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.

Now, we don't actually believe that Sorkin's a serious candidate for the managing editor role. At 31, Sorkin is less than half the age that Steiger was when he retired from the position last year; Brauchli himself was deemed young for the job when he took over from Steiger at the age of 46. And Sorkin, though credited for the success of the Times' Deal Book finance email newsletter, has little experience as a manager. Steiger may have been misheard; or simply caught up in the swirl of ill-informed gossip that has gripped the Journal since Brauchli's defenestration.

But Robert Thomson, the former editor of Murdoch's London Times before the Australian media mogul dropped him in as publisher of the Journal, has indeed reached out to Sorkin, for some undefined role. (Thomson is pictured here, above Sorkin.)

Here's why Sorkin is actually more plausible a candidate than he looks. First, in the highly competitive UK, where Thomson has spent most of his newspaper career, editors tend to assume responsibility much earlier in their careers. Thomson's successor at the London Times, James Harding, was just 38 years old. Piers Morgan, now reduced to American trash television, was just 28 when made editor of Murdoch's News of the World.

Second, Sorkin has a powerful reputation for breaking business scoops. With excellent contacts among the acquisition advisers who dole out deal stories, Sorkin has pretty much singlehandedly made the New York Times a force on the crucial M&A beat. The Journal no longer has the monopoly it once possessed over day-before news of big deals. One measure of Sorkin's value as a scoop-getter: he's among the most highly paid reporters at the Times, earning about $200,000 per annum.

Finally, the Times reporter, having spent so much time in the company of bankers and executives, has much more understanding of business dictates managers than his peers. Sorkin was one of the reporters most supportive of Murdoch's bold bid for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company. While Sorkin's articles in the Times rehearsed the traditional criticisms of the tycoon's record as a proprietor, he concluded: "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Murdoch may well return the sentiment.

We've argued before that the Journal, like many other sclerotic American newspaper organizations, might benefit from a generational change. But it is not as if the newspaper has nurtured that many young editors. If Robert Thomson is determined to raise the metabolism of the Journal, to use Howell Raines' expression, he may be forced to bring in talent from outside. And that will be even more depressing for career Journal editors than last week's putsch. It is galling to report to someone younger; or to an outsider; a manager who has both those characteristics would be positively unbearable.

If non-Christians have heard of Bibleman at all, it's probably because for the first seven years he was played by Willie Aames. In the 1970s and 80s, Aames was the shaggy-haired co-star of Eight is Enough and Charles in Charge, and his only superpower was snorting three grams of coke a day. Eventually he cleaned up, was born again and took a new job as Bibleman. His episodes are now in perpetual reruns on TBN, and I sat down to watch one.

The show opens with the backstory of our hero, Miles Peterson, "a man who had it all: wealth, status, success. Still, something was missing." That's putting it mildly. I don't know about you, but when I feel that something is missing I usually mope around the house or browse YouTube for videos of cats falling off stuff. Miles, however, goes tearing out into a rainstorm and collapses into a sobbing heap. "Then, in his darkest hour," Miles finds something half buried in the mud: a Bible. Not just any Bible — a radioactive Bible. No, actually it is just any Bible. But apparently that's enough to turn him into Bibleman.

In this episode, Bibleman and his sidekicks, Cypher (the black guy) and Biblegirl (the girl) go up against a villain called Primordius Drool, a mincing green-skinned fop with a lisp and a fondness for show tunes. Subtlety is not Bibleman's strong suit. The same actor also plays a talk show host named Sammy Davey, who is a classic stereotype of a New York Jew, complete with nerdy glasses and a giant Jew-fro. Slouching and cringing, Sammy Davey needles and browbeats poor Bibleman in an accent so thick that he actually pronounces Bibleman as if it were a surname like Silverman or Lieberman.

The heart of the show is the fight sequences, typically involving a darkened warehouse (all the better to obscure the lackluster choreography) and Bibleman swatting away CGI fireballs with his lightsaber while announcing, "Isaiah 54:17 says 'no weapon forged against me will prosper!'" Every now and then, Bibleman shares a lesson with his sidekicks, as when he laments that people "allow their minds to cover up what God has placed on their hearts" — a near perfect pitch for the common evangelical notion that feelings are to be trusted above rational discernment, a belief that many non-evangelicals would be distressed to hear is being passed on to eight-year-olds.

The Alligator Sunglasses Lady

This mysterious lady is a Horace Mann trustee. Her daughter started the offensive Facebook group that caught the attention of history teacher Peter Sheehy. So, naturally, one day she marched up to Sheehy and teacher Danielle McGuire (the target of the Facebook group) and had an insane argument with McGuire about how the teacher invaded the daughter's privacy and read daughter's secret journal by browsing the public Facebook group the daughter started. Then alligator sunglasses woman accused the teacher of calling another kid a Nazi, which almost got the teacher fired, even though it didn't happen. So—let's meet Alligator Sunglasses Lady!

Her name is Wendy Siegel. She's on the right. Her husband is Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage for CB Richard Ellis.

"Jeffrey Robbins"

This is the little boy who harrassed Danielle McGuire for being a liberal who tried to talk about minorities in class, which upset young Robbins very much. He accused McGuire of calling him a "Nazi" and even claimed to have a tape. Of course, he didn't. His personal hero is Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn, though one wonders if he knows about the closet queer thing. The spoiled little shit also ended up class president! According to a tipster, the charming young Upper East Sider has two doctor parents, got early acceptance to Columbia, and recently "cancelled a meeting of the women's issues group at HM because he didn't like them." Here he is in the Horace Mann yearbook!

Confidential to Columbia: this kid? Really?

"I decided to go forward and talk to the IRS about Ron Burkle and all the Machiavellian connections and all the monies and cash exchanged between Ron Burkle and his big buddy Bill Clinton," she says. Burkle, who likes to fly around on private jets and flirt icky-old-man-style with much younger women has been such a headache for Clinton while his wife is trying to run for President that he had to pretend to cut all ties with the man.

Next, McClintock touches on the subject of Eliot Spitzer and prostitutes, which reminds her of something about Burkle and Clinton. Something you can watch here.

• Previously: The Cruise Indoctrination Video Scientology Tried To Suppress
• Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography [Amazon]
• Church of Scientology Statement

It's important to understand why we—and others—talk about Ronn Torossian so much. He and his firm are far from the biggest players in the PR industry, so it may seem strange that he gets so much attention. The real reason he matters is that he embodies the public's worst ideas about what a PR person is: loud, brash, more flash than substance, dirty, manipulative, amoral, and, in the end, not particularly bright. The real movers and shakers in the PR industry achieved their positions partly by keeping their mouths shut. That doesn't make them better people than Ronn, but it does make them wiser.

Most people would be surprised to find out how much time the average PR person spends worrying about their industry's reputation as a den of lying bastards. Ronn has the touchiness, but not the reflective nature, of his peers. A few years ago I wrote an article in PRWeek calling him a self-promoter (a vast understatement), and we haven't gotten along ever since. Each of us thinks the other is a jerk; I'm happy with that, and I assume he is too.

Mention 5W or Ronn to most people in the PR industry, and you will draw a chuckle or a roll of the eyes. Mention him to most reporters who have been the recipients of his ALL CAPS, nonsensical email blasts , and you'll draw an even worse reaction. When I covered the PR industry for three years at PRWeek, I don't recall ever hearing any unqualified praise of Ronn from anyone who was off the record. That's not normal. He gets more press for himself than just about anybody else in PR, and consequently, has a huge effect on how people perceive the industry as a whole. And that drives a lot of people crazy, because he is just a terrible representative. Although, it must be said, he is colorful, and provides good copy—he embraces the (misguided) "all press is good press" philosophy, even if his peers wish he didn't.

Hopefully, the emails below are evidence enough for the world to see exactly why Ronn inspires the feelings that he does. He will often brag about building his firm from the ground up, and his claims are true; to the extent that you admire unbridled entrepreneurship independent of any social value, you should admire Mr. Torossian. But fundamentally, he's a hustler; and, as a PR professional, he has no idea what he's doing.

According to Melissa Weiss' lawyer, she found out soon after she was hired at 5W last month that Ronn was violating the law by miscategorizing employees and not paying them overtime. "Ms. Weiss reported these violations to Mr. Torossian and he threatened to fire her and any employee not happy with their status," her lawyer writes. "Soon thereafter, Ms. Weiss was terminated and her final pay was withheld, leading her to bring a small claims action for her earned pay."

Weiss' story is not an unfamiliar one. We've received tips telling us the same thing. Among the claims, tipsters say that 5W does not pay overtime to low-level employees, in violation of labor law; that Ronn has docked employees for a full day's pay, or a vacation day, for being 15 minutes late to work, causing several people to resign; and that employees don't get proper comp time after working 7 days in a row or more.

On March 1, Ronn sent Weiss the following email, titled "YOUR CLAIMS":

On March 7—last Friday, the same day that Torossian leaked his own lawsuit against Weiss—he sent her this email:

After Weiss got this "CUNT" message, her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist email to Ronn and his attorney. In it, he noted, "Ms. Weiss will be commencing further claims against 5W and Mr. Torossian individually. Furthermore, Ms. Weiss previously notified the Department of Labor of 5W's labor violations and we will be cooperating with their investigation to the fullest extent."

To that message, Ronn responded to Weiss and her attorney with this:

In short, a man who makes his living giving strategic advice to other people responded to a legal email by calling his former employee a "cunt," and including her attorney on the email. Not much needs to be added to that.

We will note that Ronn does have his defenders—mainly, himself, and (some of) his current employees. Christine Garabedian, a five-year employee of 5W, writes us to say Ronn is an "amazing boss," adding, "To anyone who would say 'wow this girl obviously has been brain washed' YOU ARE DEAD WRONG."

About Melissa Weiss, Garabedian writes:

Melissa Weiss came to 5W in 2008 and immediately began asking me "how can you take it here?". As the HR director are these types of questions appropriate? I suddenly began to think that maybe Melissa was jealous of my success at 5W. As a 30 something, single women who still has her parents address listed on her taxes to avoid paying NYC taxes, I could see how she would be jealous of a successful 27 year old who is happy at her job. I love that she is so happy to say that 5W doesn't follow regulations when she is the one cheating the government...

PS Melissa I just got engaged- Now are you even more jealous of me :)

Classic 5WPR.

[Click to enlarge]

First of all, the celebrity weeklies are minting stars who sell magazines, but can't sustain TV shows or pull audiences into movies. And the music stardom pays less than it did. So minor celebrities rely on paid exclusives for a growing share of their income.

But this is the more significant reason: celebrity weeklies represent one of the few growing magazine categories, and one of the most competitive. Never-seen-before pictures of the offspring of alpha celebrities are irresistible to female readers; they offer a guaranteed kick to sales. That's something embattled market leader, People Magazine, desperately needs. The Time Inc. title, under pressure from feistier competitors such as US Weekly, will report an 8% drop in circulation for the second half of 2007.

Not only is the former market leader trying to shore up circulation; it also now contends for "exclusives" with OK!, a UK import with no scruples about checkbook journalism. For instance, People used to buy preferential access to news from the Spears family; OK! paid $1m to poach the story of the pregnancy of younger sister, Jamie-Lynn, and future baby pictures.

You think that's premature? We're hearing that both People and OK! have put in bids for the story of Angelina Jolie's pregnancy. (The actress' first child by Brad Pitt, Shiloh, was the most valuable baby in celebrity media history, garnering donations worth $4m for US and international rights.) The difference this time: nobody even knows for sure whether the pouting Hollywood star is even expecting.

"The bidding wars going on between those two for these so-called exclusives is like nothing I've seen before," says a rival. "It's completely journalistically distasteful, but also fascinating to watch."

"If a Scientologist is a street sweeper, it is his responsibility to apply Scientology to his zone, and whoever he may interact with, and no, it's not an option," Scientology head David Miscavige explains. "When you stepped on the path and had your first cognition, you also stepped on the path to carry it forth."

"Every move translates to countless impressions," the movie trailer voice-over guy insists in his Tom Cruise intro. Did you know that every time you catch a minute of Mission Impossible on basic cable, you are being indoctrinated? It's true! Or at least the Church of Scientology rather wishes it was true.

You needn't watch all of the attached clips, but each one contains its own brilliant mixture of nonsensical jargon and discomfiting examples of the reach, power, and money of these legitimized Raelians.

Tom Cruise rescued America after 9/11. He saved all the firefighters with 9/11 cough! And he didn't ask permission.

Then, with the help of the Education Department's chief of staff and the FDA, Tom Cruise got Paxil banned. All by himself. And his embarrassing media tour where everyone learned that Cruise would like all the psychologists in the world jailed? That was good: 50 million people were made aware of the crimes of psychology. 5,000 people hear his word of Scientology every hour.

The video makes a damn good case for Tom Cruise being, if not Scientology's "number 2", definitely its most important emissary.

"So whattya say, should we clean this place up," Tom asks of the crowd in his acceptance speech. After watching the worshipful praise bestowed upon 2004's proud recipient of the IAS Freedom Medal of Valor, some of the claims in Andrew Morton's controversial biography seem a bit more believable. What's a field of freshly planted wildflowers for the man who does more than anyone else for raising consciousness of Scientology across the world? Even if Suri Cruise wasn't created with the frozen sperm of Scientology's founder, we can certainly understand why some of the philosophy's more devout adherents might think this man's offspring is the second coming of a prophet.

This video's been passed around privately by reporters and writers investigating Cruise's ties with Scientology. Most reporters have been wary of taking on the Scientologists, because they have a history of both litigation, and the harassment of critics. The publication of Andrew Morton's biography of Tom Cruise, which claims he is the second most powerful person in the cult, has seems to have opened the floodgates. Several indoctrination videos were available on Google Video, on Sunday, and showcased on Gawker, before being removed by the person who had originally posted them. Yesterday, for a few hours, the clip of Tom Cruise discussing his beliefs as a Scientologist appeared on Youtube, and was republished by Radar and Defamer. That video is no longer available, most likely after the Church of Scientology sent in a copyright infringement notice. Gawker is now hosting a copy of the video; it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.

• More Tom Cruise stories on Gawker
• More gossip stories on Gawker
• Popular stories on Gawker right now
• Background on Scientology, from Wikipedia

Robert Thomson (the publisher brought in from the UK by the newspaper's new owner, Rupert Murdoch) has flown in the paper's senior editors from its American and international bureaus to break some bad news. Saturday's weekend edition will get an additional two pages, for features, we're told. The implication: on busy news days, at the very least, the Journal will no longer run A-Hed features.

This isn't wholly surprising. The News Corporation boss has already indicated he wants to take on the New York Times in national news. And some sharp-eyed observers such as Ben Compaine had noted how heavily the Journal covered the news surrounding assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a story it might have left to other less detached newspapers in the past. "What was always compelling about the Journal was Page 1, with stories you would find nowhere else," said Compaine.

.