THURSDAY'S LINKS: Merrill's Family and Friends Struggle to Understand, NYT Co. Merger?, Chandlers' Top Advisor

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, publisher Philip Merrill's friends and family struggle to understand his suicide, a critic suggests it may be time for New York Times Co. to merge, and a profile of an advisor to the Chandler family working behind the scenes in its push to split up Tribune.


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Federal Debate on Media Ownership Begins Anew
Wall Street Journal: The FCC will consider whether to loosen or remove rules that restrict the ownership of radio and television broadcasters, as well as the ownership of broadcast and newspaper properties in the same market. The review is likely to stretch into next year, but advocacy groups, which helped to scuttle the FCC's last attempt in 2002 to establish new ownership rules, have mobilized for a fight. Those earlier rules were struck down by the courts.


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Merrill's Friends Try to Come to Grips With Apparent Suicide
Washington Post: Colleagues and acquaintances of publisher and diplomat Philip Merrill's struggled yesterday to understand what drove Merrill, who apparently shot himself while aboard his sailboat June 10, to take his life. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey, a family friend, said he was stunned by the news of the apparent suicide. "It still doesn't seem real to me,'' Woolsey said late yesterday as he prepared a eulogy for a memorial service today. When he last saw Merrill, on Memorial Day, "he seemed his normal, happy, exuberant, engaging self.''


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Advisor Works Behind the Scenes in Chandler Tribune Battle
New York Times: In the melee that erupted last week between the Chandler family and the Tribune Company, it has been hard to tell who is driving the Chandler caravan. One of the major players behind the scenes is Thomas Unterman. He is neither a member of the family nor a trustee overseeing its billions, nor is he one of the trust's appointees on the Tribune board. Rather, Mr. Unterman is a lawyer turned media executive turned venture capitalist who has worked for the family for years.


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Prosecutors Demand Reporters Testify in Steroid Case
New York Sun: The Justice Department urged a federal judge yesterday to force two San Francisco Chronicle reporters to testify about their sources for stories about a grand jury investigation into steroid use by professional athletes. Prosecutors from Los Angeles assigned to investigate leaks of grand jury testimony asked Judge Jeffrey White to reject a motion from the reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, to quash the subpoenas for intruding on newsgathering protected by the First Amendment.


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News Corp. Recruits Ex-PM of Spain for Board
Guardian (U.K.): Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation yesterday recruited one of the most senior statesmen involved in the Iraq war, the former Spanish prime minister Jos? Maria Aznar, as a board member. The 53-year-old former politician backed the US and British governments over the invasion of Iraq three years ago despite widespread opposition in Spain. His party was voted out of power after his government blamed the 2004 Madrid bombings on Basque separatists when Islamic extremists had in fact committed the atrocities in which 191 people died.


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CareerBuilder to Sell Stake, Newspapers Companies Interested
New York Times: Portions of CareerBuilder.com, a popular job recruitment Web site, are up for grabs among several newspaper companies trying to piggyback on its success. As online advertisers migrate to the Web, most newspapers' revenues from online job advertisers are growing. But CareerBuilder is especially attractive because it is a national brand that is actually attached to newspapers and can increase their revenue while driving traffic to their Web sites. CareerBuilder's major competitors are Monster.com and HotJobs, a Yahoo operation.


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Should New York Times Co. Merge?
CNN/Money: The Gray Lady needs to get hitched soon, or else she might wind up an old maid," writes Paul LaMonica. "That's right, the venerable New York Times Co., which also owns the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune, would be wise to succumb to the urge to merge in the rapidly consolidating newspaper business. Let's face it, Wall Street is not overly confident about the company's growth prospects. Sure, the entire newspaper industry has taken a tumble due to concerns about how more and more readers (and advertisers) are shunning ink for online publications."


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Slate's Gawky Adolescence
Slate: "Most considerations of Slate tend to focus on its political leanings (liberal, they say) or its prose style (cheeky, counterintuitive). Let's put aside those labels for the moment, since they don't get at what I think is most interesting," writes Bryan Curtis. "What's most interesting is that Slate at 10 is old new media, or, maybe, new old media?an evolutionary bridge between traditional print magazines and the outlaw forces of the Web. It's an in-between kind of magazine, and, as such, a birthday celebration can inspire a bit of an identity crisis. Is it possible for a magazine to feel both terribly young (compared with, say, the Atlantic) and terribly old (compared with, say, Gawker)? To feel like a cheeky hell-raiser of the Web and, at the same time, like a curmudgeonly veteran?"


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'NY Times' Writers on What the Pentagon Papers Mean Today
Huffington Post: At the Times' headquarters last night, reporter James Risen spoke on a panel entitled, "The Pentagon Papers and What They Mean Today." Risen -- who, along with Eric Lichtblau, wrote the paper's groundbreaking story on the NSA's domestic surveillance program -- was joined by Allan Siegal, a 45-year veteran of the paper who was on the editing team that produced the Pentagon Papers coverage and who stepped down last month as the standards editor, and Floyd Abrams, the highly respected First Amendment attorney who served as co-counsel for the Times in the litigation that followed the publishing of the papers. The discussion was moderated by Jill Abramson, the paper's managing editor since 2003.