Greedy professional athletes these days are making it harder and harder for their layabout friends to sponge money off them and land them in jail. TREND ALERT. It seems that athletic superstars and journeymen alike are getting their entourages more organized, incorporating them into real businesses and paying their hangers-on set salaries rather than just giving them unchecked credit cards and free cars [WSJ]. And then there's the NFL cornerback who pays his helpers on a per-task basis, like when "he gave one of his freelancers $5 to fetch him a Snickers bar." So it's still an evolving sphere of economics. One of the players cited is Mike Bibby, a slightly above-average NBA point guard who has organized his friends into "Team Dime" (he's #10!). That's nice and everything, but probably not worth the permanent tattoos, which send the lifelong message: "I was a member of an entourage for a slightly above-average NBA player":

MTV, having covered every other aspect of the high school experience including the marching band, has finally made a reality series about a high school newspaper [NYO]. That hotbed of intrigue and sexual tension! As once-professional journalists as well as high school graduates, we have some bad news: the high school paper is simply not that exciting. Neither is the grown-up paper, for that matter. Newspapers are a prime example of things that produce a somewhat glamorous final product, but whose inner workings are drearily workmanlike. It's like visiting the Nike factory and being disappointed that it's populated by silent, sweating Vietnamese peasants, rather than by Lebron James. MTV's trailer for "The Paper" features kissing teens, violent arguments, pool parties, and a battle for editorship of the Cypress Bay High School student paper that "could change their lives(!)." Asdfjklasdfjkl. Sorry kids, nobody has time to read your resume anways! After the jump, the full trailer. The over-under on the number of these students who actually go into journalism: one. Probably the young Laurel Touby doppelganger

Kevin Delaney, the Wall Street Journal's Google and Yahoo beat reporter, is decamping from the Valley to New York to take a deputy editor gig at WSJ.com, we hear. A perk of the job: Getting to disclose Google's business relationships with Journal parent company News Corp. in every story.

Who's had it better after the breakup? If you can't tell from the photo, our stalker and a delivery guy can explain it to you, after the jump.

Soon-to-be JPMorgan Chase subsidiary Bear Stearns will lay off 7,000 workers. The worst of it, reports Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, is that today's tough job market on the Street makes it a particularly bad time to get laid off. Fortunately, Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget also reports, Silicon Alley Insider is hiring! Where Blodget learned to describe the job market in such a self-beneficial way, nobody knows."We won't drown you in cash the way Bear would have," former financial analyst Henry Blodget writes, "but we need those same same analytical, writing, and competing skills."

Frustrated Googlers have at least one new hire at Facebook worried.

Want to work for Peter Thiel, the Facebook board member, hot-shot venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager? Thiel's personal assistant at Clarium Capital, Robertson George Morrow III — call him Trey — is sending around an email looking for the "right kind of conservative" to give away Thiel's money from his New York offices. Thiel's targeting four areas:

Owen Van Natta reluctantly left Amazon.com to become Facebook's COO in 2005. What he really wanted was a CEO gig. And so after three years and a demotion, Van Natta left Facebook yesterday in order to become CEO somewhere, anywhere. Well, Mr. Van Natta, boy are you going to owe us. Here's a note we received from a Valleywag reader that's going to make your day.

Having unloaded itself of 1,000-some employees, Yahoo is now hiring almost half that number back. Yahoo's careers site has 459 open positions. So much for cost-saving layoffs.

A job listing sent recently to an email list: "A vegetarian-owned and managed emerging sports games startup in San Francisco is looking to hire vegetarian software development interns for summer 2008." An odd qualification, but apparently legal. A recent court case in California found that employers can discriminate against vegetarians. That would imply that a startup could equally choose not to hire omnivorous sorts. One would think that the pool of candidates who simultaneously favor sports videogames and eschew meat products would be a bit shallow. The full job listing:

To find Yahoos ready to bolt, recruiters are taking a wide stance. Cake Financial, a startup, occupies the same building in SoMa as Yahoo's San Francisco incubator, Brickhouse. Employees at Cake plastered Yahoo's entrance and building restrooms with fliers, snaps of which we received from a tipster in the building. Wired confirms that, unlike electronic attempts to hunt down restless Yahoos with targeted ads, the restroom campaign has borne fruit in the form of actual résumés. The flier:

In a blog posting about how he was the most popular user of Twitter, serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis says "if there was one other company I could be the CEO of (after Mahalo) it would be Twitter I think." Jason, come up with a way for Twitter to make money and I bet you could be CEO! Incidentally, Calacanis has been supplanted by Robert Scoble as the most followed Twitterer. How embarrassing.

Gangs are using social networking sites to recruit new members. I wonder if gang recruiters have tried Facebook's new ad platform. It's supposed to be great for that sort of targeted advertising. [CBS 5]

Jason Rapp, one of Barry Diller's endless ranks of M&A execs, has lost his job. Or misplaced it, at the very least. A company press release says he'll get "management responsibilities in new growth areas" — but doesn't name them.

In November, First Round Capital VC and blogger Josh Kopelman bought a pair of ads on Facebook targeted to the Yahoo and Microsoft networks, asking "Leaving Yahoo?" and "Leaving Microsoft?" Clickthrough rates were low. Only 0.3 percent clicked on the Yahoo ads, and the Microsoft ads drew no clicks at all. But after Microsoft's recent $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo, the companies' employees seem more eager to leave. Now, 0.86 percent of Facebook users who saw the Yahoo version of the ad clicked, and 1.19 percent of Microsoft employees targeted clicked on their ad.

Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman needs a Ruby developer. If you already have a job, Forman writes on his blog, "You should quit." One small hitch? The job's in New York ... sorta.

Laid off? Here's the good news. You have plenty of time to read Robert Scoble's 1,416-word post on what to do. But if your just looking for your morning hit of schadenfreude, well, then you'll need our 100-word version.

Remember Charlie Ayers, Google's first executive chef, who retired in 2005 after making millions of dollars on the Google IPO? All those cooks who passed on that job now have a second chance, according to Inside Facebook. After years of catering takeout lunches, the social network is hiring its own chef. With Facebook poaching so many Google employees who are used to chef-cooked meals, it's no surprise that they'd hire someone who knows how to poach eggs. But check out this curious line in the job description: "Be accountable for the financial aspects of the F&B department ensuring a profitable operation." Is penny-pinching CFO Gideon Yu insisting that employees pay for their meals? The full job description:

The party line on LinkedIn's competition with Facebook is that the two sites serve different markets, and LinkedIn has nothing to worry about from the rise of Facebook's popularity among Silicon Valley professionals. LinkedIn's professional focus makes it a favorite of recruiters. Except, that is, for LinkedIn's recruiters, who have been placing job ads, like the one above, for engineers on Facebook. LinkedIn's HR department, meet LinkedIn's PR department. You might want to have some words with each other.

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project has seemingly listed a job opening for a business-plan writer. It's a bit suspect: The position is listed in Mountain View, but the $100-laptop nonprofit is based in Cambridge, Mass. Even if it's just a clever joke, it does raise a question: Has anyone ever written a real business plan for this venture? From the results, it wouldn't seem so.