What journalistic stratagems are employed when New York Times reporters go searching for the perfect source to illustrate their trend stories? The stratagem of "email everybody you know." What did you think it would be? Here, you can see Julie Scelfo's story shaping up in advance:

Hackers have broken into Salma Hayek's email, revealing the actress's iPhone-app obsession, designer-clothes habit, travel plans, and more. (Her billionaire husband, François-Henri Pinault, who's throwing a second wedding for her this weekend, pays the bill!)

Is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hunting leakers? His internal memo about CFO Gideon Yu's departure got forwarded to bloggers. Perhaps he was hoping that would happen, and not just so his spin would get out.

That poor dumb kid who "hacked" Sarah Palin's email by guessing her "security question" answers? Yes, well, he has three new federal charges:

Hey, the racist email mayor resigned! Though he still won't admit to, you know, racism. AND: there is news on Ol' B-Face!

Seriously, how can you be such a stupid racist?

A tipster tells us that Rachel Syme, culture editor at Tina Brown's Daily Beast, has sent the "world's worst email" in an attempt to get free research for an article she's writing. Let's read it!

Don't even bother to leave a comment at the Times local news blog suggesting a sexy patrician affair between the Senator-to-be and the publisher of the Times.

Over at The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson is positive that now that Patrick Fitzgerald has arrested Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich and is looking at Tony Rezko, "Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is just about on the verge on losing his near mythic status among the Washington-New York media." The fact that this hasn't happened yet, and that there is no evidence that this will happen, and the fact that a large number of the "Washington-New York media" (as opposed to liberal bloggers) were outraged at Fitz for trying to get journalists to reveal their sources in the Plamegate case? None of that changes the fact that the elite liberal media will refuse to report on ths thing they're already going nuts over. (Attached: another classic example of the preemptive bias complaint, from your day editor's inbox. It arrived shortly after the second of today's predicted 500 Blago posts ran. Keep 'em coming, America!) [The Corner]

[Update: The purported Pattinson pen-pal, Ben Coles, called us to deny that he was speaking with the Twilight star. Read more from Coles here.] Swirling around the release of Twilight, the terrible but terribly successful vampire romance movie, were rumors of a hookup between stars Kristen Stewart and heartthrob Robert Pattinson. This sounded like so much publicity fodder for the film's teenage target demos. This might be more of the same: A tipster forwarded the following screenshots, purportedly of a Pattinson Facebook account under the alias of Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Larry Mendte was the first male host of Access Hollywood before becoming a news anchor in Philadelphia, where he worked with Alycia Lane, a fellow anchor who punched an undercover cop and sent bikini photos of herself to the wife of a sports TV personality, all of which somehow made Mendte jealous, causing him to hack into Lane's email and forward the most salacious bits to gossip journalists, which ended up getting her fired, though his activities eventually came out and got him fired, and then got him sued by her as well as charged in a criminal case. Got that? Well now Mendte has been sentenced: He got six months of house arrest and three years of probation. At his sentencing he apologized, and said this:

Boy, there are some real wackos out there, right? And this election, whoo, it really brings out the worst in the crazies. Stuffed monkeys with Obama stickers, shouts of "kill him," insane email forwards, there are countless examples from this miserable election of outright racism. But those are just fringe losers—bunch of racist nobodies, right? That's why it's fun that this week's three worst examples of outright bullshit hate-mongering all come from professional, official Republican party staffers!

An Alaska Superior Court judge sided yesterday with that Republican activist who sued Sarah Palin to force her to produce emails from private accounts like Yahoo, which she may have been using to conduct government business. Ooopsie! "Palin has occasionally used private e-mail accounts to conduct state business, and her Yahoo accounts were hacked last month. The hacking of Palin's private account was significant because it showed that using private e-mail accounts to conduct state business would be vulnerable to being exposed." "The judge ordered the attorney general to contact Yahoo and other private carriers to preserve any e-mails sent and received on those accounts. If the e-mails were destroyed when the accounts were deactivated, he directed state officials to have the companies attempt to resurrect the e-mails." Actual maverick Andree McLeod, who brought the suit against Palin, said, "We shouldn't be in a position where public records have been lost because the governor didn't do what every other state employee knows to do, which is to use an official, secure state e-mail account to conduct state business." [HuffPo] Yesterday was just not good for Palin, as it was also the day that an investigation by the Alaskan legislature concluded that she did in fact abuse her powers as Governor in the Troopergate scandal.

Hip Hop Weekly is an execrable, half-assed attempt at a hip hop version of Us Weekly. HHW was founded a couple of years ago by Dave Mays and Benzino, the guys who ran The Source into the ground through sheer selfishness before being forced out. Suffice it to say there's no reason to have a sympathetic view of the magazine's existence. Which makes this epic email fuckup on their part—reprinted below!—that much more enjoyable: HHW, we hear, has trouble paying its vendors, writers, and photographers. Or just doesn't want to. Either way, lots of people who have done work for the magazine are pissed at it. So it was pretty dumb for HHW to (mistakenly?) blast out an invitation to its 50th issue release party to a long list of contributors who hadn't been paid yet. Cue the responses!

When Gawker published a selection of emails from Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo! account, we got tons of psychotic (and anti-Semitic!) hate mail full of "Don't drop the soap in prison" jokes; Bill O'Reilly said we should go to jail forever; and cesspool blogger Michelle Malkin called Gawker "a cesspool blog." But now the real villain in all this being asked to answer for her villainy. An Alaskan activist—a Republican activist—is taking Sarah Palin to court to find out why she was using personal email accounts to conduct government business in the first place.

It's a fact of life on the internet that when you are mentioned (and linked to) unfavorably by certain high traffic right-wing bloggers, you promptly start receiving some of the most remarkable hate mail you've ever seen. It begins immediately, peaks overnight, and continues usually for about 72 hours or so. Then everyone forgets about it or gets bored and only a few wackos send you the odd death threat for another week or two. (That cycle of mass hatred is not exclusive to pissing off the far-right—obsessive fans of certain celebrities act in much the same fashion!—but Malkin-readers are the form's purest expression.) For your edification, we've run some numbers on keywords used in the hate mail sent to us after we reprinted some of Sarah Palin's emails, an act of malicious terrorism that got us called all sorts of names by Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilley, and presumably many more. Why is this relevant now? Hah, two of our favorite conservative bloggers just got caught up in the same shitstorm of right-wing bile. Gentlemen, meet Kathryn Lean Lopez, editor of National Review Online! She is the mother of all Kool-Aid drinkers, according to Andrew Sullivan. She writes for The Corner, NRO's neat little group blog that really exists inside its own bubble of political fantasy and theological debate and name-calling and reality-denying. But K-Lo wrote a crazy column about how "the McCain campaign should stop trying to ruin their good thing — a vice-presidential candidate who was a breath of fresh air not only in the campaign but in American politics and culture — by over-preparing her and tossing her into hostile media interviews." Which led to this!

As someone who's designed and deployed plenty of email marketing campaigns, I have to feel for the poor sods who sent this electronic come-on to Washington Mutual customers today, as news broke that the Seattle-based bank's failure is the largest in our nation's history.Washington Mutual had $309.7 billion in assets, most of which are being taken over by JPMorgan Chase. The email carried an appeal for customers to save money — just the kind of capital that the company so desperately needed to stave off federal seizure and a firesale. Too little, too late after all those other email offers for credit cards and low, low introductory mortgage rates.

Sometimes I hear people ask: "Who uses Yahoo Mail anymore?" The answer, of course, is just about everybody. ComScore puts the number at around 260 million people — far more than Google's 90 million. But statistics can feel abstract. Now that a 4chan reprobate has hacked into Alaska governor and "average hockey mom" Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account and discovered, among other things, her contact list, we have a more concrete demonstration of Yahoo's dominance of Palin's decidedly down-home demographic. Here is a list contains six Yahoo addresses, an AOL address, a Hotmail address and exactly zero Gmail addresses.Sarah Palin's contact list: Beth Leschper (Beth Leschper SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov Blanche Kallstrom (Blanche) [Edit] [redacted]@starband.net Bristol Palin (Bristol) [Edit] [redacted]@hotmail.com Chuck Heath (Chuck) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com [redacted]@yahoo.com (Todd) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Frank) [Edit] Heather Bruce (Heather) [Edit] [redacted]@gci.net [redacted]@alaska.gov (Ivy SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Ivy Personal) [Edit] Judy Patrick (Judy Patrick) [Edit] [redacted]@mtaonline.net [redacted]@alaska.gov (Kris Perry SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Kris Personal) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Molly) [Edit] Roseanne Hughes (Roseanne Hughes SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov Sally Heath (Mom) [Edit] [redacted]@mtaonline.net Sean Parnell (Sean Personal) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.com Sharon Leighow (Sharon SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov [redacted]@aol.com (Sharon Leighow Personal) [Edit] Track Palin (Track) [Edit] [redacted]@hotmail.com

Here is one of the many charming emails your editors have received since we reposted some emails that were hacked and originally posted by Anonymous earlier today, and then called a phone number. Now the "bloggers post their hate mail so you can point and laugh" routine is dead tired, but this one invokes your day editor's mom! "You obviously are too immature to realize that this is a pregnant woman you are bothering. Ask your mom if she approves." We went to your day editor's mom for comment.

Did the internet just cause Sarah Palin to destroy evidence? The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation. Now comes word that Anonymous, the fun-loving Internet trouble-makers based loosely around the message board 4Chan, gained access to another Palin email account: gov.palin@yahoo.com. It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin's email? Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.) The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing: