Here's the setup: The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama was just convicted of 60(!) counts of bribery, and is likely headed to prison. The mayor's a former "award winning television journalist" who last year said that Birmingham should be hosting the Olympics by 2020. So after his conviction, the mayor comes out of the courthouse and a local TV reporter asks him, "What does this mean for Birmingham's chances for the 2020 Olympics?" LOL! And then a columnist for the local paper goes scolding the reporter, for his question. Hey Birmingham, lighten up! You'll still get the Olympics!


David Remnick doesn't think that long stories are going away. Good, since he's the guy paying for them.


In Germany, the government "has pledged to create a new kind of copyright to protect online journalism," and, by extension, screw bloggers. It's a classic case of balancing the interests of supporting legacy media institutions with supporting the right of new media to evolve and flourish. In other words, "Poop." Copyright that.


Do you know why America's Homeland Security Idol Bernie Kerik is in jail right now? For trying to leak info to a reporter at the Washington Times. Sure, it was confidential info about himself that he leaked in an effort to drum up pre-trial sympathy, but still. Is Bernie Kerik a hero of journalism? At least as much as Judy Miller!

"I'm too superficial to read The New Yorker because it's so unrelentingly boring. Even the cartoons suck these days," begins Finke's post reacting to the profile. Touche, babes! I feel you. But occasionally they come out with something interesting, and this—in or out of context—is definitely one of The New Yorker's more valiant efforts. Too bad it's so mediocre. Highlights:

• The New Yorker loves to write about bloggers as secluded, melodramatic cretins sniping away from the comfort of their living room while they're too socially anxious to do anything else. Which is true. Also, we learn her cat's name:

  "...In seclusion she manages to seem ubiquitous, covering the golden acres from Santa Monica to Sunset-Gower from a home newsroom containing six phones, a laptop, and her cat, Blue. Her all-knowing voice on the phone is reminiscent of Charlie of "Charlie's Angels"-yet she salts her site with references to her diabetes and dental work, drawing readers into the drama of her daily struggle."

  
  

• Finke does drams. Watch her recount the tale of her learning Dick Cook was being canned/leaving Disney: "Finke told me, 'I literally ripped the I.V. out of my arm to leave the hospital, and I would have had the story an hour earlier if I hadn't stopped to get an antibiotic.'"
  
  
• This was nice: Studios hosting dinners with Hollywood journalists having a salon about how the journalists were going to do their jobs. Finke didn't show, naturally.

  "In April, 2007, Stacy Ivers, who was then in charge of media relations at Universal Pictures, invited about thirty people-a mixture of journalists and P.R. executives from the studios and talent agencies-to dinner in Laurel Canyon. Ivers's idea was that the two camps could mingle over salmon and lemon bars, and hash out Hollywood's new rules of reporting. Ivers's dinner, attended by most of Hollywood's top corporate publicists, as well as by Fleming, Waxman, the Variety reporter Anne Thompson, the Hollywood Reporter's film editor, Gregg Kilday, and a Los Angeles Times editor, Sallie Hofmeister, among others...."

  
  

• Several allusions comparing Nikki to the communist witch hunts of Hollywood, including Warner Bros. studio chief Jeff Robinov.
  
  
• Nikki just making fun of Friend:

  After a moment, she added, "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy' "-a suggestion that Bart was too submissive to the former agent Michael Ovitz, an enduring adversary of Finke's. "I can't help it!" she said, laughing. "It's like meanness pours out of my fingers!"

  
  

• Finke talking to her cat and her assistant the same way: "She was often funny and warm, and at times appealingly distractible, breaking off to talk to her assistant ("I can't eat this-no offense, but it's gross! Yuck!") or her cat ("Yeah, there's food there-what the hell is your problem?")."
  
  
• Nikki Finke, the lonely, sad blogger:

  "One Saturday evening, after we concluded a three-hour call, she phoned back twenty minutes later to say, "Everyone tries to portray me as sad, pathetic, lonely-that's not me at all." "I don't think of you that way, Nikki," I said. "You don't know anything about my private life," she said, quietly. "That's probably true." "O.K."

  
  

• Nikki Finke, the depressive maniac:

  "There was a constant undercurrent of a kind of financial and professional desperation," her friend Bernie Weinraub, who was then the Times' Hollywood correspondent, says. After Finke's book was cancelled by Dial Press, in 1996, she wept so intensely that Lisa Chase, who edited a column Finke was writing for the New York Observer, called the Los Angeles sheriff's department and asked them to check on her. Deputies arrived at Finke's apartment at the same time as Weinraub, who had also spoken to Finke and grown concerned, and when she opened the door, sobbing, holding a knife she was using to open a package, the deputies shouted, "Put down the knife!" Later, Weinraub would jokingly blackmail her about that moment-and Finke would tease him about the time he'd fallen asleep while interviewing Jim Carrey.

  
  

• Nikki's excuses for missing deadlines, two of which I've used: "‘I was locked out of my apartment,' ‘I had food poisoning,' ‘I was being evicted.'"
  
  
• Endeavor agents talking to Friend about Ari Emmanel's handling of Finke during the Endeavor-William Morris merger:

  "Ari fed Nikki perfectly," one Endeavor agent says. "He used her just enough to help the merger."

  
  

• The only person Finke's afraid of:

  Finke is tickled by such bluster, and says that the silky David Geffen is the only person in town she's actually afraid of, adding, "I'm sure he'd take it as a compliment." (Geffen, perhaps cultivating his reputation for veiled menace, said, "Just say I had no reaction at all.")

  
  

• And finally, Finke's kicker:

  "I don't think for a minute these people like me," Finke told me. "They talk to me because that's how the game is played. They'd like to ignore me, but they can't. The best way for them to think of it is: I get bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow."

That person—or people—according to Finke's blog post, are David Remnick, Tad Friend, and most of the New Yorker's working masthead. But before we get there, let's do a quick rundown of the language used in Friend's piece:

• Finke portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves
  
  
• Jeff Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is "one of the most kiss-ass incompetents
  
  
• "Stick it where the sun don't shine, you asswipe," she recently counselled a CBS publicist.
  
  
• Nikki wrote it like the runaway bride was a whore."
  
  
• In October, 2007, Finke posted a story about Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros.' president of production: "Warner's Robinov Bitchslaps Film Women."
  
  
• "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy'"
  
  
• "Then you see a comment-maybe from someone who's in an insane asylum-saying, ‘When I worked there, he shit in the kitchen sink and wiped his ass with $100 bills.'"
  
  
• Nikki's response was that I was a pussy.
  
  
• "New Line was left holding its dick"
  
  
• "starts whining like the pussy he is,"
  
  
• A source of Finke's says, "Somehow I've become like the poster child for her-I'm her bitch."
  
  
• Ray Stark once told Finke, "Girlie, if you ever fuck me, I'm going to personally come over to your house and give you a hysterectomy."
  
  
• "You make me sound like a wuss!"
  
  
• bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow

And that wasn't even a thorough search. This thing's full of awesome Finke-isms. But the bottom line is that the juciest stuff in the profile about Nikki—she changes posts on the fly, she can be shifted by her sources, some people are afraid of her, some not so much, she's a rebel, an outsider, comes from money, lives a mysterious life, is kinda kooky—are things we already knew or could've guessed. The best part of this story, of course, is Nikki's reaction.

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker the title of her post proclaims. How does she go after the New Yorker? Her full assessment, in its most basic form is

As I expected, it's an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I'm relieved that The New Yorker didn't lay a glove on me.

Ah, but there's more. Finke argues that Friend's reporting was mediocre, and that he and the New Yorker got totally played by Hollywood. Back to the bullet points, one more time:

• Her time was wasted.
  
  
• The best stuff she gave Friend wasn't even used.
  
  
• She spoke with Friend on piles of pre-conditions only.
  
  
• Friend's work was "no better" than David Carr's NYT profile on her.
  
  
• She found Friend "easy to manipulate."
  
  
• She enjoyed "bitchslapping" New Yorker EIC David Remnick "throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process"
  
  
• The New Yorker "bent over" for Hollywood.
  
  
• Brad Grey's flack Steven Rubenstein got every reference in the story to him deleted.
  
  
• Harvey Weinstein had "cunt" replaced with the word "jerk" on his quote.
  
  
• More on Hollywood "had their way" with the New Yorker, and then this Eminem-esque kicker: "You, too, can make The New Yorker your buttboy. Just act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck."

Jesus.

I contacted Tad Friend, David Remnick, and deputy editor Pamela McCarthy at The New Yorker for comment on Finke's rebuttal. None of them replied. The New Yorker's PR director, Alexa Cassanos, did:

No, no comment from David or The New Yorker. Thanks for checking though.

I figured I'd fire one Finke's way since she's having such a great morning. What'd she think of the New Yorker's silence? Also: what she thought of the article's assertion that she could be "(positioned)..to some degree."

I have no idea what that sentence means. I do know that in the 3rd graf of the story it reads, "she's very, very, very accurate, extraordinarily so..."

And that, right there, is the Nikki Finke story: playing her own press as hard as the subjects she covers try to work her, and when occasionally caught in the middle, celebrating the nihilism of her bloodsport with a hearty "who cares?" Finke is Shiva, a force of destruction, kinda crazy and overly obsessive, caring only about how respected and powerful she is, and taking it by brute force. She's playing her game by rules she makes up as she goes along, elbows out, and occasionally tossing around doublespeak to back her transgressions and fouls. It's really quite fun to watch even if, as Finke might suggest, you have no reason to give a fuck.

In a great piece titled "The Gilded Age of Conde Nast is Over," The Observer's John Koblin reveals a slew of shocking goings-on at Conde that almost makes the purging of the company's receptionists pale in comparison. Below are a few of the choice cuts, starting with the horrifying revelation that Graydon is now being forced to lunch with the peasantry in the Frank Gehry-designed space pictured above.

"I saw Graydon in the cafeteria this week!" said one business-side insider, last Friday. "In all my years here, I've never seen him in my life there. He was behind me in the line at checkout with his little swipe card! He was milling around uncomfortably with the commoners."

Now obviously, if the Conde overlords are being forced to sacrifice some of their luxuries, you just know that the underlings are getting screwed, and they are. On that subject, two words people: tap water.

"When I started, there was this little refrigerator, and it was stocked with amazing drinks!" said one ad-sales source. "Pellegrino, Orangina, Red Bull. And like the water wasn't Poland Spring, it was like Fiji. I remember when I started working here, I emailed everyone I know and I was like, ‘I have to tell you about the drinks!'"

But then in December, a few months after Condé Nast ordered publishers and editors to cut 5 percent from their budgets, the drink supply emptied out. That Fiji water turned into Poland Spring. Worse, instead of the fridge, the water bottles were stowed in a warm closet.

And then: "I just found out today that we are on our last batch of Poland Spring," said the source. "We won't have any more after this. We have to start drinking tap water."

Tap water! At Conde Nast! Are you kidding me?! Among the article's other cutback revelations: no more expensed lunches at Nobu, no more take-out from Balthazar, no more free spa treatments, no more fresh flower deliveries to the offices of top editors — the list goes on and on.

But perhaps the most surprising (Or maybe not) detail in Koblin's piece is the revelation that Conde Nast's claim about there are no untouchables within the company is complete bullshit. The New Yorker is the one sacred cow not to be meddled with.

Two well-placed sources said that Condé Nast's chairman, Si Newhouse, reached out to (Editor David) Remnick shortly after the McKinsey announcement was made and told him not to worry about anything-the magazine would be just fine, and neither McKinsey nor company executives would be mucking with his editorial costs.

Go read this piece, if only because, as Choire Sicha pointed out on his Twitter, the story's punchline is among the best you'll ever read.

Baum, who won the respect and admiration of many, particularly Louisiana natives like myself, through his post-Katrina dispatches from the ground in the New Yorker's New Orleans Journal, used his Twitter account to detail in 140 character bursts how, among other things, it took him seventeen years of pitching stories to finally break through with the magazine.

First, a little about the job of New Yorker staff writer. "Staff writer" is a bit of a misnomer, as you're not an employee, But rather a contractor. So there's no health insurance, no 401K, and most of all, no guarantee of a job beyond one year. My gig was a straight dollars-for-words arrangement: 30,000 words a year for $90,000. And the contract was year-to-Year. Every September, I was up for review. Turns out, all New Yorker writers work this way, even the bigfeet. It's Just the way the New Yorker chooses to behave. It shows no loyalty to its writers, yet expects full fealty in return. It gets away with it, because writing for the New Yorker is the ne plus ultra of journalism gigs. Like everybody, I Loved it. More later.

It took me seventeen years to break into the New Yorker. I'd been a freelance journalist that long, and had sent in Proposals from time to time. I never even got rejections. The New Yorker doesn't send them. If they don't want the Story, they simply don't respond, so filing to the New Yorker is like filing to the dump. You send in a proposal, and if you're smart, you forget all about it.

Baum went on to detail many of the story ideas he pitched the magazine and the various stop/starts that came along the way, even linking to a number of the proposals he submitted as a freelancer, taking the timeline up to the point where he was getting assignments regularly from the magazine, but anxiously awaiting a seemingly elusive offer to become a full-fledged staff writer. Then came the breakthrough he'd been waiting for.

Then, out of the blue, Rolling Stone called with a jaw-dropping over-the-transom assignment: 30,000 words on missile defense, to run over several issues, and paying $90,000. I was floored. I got the call while I was in San Francisco working on yet another New Yorker assignment about geneticists trying to make people live forever. Right after I hung up with Rolling Stone, John Bennet, my New Yorker editor, called for some reason. In an act of inadvertant brilliance, I mentioned to him my new Rolling Stone assignment. Forty minutes later, David Remnick rang my phone. "Don't do that Rolling Stone piece, he said. "Come to work for me instead, on staff." The heavenly angels burst into song. I'd made it to the staff of the New Yorker.

When you really stop to think about it, this is sort of a watershed moment for Twitter, and storytelling in general, isn't it? I mean, here's a guy, a widely respected writer, using Twitter's 140 character "tweets" to weave a bit of an epic story, a story I can easily see aspiring journalists turning to for years to come as a resource and for inspiration. I certainly can't recall anything else of the sort happening previously.

Anyway, Baum promises to pick up the story with his next chapter later today, so stay tuned.

• Bruce Willis supposedly met his wife, 24 years younger, through scuzzy casting calls he set up for the movie Perfect Strangers. Modeling agencies supplied candidates for minor roles; Willis did the "auditions" and successful candidates got maybe a sex scene or minor speaking role. Suddenly the phrase "what I've always wanted to do is direct" makes a lot more sense. [P6]
  
• Barbara Walters is planning to quit ABC this summer to have more time for herself, according to "industry insiders." [National Enquirer]
• As part of her PR breakup from Chris Brown, Rihanna is "taking a beak" from the relationship, because why do something rash like actually really break up with an abusive boyfriend? In the meantime, cautious Rihanna might buy Jerry Seinfeld's old house, for $7 million.
  
• At Condé Nast, the frugal editors (David Remnick, Ruth Reichl) take the subway; the posh editors still use car services; and the most foolish editors have their limos waiting for them right in front of 4 Times Square, so Si Newhouse knows who to fire. [Post]
• Octo-mom Nadya Suleman was "a stripper," in the sense that she danced topless for one night, and then quit in disgust. Oddly enough, Suleman's now-former nurses had a similar employment experience.
• Natasha Richardson donated her organs. [P6]
• Robert Pattinson never showers. He admitted this like two months ago. Bet his co-stars — "he completely reeks," said one — wish they had read Robert Pattinson Online a bit more diligently.

Soon after his post went up, Mr. Stern received a call from one of Condé Nast's lawyers, Eric Gisolfi of Sabin, Bermant & Gould. Mr. Gisolfi requested that Mr. Stern turn over the domain names belonging to New Yorker editor David Remnick, Vogue publisher Tom Florio, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, Lucky's Kim France, and Glamour's Cindi Leive.

So Cityfile chief Remy Stern decided to give Conde back its precious web addresses, god, okay fine. At least Conde is putting them to good use. [NYO]

Remnick hired a guy named Ari Zenelman to bludgeon the magazine's famously coddled staff contributors into doing more posts, according to the Observer. So basically all journalists everywhere have some kind of quota now, just like at Gawker! Just wait until they start breaking Web traffic down by writer, New Yorker people.

Anyway, the writers are clearly outside their comfort zones, or maybe just our comfort zones.

Television writer Nancy Franklin actually wrote the following in a post Tuesday she dubbed "Nancy's Fancies," about her top TV moments of 2008: "David [Letterman], this is between you and me. I loved you in 2008 as I have always loved you. You will be my favorite late-night talk-show host 4ever..." (Emphasis added, although it does jump off the page in the original.)

Also yesteday, the magazine's George Packer got totally snarky with actor Sean Penn, sarcastically calling him a "veteran foreign correspondent" and mocking his writing:

Travelling in the company of Douglas Brinkley, the noted actor, and Christopher Hitchens, the world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist, Penn was the invited guest of President Hugo Chávez, of Venezuela, well-known as an advocate for the Social Gospel, and of Raúl Castro, Cuba’s humorous, wonky, and athletically gifted new chief executive. ...Good interviewers also know how to analyze the material they work so hard to elicit, and Penn treats his readers to gems such as “Inside, I’m wondering, Have I got a big story to break here? Or is this of little relevance?”

Then Packer writes that Penn should "stick to what you do well," acting, and stop attempting journalism, "which isn't his job."

Speaking of which: Stay in your lane, Packer. We'll take the bitchy media meta-commentary from here, thank you very much. (Although, in the meantime, our friend's sister's boyfriend heard some dirt on Penn that might make a good blind item; what's your "tips" email??)

In 1975 Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times that as a critic, John Updike was "too kind." In the years since he seems to have taken that diss to heart, relentlessly smearing even the most slightly ambitious work that's not in his preferred, realistic style...of men who only think about sex. He starts off this truly wretched review in this week's New Yorker with the following bon mot/machete, "Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on."

This is nothing new for Updike — as his prose has gotten more journalistic and dull over time, his level of tolerance for more exciting stylists is inversely proportional to his own ineptitude, and he's made many enemies. (Salman Rushdie once said after Updike criticized how he named his characters, "Why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's a male prostitute named John Updike.")

He needs to take a cue from the man who said, "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." That of course was John Updike, more than three decades ago.

The 76-year-old Updike pretends to be more politic before throwing Morrison under the bus, as if it were impossible to know exactly what he thinks of A Mercy. Ironically, his language becomes more circular and winding than Morrison as he puts her down in the most condescending fashion possible. Does he know how transparently pathetic he sounds?

...she does better at finding poetry in this raw, scrappy colonial world than in populating another installment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American. The white characters in A Mercy come to life more readily than the black, and they less ambiguously dramatize America’s discovery and settlement.

This is the usual Updike horseshit: finding something to damn with faint praise in A Mercy while undermining Morrison's chronicling of the black experience. "This author’s early novels were breakthroughs into the experience of black Americans as refracted in the poetic and indignant perceptions of a black woman from Lorain, Ohio," he sneers, by which he means to say, that is all she is.

The newspaper industry is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The biggest kiosk seller this month was a highbrow liberal weekly that featured a tabloid satire of a presidential candidate and his wife. The biggest newsmaker this month was a supermarket tabloid that caught a former presidential candidate visiting his extramarital baby mama, and the major journals of record won't even blog about it. Surely this is the End Times of big media. What is to be done? Where are our journalistic standards headed? And how long before what you see above becomes an actual New York Times Magazine cover?

It may just be the economy, but all the apocalyptic chatter about the "death of the MSM" is starting seem prescient. For years, newspapers have been struggling to reconcile the Internet's up-to-the-second information spigot with old-fashioned standards of reporting. It's hard to keep track of how many "blogs" the Times now has, or how indistinguishable most of their substance and style are from what you'd find in the print edition. Apart from writing cloyingly and belatedly about the new media revolution and its cultural implications, what has the Gray Lady really done to ensure its continued relevance?

Judging by its books, not much—it actually asks more of its shrinking readership. By close of trading Thursday, the stock of the New York Times Co. was listed at $12.48 per share, half the price it was a year ago. The paper then announced it'd be increasing its daily newsstand price by 25 cents, beginning August 18. Oh, the company also posted double-digit losses in ad revenue this quarter, citing the worst month so far as June, with July fast closing in. Circulation is down (profits here are only up because of previous price-gauging), 100 reporters were laid off this year, and everyone's wondering whether the Sulzberger clan will simply call it quits and switch to a small soy agribusiness in northern California. It'd be more wholesome than acknowledging that this century's Huey Long got his freak on.

Other media empires are hurting, too. McClatchy Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and E.W. Scripps Co. all claimed profit falls by almost half of last year's earnings. And most industry analysts expect the locust year to extend into well next. That must mean more bullshit trend pieces.

Meanwhile, remember how vilified David Remnick was in cyberspace, like, five minutes ago for allowing a lampoon of the paranoid reactionary's conception of the Obamas besmirch the handbook of East Coast liberal elitism? There was even talk of Conde Nast's firing him, despite his otherwise terrific stewardship of the New Yorker, once a cash hemorrhaging glossy like all the others. Remnick insists he didn't run the Blitt cartoon for shock value (judging by the look on his face after during all those late-night pundit inquisitions, he's telling the truth), but clearly everyone else was into it, and shock value may have been his saving grace. As New York Post reports:

The issue went off sale on Monday and preliminary estimates show single-copy sales surged 80 percent over average weekly newsstand sales, or around 75,000 copies, compared with average newsstand sales of around 43,000.

So that's how Eustace Tilley stays in the black. Don't count on Remnick even pretending to not know he's slumming it again, at least not anytime soon. But might this be a lesson for other publications high on their own brand supply: it pays to take risks when the only American ideology is taking umbrage. Blogs help magazines and newspapers by objecting furiously — and linking even more furiously — to what's being printed in magazines and newspapers. They're frenemies, and the dead-tree press should learn to exploit the relationship.

Take the case of American Media, the debt-ridden publisher of Star and the now kind-of-influential National Enquirer, which broke the major story of John Edwards' affair and love child with Rielle Hunter on Wednesday. Again, it was all over the blogosphere, which per force sent precious ad dollars the Enquirer's way at particularly crucial time in its accounting cycle. According to the Post, "While talks are at a sensitive stage and could still fall apart, American Media's owners, THL Partners and Evercore Partners, are working on firming up a deal that would reduce the publisher's debt by around $200 million and hand a sizable minority equity stake in the company to its lenders, sources said." Any guesses as to how that deal's looking right about now?

So a trash rag crawls out of the dumpster and into the spotlight, and the outlets that should be reporting misbehavior by public figures are simply refusing to. Slate's Mickey Kaus, who rang every alarm bell about the Edwards-Hunter rumors before they were photographically substantiated this week, has reproduced an email sent by L.A. Times editor Tony Pierce to his blog staff:

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

Is this liberal media bias, Kaus asks, or a dying MSM mastodon's way of playing "gatekeeper" between juicy information and an eager public? We would add: Can the L.A. Times really afford to take such a magisterial attitude given its financial woes and shit-canning of 250 employees? Keep rockin' indeed, Tony.

[Photoshop credit: Steve Dressler.]

He claims, like the anti-change Rethuglican that he is, that the cover is not even a satire of The Obamas, but rather a comment on "the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's—both Obamas'—past, and their politics." That sounds like the sort of "nuance" that a responsible editor would know never to attempt! Why can't you be more like Rolling Stone, David, and only feature angelic photos of Barry as Jesus Christ?

This is saying a particular thing at a particular time, when these imaginings and dark fantasies and misconceptions about Obama exist. And we're putting it all together in one image and holding a mirror up to it and showing it for it for the absurdity that it is.

We look forward to this new era of political cartooning, when images must reflect precisely what the creator means without use of exaggeration or satire. Maybe the Mallard Filmore guy should do their next issue?

So far perhaps the funniest unintended consequence of this irritating flap is that culture warrior conservatives are suddenly happily defending the goddamn New Yorker of all things!

We hope the Great New Yorker Joke-Explaining Tour lasts for the rest of this godforsaken month, as there's very little else happening in the news.

I guess if you want to get technical about it, Julia Allison is employed by a magazine. But her main occupation is fameball. So when I saw her, in a white dress, dramatically posing for photos as if she was getting married, it made me question whether these magazine awards were supposed to be some sort of society event. Apparently so! The following people showed up to present awards, for no discernible reason whatsoever:

• Anderson Cooper. Who did not say anything gay.
• Former New Yorker editor and current Clinton family stalker Tina Brown. "She looks like Hillary," someone whispered loudly when she appeared.
• The aforementioned Padma Lakshmi. She said some stuff about her food show, too.
• Former baseball star turned investor turned magazine publisher Lenny Dykstra. Though he can't be 50 years old yet, he shuffled, mumbled, and spoke with his mouth an inch from the mike in a disquieting impression of Muhammad Ali in the throes of Parkinson's disease. Or maybe it wasn't an impression.
• Obama girl.
• New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Who, after the ceremony, was deep in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick. A conversation I imagine going like this:

  KELLY: Congratulations on the award.

  REMNICK: Thanks. Coincidentally, we're going to be doing an investigative piece on the NYPD soon.

  KELLY: You are under arrest.

• Judah Friedlander and two other people from 30 Rock. They also made awkward, jokey attempts to somehow tie their show to the magazine industry. Not their fault, though. My guess is they were just as mystified that they were there as anyone else.
• Charlie Rose

The "Nick Denton Could Make This A Metaphor" moment of the night: Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, after receiving an award, tried to walk off stage the wrong way, and had to turn around and double back.

And here, the night in poor pictures. I'm having some trouble aligning them correctly, so I will put the captions here, and the pictures below. 1. The view from the ballroom, and also what this crowd of media honchos controls: the world. 2. Here, Anderson Cooper, live on stage! It's really him, I promise! 3. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly walks away from me in fear after I challenge him to a debate on media consolidation laws. 4. Fameball Julia Allison and New York Magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, whose article about this site was nominated for an award last night. They're both very personable!

That's about it.

First, Mead emails Malkin, repeatedly, to no response at all. Then they try her editor at the New York Post—nothing. Then Remnick tries!

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

Best regards,
David Remnick

On 2/16/08, Michelle Malkin wrote:

Thanks.

Dear Ms. Malkin, "Thanks..." but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

OMG, the home number! Malkin finally responds: she has "neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership."

Ok, Michelle. Whatever.

Hilariously she was more than happy to be profiled by Washington Post Media "critic" Howard Kurtz last year.

Why the Hell Would The New Yorker Want to Write a Profile of Michelle Malkin [Bloggasm]

Let's start with that rascal king of the New Yorker David Remnick, who seems to know a thing or two about media empires. He has a certain industry reputation to uphold, so it's no surprise to see him assuaging the fears of the children at Princeton: magazines are doing just fine! Totally fine! Seriously! Too bad the kids were too busy looking for ways to sell their voting rights on eBay to believe this bullshit.

(While we're here, am I allowed a non sequitur Tina Brown reference? Tina told the totally-not-made-up-newspaper the Indian Express that The New Yorker needs a redesign. Burn, Remnick, burn!)

Meanwhile, Newser daddy Michael Wolff phoned in his Vanity Fair column this month, hoping that someone would blurb it with trite usage of the word "eviscerating." Like this: Michael Wolff's eviscerating critique of cable companies, record labels, and your mama is enough to leave you with a cold sweaty feeling of media desperation. You're welcome, Michael, consider this an early Festivus present!

Breaking: Tom Brokaw has another book to promote. It's called Boom! Voices of the Sixties. Everyone hold your breath and hope he says something profound by mixing equal bits of nostalgia and futurism. Done: "Ten years from now, will [the Washington Post] be here?' I don't know. Probably ... if you would do a hardcore analysis - probably not. It'll be probably digital 10 years from now." He probably meant it too, probably.

Meanwhile, someone over on 41st Street seemed to cut a virtual ribbon and declare that the new Times building is officially open for business. In an also-totally-not-made-up company video called "The Integrated Newsroom," Digital Editor Jim Roberts exclaims, "Here we have web producers sitting right next [not really my emphasis] to the print news desk." Quickly thereafter, Deputy Editor Jon Landman extols the virtues of shared cubicles: "When something pops into your head, you can very easily assemble the people to do it. When you were five blocks apart, you couldn't do that." Someone needs to show NYT editors this amazing new technology called IM.

And finally, Amazon announced Kindle, its digital portable media reader this week. While Jeff Bezos would tell Charlie Rose that the book reader's name was a reference to igniting the imagination, one couldn't help suspect he was actually invoking the visions of fascism found in Fahrenheit 451. We didn't start the fire. It's been burning since the world's been turning...CUT!