Salon has named Kerry Lauerman as its new editor in chief now that Joan Walsh, who held the position since 2005, is stepping down to pen a book, The New York Times is reporting.

Walsh will continue to contribute to Salon as she writes her book.

Lauerman formerly worked at The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones.

Looks like Citigroup wasn’t the only one struggling to get through the weekend. The WSJ is reporting that Alpha Media, the publisher of laddie magazines Maxim and Blender, is in “restructuring talks that are expected to turn over the company to creditors.” Just to give you a sense of how closely everything is tied together, Alpha Media was purchased in 2007 by superstar deal-maker Steve Rattner‘s Quadrangle Capital Partners — Rattner’s firm also happens to be in charge of Mayor Bloomberg‘s fortune.

Quadrangle’s private-equity fund paid about $250 million for Alpha Media in August 2007, lauding the company as an “unrivaled” play for reaching 18-to 34-year-old males. The New York-based firm put up about $90 million of equity and borrowed the rest to purchase the titles from British publisher Felix Dennis.

Like everyone else even remotely involved with Wall St. Rattner’s firm is “struggling with its private-equity portfolio and recently unwound its hedge fund amid market turmoil.” That and both Blender and Maxim‘s ad pages have plummeted. And that’s not all.

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It was the television we’ve all been waiting for &#151 at least for the last seven days. Parts one and two of Sarah Palin‘s interview with Charlie Gibson aired last night, and as you might imagine a lot of people had a lot to say about the Alaskan governor’s introduction to the press, and, you know, the fact she needed to have the Bush Doctrine explained to her by a very professorial looking Gibson (did anyone else get a My Fair Lady flash during that segment?). After the jump we take a quick look at the early reactions, and Joan Walsh isn’t pulling any punches.

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Let the rationalizing begin! After the John Edwards story officially broke last Friday — running almost non-stop on every cable channel — many news organizations are now in the process of trying to explain why it took them so long to take up a story initially reported by the National Enquirer last December. The general consensus seems to be that the reluctance may have been less about an overriding sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards than the fact that no one wanted to dirty their hand on a Enquirer story. Well he who laughs last laughs loudest as they say, and, as the WSJ points out the NI actually has a history of breaking stories (remember Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones?) so arguably people should have been less wary about getting their hands dirty.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources Salon‘s Joan Walsh said it was more a matter of there not being enough sources, even anonymous ones. CNN’s Jessica Yellin concurred but also pointed out (and we think she probably makes a very good point here) that if the media had been in “hot pursuit of the story and pushing it and putting it on the airwaves at that time, we would have gotten lambasted for ignoring a war, ignoring a tanking economy, and all these issues that matters to voters.” For his part Howie Kurtz says the situation became “ludicrous” and basically turned into “a conspiracy of silence by the media.” That said, up until today the majority of the NYT print coverage was relegated to the Caucus blog, the op-ed pages and a Week in Review story about disgraced politicians and television written by Alessandra Stanley (according to public editor Clark Hoyt the Times never even made “serious effort to investigate the story”). Of course, you may have also heard that Russia is in the midst of launching a war.