Today brings wild fake-person news from the land of big hair and Neiman-Marcus: A woman named Elizabeth Albanese became head of the Dallas Press Club (ooh, a press club! How quaint) and used it for her own nefarious ends, such as awarding herself several coveted (in those parts, apparently) "Katie Awards" for outstanding journalism over the course of several years. This, even though she worked for the Bond Buyer and wrote "dull and forgettable stories on municipal finance," according to the Dallas Observer, which has the great blow-by-blow account of how she handed out the Katie Awards at random and used the Press Club's credit card to pay for her personal vacations. Also, she'd been arrested a couple times before and told everyone she went to Harvard Law School, even though she hadn't graduated from high school. Which of course raises the question: What took the Dallas journalists so long to catch on?

Perhaps it's because some of them enjoyed the attention Albanese bestowed on them. When the other Press Club board members started questioning Albanese, some of them refused to believe the allegations against her could be true:

"Wasn't the ambush and resignation enough?" wrote Bob Morrison, news and radio director at USA Radio Network, in an e-mail to his colleagues on the club's board. "You've done enough. Have you no decency?"

It's perhaps not surprising that "some of Albanese's friends happened to win Katies, including Bob Morrison, one of her staunchest defenders on the board." Hmmm! When you can't trust journalists to tell you the truth, just whom can you trust? Oh yeah, publicists.

Kiss Me, Katie [Dallas Observer via Romenesko]