In your early Friday media column: Laurel Touby is officially chillin like a villain, the Boston Globe gets another contract vote, Nikki Finke is mysterious, and CNN's creative accounting of what it means to be "number one."

Laurel Touby became a middle class millionaire after selling Mediabistro for $23 million two years ago today; now, she's officially free of the corporate yoke. She's a consultant (for Mediabistro). Despite everything we've ever said, Laurel Touby is clearly smarter than all of us.

A Boston Globe update! Haven't had one of those in a while. Newsroom union members are voting on their new package of cutbacks on Monday, after rejecting it last time, then deciding that wasn't so great after all. The alternative is the current 23% pay cut. But the outcome of the vote still seems unpredictable. Oh, Boston Globe. We don't envy you.

David Carr's profile of crazy-but-connected Hollywood blog supremo Nikki Finke makes the front page of the New York Times today, but not even the paper of record can turn up a new photo of Nikki. "Why is there only one Nikki Finke photo?" is Hollywood's greatest mystery.

Oh look some sort of cable news 'ad war' thing: CNN is running ads that say it's ""No. 1, with more viewers than Fox and MSNBC."

This came as a news flash to Fox and MSNBC, considering that both top CNN in the ratings. During the second quarter, Fox News — which has been handily beating CNN since January 2002 — more than doubled CNN's audience in prime time and for the entire day. Even MSNBC, a onetime also-ran in the cable news wars, topped CNN in weekday prime-time ratings for the first time in the second quarter.

At issue is the metric that CNN is using in the advertisement to back its claim. The cable news channel is attributing its No. 1 status to a cumulative number that reflects anyone who watched CNN for six minutes in a given month, a tidbit it chose not to disclose in the ad.

Why not just say you are less fucking stupid than the competition, CNN?