Starting tomorrow, if you visit BBC.com instead of BBC.co.uk, you will find a new website with "U.S.-focused articles on politics and general news," helmed by 10 journalists in DC. First they ruin our ocean, now they compete with our newspapers.

Today in our occasional series of Reporters Gamely Trying to Do Other Things and Failing Miserably, For Journalism: Ad Age's Larry Dobrow tried out for a TV pitchman job. Good enthusiasm! Just makes you miss Billy Mays that much more.

In your frigid Thursday media column: Editorial turnover at Ad Age, Mediaite invites people more famous and attractive than you to their soiree, journalists prepare to forage, and Sarah Palin's only a few steps from the 99-cent store.

The Atlantic's James Bennet is Ad Age's "Editor of the Year." A good pick—The Atlantic is as robust and thoughtful online as it is in print. Although "You (Unpaid)" would have been the zeitgeisty choice. [Ad Age. Pic: Flickr]

The I Can Haz Cheezburger guy, Ben Huh, got an AdAge profile. They've got 21 full-time employees, 30 blogs, and 11.5M visitors a month. They were profitable in their first quarter "almost entirely via ad networks and Google AdSense." [AdAge]

In your unforgettable Friday media column: Creativity magazine folds, a high school paper bravely outs its school's Jesus-tainted food supply, medical journals are full of ghostwriters, and the WaPo's most infamous marketer resigns.

Paul Tilley, the ad exec who killed himself because blogs were mean to him (or something), continues to inspire the most self-righteous and least self-aware of scribes to put quill to parchment, adjust their oft-dropped monocles, and write, more in sadness than in anger ("I think I'm more saddened than pissed off"), strongly worded letters to whom it may concern regarding those mean, mean bloggers. Today, Bob Garfield, who blogs at Ad Age, helpfully explains "the difference between commentary and vandalism." "Commentary" is when smart, mustachioed professionals who've written books and things blog. "Vandalism" is when people are mean to those people, on the internet. [AdAge, UnRelated]

Richard Rapaport is VERY concerned about the rise of "snide advertising." It's eating a hole in our national soul! The ennui, the decline of sophistication, the "nanny-nanny boo-boo that passes for wit these days." Some might say that advertising never had a golden age of wit and sophistication, but Rapaport argues in a long Ad Age piece that the current trend is one that historians will look back on with disdain. Is our entire society becoming less civil, right down to the way we sell things to each other? It's an important issue. Below, Gawker chief Nick Denton's analysis of this controversial topic:

No environmental program has ever in the history of ever been more brutally-named than "ReMix," the city's new "Recycling Magazines Is Excellent!" campaign. The plan aims to draw attention to the wasteful practices of the glossies industry, which, AdAge tells us, often prints copies of issues which nobody reads. Stunning. There are some decent ideas in the green scheme (recycled paper is good! Extraneous direct mail is bad!) but it's hard not to walk away with the idea that the only way for a magazine to be ecologically sustainable is to uh, well, flop. So much better for Mother Earth! After the jump, a gallery of magazines so environmentally cutting-edge that they've been dead for years.

AdAge features and blogs editor Ken Wheaton, is easy on the eyes and perhaps a tad overexcited about the possibility of the New Republic hitting the skids. It seems that in the wake of the "Baghdad Diarist" scandal, Wheaton reported today, "Military bloggers and bloggers from the right are calling for a boycott of marketers who advertise in The New Republic. Of course, the news here is that The New Republic still had advertisers!" Aww, mean. So far, these "military bloggers and bloggers from the right" are actually Pajamas Media blogger, Bob Owens, who's campaigning over at Confederate Yankee against TNR advertisers and industry titans like Microsoft, Freddie Mac, GM, HBO and Warner Brothers. We tease, but Owens has the attention of Weekly Standard writer Michael Goldfarb, who was among the first to be suspicious of the 'Diarist' column, is sending traffic Owens' way. Stay tuned.

New York mag editor Adam Moss is the Lord God King Of All Magazines, says the American Magazine Conference. Or at least he is the "Ad Age editor of the year." (And at a time when the editing is getting significantly less skillful at his magazine—though the packaging is increasingly stupendously good!) Also Conde Nast was named the "publishing company of the year." Those crazy young upstarts! [NYP]

We didn't know that the guys over at Ad Age were all kind of hot! Features editor Ken Wheaton and editor Jonah Bloom get down and dirty in this video, trying to rip up an "unrippable" ad page in Maxim. We might have to go on a site visit. [Ad Age]

Writing in AdAge, former News scold Lenore Skenazy (the low-carb version of Andrea Peyser) takes on torture porn—"that new category where the star gets raped and disemboweled." Leaving aside the fact that Skenazy has clearly never heard of genre classics like, say, Titus Andronicus, the soi-disant "resident school marm" poses the following question about the "slippery slope" we've come to accept in violent entertainment:

AdAge has a super-servicey piece today about how to tell if you should find another job. The piece offers five indicators that may mean it's time to move on. I've been feeling a little bit of workplace dissatisfaction lately, but assumed it was just weather-related. I decided to do a little self-assessment based on the AdAge metrics. The results were disturbing.

Irish singer Bono's (Red) campaign—you know, the thing besides guest-editing July's Vanity Fair that Bono's doing to help bring awareness to the plight of African AIDS victims—got slammed yesterday in AdAge. The mag got all bitchy on the discrepancy between the estimated $100 million for marketing and the campaign's $18 million gleanings. (Red) didn't like that so much!

• Maer Roshan, the "battle-scarred veteran" of the "buzz-intensive media hothouses" that are New York and L.A. is back, and this time "the buzz seems to be moving back in his favor." That picture can't hurt. [WSJ]
  

• Keith Kelly gets the "exclusive": Time Warner is selling its Time 4 Media properties to the Bonnier Group for a sum considerably less than the $300 million they wanted. Tough break for AdAge, which had the story yesterday but pulled it. [NYP]
  

We're almost certain that no one's as sick to death as we are of the tired old 'Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko = inferior cunnilingus' joke (with the exception, perhaps, of "Adorable" Dave himself). So we were flooded with a mix of emotions when we learned that he'd once again provided us with a perfect setup. In an AdAge piece on how he and Cosmo E in C Kate White will edit sections of each others' respective mags' May issues, Dave describes the switcheroo like so:

• Federal government trying to make Times op-ed page less boring. [NYT]
  

• Ad Age's Media Mavens: A remarkably diverse group. [copyranter]