Monocle, the worldly Tyler Brule-helmed lifestyle magazine for young, stylish, business-oriented jetsetters who receive free subscriptions, is sending out the following note to editors: "Monocle magazine offers a briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design. It is not a lifestyle magazine." Hmm. Monocle has formerly been described on Gawker as a "travel-culture magazine" and a repository of "lifestyle sensuality and gaywad uptightness." Close enough. [NYO]

It seemed strange that the Wall Street Journal-so concerned about beating the competition in hard news-would choose for a Page One story today a piece on business people who do yoga. Really, WSJ? It's a pretty standard, low-hanging "take a trend, and add business angle" story that might have more rightly been in the back pages. But their work had this added benefit: a WSJ editor owns her own yoga studio, and one of her employees gives great on-the-money quotes: Tina Gaudoin was brought over to the WSJ from the UK early this year to edit the paper's upcoming "lifestyle magazine." She's also the owner of Triyoga, a chain of yoga studios in the UK. And she used to tout that fact over and over again in her column! Which tends to go over less well in the US than in the UK. Still, it was so hard for the WSJ to find a good yoga-as-business quote that they ended up using this one, from Claire Missingham (pictured):

If you only read the Washington Post for one thing, read it for its offbeat profiles of weird people in the Style section. Screw politics! Today they profile an author named Max Holland, who's spent the last 12 years—12 years!—working on a book about the Kennedy assassination. His big revelation in that decade-plus of research? That maybe there was a gunshot before the Zapruder film started filming. But, a shot that missed! So who cares, right? Are Kennedy assassination people the most serious-minded crazies in America? Very possibly:

Dustin Diamond, who played the lovable Screech on the most baffling teen show of all time, Saved By the Bell, is writing a tell-all book about his thirteen years on the show. (He's already parlayed his C-list fame into a C-list sex tape.) He'll detail the sex and drugs that went on behind the scenes with castmates—noted thespians such as Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkeley, and Tiffani Amber-Thiessen. It will be called Behind the Bell. It will have a ghostwriter. [via Vulture] To refresh your memory, one of Screech's greatest soliloquies after the jump.

Andrea Peyser, the Post's fire-breathing outrage columnist and dedicated cock-looker, spends her entire column today saying, essentially, "I don't even care about your stupid party." It seems Peyser went to attend a press conference for "YouTube divorce troll Tricia Walsh-Smith," and they wouldn't let her in! What's the reason for this lack of graciousness? Peyser thinks it's because she wants to fuck Walsh-Smith's elderly, gray "smoking hot" husband:

Look! Those Gossip Girl ads the whole world is talking about (or at least the part of the world that lives in New York and probably "curates" a "linklog" or something) made the front page of am New York, a free tabloid daily owned by Tribune Co. You know what's funny? Gossip Girl airs on the CW, the network most people still mistake for the one that failed after canceling Homeboys in Outer Space. Also the CW has something called a "ten-year affiliation agreement" with—wait for it!—Tribune Co! Which also owns the CW affiliate WPIX, right here in (am) New York. SYNERGY. [Maura] (Related: watch Mad Men! It's a show about men in suits who smoke or something.)

As soon as you see an op-ed which begins, "As the owner of one of the 25th largest public relations agencies in the U.S.," you should immediately guess that it's an opus by none other than language-challenged sock puppeteer and unapologetically incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian, head of 5WPR. "Let's begin with the basics: Bribery is unacceptable, yet for a democracy or civilized government, it is wholly abhorrent," writes Ronn. Please explain, sir!

Max Mosley, the British auto racing boss who found himself in a scandal over his Nazi-or-maybe-prison-themed sex orgy video and embarrassed the world's luxury auto makers, has won his privacy lawsuit against the UK paper that published the photos, thereby killing the UK's gossip industry. Slate will find a way to make the whole thing boring. Jalopnik has the tape. Here's how Mosley won:

It looks like American Media didn't cut its $2.4-million-per-year editorial chief Bonnie Fuller fast enough: the tabloid publisher is reportedly nearly broke, desperately trying to raise money before a bunch of junk bonds come due in February. Granted, those bonds are worth $415 million, so Fuller's salary is only a sliver of the problem, but had Fuller delivered on hopes she could improve Star and National Enquirer enough to beat back competitors like Us Weekly and People perhaps the situation might not be so bleak. The company's worth has fallen by half in seven months, and its private equity owners will likely give up equity to keep it going. Perhaps some sort of juicy scandal will come along to breathe some life into the firm! [Post]

"Analysts say that 2008 is shaping up as the worst year for the newspaper business since the Depression, and the second quarter is clearly worse than the first." [Times]

If you want an efficient, capsule summary of why you haven't read anything in newspapers or seen anything on major network news about how John Edwards ran from National Enquirer reporters in a hotel parking garage, about how he hid in a bathroom for 15 minutes, and about how he was holed up overnight with his alleged mistress and love child — an awesome, amazing story — parse these three revealing sentences from Washington Post "gossip" columnist Roxanne Roberts, in response to one of many persistent questions about the scandal in an online chat yesterday:

There's something about organizing social events over the internet that encourages people — everyone, really — to try a little too hard to impress. This is why Evite pages are filled not only with RSVPs but also with in-jokes, double entendres and various other self-conscious displays of wit. And why so many emailed party invitations take three long paragraphs to get to the point! To make sure you never waste another minute being cute like that in a damned internet invite, have a look at this phenomenon in extreme form: Emails in which n+1 staffers, along with other highfalutin types (from the New Yorker, Council On Foreign Relations, Paris Review and so forth), are told "hey let's meet at the bar" in the insanely obtuse manner they surely prefer. Harper's editor Christian Lorentzen is apparently the one who writes these things, but Jess Roy could no doubt use the emails to spin yet another indictment of the greatest literary cabal of our era, etc. — without even leaving the house! We've reprinted a couple, via Daily Intelligencer, after the jump.

We heard last week that Daily Candy, the email newsletter for lady shopaholics, was about to be sold. Now digital PR man Adam Isserlis is floating the name of the rumored acquirer: Comcast, one of the two consumer-unfriendliest companies in America! The rumored price is $75 million, a bit below the $100 million+ controlling shareholder and former AOL second-in-command Bob Pittman has been seeking since 2006. But that's still not bad for an email list. The question is: Why Comcast? What the hell is a cable company doing buying a content play? Shouldn't the very presence of Bob Pittman, spectre of the darkest days of the failed AOL-Time Warner merger, remind Comcast of how ill-advised this sort of vertical empire building can be? Meh, Comast is on a roll and doesn't want to hear it.

Female->male transsexual Thomas Beatie is featured in People magazine today with his new daughter Susan Juliette, born June 29 in Bend, Oregon without a c-section (which would make it a "natural birth," haters!). GaySocialites.com said the child will live a "confusing life" because of the father's love for the spotlight, adding that admirers of the pioneering birth should bear in mind that "you don't go on the cover of People magazine for free honey!" Actually, that's very true!

Minneapolis Star and Tribune "gossip" columnist (there is no gossip in Minneapolis) C.J. has a kind of hilarious "item" about how Times media columnist and addiction memoirist David Carr is now feuding with Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz. How does she manage this? She quotes a Kurtz column in which Kurtz sums up Carr's assesment of himself as a lousy junkie, then calls Carr to ask if he'll be on Kurtz's show. Carr, probably befuddled at receiving a call from C.J., says something kind of confusing about how they are not that close. Then, FishbowlNY picks it up? Best entirely nonsensical made-up feud ever! Team Junkie! [Strib]

See, this is why I will always stand behind Profnet as my preferred place for reporters to find sources for bizarre stories, no matter what cheaper competition comes along: because of Profnet's unparalleled sophomoric joke opportunities! For example, are you an expert on masturbation and all of its ins-and-outs, ha? Well "Em" of "Em & Lo," sex book authors and your source for "all things love, sex, and star related," wants to talk to you right away! And she'll happily promote your masturbation projects in return:

House Republicans "fired off" a strongly-worded letter to the editor of the New York Times today, because that mean and biased newspaper asked John McCain to write a second draft of his stupid editorial. It's hilarious for like ten reasons. Look, regardless of the quality of the work the Times op-ed page prints, you do, as a political candidate, have to aspire to a certain level of pretend-seriousness before you can be printed there. Having a junior staffer throw together old talking points and attack-ad rhetoric is just not acceptable. And so now we have House Republicans crowing about a mythical right of "equal access" to the op-ed page of a privately owned newspaper. Ha ha do they want to bring back the fairness doctrine? Anyway let's all climb the New York Times building and burn it to the ground. Or let's make like the GOP wants to do and buy a full-page ad in the revenue-starved paper. That'll teach 'em! [Politico]

Dude, how much would it suck to be a reporter covering the McCain campaign? I mean they're probably all riding the Straight Talk Express rolling their eyes like "I went to J-school for this? I could be at a school board meeting right now." J-Mac knows he can't win this thing, but he's still hoping to come out of the campaign with enough good will to be able to get at least five or six reporters to join him for his biweekly cribbage games when he moves into The Home. So his campaign is handing out some fakey press passes ribbing the journalists about what a crappy assignment they have being stuck eating Freedom Toast with the red-blooded Americans. Hey, at least they're not covering Obama off in France or wherever he is!:

Hah. Here is friendly Joe Scarborough taking the most thinly-veiled shot EVER at his MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann. "I know a couple of hosts ran this last night, made a huge deal because a liberal blogger picked it up. I guarantee the hosts that ran this, waving their arms, had no idea whether the Sunni Awakening or the Surge began at the same time." Hah. Way to not name names, Joe! See, it's funny because Keith Olbermann is running for president as an experienced foreign policy pro. Do Joe and Keith not get along? Clip after the jump.

A flack named Peter Shankman (who enjoys getting tased) has built up quite a little reporter-helping service! Through a free website, Helpareporter.com, Shankman takes in queries from reporters in search of sources for random stories, and then sends those queries out to the PR world, who-coincidentally-like to be featured sources. Everybody wins! Except for the other reporter-source website called Profnet, which does the same thing, but charges a big fee to flacks to participate: