• Wal-Mart is in trouble for taping New York Times reporter’s phone calls. ‘Yo, that’s fucked up!’ says the NSA.
• Meanwhile, advertisers, Norman Mailer not big fans of New York Times‘ book reviews.
• Ron Burkle banks $200 million; Jared Paul Stern wishes he could go back in time and extort him for a whole lot more.
• New Nightly News exec producer Alex Wallace started out working for CBS and NBC. Looks like she finally backed the right horse.
• “Seriously, Brian Williams’ trip to Iraq isn’t a ratings stunt. He just really, really, wanted to go,” says NBC.
• Boston Globe sportswriter suspended for plagiarism; experts say this reporter’s “a few yards short of a touchdown.”
• Small bookstores being pushed out by big, corporate chains? Didn’t we already see this when our girlfriend forced us to sit through
• Anna Wintour trades in tennis hottie Roger Federer for actor/singer Harry Connick Jr. as this season’s Fashion Week arm-candy. Even the biggest Hope Floats fans concede, “it’s a huge step down.”
• NYO prepares for its big relaunch. It’s coming very soon! Any day now! Could even be today! Nope? Perhaps tomorrow?
• Wal-Mart to sell movies, tv shows online. You know what they’re still not selling? Walls. (Haha, remember? Paris Hilton from The Simple Life, season 1? Nobody?)
• Jeff Zucker, NBC, pissed at YouTube for letting “You” run wild. Oh, how far “You” have fallen since the days you were named Time’s “Person of the Year.”
• Another article pointing out the infallible New Yorker’s myriad of sloppy mistakes.
• And you thought silent birth was weird. Turns out 718 NYC moms prefer to have their babies au natural in a hydrotherapy tub. Of course they skip the Brooklyn hospitals and head for Manhattan. [NYO]
• Minnesota gets a wrestler and California a bad actor, New York gets … Malachy McCourt. The brother of Angela’s Ashes’s author will run for Governor. Hey, at least it isn’t James Frey’s brother. [NYP]
• From coyotes to cats … and back to coyotes. This time the coyote named Jacob hits Bronx parks. Which is so much nature-full than Manhattan. [amNY]
• We will not have Wal-Mart in this city. It is the last thing separating us from the rest of America. Well, that and Roosevelt Island trams. [NYDN]
• The subway flasher gets a whopping two years probation sentence … because some women might want to be flashed and in turn go out with this perv. March on Thao Nguyen. [Gothamist]