Today, New York Times staffers staged the golf clap of protests when about 300 staffers essentially took a smoke break at the same time. Now This News reports the walk out lasted about 10 minutes, which is understandable because oh my god why is it so cold in New York today?

If you're at the Wall Street Journal, get ready for layoffs. Er... that is, get ready for newsroom integration.

Is this the least interesting AP story of 2012? Christ, let's hope so.

Imagine what it must be like to be the editor of globalism's Rain Man, Thomas Friedman. Your job, ostensibly, is to hammer this man's prose into some semblance of logical readability, and yet he has built a fabulously lucrative career on his total lack of logic, readability, or, really, variety of any kind. Clearly, his editors have now made the only sensible choice: "Eh, just put that shit right in the paper exactly how he typed it on his Blackberry." (*Big shot of heroin*)

So, Fox News has, excruciatingly, just broadcast live video of a man committing suicide after a car chase. Fox anchor Shep Smith said afterwards that the network was on a five-second delay, but that the video got through regardless. A network technician being too slow on the button is not the real issue here. The real issue is that car chases aren't worthy of live television (and this might be the thing that brings them to an end).

After 10 years, Playboy redesigned their cover to look like Esquire did five years ago. Happy 2007, Hef, Inc.

Village Voice Media, owner of the Voice and a dozen other alt-weeklies across the country, has decided to try a nifty trick: it's cleaving itself in two. Executives from the company are "buying out" all of the papers, putting them into what is technically a new, standalone company. And VVM's main profit center, hooker ad site Backpage.com, is going to be left in its own separate company, controlled by VVM bosses Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey. This is a weird gambit.

The Sun Runner is "The Magazine of the Real California Desert." Published in 29 Palms, California, not in one of those cheap imitation deserts. Here's the cover of their August/ September issue, "Celebrating Robin Maxwell's Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan."

USA Today publishes a Michael Wolff column about Tina Brown. Jurassic Park is real.

We just came from the DNC's daily "blogger briefing," not to be confused with the Real Press briefing. There were 20 or so bloggers, various Democratic media reps and invited speakers.

The Democratic convention, like the Republican convention, and every political convention, is a television event. That is, it is designed and intended expressly to satisfy the audience watching at home, on the screen. The media, gathered here on-site, does not so much "cover" a convention as news as we hold it up, turn it over in our hands, and remark on its qualities, like a bunch of Home Shopping Network hosts talking up a new snow globe.

Michelle Obama stutters. She does not have a stutter. She stutters on purpose. "I-I-I, I've seen it in our men and women in uniform." "Fr-from the young person with so much promise." "And-and, even as a kid..."

Goodbye, Tampa. I'm leaving you. When I think back on our time together, I will always remember the immortal words of ODB:

REPORTING LIVE FROM THE TAMPA CONVENTION CENTER'S RADIO ROW—Just moments ago, the political world's axis tilted directly towards the second floor of the Tampa Convention Center, near the back doors, where onetime pizza restaurateur Herman Cain delivered a scorching call for truth to the assembled voracious media scrum.

The Republican Convention isn't all "inside baseball" and "delegates" and "wandering around inside prison-style fencing in search of meaning." It's also about venturing out to see "the real Tampa." Sometimes, you have to get out of your chair, go "outside the wire," and take in a screening of a haranguing right wing documentary with an unmistakably karmic ending.

Pretty much any asshole can get some kind of credential to get into a political convention; a look at the press room can tell you that. It's a low bar. Which is not to say that the RNC organizers are fools.

Celebration time: Day-Two-Which-Is-Actually-Day-One of the Republican Convention is now, as we speak (type), UNDERWAY in Tampa, a hot parking lot located in a swing state. We can assure you that our investigations have revealed that absolutely no one, including those in official capacities, know where the fuck they are supposed to go right now. Here are a few of the most crucial "insider" factoids that you will need to know about this vital U.S. political institution going forward:

All of the news on CNN this morning was about Hurricane Isaac. On NBC, too. And Fox News, for the most part. Yes, the storm has already screwed the Republican convention in so very many ways. But here today, in (sunny!) Tampa, as journalists stream into our media holding pen like so many wayward Katrina refugees, comes the final indignity: this pseudoevent threatens to be completely upstaged by a real event.

The second floor of the Tampa Convention Center is home to the Republican Convention's "Radio Row," the very EPICENTER of America's news and talk radio industry for the next four days. And just as exciting as it sounds. Who is on radio row? Let's see.

The public relations industry could fairly be described as a machine that functions on broken dreams. The only question is whether your dreams will be broken now, or later. If that dream is about meeting Oprah, the answer is: now. This is PR Dummies. Oprah will not be coming.