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

It took what? A hundred years for papers to get their ethical issues worked out? Blogs will do it faster, but they’re nowhere near it yet. For now, we readers should stay wary, and blogs should be aware of the impact of their business model on their ethics. One TMZ scoop does not a revolution make. And in the meantime, forgive us for waiting for theLA Times to confirm your scoop.

The only disclosure in Politico’s glowing piece about Allbritton’s generosity, which mentions the company is also Politico’s owner comes all the way down in the 10th graf. It’s something that probably should have been made clear at the outset. Maybe we’re just being sensitive. Or maybe we’re not. You decide.

The New York Times‘ Executive Editor Bill Keller is answering “10 Questions” from readers at Time this week and addresses his “faintly ridiculous” Daily Show appearance.

After yesterday’s allegations from the UK’s Guardian that Rupert Murdoch‘s tabloid journalists had been wiretapping public figures, London police have already dropped their investigation. The New York Times is reporting that the case was opened, and then closed just a few hours later.

The time has come. Maybe. For months now rumors have been circulating that the financially strapped New York Times was considering charging for content in some form or other. Now it looks like they may be ready to make it a reality. Is all the news that’s fit to print worth $5 to you?

The eagle-eyed folks over at NYTPicker have picked up on the fact that Preston, who only activated her Twitter account on the day she was hired to the position, hasn’t tweeted in a month.

Turns out the housing crisis-themed photo story from Sunday’s New York Times, which the paper had pulled offline amidst charges of photoshopping, was indeed digitally altered. And we have the photo evidence!

On Thursday Politico reported the discovery of a flier advertising special WaPo ‘salons’: “For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off the record, non-confrontational access to ‘those powerful few.’” Cue media outrage. But is it really so bad?

It’s not your imagination! Last week was a schizophrenic news week. Phew. So much for a summer news slump!

Our friend Rachelle Hruska, founder of the New York social site Guest of a Guest, followed up this week-end’s Sunday Styles profile with an appearance on CNBC’s Overpayed and Underplayed to talk about….health care. What else? That’s quite the 48 hour career arc!

Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times featured two stories without bylines. One piece recounted Times reporter David Rohde‘s Saturday escape from Taliban captors following a seven month ordeal (and accompanying news blackout). The other piece was datelined Tehran.

As has been made clear here and elsewhere — most notably in the pages of the actual paper(!) — New York Times managing editor Bill Keller has in the last week unchained himself from his managerial desk duties at the Times building and reappeared smack in the middle of Iran’s (and possibly Twitter’s, depending whom you read) historic uprising. Some people seemed to find this disconcerting. Or perhaps it’s just sour grapes (does green with envy qualify as supporting Democracy in Iran?). Anyway, Keller has responded to the “bizarre vibes.”