Davies. (guardian.co.uk)

The Guardian is not coming to America with a couple of easily uprooted college graduates but instead appears to be invading with its best and brightest. The Cutline is reporting that Nick Davies, the toast of Fleet Street, who revealed the malevolent ways of news gathering at News Corp., will be joining in on the newspaper's digital expansion in the U.S. market.

Are they giving up on the old country, with its class rage, burning cities and austerity packages? Does this mean the Guardian really expects to take on the New York Times? As reported earlier today Nick Davies will also be in direct competition with Times reporters Don Van Natta, Jr. and Sarah Lyall with books about the hacking scandal. But apparently this is all still somewhat tentative -- he doesn't even know where to base himself (like he's going to go to Chicago or something!)

Sarah Lyall

London may be burning, but that doesn’t mean that the Murdoch hacking scandal isn’t still helping sell book proposals.

New York Times writers Sarah Lyall and Don Van Natta, Jr. will co-author the “definitive account.” Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, will publish, they announced today. They did not announce a publication date or title.

Ms. Lyall is the witty American writer of The Anglo Files, a book about cultural differences between the US and Great Britain (as well as countless Times articles on the subject).

Mr. Van Natta is a Times investigative reporter. He co-authored Her Way, a 2007 book about Hillary Clinton. Wonder Girl, his book about female golfer Babe Didrikson, came out earlier this year. Mr. Van Natta also co-wrote a 2010 cover story for the New York Times Magazine on News of the World’s phone hacking.

The “definitive account” is not the only book about the scandal coming out of a Macmillan imprint. Late last month, Faber & Faber’s Mitzi Angel bought US rights to Guardian journalist Nick Davies’ account of how he broke the hacking story. HACK ATTACK: How the Truth Caught up with the World's Most Powerful Man is slated for publication in Fall 2012.

Jo Becker, a Times investigative reporter who has been on the Murdoch beat of late (and shared many bylines, including the magazine cover story, with Mr. Van Natta) will presumably be thanked in the acknowledgements, as will Ravi Somaiya, who has also written about the hacking scandal. Mr. Somaiya is now covering the riots.

Guardian journalist Nick Davies thinks James Murdoch will have a hard time recovering, politically, from misleading Parliament, as he believes reports will show in the fall. He also thinks James's reputation is shot with shareholders.

"Back in May 2008 he was shown evidence of criminal activity by reporters at News Of The World and he didn't do anything about it. Investors have lost a small fortune as the shares have died. I think those shareholders may react to that committee report and say, 'Well, you've got to go'," Mr. Davies said in an interview with Deadline.

Tomorrow News Corp.'s board will meet for the first time since the scandal broke, according to the WSJ, to discuss how to distract shareholders from the mismanagement with Wednesday's earnings reports. The reports will be good, they predict, due to the sale of MySpace and the the $12 billion they're sitting on since abandoning BSkyB. Elisabeth Murdoch won't be attending, and some small shareholders have filed a motion to force Rupert Murdoch to step down.

Although the economy is collapsing around us, again, already, television ad revenue has seen growth, reports The New York Times.

“We’re not at all afraid, and frankly we’re looking forward to the fall,” said Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of the CBS Corporation, referring to the start of the fall season.

Television might be like gold--twenty four-hour cable news it isn't worth anything except a feeling of security during a scary time. It's in high demand these days.

The book will be called Hack Attack (not to be confused with a 1980s-era McDonald's ad campaign, for those who might be feeling the strange onset of a Mac attack.) American rights went to Mr. Davies' compatriot, Mitzi Angel, at Faber & Faber (a division of FSG.) Ms. Angel acquired the book in a pre-empt, according to Publishers Weekly.