Before disliked Charlie St. Cloud author Ben Sherwood became the new head of ABC News, he was executive producer of Good Morning America. Resentment of Sherwood still lingers from those days: people are forwarding us his email fuckups from 2004.

If you wrote a piece for the Huffington Post entitled Do You Really Need an Editor at a Publishing House?, you'd make a strong case, right? The answer, as evidenced by Knopf editor Carole Baron, is a resounding absolutely.

Out of all the celebrities to resemble, North Korean loonmonster Kim Jong Il would not be the first choice of most guys (it would be this guy). But one dude does resemble him, and fooled the world media. Accidentally.

Sheila Nevins, HBO documentary films president and overall entertainment industry big shot, was very mad she couldn't watch Obama's inauguration live from her first class airplane seat. But were the cops and lawyers necessary?

OMG: Celebuzz exclusively reports that faux lesbian Katy Perry has broken up with her faux lesbian-loving boyfriend, Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes. Celebuzz also exclusively reports that Travis took to his blog with these heartfelt words of pain about the breakup:

The media screwed up many, many times in 2008. As in other years! The ten finest episodes, listed for you below. Merry Christmas, from the media:

Everybody in the media fucks up once in a while. Sometimes the fallout is bad. Remember when Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs' obituary while he was still alive? Then shortly afterward they mistakenly ran an old headline about United's bankruptcy as if it was current, and temporarily destroyed the company's stock price? Both are very bad errors, but at least Bloomberg apologized for them. Which is more than you can say for Dow Jones, which handily fails to mention its own mistake that crushed GE's stock price yesterday: With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

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!

Oh dear, it seems that the corporate leadership of a media agency has royally fucked up. Carat decided it had to lay off some workers. So the honchos carefully prepared secret internal talking points and strategy memos laying out exactly how they would break the news to the staff and clients, and deal with the media fallout. Then they accidentally emailed all that shit to their entire agency. Ha. Ha. Ha. The highlights are just so delicious: Lesson 1: Layoffs provide innovation, somehow. Message to clients:

Anonymous sources can usually put some faith in the journalistic principle, that the anonymity of a source is a sacred thing, to be protected even at the risk of jail. But they should have less faith in a reporter's competence. Last week, a New York Times reporter withheld the name of a critic of the Chinese government but gave him away accidentally by mentioning the restaurant he owned. And there's an equally moronic slip in this week's cover story on plastic surgery in New York magazine.