Daily Candy, the email newsletter for women who like to buy things, was improbably successful. Former journalist Dany Levy founded it in 2000; it quickly became profitable, and she sold a controlling stake in the business to the private investment firm Pilot Group in 2003 for $3.5 million. Pilot Group sold the newsletter to Comcast last week for (an unbelievable) $125 million. But Levy, we hear, retained about a 20% interest in Daily Candy-which would mean that she walked away from the sale with $25 million. That would make her the undisputed internet cash queen of New York media. Take that, Laurel Touby!

As you may have heard, a faux-grizzled Mississippi boy named Brett Favre has brought his quarterbacking services to the New York Jets, the sad and mopey second-tier football team in a second-tier football town. This is quite big news, since Favre is a revered football icon, an unpredictable head case, and could easily win a Super Bowl or have one of the worst seasons in professional football history. Favre's arrival has created a frenzy amongst the bloodthirsty NYC sports media. Which has itself created a separate frenzy of analysis about why this particular segment of the media is such a schizophrenic mob. All of which has circled back into a scrum of grown men fighting over this simple question: Is New York City the pinnacle of sports media; or the most hellacious sports reporting town in America? New York City boasts a tabloid-led sports media machine that is unrivaled anywhere in America. But to outside observers, this can seem like the worst possible setup. Here's what Gregg Doyle, a columnist for CBS Sportsline, had to say on Howard Kurtz's CNN show yesterday:

Let's just put it out there: copy editors are vaguely creepy. There they sit in their corner, poring over pages while all the reporters and (other) editors are doing the real, sexy work of journalism. What makes someone want to be a copy editor in the first place? Could it be... sexual perversion? (Kidding of course! We love copy editors, platonically). Charles Cretella, a veteran New York Times copy editor, is now going to court over a sexual harassment case that centers on-you guessed it-a fellow copy editor, who was masturbating at work. Goodness. The strange details: Cretella says the Times didn't give him a promotion because he was falsely charged with sexually harassing a new 33-year-old copy editor that Cretella was training. Very enthusiastically:

Ha ha ha so it turns out that everyone in the world knew that Rielle Hunter had a (shall we say!) inappropriate relationship with John Edwards back in 2006 (when they were fucking). As we've learned, Rielle is a starry-eyed new age nutcase with a bizarre and tawdry history. So some reporters thought it was maybe odd that this weird hippie chick was apparently hanging out with the Edwards campaign and openly flirting with the candidate. After the jump, journalists on what they knewl about Hunter back in the day.

Speaking of cratering ad sales in print media: Your favorite fashion magazine's historically huge September issue is going to be a bit lighter this year. Which god knows is a good thing for our nation's lower backs. Not so good, though, for the equally hardworking slaves to fashion that toil in the caves of Conde Nast and Hearst. W magazine lost 18% of its ads this September! (What, not enough girl-on-girl covers?) And almost all of their brethren are suffering, too. Is it finally a backlash against ostentatious luxury in lean times? Not at all, actually. It's not the luxury companies that are cutting back on their ads, you see; Oscar de la Renta, for example, increased his ad spending 15% to bring you news of his new $5,000 handbags. Rather, it's "midtier marketers" like bebe and Nordstrom's that are responsible for the decline. So while fashion magazines are totems for a certain segment of the overclass, their suffering is not a sign of fewer rich people. Rather, it's yet another indicator of the decline of the aspirational middle class. As goes W magazine, so goes the American dream.

Be this guy he knew who got a newspaper column because he was a really funny bartender. Oh, and also be talented? [BigThink]

There's no question the auto industry-particularly the US auto industry-is currently in the toilet. There's also no question that bad times for the auto industry lead to cuts in car companies' advertising budgets, which hurts the print and broadcast media outlets that reap billions from automakers every year. That's not news to anybody. What is news is the revelation that prospects for the print media have grown so dim that they are now celebrating the fact of declining auto ads, as proof that they're at the mercy of temporary business cycles beyond their control. Wow, that's sad: Newspapers nationwide lost more than $130 million last year in auto ad sales. Car ads have gone from 10% of national newspaper ads, to less that 3% in just three years. That's terrible by any standards. Magazines are experiencing a similar decline. So how to put this disaster in a good light?

"We proved that celebrity-magazine readers were not obese women who spent all day watching TV and smoking cigarettes." [Post]

Perhaps you recall that time Today show host Kathie Lee Gifford interrupted "Sam the Cooking Guy" one too many times, prompting the chef to ask, "Can't I talk?" The Times today notes that Gifford has become a "lightning rod for ridicule" in the wake of the video and asks if the incident is part of a broader trend — the trend of Kathie Lee Gifford being THE DEVIL. "Every time that fourth hour comes on, I can literally feel my body temperature rising," a Las Vegas schoolteacher told the paper. "The way she always talks over poor Hoda [Kotb] and the guests and is just constantly talking about herself." Also, there's an "I Hate Kathy [sic] Lee Gifford," Facebook group with all of four members. But NBC likes her because at least people are talking. Lesson: In television, memorable is better than tactful. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the formulation the chef used when he told off Gifford. Click the video icon to watch the incident. [Times]

"Mr. Stelter's wonderful article on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience." [Times]

Traditional media acted with predictable arrogance for ten months in ignoring tabloid and blog stories about John Edwards' philandering. Also utterly predictable: The self-flagellation now occurring on how the story was missed and what it means for the future of newspapers. Yes, if there's one story the public eats up more than a sex scandal complete with love child, it's yet another navel-gaze at media ethics and economics! Reporters for the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all shared their thoughts on the matter. But the fact that they waited, or had to wait, so long to do so hints that their bosses are missing the point.

Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner just confirmed to the Times that he's shrinking the once-groundbreaking magazine to a distinctly ordinary format. And already, in that same story, the magazine mogul has allowed himself to sound insecure about the change. "I myself was kind of torn about it," Wenner said. He's right to be worried. Rolling Stone's large format stirred a certain nostalgia. And not just among readers, as the Times noted, but also among a more important group: The celebrities who still trip over themselves to appear on the magazine's iconic cover, despite the fairly humdrum content within. That magnetic draw will surely be diminished now that the publication looks so thoroughly contemporary, and 1967 so very far in the past. After the jump, Wenner pulls off a similarly-self-defeating trick in a year-old Charlie Rose interview by saying the key difference between rollingstone.com and Facebook is that the latter is "kind of a teen thing."

Every hero needs a helper, and every bad guy needs a heavy. It's a long and storied tradition. Usually, they either get killed or they save the day. But these second bananas are essential to hundreds of movies and TV shows. And they deserve some respect! So please share your fave clips of these unsung wonders with us all. As always, I'll get us started with something obvious.

Tropic Thunder, the hilarious-looking movie-in-a-movie that has so far failed to score a boycott for featuring Robert Downey Jr. in blackface or Tom Cruise as reportedly the most offensive Jewish stereotype since... Well, I don't find those very offensive, so don't ask me. Anywho, Ben Stiller's character is an actor who failed to get an Oscar nod for portraying a "retard" in the film "Simple Jack". And that's what's getting the pic boy-the-fuck-cotted. "'Not only might it happen, it will happen,' Timothy P. Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, said of the expected push for a boycott." Because it's fine for actors to cynically go bobbing for Academy apples every year by playing a special character, but it's not okay for a comic actor to make fun of them for doing so.

Hackers brought down the website for Russia's state-sponsored news agency, RIA Novosti, for several hours today with a series of cyber attacks. This in the wake of three days of fighting between Russia and Georgia. "'The DNS-servers and the site itself have been coming under severe attack,' said Maxim Kuznetsov, head of the RIA Novosti IT department." It's hard to imagine why in the world anyone would want to cripple good ol' RIA Novosti's news-spreading capabilities. Oh, in unrelated news, here is the rest of the Kremlin-backed article.

Some weekend. Isaak Hayes died today at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 65. His wife found him unconscious next to his treadmill, which was still running. Paramedics could not revive him and he was pronounced dead shortly after 2:00 p.m., according to the Shelby County Sheriff's Department. Among the highlights of his career, Hayes won an Oscar for his extraordinary theme to 1971's Shaft. And won over a whole new generation of fans with his role as the beloved Chef on South Park. Cause of death has not been reported yet, but foul play is not suspected. I'll update as details come in. [CNN]

It's an age-old question that will probably never be answered: Does Billy Joel suck, or does he actually rule? Impossible to say, really. But, whatever your stance, do not pal around with The Piano Man and pretend you're best buds when actually you're a nasty music critic who's going to go back to his office and trash the guy's work. Because Billy is not having it! "I had no idea when you interviewed me that you considered much of my later work to be `sentimental rubbish', or that you thought songs like 'Uptown Girl' and 'We Didn't Start the Fire' were `abominations'. And your back-slapping, buddy-buddy style of conversation betrayed no indication that you actually compared talking with me to `sleeping with an inflatable girlfriend'," Joel wrote to New Zealand Sunday Times-Star scribe Grant Smithies the other day.

Orthodox Jews-previously thought unknown above 42nd Street in Manhattan-are massing on the Upper West Side, reports The New York Times. And they've come to breed! But despite their somber suits, long skirts and aversion to motor-power on the Sabbath, these young singles are as a hip and unbearable as any Yuppie on that overpriced island. "Although dating is a major preoccupation of the vast number of single twenty- and thirtysomethings, it's hard to think of a group that so completely chooses to live in a neighborhood based on dating opportunities as the city's young Orthodox Jews. And the Upper West Side, an increasingly Orthodox enclave, has over the past four decades emerged as courting central for modern Orthodox singles from across the country and around the world."

This is what happens when you let the Canadians have technology more advanced than wood-burning stoves and beaver traps. A series of massive explosions rocked Toronto last night when the Sunrise Propane Depot went up in flames, sending fireballs and smoke soaring as high as 60 stories. There's a bunch of coverage on Rain Coaster's page. And a nifty video of the fiery hell after the jump. Update: "Police report at least two injuries involving people hit by broken glass and fiery debris that shot into the air after the initial blast, just before 4 a.m. ET. One man lost his balance and fell while running from the scene, where a huge fireball lit up the sky. Tony Testa said he suffered burns to his back from falling debris." [CBC]

Really, what is a movie or a TV show without a bad guy or bad girl to hate and admire at the same time? Not much, says I. So, let's share our most beloved baddies this evening, shall we? You know, all those great characters that you just want to see die in pain and ill-repute, but you still have to admire them in some awful way. I'll get us started with a true total bastard.