♦ Not only is Rachel Maddow more popular than Keith Olbermann, she's now ahead of CNN's Larry King, too. [HuffPo]
♦ Sunday night's Emmy Awards generated the lowest ratings in history. [THR]
♦ MTV missed out on its chance to buy MySpace, but they have no plans to give up on their sixth-tier social network, Flux. [AdAge]
♦ Life magazine is back. For the third time. Time Inc. and Getty Images will use life.com to offer up "free, downloadable photos from world-renowned photographers." [NYP]
♦ Jeffrey Toobin, who says he "owes his TV career to [O.J.] Simpson," has no interest in covering him again, thank you very much. [TV Newser]
♦ Starbucks and ad agency Wieden & Kennedy are parting ways. [AdAge]
♦ Kanye West is teaming up with Comedy Central on a new series described as "hip-hop meets the Muppets." [THR]
♦ The Times recaps the service held on Monday night in memory of Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine who died on July 1. [NYT]

You're invited, space permitting, to a memorial service this evening for the beloved New York magazine founding editor Clay Felker. It's at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and starts at six. Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem and Lesley Stahl will pay tribute to the man who taught a city to talk about itself at a celebration organized by New York and Gail Sheehy, the writer and widow of the late editor. Felker's legacy, which Wolfe in July described as nothing less than the restoration of vitality to a bloodless, disconnected New York media, is also honored less directly today in New York's excellent issue on the Great Shakeout.

Writes author Tom Wolfe on New York magazine's late founder, Clay Felker: "One afternoon I came by to see Clay at his Xanadu on 57th Street and found him sitting at a desk going through a date book to put together some income-tax data. 'Look at this,' he told me, riffling through the date book, 'I only ate dinner at home eight times last year!' I don't think I can adequately convey the pride he took in this discovery. He had developed night vision for detecting new styles of life." [NY Mag]

Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career.

The Observer has a good deal of coverage on the life and times of Clay Felker today, including remembrances from Milton Glaser, Gloria Steinem, Gay Talese, Andrew Tobias, Steve Brill, Binky Urban, Ken Auletta, Peter Kaplan, and Tom Wolfe, who says "Clay was the greatest idea man of any editor I've ever known." [Observer]

• Tom Wolfe Remembers Clay Felker[New York Magazine]

Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, died today at the age of 80 after an extended illness. The Missouri native got his start in journalism as a magazine writer for titles like LIFE, Time, and Esquire, but he will go down in history as the man who codified a method for chronicling the elite of New York, while providing a platform for the city's best writers. He's responsible for creating the only real glossy city magazine that is also a good magazine on its own merits—unapologetically elitist, but not blinkered. And slick enough to justify it all.

• Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York, has died at 80. [NYM]

• Post headline promises way more than it delivers. [NYP]
•Film editor Dennis Lim is the latest casualty at the Village Voice. At this rate David Blum is going to run out of former students to fill all the open slots. [Anthony Kaufman]
•Fortune claims that female media CEOs are losing influence in relation to other lady businessmen. We don't know. Time Chair Ann Moore laid off about a million people this year, you don't get more influential than that. [WWD]
•New York magazine creator Clay Felker is in a nursing home. There will be no joke. [Forbes]