It's hard to read the Observer's profile of Taylor Momsen without comparing the Gossip Girl star to Miley Cyrus. Both celebrities are 15, and both must strategically handle the news media's desire, however subtle, to examine them as sex objects. The game is especially tricky for Cyrus, whose audience is heavily pre-teen and whose show lives on the Disney Channel. She must disavow racy photo spreads in the traditional media even as her underwear cell-phone pictures leak online. Momsen has an advantage: Gossip Girl is about teen sex, and high school kids otherwise acting like adults. So the actress, who plays Jenny Humphrey on the show, doesn't have to feign outrage when the Observer talks about her "coltish beauty," or says "her legs are epic, long and stretching out from here to forever," or runs a picture selected, it would seem, to illustrate the latter. The adult positioning also draws to the child star a bankable, cultlike adult following, as illustrated in the profile:

Once upon a time, media bulletin board site Mediabistro had a talented, anonymous ad blogger called Agency Spy, who got good dirt and the occasional undeserved murder rap. The original Agency Spy left to start her own blog a couple months ago, but earlier today she put up a post saying the site was grinding to a temporary halt. Why? Because, Mediabistro multimillionaire founder Laurel Touby said, MB was enforcing a noncompete agreement against her! Seems pretty petty, Laurel, considering you're the second-richest internet media woman in New York now. The $23 million Mediabistro machine can't compete with one little alumnus? Tisk tisk. [Adscam, The Brief]

The Unabomber is upset that his old cabin is now a display in Washington's Newseum. We share his concern. [TSG]

A lonely van for the recently-defunct Playgirl magazine, in Williamsburg. Playgirl will live on in digital form, however, so the van can still be put to good use—in a number of ways!

The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!

The wee free newspapers of nutty Christian entrepreneur Philip Anschutz (the DC, Baltimore, and San Francisco Examiners) have announced an exciting new method of paying content-providers: based on the page views those content-providers accumulate! The Examiner umbrella brand has launched what looks like 1,000 new blogs based on every possible topic one could blog about (with plenty of overlap), written by, who knows, hobos and bored high school students, and all of them will be paid between $2.50 and $10 for every 1,000 views they attract to their pages. Do you want to be an Examiner? Here's how!

Vogue contributor and Bergdorf Blondes author Plum Sykes is co-writing a new TV show for NBC, Mogulettes. It's about twentysomething women who are already successful and jetting their way around the world. We would like to meet them! We can only hope watching it will be less painful than the reading of excruciating Bergdorf Blondes. [Observer via Variety]

First, it was revealed that the giant fireworks footprints in Beijing's Olympics Opening Ceremonies were digitally manipulated fakes. Fakes! Sickening! Then came a more shocking revelation: even China's adorable little girls are forgeries.

Tucker Max: blogger of beer and sluts, writer and producer of one of the least funny comedy movie scripts since Illegally Yours, and asshole in a dozen different ways. The most ridiculous of which is as the boss of his own mini-empire of blogs! And since last week, we've heard from several of his former Rudius Media employees, who expound on the gentle pleasures of working for one of America's foremost purveyors of racist poop jokes: He's a cheapskate. Last week we noted how Tucker scoffed at a former blogger who wondered why he only made $82 for six months of work. Other employees tell us the standard pay for Rudius bloggers is somewhere in the $80/ quarter range, with one noting "I got just a tiny bit more than that when my site was doing really well." Sweet. So Rudius must be making a lot of money. You work hard for the money. One Rudius employee was ordered by Tucker to move to a different, more expensive city because Tucker thought that they could better do their job elsewhere. Once the employee had gone to the trouble of packing up and moving and finding a new, more costly apartment, we hear, their pay was reduced to almost nothing. Which seems like the standard Rudius pay rate, now that we think of it. He's not popular with publishers. We hear that at least one book agent quit working with Tucker because he flaked out on book proposal deadlines. (Not true? Email us!) He's not popular with the bloggers that work for him at Rudius. The emails we've received from disgruntled bloggers alone are ample evidence of this. He attracts bloggers he's interested in with the promise of writing for a wider audience-though, as you can tell by their pay, not necessarily more money. But when bloggers tire of Rudius and leave the fold, we hear, they are bizarrely wiped from existence in Tucker Max's world:

Nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan has always wanted to be respected. His pictures helped create the reputations of niche characters ranging from hipster party gods the Misshapes to famed socialgay publicist Kristian Laliberte, and McMullan himself sees no reason he shouldn't share the spotlight. Unfortunately for him, he's fundamentally an inflated paparazzo, and not a wealthy one-a pretty significant stumbling block to becoming close friends with real celebrities. What to do, when publishing books has proved fruitless? Start a self-branded magazine, of course! (That comes on your iPhone, for some reason?) McMullan's new "magazine" will be strictly iPhone-only, I guess to keep it out of the hands of the wrong crowd. The "magazine" will be called PMc and feature his own photos, a double shot of self-promotion.

Life's social dynamic never really changes beyond high school. WIth the Olympics upon us, journalists are feasting on the fit bodies of athletes—so different than their (and our) own! There was the poetic ode to the wonders of swimmer Michael Phelps in the NYT's Play magazine, and now we have (presidential cousin) Billy Bush of Access Hollywood's breathless, "stream of consciousness" description of the "glutes" of the men's gymnastics team:

"Rush & Molloy" today ask: "What publisher and man-about-town may have had a liaison with Rielle Hunter, the woman who had an affair with John Edwards and a relationship with his pal Jay McInerney? He's told friends they were 'in bed for a week.'" That's a liaison? We call it a hangover (or a stay-cation!), but let's not split hairs. Who is it? Nick Denton? John Peter Zenger? Is Men's Health publisher Jack Essig a man-about-town? Actually how great would it be if it was Jared Kushner! In bed with a week with the acid-damaged Donna Rice. He's probably not her type, though. Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes would be a similarly amusing choice. Maybe it's Bob Guccione, Jr? After Ann Coulter and Candace Bushnell, we know he likes insane blondes. And they've got to make Rielle look low-maintenance, right? Wait, shit, it's Felix Dennis, isn't it?

NBC has billions riding on the Olympics, and no amount of whining from sports fans is going to make them screw it up. Many fans are-not outraged, but mildly peeved-that some premier events at the '04 games were shown on tape delay, after everybody had a chance to find out who won on the nifty internet. So NBC made the Olympic Committee schedule too-popular swimmer Michael Phelps' races when they could be shown during prime time. Oh, the things that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy. And, deep down, we all sympathize with NBC: destroy whatever is necessary to fulfill America's greedy need for live-action gold, we say!

Various people became quite alarmed when New York said the following at the end of a long article on Barack Obama's campaign and race: "In October, Obama's former pastor, [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama's blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate." Oh, EXCELLENT.

"Representatives of the Special Olympics, the National Down Syndrome Congress and the American Association of People With Disabilities are among those that said they would picket the movie, beginning with a screening Monday in Los Angeles." [Times, Previously]

The Times published two amazing corrections this morning, starting with one stating that the newspaper had erroneously called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "fighter pilot" on Sunday and in "numerous other Times articles the past dozen years." Wow, a correction that spans more than a decade! When McCain was famously shot down over Vietnam, he was flying his usual plane, a small jet aircraft known as the A-4 Skyhawk, which the Times now refers to as an "attack aircraft." That's a safe and widely-agreed upon label for the plane pilots dubbed "Scooter" (heh), but the newspaper needn't have apologized for calling it a "fighter." Many in the aviation community regard it as precisely that, starting with the military's most famous training program, Top Gun.

David Malone wasn't scared of climbing the 52-story Times building last month. "It was like climbing a ladder and I knew I could climb a ladder," the 29-year-old anti-Al Qaeda activist told the Daily News, referring to architect Renzo Piano's inviting ceramic rods. But, with a court date looming Tuesday, he does sound nervous about New York City prosecutors, calling the climb "the biggest mistake of my life... It caused a public disturbance and put police officers potentially at risk." One wonders if Malone realizes the other two climbers got off with basically parking tickets. And one would assume the Times isn't putting any new pressure on the court, given its own passion for breaking certain legal directives in the service of free expression. Malone even showed an almost Times-esque caution in his civil disobedience:

Roger Clark, the NY1 morning reporter who is perhaps the goofiest and most endearing working journalist in America, on some of his favorite recent stories here in our dark metropolis: "I did a story about a kids fishing derby in Prospect Park [Brooklyn], and I actually caught a fish, so that was exciting. A place I enjoyed when I was growing up was the New York Aquarium, and I got to go back and get kissed by a sea lion, which is something I don't get to do every day." Any promising news pitches lately, Roger? "I got one about an international yo-yo contest and that's a possibility, that's something that I may consider covering." Surely you will! After the jump is a must-see video of Roger inexplicably breaking into a James Earl Jones impression while covering a UN meeting. And yes, we fully expect this man to save journalism:

In a roundup of every current media-wonk topic — the Olympics, YouTube, TiVo, and the Philadelphia Inquirer's boneheaded move to keep its hottest stories offline — David Carr of the New York Times has deftly buried a hint to his employer's Web strategy: "The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off." Carr's not just speculating. He's alluding to a move already being made at the Times:

Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the John Edwards affair, detailing the circumstances behind the meeting of Edwards and Rielle Hunter in a Beverly Hills hotel that ended up getting the ex-VP candidate caught by the National Enquirer. The story includes various bits of background info on Bob McGovern, a new-age friend of Hunter who set up the meeting. Just about all of that background appears to have been taken from a post more than a week earlier on Deceiver.com-although the Times didn't credit them at all. That's stealing. Full comparison of the Times story and the blog info, below: Deceiver, July 31: