“We’re not offering big fees,” Ms. Brown said. Posts are generally good for $250. One recently laid-off staffer who’s been pitching the site was told posts could get $300 to $500—others say it’s closer to 50 cents per word...

“They want celeb-focus and featurey stuff that’s light and fun to read,” said one recently laid-off staffer who contributes. “They’re less interested in the scoop and more interested in the fun, light read. They like stuff with celebrities attached with little lists: five of this, five of that.”

Well that sounds like... our job. If we got paid at that rate, we would make six hundred and eleven million dollars per year. [NYO; pic via. Choire Sicha is on The Daily Beast, for example!]

For the 1999 bash, guests had to take a boat from Lower Manhattan, and the party was full of celebrities (De Niro, Madonna, Demi, Paul Newman...) and literal fireworks. It resulted in the union of Salman Rushdie and his now-ex wife Padma Lakshmi, who met there. "Weinstein Brothers Revel in Vulgarity, Glory of Manhattan," was the headline in the New York Observer. "[Publisher Ron] Galotti continued his Bullworth -esque excursion into black culture by swaggering through a rap he had written for the occasion."

At Pop Burger, there was an open bar. It was hard to get a drink! The event was hardly star-studded—a round up of the usual suspects you see at every media event, add a dash of Christopher Buckley and his post-National Review fame. When fact the mini-burgers ran out after 8:15, making some people sad. Yet, free prosecco still felt decadent for our lowered standards. "I'm surprised we were even able to have this!" said one guest while quaffing champagne. And the small talk? About the layoffs and the recently laid-off, as well as "I'm not even allowed to bitch about work anymore, because at least I still have a job."

HuffPo, as we've said before is a partisan political site and thus a tough sell to advertisers. Even if the site could somehow maintain its traffic levels after the election (doubtful), it will struggle to likewise maintain advertiser base. Rolling high right before the election, it's nevertheless losing money and trying to put together $6 million to $10 million in financing amid a liquidity crisis. (The Times is told this financing "could be closed" by the end of December. Sure.) (UPDATE: Ad Age tackled the question of HuffPo's future Monday.)

The Daily Beast, meanwhile, seems like it could well be too highbrow, ultimately aiming, one presumes, for a rarified market of "globally curious" luxury good purchasers. The Monocle set, if you will. Trouble is, that demographic and its advertisers hav suddenly become quite a bit more, uh, exclusive and hard to come by.

The juiciest bit in the Times piece concerns debate among Brown's backers over money:

Michael Jackson, the head of online programming at IAC and a longtime lieutenant of the company’s chairman, Barry Diller, distanced himself from The Daily Beast. After being involved in its early formation, he raised questions about the cost, according to three people briefed on the matter who were willing to speak freely on the condition that they remain anonymous. Ms. Brown now reports directly to Mr. Diller.

Every party is broken up by someone at some point. Huffington and Brown should appreciate that fact particularly.

L.G.: Arianna Huffington doesn't pay her writers, as you know—her bloggers particularly.
T.B.: Don't forget, Lloyd, it's a completely different model, because that's a come-one-come-all, multi sort of present site. We are commissioning and not just trying to publish every blog that comes in as a post. It's going through editors. It's not people posting without an editor, it's people writing for either a commission or a particular editor. We accept and we reject.
...We do feel that our service is to be discerning... we're not just looking to simply post everything in the world that's close to the door right now.

As if to cement the notion that she's a media A-lister (as opposed to, say, a bored divorcée looking to stay at the top of the cocktail circuit), Brown eagerly mentioned that she's also got a book on the Clintons due soon (actually 2010, she later realized) and a "production development deal" with HBO (she's adapting Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" for the small screen).

The former Vanity Fair chief also let it be known that it was financial backer Barry Diller who approached her and not the other way around — and that she made him wait while she finished her book.

This top-shelf positioning seems to be working fabulously, by the way. In its first two weeks the Beast has earned wide notice for Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama, news of Buckley's subsequent firing from National Review, Mike Kinsley on John McCain having a meltdown at a craps table and Kevin Sessums' spiked profile of a fragile, breakdown-prone Jennifer Lopez.

Now Brown just needs to figure out how to make money on this highbrow stew. Diller won't finance her highbrow airs forever, after all.

Buckley's hate mail column, though, has the advantage of quoting an unnamed editor from the magazine his father founded! "One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions 'cretinous.'" Ha, ha, that is probably from Rich Lowry? Buckley continues:

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

Is it perhaps too cynical of us to assume that this was all orchestrated as a PR stunt for Tina Brown's crazy new Internet Thing?

First of all, Charlotte Simmons is supposed among other things to be an indictment of college promiscuity, something Tina Brown had no trouble with as an ambitious young undergraduate at Oxford University with boyfriends such as Martin Amis. (I'd been looking for an excuse to rehash Brown's active college sex life.)

Second, it is a profoundly conservative book—George Bush's favorite—by an author who has mocked Tina Brown for her salon liberalism. Tom Wolfe tells of a dinner party at which the guests engaged in ritualistic disdain for George Bush, only to be punctured by one of those workers they professed to care about so much, a waiter who planned to vote for the despised Republican. Wolfe told the Guardian: "Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States."

Above all, how on earth can Brown spare the time? In her career choices Tina Brown has of late become as promiscuous as the college students ridiculed in Charlotte Simmons. She pops up in the restroom to which reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign had been exiled, working on a book on the candidate which now seems redundant; she's still pitching her book on Lady Diana to middle-aged women in cities such as Pittsburgh and Naples, FL; originally British, Tina Brown is one of the candidates to take over the BBC's famed Letter from America radio broadcast; as the supposed founder of the forthcoming Daily Beast web site, she's been establishing her internet bona fides talking to the dreary Online News Association.

That wouldn't matter except that she's been presenting herself as an internet convert, full of passion for a new medium “vibrant with life instead of constantly obsessed with fears of its own extinction.” She's a founder of a website which is supposed to launch in weeks. One would have thought Barry Diller would be expecting the degree of maniacal commitment that Brown once brought to magazines and that internet entrepreneurs are expected to bring to their ventures.

[Brown man Tom] Tapp is sending out increasingly desperate-sounding emails to flacks working for studios, tenpercenteries, big producers and PR firms begging for help. ("Hey Man, We need to get moving on this. Any chance we can set something up in the two weeks?")

Finke reports that Hollywood players think Brown's star is fading and hate the moguls she has consorted with — Harvey Weinstein, Mike Ovitz and now Diller.

But there's a strategic error, as well, in Brown's attempt to cozy up to Hollywood: The Huffington Post already has the town in a blog bear hug. Good luck getting between celebrities and their beloved Arianna!

Meanwhile, Brown is angling to lead the revival of Alistair Cooke's Letter From America radio show on the BBC. How 20th century. A real internet mogul would stoop to nothing more retro than a niche-y podcast.

In the four years since I was last forced to watch beach volleyball, I somehow have not found the maturity and wisdom to take it seriously as an Olympic sport, and, frankly, I doubt that NBC takes it seriously, either, except as a ratings grabber. Every time I turned on the TV, there was May-Treanor (the short one) and Walsh (the tall one), in those silly little Victoria’s Ill-Kept Secret outfits. I now know more about these two women than I know about some of my relatives, including when Walsh met her husband; what’s inscribed on her wedding ring (it flew off her finger during a match, and a fair amount of time was spent keeping viewers posted on the successful Search in the Sand); what the tattoo on May-Treanor’s left shoulder signifies; and when the two of them plan to start families (soon after the Games are over). I’m not questioning Walsh’s and May-Treanor’s abilities—they won the gold medal in 2004 and have won more than a hundred consecutive matches—but I don’t think their every move had to be documented.

Victoria's ill-kept secret: snicker snicker!

It's also funny because Franklin hearts Gossip Girl and tolerates The Hills. ("I think people watch it mostly to figure out why they’re watching it," she said of the latter, which I thought about over the weekend between Olympic commercial breaks. And no actually as my gay Ryan pointed out people watch The Hills because it is an opiate.)

Franklin has some other quibbles with the coverage. The announcers, for one, are sometimes "punishingly shrill" — and a little given to melodrama and hyperbole! Everyone goes too easy on the Chinese military-gymnastic complex, and reporters make her wince when they try "'funny' food like fried scorpions." Good points, but odd coming from a Gossip Girl apologist! I almost wondered: is it the end of the Nobrow? (You know, the "pop culture writing made to sound just as erudite as actual culture writing but able to sell lots more magazines and make everyone a lot more popular at parties" style that took over the New Yorker when they put that former Tatler editor in charge of things?) Well, probably not, with a line like this:

As of this writing, it’s not known whether he will reach his personal goal of winning eight gold medals in the Games, only that he has won more gold medals than any Olympic athlete in history, has broken records with each win in these Games, and is completely awesome.

The Fab Fortnight [The New Yorker]

No seriously, we actually wish Sharon, who hopes The Wrap will be the Politico of the entertainment industry even though there are already innumerable trade publications plus Nikki Finke serving that role and hello, entertainment is actually a tiny and shrinking sector of the American economy that really does not deserve as much attention as the federal government, marginally more success than we wish the other two ventures, because Bonnie Fuller is the mustard gas of American brain cells and Tina Brown's Beast sounds like another Huffington Post, which, you know, is a lovely site and all, but…do we really need more? (No.)

Why does everyone have to start new stuff all the time, anyway? Would it really be so radical for one of these broads to go work for something that already existed? Or even SOMEONE ELSE??

Full disclosure: I know Sharon sort of, because when I lived in LA I went to a party at her house one time with this old friend of mine, Evan Wright. Fittingly, Sharon had met Evan while writing a story about his internet startup, which was naturally some sort of porn company. At the time Sharon was frustrated at the Washington Post in part, I was told, because she liked "hard news" and politics and the Middle East and spoke Arabic and stuff, and also maybe because she was a little on the pathologically sloppy side. Meanwhile Evan was transitioning out of porn and into a magazine career that has since yielded two National Magazine Awards for and the much-acclaimed HBO series show Generation Kill. All of which is to say: nice job, both of you, you could be doing this.

Which is to say, hi guys! This is my first Gawker post. I'll be covering the media and ideas, which is to say, Nick Denton's ideas about the media. I am open to all venture financing I can receive via PayPal.

Are Tina Brown And Bonnie Fuller Wired For Their Shift Online? [LAT]
Sharon Waxman Aims To Be The Politico Of Hollywood [Marketwatch]

Incidentally, the site's branding was outed by Tina's friend, octogenarian gossip columnist Liz Smith. Having been burned by the backlash against Talk magazine—the glossy backed by Harvey Weinstein which Tina Brown launched with massive hype and one of the most lavish parties in magazine history—Manhattan's "queen of buzz" has been more discreet in the preparation of her first web venture. One assumes that Liz Smith forgot the sneak peek of the website was supposed to be for her eyes only—though Tina Brown can hardly complain about Smith's discretion, having pressured the ancient New York Post gossip writer to come out as a lesbian for an early issue of Talk.

No doubt The Daily Beast will invite comparisons to the newspaper of Waugh's novel; already Liz Smith compares the IAC mogul backing Tina Brown to a character in Scoop, proprietor Lord Copper; and there will be easy jokes to make whenever Brown's news site makes an error or hypes a story.

But I was reminded more of the scene in Scoop in which the hapless hero goes on an extravagant shopping trip before heading to Africa to cover the war, buying six linen suits, surgical instruments and a portable humidor. Waugh, himself a foreign correspondent during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, once said: "There are few pleasures more complete, or to me more rare, than that of shopping extravagantly at someone else's expense."

That quote could serve as a statement of editorial principles for the notoriously profligate Tina Brown, who happily doubled writers' contracts to lure them to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The Daily Beast has already run through a series of expensive design consultants and employs about half-a-dozen staff its office in IAC's Gehry-designed office palace. During her magazine career, Tina Brown shopped at the expense of Conde Nast's Si Newhouse; reinvented as an internet entrepreneur backed by Barry Diller, she's still spending other people's money.

The trouble started, we hear, when Wintour found out that star fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier had some work in the latest issue of Interview. Demarchelier is closely associated with Vogue, and has shot numerous covers for domestic and international issues of the magazine.

Further, we hear that Demarchelier may be on an extremely lucrative exclusive contract with Vogue. So Wintour "flipped her shit" at the thought of him working for a semi-competitor. She got so upset that eventually she had to go and have a mob-like "Sit down" meeting with Glenn O'Brien, who oversees Interview for Brant Publications and is not a fan of celebrities.

The outcome of that meeting is unclear. But everyone involved better hope that Wintour cools off. Her reaction to Demarchelier's perceived betrayal was to call around to Vogue's top photographers—including Brad Pitt chronicler Steven Klein—and urge (order?) them not to shoot any photos for Interview. We hear that this isn't the first time she's gotten angry like this; she tried to tell photographers not to work for Tina Brown's ill-fated Talk magazine when it launched, too.

The upshot of her earlier attempt to keep all the good photographers for herself? They all got to jack up their own prices, which may have played a role in Demarchelier getting such a lucrative contract from Vogue in the first place.

Such a cut-throat fashion photography world. Or so we hear! If you have anything to add, email us.

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

Though both women were plucked by S.I. Newhouse from similar backgrounds in the UK to run magazines in his Condé Nast empire—or maybe precisely because they occupied such similar niches in American publishing—their relationship was always testy. Tina Brown saw Wintour's hiring as a deliberate slight by the Condé Nast boss, according to friends. "He knows Anna's father and my father are mortal enemies! He knows!" she was quoted as saying.

Even though they were sufficiently chummy to lunch together with Diana on the princess' jaunts through New York, the rivalry was never far from the surface. Wintour had set up the lunch; but Tina Brown worked the private conversation into her obituary of the princess after she died in a Paris car crash. And, later, Brown ran a malicious profile on Wintour's then boyfriend, womanizing entrepreneur Shelby Bryan. "He asks nineteen-year-old girls and forty-five-year-olds at parties in Southampton if they want to fuck him," said one socialite.

There's a consolation: Wintour still has a job atop a glossy and profitable magazine and the power of patronage that comes with that; Tina Brown depends on the charity of gay mogul Barry Diller, who is funding her latest project, a "news aggregator" in a medium that she's never understood. The C.B.E. won't help her.

Tina Brown's fascination with Hillary Clinton is longstanding. In Tina and Harvey come to America, Judy Bachrach writes how the magazine editor saw in Hillary's life her own marriage to a powerful and philandering man, Harry Evans, and the vast conspiracies she faced when she took the helm at one hostile Conde Nast title after another.

"More and more, it was noticed, Tina found her self identifying with Hillary Clinton and her travails," writes Bachrach. "It wasn't simply the imperfections of marriage that united them, although here Tina clearly empathized. It was the animosity—cataclysmic in its ease of ignition—that both women managed almost effortlessly to arouse. Some of this derived from their ability to alienate friends and associates."

The launch issue of Tina Brown's biggest flop, Talk magazine, splashed with Hillary Opens Up, an profile the former First Lady, then gearing up for her Senate race. Talk's editor-in-chief not only tried to insert comparisons between Clinton and Lady Diana, yet another woman who grabbed the spotlight from a more powerful husband; colleagues again saw in editorial meetings about the article Brown's very personal obsession with Clinton's trajectory. Said one: "She is so obviously talking to you about herself in the guise of Hillary... Everything talked about is strangely associative: in her mind, Hillary is Tina."

Since the collapse of Talk, Tina Brown and her husband have faded from view. Her biography of Lady Diana has been a success; but it's the last performance of an old circus act. Her talk show, Topic A, never picked up much of an audience; her interests are those of a disconnected Manhattan elite too narrow to sustain ratings. (Ironic, because Brown was once seen as the mass-market debaucher of stories magazine titles. Hillary Clinton herself once declared: "Tina Brown is the junk food of journalism.")

But her personal disappointments may give 55-year-old Tina Brown an insight into Hillary Clinton's. Now the Democratic candidate's story still more perfectly mirrors her own.

Take the legendary magazine editor's spin on ABC this morning. "The fact that Hillary didn't make it is in a way it's more interesting. It would have been harder for me if the book had come out in the middle of the first term. This way there is a 16-year period which we can honestly call the Clinton era. There is an arc to the story now. There is now a beginning, a middle and a closing to it, which to me makes it a more intensely plotted drama."

And now take the blurb of Bachrach's book on Tina Brown and her husband. "This rich, fast-paced story of Tina Brown and Harry Evans is not only a brilliant account of two media stars but also a tale of how this British couple molded and shaped every aspect of the American publishing world—until it inevitably turned on them." Snap.

Within a year, the comedian Dudley Moore, then at the height of his fame and career, came courting at St. Anne's in his limousine, much to the amazement of Tina's classmates... Martin Amis, the son of another famous novelist, Kingsley Amis, followed suit. None of these conquests—with the exception of Amis—did she hold in awe. Privately, a few of them would become the objects of a coolly detached amusement. Later confidants claimed to have been informed by Tina that Dudley Moore, despite his attractions, had one leg shorter than the other; that Auberon Waugh washed frequently after sex.

[Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power—by Judy Bachrach]

Sometimes hires don't work out, particularly in the early stages of a new company, so no blame attaches there. But here's what I don't understand: why do magazine industry veterans like Tina Brown and Radar's Maer Roshan insist on encouraging buzz so long before launch? Premature promotion no longer works: pre-announcements of big-name hires just leave hostages to fortune, such as the one just executed by Keith Kelly; the hype cycle has become compressed in an age of instant contrarianism; and this week's excitement is next week's disappointment.

True, Tina Brown—New York's former queen of buzz—can't help but attract attention. The storyline—the 55-year-old doyenne of glossy magazines would reinvent herself as an internet entrepreneur—is irresistible. But Brown's probably been briefing media reporters, and she should resist the habit. Remember her magazine start-up, Talk. "Talk became this kind of hysterically over-inflated sort of media story," she remembered, last year. "And it was fun for people to write about. I thought that it was a little excessive at times. But I'm kind of used to that at this point."

After the failure of Talk, the expectations are now less weighty. Anything better than sheer embarrassment would count as success. If Tina Brown could only keep quiet, she might even be able to pull off a surprise.

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.

The "reports" come from news.com.au, which, as everyone knows, is from Australia. And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as this item is not trusted by me. So I can clearly not believe the story in front of me!

Radar reports Tina Brown, 55-year-old former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, is putting together a news "aggregator" with backing from another old media legend, a former studio boss IAC's Barry Diller. The site is to be run by Edward Felsenthal, who was one of the first people forced out when Marcus Brauchli took over the Wall Street Journal and found temporary refuge with his former patron at Joanne Lipman's Portfolio.

The former queen of buzz is presumably inspired by her friend, Arianna Huffington, who's built a forum for middle-aged liberal celebrities to sound off against George Bush and promote their often tedious causes. The Huffington Post, casting for an acquiror while its pre-election traffic holds, has put out word that it's now worth $200m.

But if the half-baked venture ever gets off the ground, Brown will also compete against one of her most irritating critics,