In your competitive Tuesday media column: the fashion mag ad race is heated, GQ manages to sell electric doo-dads to people somehow, Michael Wolff's beef parade marches on, and the NYT rocked by "getting a good political story" scandal.

  • Fashion magazine ad pages are mostly up in the first half of this year, with the notable exceptions of Glamour, W, and Town & Country. And InStyle has surpassed Vogue as the ad page leader, which may say something bad about America's quality fashion sense.
  • GQ sold only 365 $2.99 iPad apps of its Men of the Year issue. Which sounds bad at first, but come on: how man men, human beings, are going to go buy some iPad, then, when they get it home, they're gonna be like hey, you know what I could really use is the GQ Men of the Year issue, and then they go Googling and searching and shit and find an "app" for it, and then they pay up for it, to read this random thing on their "iPad?" 365 is pretty many.
  • Yesterday, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter started an email war with Michael Wolff. Today, of course, Michael Wolff has written a column about how "Jonathan Alter really may be responsible for the death of journalism." Then somebody criticizes that column, so then Michael Wolff can write a column about them next. Seriously, what else does he have to do? He can do this all year. This is what he does!
  • The NYT nailed Connecticut attorney general Dick Blumenthal for lying about his Vietnam service. Immediately after the story came out, Blumenthal's Republican opponent in the Senate race took credit for feeding the story to the paper. The NYT's response was that "[A]nyone reading it can tell that it was the product of extensive independent reporting - including our FOIA of his military records." But its response should have been, "Yea, so? That's how most stories happen. People feed them to reporters, for one reason or another. That's called a 'tip.' Then we report it out. Duh."