The drums of media war are once again beating as we plow into 2007. A juicy piece of information was unearthed by the NY Observer regarding The New York Times’ possible foray into the world of weekly tabloids. According to The NYO,

Times Editor Bill Keller claims the tabloid is still in the brainstorm stages and may or may not be called UrbanEye (the name of The Times’ current email newsletter that aggregates various stories from the paper). Born at what has come to be known as “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions, the story asserts, “The idea is for it to be more like a hard-copy relative of UrbanEye than an easy-read news digest. It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings—like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.”

As competition may be increasing, this also raises questions for The NY Observer itself who, after being taken over by new, younger management, has scarcely changed one detail of the publication other than announcing an upcoming smaller page format. While some believe the alternative weekly format (and print in general) has been struggling in recent years, The Times move would go a long way towards re-validating the alt-weekly format and possibly igniting a

New York War of the Weeklies. Here’s to an interesting 2007 publishing schedule.

Speaking of the NY Times, kudos go to their online department for putting together a slick multimedia presentation called “Faces of the Dead,” representing the fallen U.S. soldiers in Iraq. On the paper’s site you’ll find a square graphic that shows the face of a deceased soldier. That soldier’s face is made up of hundreds of tiny squares that can be clicked to change the main image and display a new fallen soldier’s name and information. Maybe this “InterWeb” thing is useful for something after all.

An odd bit of end-of-the-year spin took place just before the new year. Even though bombs went off in Madrid and Bangkok, and an Indonesian passenger plane carrying 102 travelers simply vanished after sending out a distress signal, most media outlets seemed content to report that the New Year had come in without any significant terror incidents. Oddly enough, one day prior to New Years, intelligence authorities with ties to the U.K. told ABCNews.com, “It will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London …” Perhaps we can be thankful that at least one miracle panned out.

In case your 2007 needed an early injection of weirdness, the word in publishing circles is that Prince (right, the Artist Formerly Known As …) is heading up a new music publication called 3121 Magazine. But Spin and Rolling Stone have nothing to fear: Prince’s plan is to pull an Oprah and put his image on the cover of every issue. Yes, we definitely needed another one of those.