In your absurd Thursday media column: the oil spill drives reporters to attempt insane feats, Peter Shankman makes an insane pile of money, and a WaPo reporter's insane book party. Insanity!

Huzzah, it's time for another risible media query from Help a Reporter Out, where flacks and desperate journalists connect. Put on your thinking caps: Can you come up with a bright side to this oil spill? Anyone? [UPDATED below].

All you do is take some element of popular culture, like a popular television show, and then ask, provocatively: Is society itself changing in response to this pop culture thing? Today: Glee makes chorus groups "cool" again.

In your revenue-generating Tuesday media column: the BusinessWeek bidding draws to a close, Americans would pay only a pittance for newspaper websites, Peter Shankman's getting rich somehow, and the WaPo is determined not to write about dwarves.

Consider Peter Shankman: skydiving flack, taser lover, and the founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the free (!) service that connects reporters with a world of flacks dying to appear in their stories. HARO is a lot like Profnet, except Profnet costs flacks thousands of dollars a year. We wondered why Shankman went to all the trouble of running HARO, and now we know: $800,000 a year! Is this oversharing man the future of flackery? Adweek takes an in-depth look at the HARO phenomenon, and does a little calculating to figure out that Shankman makes more than $3K every day selling ads on his two daily HARO emails, that go out to more than 30,000 flacks and other wannabe media sources. For an hour and a half of work. Okay, that's kind of slick. But you know who thinks HARO sucks? The people at Profnet! HARO's deficiencies: