"Fashion Rocks" is Conde Nast's big advertorial extravaganza pegged to Fashion Week, when the magazine company can sell extra ad space to all its fashion advertisers in a fluffy, profile-heavy special supplements. But we hear that the staff of the Conde-owned WWD is currently embroiled in a mini-revolt, after they were ordered to write the copy for the 48-page Fashion Rocks supplement that went out with yesterday's issue. There's no reason an editorial staff should ever be made to write advertorial copy. The most egregious line-crossing of all: a full-page interview in the supplement with Richard Beckman, Conde Nast's own head of marketing. Beckman, of course, would be the mastermind of the entire Fashion Rocks campaign, so what the hell is a fluff interview of him doing in a WWD-penned special supplement, posing as legit editorial copy? Staffers there are asking themselves the same thing. They feel that Mary Berner, who formerly led Fairchild and WWD before it was all absorbed into Conde Nast, would never have stood for such a thing. On MediaPost yesterday, Ari Rosenberg decried the whole ongoing degeneration of the advertising/ editorial line. "Today's media-buying demand for a 'big idea' required to earn a media commitment, combined with a softer and more competitive environment, all driven by a sales force that has no idea who Henry Luce is, have publishers doing things not done before," he wrote. Which leads to this:

We just received a sternly-worded missive from the Orange Center Elementary School in Fresno, asking us to cancel their subscription to US Weekly. Presumably this is part of the wave of cancellations related to their totally controversial Sarah Palin coverage. This raises so many questions: what exactly is an elementary school doing with a subscription to US Weekly? And why did they e-mail us to cancel it?From: Wayne Werning [redacted] Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:03 PM Subject: subscription To: ——@gawker.com Hello, Please advise how our school can cancel its subscription to US MAGAZINE so that we do not receive any more copies. Your publication has become offensive. Thanking you in advance, Orange Center Elementary School 3530 S. Cherry Ave. Fresno, Ca 93706

The US Weekly reporter who wrote this week's cover story about Sarah Palin's "Babies, Lies & Scandal" tells the HuffPo she's voting for McCain. (She also got a crapload of angry messages on her answering machine!) Thankfully, she had the HuffPo to journal her side of the story. [Time blog]

Matt Drudge's sources tell the staff of Oprah are bitterly divided over Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate: some thinking the daytime talk show host owes Barack Obama her continued loyalty; others wanting to respond to the flurry of requests on Oprah's website for an appearance by the twangy-voiced moose-hunting Republican vice-presidential nominee. And here's why they'll book her: Sarah Palin sells.

Maybe it should have been obvious that the celebrity weeklies were going to politicize as soon as Hillary Clinton and her supporters showed strong resistance, during the primary season, to acquiescing to Barack Obama, thus highlighting the importance of women voters in 2008. But the heightened political importance of the magazines, whose readers are overwhelmingly female, wasn't in anyone's face until this week, when Us Weekly made waves with its controversial "Babies, Lies & Scandal" Sarah Palin cover. The issue, unflattering to Palin, has so far resulted in 5,000-10,000 cancelled subscriptions, MSNBC.com's gossip column is reporting. (Though MSNBC's Courtney Hazlett is close to Us Weekly's rivals; and-see below-the magazine's Janice Min says the losses are overstated.)

Time Out New York president Alison Tocci just sent out a memo to the magazine's staff addressing the "anonymous, typo-riddled post on Gossip, I mean, Gawker.com, which alludes to our imminent demise." She confirms TONY's money troubles, which were the subject of our rumormonger post yesterday, but says that the magazine's trusty investors are ponying up cash to ensure that everyone is paid! Within three months. The full zing-y memo:

Where does the Wall Street Journal's Tina Gaudoin find the time for her hectic trans-Atlantic lifestyle? She'll tell you, in book form! Gaudoin, the yoga mogul who edits the business paper's new glossy weekend magazine, somehow found time to write an autobiographical book about "the ins and outs of the most glamorous and bitchy of industries" (magazines!). After the jump, the semi-grammatical Amazon summary of Gaudoin's Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines (Paperback) [sic]:

So the rumor—which is still, we should note, just a rumor—is that listings-and-more magazine Time Out New York is in financial trouble. Tipsters say the money trouble is a result of bad investment decisions by management. But TONY has even bigger problems: its entire business model is built on quicksand.
TONY is light on content and heavy on listings. That's probably not going to change significantly. So consider what they're up against:

Assuming that people are actually interested in how a story is formed and goes to press, Wired magazine is continuing how-to series with a blog about how a Wired article gets written. The article in question is about Being John Malkovich/Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, so it's "meta." Wondered some editors, "What if we posted the edit—hell, the rough draft. What if we posted the pitch letter? What if we posted the emails about the pitch letter?" Haha, what if you exposed the sad quotidian details of our everyday work lives?

Us Weekly's (amusingly) gratuitously aggressive coverage of Sarah Palin has triggered a full-blown culture war! We have some of the vicious hate mail to prove it. (From "Juno.com" email addresses, to lend the whole saga a somewhat literary flourish!) That lady Ted Kennedy killed is invoked. So is some language too hot for Peggy Noonan! Some notable specimens and a message for Janice Min after the jump.

Rob Shuter may be single most well-qualified man for his job in all the celebrity media. His job, of course, is editor of photo-happy, celebrity-friendly, "What interview questions would you like to answer, Britney?" pseudo-magazine OK! But set aside your revulsion at the existence of this pair of celebrity culture warriors, and you come to realize that we can all learn something from the way the man does business. His reputation is (grudgingly) improving along with his personal appearance (pic: old on left, new on right). Shuter told CoverAwards that his magazine is "celebrity-fair." Classic, classic. Break it down: Shuter was a celebrity flack before he came to OK. So when he got the job, some of the esteemed journalists at the magazine were angry at this publicist interloping on their territory. But really, a PR guy is much better suited to the job than someone with a history on the editorial side. The editor of OK essentially works to broker deals with celebrities and their managers and publicists. That was Shuter's gig before, on the other side of things, so he knows just how to make this work. His competitors, who came up as reporters and editors, will never have that experience. He could be functionally illiterate. No problem! Celeb magazines are driven by photos—exclusive photos. Who fucking cares what OK's brain damaged stories say? People want to look at pretty photos of famous people that they can't get anywhere else, and that's what they get from Shuter. Plus, appearance on shows like ET and Access Hollywood usually materialize only after the exclusive magazine deal has been closed, meaning that celebrities have to deal with one of the mags no matter what. And since OK is the friendliest and one of the most financially generous, bingo. Rob Shuter is a shameless man in a shameless job. Many lesser people would be embarrassed to be him. But Shuter can say with a straight face that he's "proud of the product" and dismiss competitors as "haters" and be totally genuine. He's worth every penny. "Celebrity-fair" is the new "right-sizing."

Today, a blog post on Glamour's Smitten talked about how it feels when an ex of yours gets married. Which makes it the second essay writer Joanna Goddard has written about Page Six Mag's Joshua Stein. Add this to the New York Times Magazine article by former Gawker Emily Gould that mentioned her relationship with Stein, which followed his own Page Six Magazine essay about the dangers of blogger love, and you have... well, you have an entertaining media clusterfuck. Why does it seem like he's the most written-about ex in New York? Hey, that's just what happens when writers date. Now that everyone's a writer—armed with their blogs and Tumblogs and lifestreams and the like—the scribes among us should just stop dating each other now. Think of it this way:Post-breakup, a writer's first instinct it to write or blog it out. This is their nature. It's totally fine if kept confined to a Word doc or a friends-only LiveJournal blog or whatever. But still, you must work, work—as Chekhov said. Maybe you're freelancing, and you're miserable, and all you can think about is this fucking ex of yours who keeps popping up in the damndest of places—whether it's their byline in a magazine or at the corner deli or at a media party. And hey, why not mine your life for stories? That's what your writing teacher at that night class at the New School told you! You might even earn some sweet freelance cash from a personal essay—or if you're really good, a Modern Love in the Sunday Times, which is the pinnacle of the breakup essay. You can then use the $500 to buy an awesome dress, which is sort of like an investment in a future relationship. (It's easier to catch flies at media parties with honey!) And so you write. Whether what you write is good or bad, the fact is that it's published, and it's out there. The written-about ex might form a rebuttal. They might not. They might get a six-figure book deal which allows them to feature you in any damned essay they want, like Ms. Gould! That essay might get leaked and it might contain certain bits about your sex life or your musculature. Of course, there have been other, more luminary, writer couplings. Sartre and de Beauvoir, Plath and Hughes, the Bloomsbury Group. Do not pay attention to them. They had no high-speed Internet. And so the vicious cycle continues. But enough about work. You doing anything Saturday night?

Hey, Yves Saint Laurent designer Stefano Pilati started a magazine! It's called Manifesto. Hey guy, "Manifesto," really? I mean, didn't Vivienne Westwood take that name already? Anyhow, the story is that PIlati started giving out the magazine in canvas logo tote bags — "as a gesture" — he says, but no one gave a shit about the magazines, all anyone wanted was the fucking logo bags, and now he is "going to have to" start producing the logo bags for stores. Which, when you remember the whole point of Manifesto in the first place was to better display YSL clothes because all anyone cares about these days seems to be the logoed accessories is so poignantly circular…so "Gift of the Magi" you know? But let's be honest Stef: no one ever really looks at the magazines they get in goody bags at parties. This does not mean print is dead.It just means print gets kind of gross after it gets a few complimentary Chambord-sponsored cocktails on it. There are very few magazines I take home from such parties and actually read. Chiefly because I am drunk. But I have, later on, gone back and purchased magazines I got for free at parties. That's just the way it goes. They're on newsstands everywhere. Maybe I would change this policy if you every magazine were $7 on newsstands like Harper's. But I'm with Esquire editor in chief David Granger here, print is not dead, it is just not something tipsy Fashion Week goers who probably already work at magazines and thus get them all for free anyway are going to appreciate when they are busy heaving into the Bryant Park portapotties. [NYT]

At what point does empathy for elfin British pop singer Lily Allen begin to dry up? So far this year she's had a miscarriage, broke up with her lover and lost a contract to Agent Provocateur. Last night she got drunk at the GQ Men Of The Year awards, drunkenly told off her co-host Elton John, got in a big fight with her future sister in law and infuriated police by revealing details of a secret kidnapping. Fun to watch (click the video icon to do so), but telling Elton John "fuck off... I'm 40 years younger than you and have my whole life ahead of me: probably does not enhance Allen's chances of retaining her BBC Three show, which she still has not yet lost. Unfortunately, if Allen is on the typical cycle of starlet drunkenness, she has further to fall before the rehab and bounceback. [Daily Mail, Dan News]

Uh oh! Looks like it's time for another blind-item guessing game. Glamour's "Smitten" blog has a new "series of real women’s stories about their awkward sexual experiences." Um, sounds like a great book proposal for a new anthology! (Note to self: has this been done yet? Call agent.) Today, we learn about a "horribly awkward sexual experience" from a "hilarious 29-year-old editor in New York." So, uh, what happened? And more importantly, who is it?

Is fashion too gay? I know, I know, that is like asking, "do Americans love Jesus too much?" Like, maybe they do, but in general neither side is attempting to carbomb the other into submission and that is why Toqueville loved it here! But speaking of French transplants: many in the publishing world believe that Elle, America's second-biggest (and first-best) fashion magazine, has gotten "too gay" under great helmsman Joe Zee, who succeeded longtime "director" Gilles Bensimon, a lecherous Euro modelizer (who once was married to 'Elle' Macpherson!). Gilles was pushed out of the magazine in a protracted power struggle with Editor-in-chief Robbie Myers* that famously culminated in the firing of style director (and least gay person on Project Runway) Nina Garcia, and in came Joe at the beginning of last year. Gilles, who basically defined the magazine's look after 22 years in the job, liked to celebrate the "Essence of Woman"; Joe, a refugee from the male shopping rag Vitals, is more of an "Essence of Faghag" type. Opening arguments after the jump!Here, boiled down, are the arguments pro and con, which I gleaned in the process of chronicling the Anne Slowey-Nina Garcia Project Runway Stylista saga a couple weeks ago. As a non-consumer of fashion, I don't have a very strong personal opinion on the matter, but I bet I know someone who does! (Ha ha ha, well, my boss duh.) JOE ZEE'S ELLE = TOO GAY. Joe Zee is too gay. He is so gay he immediately brought in his gay boyfriend to work as the web editor. He thinks everyone should dress like Mary-Kate Olsen and he only likes gay celebrities like Mariah and Lindsay, except he is probably over Linds now that she is actually really gay. Everyone who loves him and thinks he is so nice is just fooled by the fact that he is a gay man and everyone knows gay men act nicer than straight men but deep down they are STILL MEN. Also he has ADD and is a self-promoter. When Gilles and Nina and their crew were running things, the magazine was classier and not so trendy and the halls were filled with the sounds of cool accents screaming at one another. Now everyone screams in American. Gilles' style was more timeless and feminine and less consumerporny and that's how it differentiated itself from Vogue. And seriously, why do you think Gilles is Tyra's favorite photographer? JOE ZEE'S ELLE = JUST GAY ENOUGH Whatevs! You are in America now, and in America people who like fashion (Marc! Tom! Christian Siriano!) are GAY. Like is it just through some bizarre series of unrelated circumstances that Elle resurrected its whole business thanks to its appearance on the gayest show on the gay network? And where do you expect all those mediagays to work, anyway? Men's magazines???? Hahahahahahahaha sorry, but the Fashion Week galas are just slightly better in women's! Oh, and Joe's boyfriend can actually code HTML, which is just a little more than slightly more qualified than we might say for that ex-wife Gilles made "editor in chief" of Elle Accessories! In any case, the rising generation of fashion consumers is a bunch of Fashion Spot-posting Project Runway marathoning MK-idolizing Santogold-muxtaping Andy Sachs wannabes with just the sort of warped priorities that sell fashion magazines, and you know what? When that generation invariably arrives in New York to waste its twenties buying boots and learning the hard way that there is no such thing as a free bump, it is going to need some real friends and guess what THOSE FRIENDS ARE ALL GAY. Okay everybody, recess! We'll follow up with some exhibits from both sides once we're reunited with our scanners.

Nude supermodel photo scandal lawsuit alert! An anonymous model has filed suit in Miami against Egotastic.com and Splash photo agency for taking pictures of her sunbathing in her birthday suit (NAKED) in her own backyard—"as is often done by professional models to avoid tan lines." Invasion of privacy and emotional distress! But who is this mysterious, super-beautiful plaintiff? She helpfully includes several clues [UPDATE: the case may already be cracked!]:

Media types hung out at the defunct, apocalyptic bar Siberia because its Hell's Kitchen location was close to their offices—and also because it allowed them their "celebration of self-loathing." Now where will owner Tracy Westmoreland re-open? Maybe Crown Heights, he tells the Observer. “Let’s say it’s a voodoo bar. … I’ll have guys coming in saying, ‘Hey man, I’ve got this shrunken head.’” [Observer]

Last year, Time Out New York had aspirations of building up its online event listings into a sort of Craigslist of North American listings. The magazine invested in its website in pursuit of this, but the project never completely panned out. But according to some tipsters, that might just be the start of TONY's problems. Could the stalwart around-town manual be in (*dramatic pause*) life-threatening financial trouble? The rumor's not a complete surprise—we were reporting last year that some freelancers were having trouble getting paid by TONY. Our tipsters, though, say that's just a symptom of more serious money problems for publisher Allison Tocci and company:

Kent Brownridge, former deputy to magazine mogul Jann Wenner and recent overlord to Maxim and Blender, is now general manager of the U.S. edition of free-spending celebrity weekly OK!. It seems that between billionaire owner Richard Desmond supplying famous-baby-photo cash and editors Sarah Ivens and the creepy Rob Shuter keeping sources fluffed, OK! needed someone to, like, sell some ads or something. Brownridge apparently didn't compile a stellar track record doing that for Maxim and company, which earlier this month squeezed him from his job, but as Shuter knows, OK! is fast becoming a miraculous land of second media-industry chances. [Post]