The obvious reason this happened is that RadarOnline was bought by AMI as the new online front for the National Enquirer, to be used for the purpose of gossip-laundering. But even that doesn't explain the sheer scope of the Octomomness currently going on over there.

Just this week at RadarOnline, Octo has launched a video diary and a blog and is just communicating her heart out, while, as far as I can tell, the rest of the world continues to steadily lose interest in her story.

She's lifecasting, people. RadarOnline is slowly morphing into the new Nonsociety, which would make Octomom the new Julia Alllison, of bizarro world. What a crazy place the internet is!

Put your cynicism underneath the seat in front of you! Yes, the seat-pocket reading world may seem like a comedown from cavorting with stars like Shannen Doherty, the subject of the defunct Radar's final cover story. But given readers' Internet-distracted flight from the printed word, the unconnected skies may be the last refuge of the great magazine makers. And mocking someone's gig? In these times, it seems like just another disposable habit of a deflated bubble. Just one question: Does this mean Gell must resign from ASSME, his support group for the pink-slipped?

Think about it: RadarOnline is run by the Enquirer staff. It is the Enquirer. That's how it got its scoops on the death of Travolta's son in the first place—the rescue worker's story, the friend's story, etc. This is their groove. Their stories are everywhere! But now, a news outlet can credit Radar rather than the National Enquirer, lending the reporting a somewhat more respectable air. RadarOnline's only real purpose now is to whitewash scoops for the Enquirer. This is what Alex Balk & co. were fired for. Psht.

Ferrari, one of five laidoff New Yorkers featured in the Post, was the tabloid's poster girl for out-of-work media types. She told the paper she has landed a part-time editing job at an undisclosed web site. No surprise that she wouldn't say where she was working: Anything would seem like a comedown compared to her position as online features editor at Radar, the inexplicably buzzy pop-culture rag whose on-again, off-gain publication cycle mirrored the economy's up and downs. (Previous gig: Slate intern.)

Just as the mere existence of Radar, improbable as it was, made editors everywhere feel a little more desirable, the news of Ferrari's post-Radar employment should cheer gloomy journalists who spend all day reading about layoffs. There is life after the collapse of the media business, Ferrari tells us! It's just not worth talking about.

They "regret to inform" us that "due to market conditions, Radar magazine has stopped publishing." The other side informs that you can choose one of AMI's other magazines as a replacement: either Star, Men's Fitness, or Shape. Ominously, if you do not reply by January 12th, "your remaining subscription will be replaced by Star magazine." (How about "none of the above"?)

• Barack Obama. Blago wanted to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.
• Rahm Emanuel Obama's incoming chief of staff was the one Blago wanted to negotiate with—he hoped to get stuff from Rahm in exchange for picking Obama's preferred candidate. Also Rahm maybe alerted the feds!
• Tony Rezko This Chicago fundraiser and felon raised a fortune for Blago, and a smaller fortune for Obama back in the day. From Blago he got plum appointments for associates and friends, and lord knows what else.
• Sam Zell Blago was unhappy with the Chicago Tribune's coverage of how corrupt he was, so he told the owner of their parent company, Zell, to make them cut it out. Zell, who needed the state's help to unload the Chicago Cubs, allegedly agreed to look into it. Zell also connects us to Lee Abrams! Abrams is Zell's friend and Tribune Co's insane "Chief Innovation Officer." He will hopefully have a crazy memo about this soon.
• John McCormick This is the Tribune editor who was mean to Blago all the time. Supposedly Zell agreed to have him "restructured" out of his job in exchange for state help with Tribune's bankruptcy, but this didn't actually happen.
• Patrick Fitzgerald the dreamboat US Attorney who's bringing Blago down is known as a tenacious prosecutor, and he was already famous for his role investigating Plamegate, the weird old scandal in which Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to journalists to damager her husband's credibility. That scandal, as we all remember, ended up with Times reporter and terrible hack Judy Miller going to jail rather than revealing to Fitzgerald that her source was Scooter Libby, even though Libby had already given her permission to reveal this.
• Jesse Jackson Jr. It's sill possible that "Senate Candidate 5" is Jesse Jackson, Jr. Even if he isn't, he's a family friend of the Obamas (specifically his childhood friend Michelle) who is seen by many as a front-runner for Obama's vacant seat. So Blago would obviously have been in contact with him regarding the seat, and what Blago wanted in exchange for giving it to him. Meanwhile Jackson's brother Yusef was an investor in a magazine called Radar with pervy billionaire friend-of-Clinton Ron Burkle!
• Also Jesse Jackson Sr was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as was Kelly Preson, who was in Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon!

"You'll be seeing us again in some way!" he told us without blinking or laughing once. Performance art.

"You're killing me," sighed the flack at the door when we were finally plucked from the line and had the audacity to bring in a guest. No, we're killing print! It did seem a bit ironic that the final Radar party was wildly oversubscribed.

So Maer, how are you feeling? "We put out sixteen good issues," he said, adding that he'll be an editor-at-large at Tina Brown's Daily Beast, "helping out." Will he have to go into the office? "Only when I feel like it."

Meanwhile, we heard the rumor of a party guest who was laid off at Radar on Friday, hired at Culture + Travel on Monday, and laid off again on Wednesday when that magazine folded. And this was all before covergirl Shannen Doherty arrived, who showed up dressed in black shiny leggings, looking like a sexy cat. (We were promised absolutely "no access" to her.)

As Nick Denton wrote in 2005,

"Gawker has covered Radar to the point of absurdity, as if it was a reality TV show, in which every actor and every action, however minor, was worthy of mention. Maer said that, at Radar, everyone was a celebrity. The blogs have taken him at his word. One day he'll appreciate the attention; but not just yet."

While the party was just (yet another) Radar wake, it felt like much more: Maer Roshan has always been one of the biggest believers in magazines and in the now-outdated idea that they can be culturally relevant—a fine industry to dedicate your life to. After a brutal week of magazine foldings and months of layoffs, it felt like we were mourning much more than the third death of Radar.

[Photos: Nick McGlynnn for Random Night Out]

Previously: Radar 2.0 Launch Party
Radar 2.0 Wake
Radar 3.0 Launch

First order of business in Wasilla: a good old-fashioned house party.

"There is a senior from Wasilla High that was going to drive me from the airport in Anchorage to my hotel, and then I am invited to an "official house party," as he put it... First night—-2:00AM... a house party in Wasilla thrown by frienemies of Bristol..."

Next item: boyfriends! "I'm interviewing Sarah P's old high school friends, one who might have been her "first" boyfriend."

Other dirt she's dug up so far: no one in Wasilla will be dressing up as Sarah Palin for Halloween. "It would be like dressing like your next door neighbor," a Wasilla High School sophomore named Kayla told her.

Question is, will any magazines have "PALIN FEVER" after the election?

For now, some of the new items are bylined as the mysterious "FI staff." Posts since the takeover include heroin king Frank Lucas's lawsuit, the alleged non-promotion of new Sean Penn movie about Harvey Milk, the delay in the Harry Potter movie, something about a James Bond movie, the gossip about married rock star Bono hanging out with a girl, and the death of the hairdresser for seminal porn movie Deep Throat.

We're noticing a theme: is it movies, along with the run-of-the-mill celeb gossip that can be found anywhere else on the web?

Writing style: one-sentence paras with lots of exclamation points!

Kind of like Perez Hilton!

Or Page Six, if it was written by monkeys!

Maybe we're wrong though. Maybe Zombie Radar is actually meant to be a parody of a gossip site. Or a comment on the state of gossip-blogging today. If so, it's the most sophisticated take we've seen. Best headline yet: "Somebody's Lion about Siegfried and Roy!"

Anyway, we're sure they're very busy!

As AMI chairman David Pecker said, "If it's on your radar, it's on Radar Online, and if it's not on your radar, we'll put it there." We're not so sure we want him to put it there. It's like watching an old friend get mauled to death by vampirezombies, and all you can do is watch.

Burkle made his money with supermarkets. It is quite profitable, of course, to own all the supermarkets, because people need to eat. But, you know, it's not very glamorous! And Burkle enjoys flying around on his private jet with famous people, and globe trotting with politicians, and partying, and models. He likes models. One can enjoy this lifestyle with supermarket billions, but isn't it more fun to enjoy it with media holdings?

So at some point he and Jackson decided to invest in Maer Roshan's crazy magazine about "pop and politics and pop culture and scandal and pop" or whatever the hell the tagline of Radar 3.0 was. And they gave him 15 issues to do with as he pleased, and he did eventually turn out a pretty good product. But the money wasn't there, because it was a new magazine, and there's not even money for old magazines anymore.

And honestly it was probably not as exciting and fun to own a magazine as Burkle thought it would be! It's tough, because he also wanted to secretly own the magazine, and no one who secretly owns things gets the same pleasure Rupert Murdoch does from personally tearing up the Wall Street Journal and remaking it in his image. And Murdoch loves newspapers. There's really never been any evidence that Burkle loves magazines. Murdoch will take a loss for years on something like the New York Post. Burkle didn't give Roshan the five years he said it'd take to break even on Radar before he pulled the plug. Because if it's not subsidizing his lifestyle, it's not worth the cash. He's a capitalist, obviously, and Radar was not a charitable endeavor, but if we had his fortune we wouldn't mind wasting it on the talent Roshan brought together.

Back to controlling distribution and sales of food! Unlike media, mac and cheese is recession-proof!

This is, appropriately enough, a political fundraising method, where donors get special access and personal attention for their cash. All it is missing is cute names for each tier, like Bush's "Rangers" and Hillary Clinton's "Hillraisers." As a model for the future of professional journalism, it is perhaps worrying! But you know we're all "marketing" our "personal brands," right? Now we are microtargeting, too.

And once we are finally out of work, when Nick Denton decamps to his secret underground fortress to ride out the End Times, we will gladly email you, personally, 200 words on why Rachel Maddow is so popular in exchange for a hamburger. But who will donate to the commenters? The system is unsustainable!

Maybe Monday.

• It was too late to have a new tone: Radar's tone is wry, arch, post-modern, skeptical, and, you know "snarky" (*retch*). Had the magazine launched five or ten years before it did, it would have been a lone, intelligent voice amongst the wilderness of celebrity coverage. As it was, it was just one more magazine with the same tone that hundreds and hundreds of blogs had made into the default voice of the entire young American audience. Radar was never bad—it just wasn't fresh.
• It was too late to start a standalone magazine: There are plenty of people who dream of starting their own magazines. Few make it happen. Roshan did,somehow, but he missed the era when it would have been a viable enterprise. What was the last great standalone magazine to launch, and be successful? Wired, in 1993? And Wired is still around because it now has the money of Conde Nast to back it up. The day of launching new, large-scale, general-interest print magazines (rather than super-niche ones) that turn a profit are gone. Technology will determine the future of publishing, but that's not it.
• It was too late to own its category: Celebrity coverage with a twist. Smart celebrity coverage. For people who are actually intelligent, but have a pop culture habit. This is a niche with no space left in it. It is a niche that was filled before Radar got a chance to get to it. Radar didn't lack talent—it lacked a compelling reason to exist. That Maer Roshan got three cracks at it is a testament to his otherworldly skills as a salesman.

American Media Inc. and Integrity Multimedia Company form joint venture to launch a new and enhanced RadarOnline web site

(October 24, 2008, New York, New York) – American Media Inc. (AMI) today announced they are partnering with Integrity Multimedia Company in creating a new company, Radar Online LLC. Integrity Multimedia will make a multi-million dollar investment in RadarOnline.com to launch it as the ultimate destination for breaking celebrity news and cutting edge pop culture.

RadarOnline.com will be supported by the AMI news organization and its network of hundreds of newsgatherers and thousands of sources. In addition, the Radar Online site will also have its own staff of editors, reporters, photographers and videographers .

In the first of many announcements to be forthcoming, American Media Inc. Chairman and CEO David Pecker said that David Perel, Executive Vice President of AMI News, will leave that position to become managing editor of RadarOnline. At AMI, Mr. Perel was responsible for breaking many of the biggest celebrity stories of the past two decades.

Mr. Pecker commented, "The AMI newsgathering team that David Perel has at his disposal for the new site is unmatched in the celebrity market, as is the access we have to past, present and future pop culture milestones. Our message is simple - if it's on your radar, it's on Radar Online, and if it's not on your radar, we'll put it there."

Integrity Multimedia Company Chairman Yusef Jackson added "By teaming with AMI, we will build on what we have already established with Radar while at the same time accelerating the potential for our return on investment. It is a win/win for both partners."

Plans call for RadarOnline.com to launch a redesigned site in the early part of 2009.