• Will Katie go to CBS? We continue to not really have any idea. [USAT]
• What did Bonnie Fuller learn from getting fired from Conde Nast? "Blatant disloyalty is never the smart course of action." Who knew? [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks — hopes! — that the celebrity moment might finally be over. [NYM]
• Elizabeth Spiers is starting a blog about Wall Street. Also, she used to work here. [IWantMedia]
• Esquire has a funny spoof in its new issue written by — who else? — a Foer brother, in this case champion memorizer Joshua. [WP]
• Simon Dumenco isn't sure newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took the Times until now to get rid of the printed stock tables. [Ad Age]
• Jim Surowiecki thinks newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took them until now to get rid of printed stock tables. [NYer]
• WWD media reporter Jeff Bercovici breakfasts on spelt toast with almond butter and a home-brewed cappuccino. [Jossip]
• Syd Schanberg quit his job as the Village Voice's Press Clips columnist just after the New Times deal closed, feeling that the company was no longer interested in media criticism. Friday he won an award for his Voice media criticism. [VV]

Speaking of rumors that turn out to be true — and speaking of simply asking for y'all to confirm shit for us — here's an interesting one that just arrived in the inbox:

Us Weekly has been furiously a-bloggin' since the Oscars, but their readers have yet to fully grasp the brave new format. In an item about George Clooney and Arianna Huffington's throwdown, the commenters respond with their thoughts on the matter:

Third Reichers — they're just like Us!

Thanks to yesterday's record-setting tech woes, we never had the chance to tell you how we really feel:

A few months ago Britney Spears announced she was suing Us Weekly for libel over the magazine's report that this refined lady and her debonair husband had made a sex tape and then screened it with their attorney. Not true!, insisted the Spearserlines, and now we've gotten our grubby mitts on the latest legal document protesting their innocence, filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Like manna from heaven, the image at right appeared in our mailbox this morning (click to enlarge). It appears to be a misplaced receipt for a $400 order of flowers sent to AMI editorial director Bonnie Fuller from her loving husband, Michael.

Yesterday's Life & Style has a great speculative scoop: Could hottie stoner Matthew McConaughey be married? Perhaps to his girlfriend, Penelope Cruz? The mag has a photo of him wearing what seems to be a wedding band on his left ring finger, so it would seem he's done the deed, right? Well, actually, no: As the backwards Nike swoosh on his shorts indicates, the photo is flipped and the ring is on his far less interesting right hand. Which the folks at L&S's Bauer stablemate, In Touch Weekly, were able to figure out.

• Wireless-entertainment provider Kargo Global sues Cargo magazine for copyright infringement. Also, one imagines, for poor newsstand. [Mediaweek]
• Freelancers often go without health insurance. Who knew? [MetroNY]
• Are Americans getting growing tired of celeb news? God we hope not. [Economist]
• Time Inc. EIC John Huey — who ousted Jim Seymore to install Rick Tetzeli as Entertainment Weekly's editor a few years ago, is now jumping back in to shuffle Tetzeli's top editorial ranks after a crappy 2005. [NYP (second item)]

We mentioned earlier today that Bauer Publishing's Life & Style is insisting upon its TomKat-breakup scoop even while the rest of the celeb-weekly establishment begs insists the mag wrong. Now a charmingly catty contact at a rival pub points out that even Bauer's other celebrity title, In Touch Weekly doesn't buy it:

To recap: Late in the day last Tuesday, Life & Style announced the imminent breakup of TomKat. Later that afternoon, Star rushed out a report calling bullshit on Life & Style. The next morning — a week ago today — Us Weekly further dismissed Life & Style's breakup claim by not even deigning to address it. It seemed almost like an alliance between Star and Us Weekly against Life & Style. Until Star put out a story later last Wednesday directly contradicting Us Weekly. And there, eyeball to eyeball and with fingers on triggers, it seemed d tente was reached; there's been no inter-weekly skirmishing since, and peace has reigned in celebmagland.

• Remember how Ad Age told us last week that when the biannual circ numbers came out they'd show the celeb weeklies way up and O, The Oprah Magazine way down? Well, they came out, and they did. [NYT]
• Designer working on WSJ overhaul is urging the paper to consider more fashion and celeb coverage. Dow Jones execs can't wait to catch the celeb-mags circ mojo — and we can't wait for the stipple portrait of Jessica Simpson. [St. Pete Times]
• Nick Kristof raises $727K to send Bill O'Reilly to Darfur. It's amazing how much money you can raise when people will never actually have to fork it over. [E&P]

Click to enlarge.

• It was an emotional week for all of us: Life & Style declared the death of TomKat. As we try to wrap our heads around the implications of such heartbreak, it's important to keep some historical perspective.
• Meanwhile, we were faced with Us Weekly's gut-wrenching claim that Jessica Simpson is a ho, having cheated on Nick Lachey with Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine. Star calls bullshit on the scoop, because it's only true if your magazine breaks it first.
• The evils of pop culture know no limit: Meet the sex tape from Kid Rock and Scott Stapp.
• Budget Living is going, going, and, sadly, gone.
• But, as there's no justice in this world, Shop, Etc. continues to thrive.
• We fall in love with faggy Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, only to have him break our hearts.
• Time Inc. finally ends the bloodshed, but we've yet to get the names of layoff victims.
• The people have spoken: the Funny Pages are not funny, nor have they ever been.
• First JT Leroy; now, possibly, Pete Doherty. Are all our antiheroes just a skeezy mirage?

The celeb weeklies have clearly gotten bored with trying to scoop one another. This week they've also started calling each other liars. Yesterday afternoon Life & Style broke news that TomKat is splitting up; later yesterday afternoon Star insisted they're not. This morning Us Weekly trumpeted a report that Jessica Simpson was fucking Adam Levine even while she was still married to Nick Lachey; this afternoon, once again, Star calls bullshit:

Life & Style rocked our world today — rocked all our worlds — with some of the most shocking celeb news since the last time a sham Hollywood couple split up: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, the mag says, are splitting up. While we're all processing this information, it seems a good time to take a look back at some of Life & Style's recent greatest hits.

The latest news from celeb-mag-land is that Tamara Glenny, the former high-ranking YM editor who joined Bauer's Life & Style Weekly over the summer as executive editor, has just been canned from Bauer's Life & Style Weekly as executive editor. A spy on the Englewood Cliffs beat gives some inside color:

You might recall that Ad Age's Media Guy, Simon Dumenco, had his Calvin Kleins in a twist Monday about a speech — or, as he'd probably prefer, an abomination of a speech — Bonnie Fuller recently delivered to Columbia Journalism School students last month. Fretted Simon, with his own extensive capitalization:

Tomorrow's a "big" "dramatic" day in the celebrity weekly wars, as the Post unveils its new 74-page glossy, Page Six: The Magazine. It's OK, go ahead and take a moment to change your underwear.

We often tell people that bloggers aren't the crazy, braying, entirely unprincipled people the old-media graybeards like to say we are. Sure, we process information faster, and we're more willing to publish things we're not sure are true so long as we say we're not sure they're true, we always say, but really we work symbiotically with old media, and we're still good people.