Director Andrew Rossi‘s upcoming film Page One: Inside The New York Times (opening June 17th in New York, and nationally July 1) documents a year in the life of the Gray Lady, but also sets the table for what may either be the print media’s suffocation within, or emergence from, the chrysalis of the brave new media world. Rossi spoke with Mediaite about his film, its de facto star (Times Media reporter David Carr), and what it all means for journalism.

Before Meg Whitman was California’s Republican candidate for governor, she was the CEO of eBay. During her time there, Whitman was reportedly accused of becoming angry and “forcefully” pushing another employee. The employee, Young Mi Kim, threatened a lawsuit, but the matter was settled for “around $200,000.”

The New York Times today devoted a lengthy article to one of today’s evils: technology. The five-page story essentially boils down to one general point: we are increasingly attached to technology, and it’s not a good thing.

On the heels of the White House Counsel’s memo detailing the administration’s contact (via Bill Clinton) with Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), Sestak spoke out today, going into detail for the first time. Short version: There’s nothing to see here.

With the release of the White House Counsel’s memo on the Joe Sestak controversy, the race is on to keep this story’s heart pumping. Today, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier give the story a good going-over, but former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey comes along to spoil the fun.

At the end of yesterday’s presidential press conference, Fox News’ asked the final two-part question – and one part was about PA Rep. Joe Sestak and his run in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against Sen. Arlen Specter. At the time, Pres. Obama said he was not ready to speak about it, but “there will be an official response shortly on the Sestak issue.” Today, the Washington Post and the New York Times are reporting that the White House involved Bill Clinton in the Sestak issue.

On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand sales for American consumer magazines “declined,” in the summary of the NYT, “9.1%, to 39.3 million, in the last half of 2009 versus the same period a year earlier.” Frightful as these numbers may appear, in the first half of 2009, newsstand magazine sales declined 12.36%. The decline is decreasing. The decline is in decline. Though far from stanched, though still voluminous, the bleeding, we are encouraged to believe, has slowed.

New technology invariably brings, along with change, a torrent of anxiety about what that change will lookl ike. This anxiety can be more or less poetic. “Twitter is crack for media addicts,” wrote George Packer in a recent blogpost. The new anxiety – induced, primarily, by the new media – is the prosiest prose.

Sometimes intrusive journalism is just that: intrusive. It wantonly disregards a subject’s privacy in pursuit of the petty dividend of a byline. Yet with Salinger, the intrusions seem more than anything acts of generosity, if occasionally ham-handed. What tragedy attends on Salinger’s death is, ultimately, in the realm of PR: Salinger has missed the chance to explain himself.

Hardly two weeks have elapsed since Pat Robertson, of The 700 Club, made headlines for the unusual bit of theodicy with which he sought to justify the earthquake that routed Port-au-Prince. Yesterday, Robertson was again in the news, in an article on the denouement of the murder trial of Scott Roeder for the assassination of Dr. George R. Tiller, that Roeder claimed Robertson’s show spurred him to take up arms against abortionists.

After months of the news side of the paper covering every twist and turn of the health care debate, the New York Times editorial board took a decisive step today, coming out in favor of the health care reform bill currently under consideration by the Senate. While they said that the bill has “some imperfections,” they deemed it “a bill well worth passing:”

This is pretty neat: the New York Times has put together a visualizer that geographically maps out NYTimes.com’s traffic over the course of a day. To make things even more interesting, the day they picked was June 25, 2009 — the day Michael Jackson died. The flaring map to the left roughly captures the moment that TMZ.com reported his death. Video after the jump:

This week, the New York Times Magazine was dedicated to their newly traditional Year In Ideas thinkpiece. It’s always a fantastic collection of new discoveries, shifts in ways of thinking, and products that we’re likely to hear more about in years to come. It tries, in many ways, to be predictive; to isolate still-germinating concepts [...]

In many respects, PBS’ NewsHour With Jim Lehrer is the anti-cable news show. Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy is blunt in his assessment of it: “There is absolutely no need for a serious newscast to be that boring. NPR has hit on a formula that’s intelligent but also keeps things moving.”

This is just cool: the New York Times has mapped out web searches for 50 Thanksgiving recipes by state. “Sweet potato casserole” was by far the most popular search, “yams” are a more common search in the west than in the east, and Northeasterners don’t look for Thanksgiving recipes online much:

Everyone who’s paying attention knows that Condé Nast is in trouble. But given how little substantiation there has been as to the scope of that trouble, there’s been quite a lot of writing about it, often taking on tut-tutting moralistic tones. Why do media watchers so love to pile on Condé?

How do you handle the news that a decorated international correspondent who put his life on the line for his job narrowly escaped captivity and death? If you’re Matt Drudge, you turn it into a totally misleading New York Times smear!

This morning, New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell was freed from his captors in northern Afghanistan by a military raid that took the life of his interpreter. As in the case of David Rohde, the Times asked news outlets not to report on Farrell’s capture, although fortunately his was a shorter ordeal than Rohde’s. Some may argue that this violates journalistic ethics; here’s why they’re wrong.

Twelve years ago today, the New York Times asked whether an upstart new technology called “DVD” could possibly succeed. Disney wasn’t planning on using it anytime soon! Some of the Times’ predictions and insights have not aged particularly well:

Seven years after its founding, Gawker Media is getting more online traffic than the LA Times and nearly as much as the New York Times — and with a staff a fraction of their sizes. Need evidence of their influence? They are now effectively running the state department. A look at their growth and impact after the jump.

News reporters like to catch readers’ attention with a few zingy lines at the start of an article. Sometimes, these so-called “ledes” go horribly wrong. In Today’s Worst News Ledes, we highlight some of the biggest offenders:

The NYT Co. is reporting that it made a profit last quarter. A PROFIT. In this media climate? Is that even possible? Well, sort of.

Frequent visitors to the NYT.com could not have helped but noticed yesterday that the website is apparently scraping the bottom of the advertising barrel. Well, perhaps not the very bottom — there’s no dancing chickens quite yet — but close! Smack in the middle of the page, right beside a lot of important news, was a very hard-to-miss ad for…shingles. Is this part of some evil Sulzberger conspiracy?

Today’s dispatch from Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson is all about debt. The NYT Co. has alot, and even though it has been extensively documented by the media, “Arthur & Janet” apparently felt it necessary — perhaps after yesterday’s sale of WQXR — to go over it again, step by step.

The good news? The Times plans to stick around until at least 2011!

And the award for most blasé member of the Power Grid goes to … #8 Print/Online Columnist and NYT foodie Mark Bittman.

Bittman, who literally has his hand in every pot — books, blogs, Twitter, Today, print — told Splice Today that he’s still not sold on the value of Twitter and other ‘short-form’ media