Federal Reserve division that supervises U.S. banks."
-NYT

Face the music babe: if you work in the media sector right now, your job security is about to go from "unstable" to "amber alert." Why? Because it's the day after the election, and publications notoriously swipe off big chunks of those writers who they hired to cover the campaign trail. And with less writers, there doesn't need to be as many editors or (if you're on TV) producers, and bing bang boom, you are on the unemployment line with the rest of Goldman Sachs.

If media companies can't control the need to downsize in this shit storm, they can decide how they are going to release the news. In the age of 24-hour news cycles and 26-hour blog-a-thons, the only way the media can get a jump-start on the rest of the Internet finding out about their company layoffs before they've been able to even tell their own employees is to…that's right, blog about it.

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This is two clicks away from being the plot of Fatal Attraction. Or maybe Cape Fear. Or perhaps…a Nora Ephron movie??

Over news that the New York Times might be firing conservative columnist Bill Kristol, WaPo's Nora Ephron writes an annoyed love letter to her favorite hate-fuck.

Then Kristol's column began. I read it religiously every Monday. And slowly but surely, I became infatuated with him. How could I not? The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.

We see Meg Ryan in the role of Nora, and maybe Billy Crystal as Bill Bristol.

Trying to sum up the last two years of this election season, which at last wraps up tomorrow, is an ambitious undertaking, although a worthy one — because after America selects the new president tomorrow, we're going to be inundated with weeks of look-backs and look-aheads. So the Times got a jump start on it today, with this wrap-up video currently playing on the newspaper's homepage. Except, um, it is more than 13 minutes long. THIRTEEN MINUTES! The only video on the Internet that keeps our attention for that length of time probably appears on Xtube.com, and it features a Sarah Palin lookalike.

When we reported yesterday that Christian Science Monitor was going to all but halt print publication and focus on their website (Portfolio, are you guys listening??), there was no sense that this story had been hand fed to a couple of reporters a week ago before by the top brass at CSM, but with the extraction of a promise that they were to tell no one until Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.

And how weird…no one did. Even in the age of anonymous leaks and gossipy media blogs *achem*, not one of the reporters from Editor & Publisher, AP, New York Times, or Business Week spilled the beans on the big news even a minute before Christian Science dictated.

And it's one of the most brilliant non-zero-sum games that's ever been played in the publishing world.

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Let's take a look at this: Bill O'Reilly is applauding New York Time's TV critic Alessandra Stanley, a woman not known for her ability to fact check, for her comments about Fox News and MSNBC. Even though it's doubtful she even watches television, since she got wrong the fact that it's CNN that calls their anchors "the best political team on television," not MSNBC. (And somewhere out there, there's a built-in counter for how many days it's been since Stanley got the dates of the Iraq War wrong.)

But Stanley is spelled L-E-Y, not, as it's written on the Factor, E-L-Y. So is this thumbs up actually a subtle smirk at the error-riddled NYT? Or just more proof that even those who would call themselves infallible are, in fact, human after all. Or at least their writers are.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are finally getting married! Well, once Ivanka converts over to Judaism, which is standard practice for becoming a big name in the media world. Kushner owns the Observer and Ivanka is a Trump, so this wedding should be featured prominently in the Sunday Fashion & Style section of The New York Times.

But not if their Rabbi has anything to say about it.

As we reported in 2001, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun on East 85th led his flock to boycott the Times over "biased and unfair coverage" of Israel and the Mideast, and got 1,000 subscribers to bail.

Is picking a Times-hating Rabbi Kushner's subtle dig at the competition? Lord knows NYT needs those subscribers back now.

Oh goodness. Bono was hired as the newest Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times starting in 2009, despite the fact that Irish gent will be paid zero for his services. Which, technically, is all they are worth, since Bono will inevitably use the columns to preach the same old, same old stuff he usually does: Africa, poverty, blah blah blah.

Times and the times are changing Bono! If you want to see poverty, go down to the old offices of the New York Sun. Op-Ed editor Andrew Rosenthal made the pick, most likely hoping that if any more suspicious white packages come in the mail, he can just forward them to the U2 front man.

At any rate, he can't be worse than Bill Kristol.

A white powdery substance was sent in the mail to New York Time's Editorial editor Andrew Rosenthal. So three Times employees were asked to take a shower as a precaution, and the NYPD showed up the Times building was shut down for four hours.

Come on people, it's 2008. Seven years ago this was a problem, but right now Rosenthral would probably have to snort eight bigs lines of the stuff to even get a good buzz going.

The New York Times over the weekend ran an article focused on crypt keeper Cindy McCain, and it wasn't exactly flattering. The feature paints John's latest wife as an outsider in an emotionally-challenged marriage, deprived of warmth and attention. We kind of guessed that just by looking at her. Who knew there would be photo evidence to go along with the vivid descriptions the Times offered up?

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As part of our celebration of Judith Miller joining Fox News as a correspondent — a gig that can pay anywhere from $150-$350k/year — we thought it worth revisiting November 9, 2005, when the Times' executive editor Bill Keller wished her farewell: "We wish her well in the next phase of her career." Well that does sum things up.

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Forget the "just a matter of time" Obama endorsements from liberal mainstays the New York Times and the Washington Post. Those rags were in the tank since '04. For a real barometer for America's political attitudes, check out the Bryan-College Station Eagle's endorsement of the Democratic ticket. Things are finally so bad that even Texas hate communities that usually loathe any African American who can't score a touchdown are betting on black!

Put this on your fourth cheeseburger, Limbaugh.

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"OMG! Like, how totally high school are Madonna and Guy? Totes, right?" [NYT]

Judith Miller is the erstwhile New York Times reporter who claimed, having been fed very bad information, that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. She was summarily ridiculed, shamed, and slayed at the stake. Fitting, then, that the woman who helped get us into the Iraq war will find work on the television network that's helped us stay there. Indeed, Ms. Miller is joining Fox News as a contributor, because that is where all once high flying members of the the media-political establishment end up. [Photo: Salon]

So all y'all read that piece in The New York Times about Cindy McCain and her drug habits and her second wife status in Washington circles and her distant relationship to husband John McCain her support of her husband?

If you didn't know any better, you'd think the NYT was one of those liberal elite media institutions that unfairly paint ugly pictures of candidate's spouses much in the way that the GOP and Fox News tried to portray Michelle Obama as an American-hating fistbumper who has never been proud of her country.

It's almost like…both sides are wrong! Judge for yourself this example of tit-for-tat, after the jump:

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In August, a publishing executive who hoped to keep her cosmetic surgery birthday plans a secret made the unfortunate mistake of telling New York magazine about them in a cover story by Jonathan Van Meter, Vibe's founding editor. Though the confession was anonymous, it didn't take long for Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici to out her: It was Elle publisher Carol Smith, who knew Van Meter from her days as Vibe's publisher, that planned on having some work done.

And now, the New York Times offers up a chance to repeat the outing of a high-profile media exec who's a fan of cosmetic procedures. Yey media puzzles!

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