The business of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door is surprisingly shady. It consists largely of crews of young people-some under 18-recruited by (often) criminal characters who haul them around the country in vans, releasing them only to make their way through neighborhoods, using any lies necessary to tug the heartstrings of people enough to get them to buy something. Then all the kids are rounded up again, given their meager cut of the profits, and they all go do drugs. Sometimes they rape people, or drive off cliffs. The Houston Press just put out a monster investigation of the industry, and it shows a long but clear path from the offices of Conde Nast out to the wild kids hustling in the hinterlands. And there are some true horror stories:

The government of France has officially forfeited all the liberal cred it's earned over the past 500 years: yesterday, French prosecutors raided the office of an auto magazine, confiscated its computers and files, and arrested a reporter for the crime of publishing a scoop. A scoop about autos, the subject of the magazine! Because in France, freedom of the press must take a back seat to the concerns of the almighty Renault corporation.

The newest catchphrase in the cratering print media industry: "Flat is the new up." Good use of positive mental attitude! This also means the newspaper industry can say "Down is the new flat." [Slate]

Remember Julie Roehm, the fabulous woman that Wal-Mart hired to be its head of marketing, then fired because she was fucking around with her married subordinate and hitting WM ad agencies up for jobs and being unwilling to become a part of the "Wal-Mart culture" by painting her office grey or whatever? Then she sued them in a huge, public, scandalous lawsuit. Emily Gould dubbed her the "Wal-Mart Ho," which I am too classy to endorse but not too classy to repeat. Anyhow, Roehm is about to become a reality show star! Is she the "next Paula Abdul"? Or just the Julia Allison of advertising?

Has Second Life, the weird, clunky virtual world, ever been good for anything except strange computer sex and time-wasting? For about a year there, you couldn't pick up a magazine without seeing 2L touted as the next big thing for business. For business! Yes, why wouldn't an imaginary land packed with flying monsters and huge selections of virtual penises become corporate America's preferred communications medium? Christ. Lots of the hype was the fault of BusinessWeek, which bought into it with wide-eyed enthusiasm. And the magazine is still trying to get your employer to drag you off to a fantasy computer island for fun team-building exercises:

Alec Niedenthal is the 17-year-old Alabama novelist who became suddenly prominent thanks to a cheeky letter in the Times Book Review last month. The missive promised a new wave of fiction from a "MySpace-addled" generation, called out well-known older authors and included many large words. This attracted interest from publishers HarperCollins and Grove/Atlantic and an inquiry from Jonathan Franzen's literary agent. But of this group, only one party, HarperCollins, deigned to meet with Niedenthal on his trip to New York this past weekend, and the ambitious young writer left town with a tote bag rather than any deal. He'll presumably have a more fruitful tour after finishing his own edition of the collective "manuscript" alluded to in his Times letter. Until then, the hordes of older novelists struggling to get published have no reason to gouge their eyes out with a fork. After the jump, Niedenthal recalls for the Observer his HarperCollins meeting.

The Wall Street Journal's new managing editor Robert Thomson took another step toward remaking the paper in the image of his former employer the Financial Times, hiking the cover price 50 cents to match the FT at $2 per copy. But another directive, reported by Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio, seems to have been borrowed from the Journal's News Corp. sister, the Post:

"Two payments to the Mayflower Hotel [NO!] in Washington were included in former Gov. Eliot Spitzer's latest campaign filing, released on Tuesday afternoon. The two payments, $411.06 apiece, were recorded on Jan. 14 - predating the now infamous February rendezvous with a prostitute that prompted his resignation - and the immediate purpose of the payments was not clear." [Times]

Oh, hey, Times political reporter Adam Nagourney, we hope you're reading! Because someone is trying to use this site to reach you regarding your relations, or possible relations, who bestowed you with the genes necessary to write that blog you used to keep, that insane story about being a tourist DC and, most impressively, your widely-noted columns for the "Google" News. Wait, do you even work for the Times anymore? Click the thumb to read the email.

After bitter tabloid rivals the Post and Daily News both lost their bidding war for Newsday to bumbling Long Island cable concern Cablevision, discussion centered on which tab would be first to strike some kind of cost-cutting partnership with Cablevision. As it turns out, the Post and Daily News may just cut Cablevision out of the loop entirely — the Times tonight substantiates prior rumors the two papers will partner. The tabloids are in preliminary but "committed" discussions to share printing, distribution, sales and other functions, stopping short of a full Joint Operating Agreement. If only it were all so easy as simply signing off on such a deal.

O'Reilly Factor executive producer David Tabacoff shot down the rumor floated here last week (via Fox News insider) that Jesse Jackson called Barack Obama the n-word in unaired portions of his infamous "cut his nuts off" comments about Barack Obama. Tabacoff told TVNewser that Jackson never uttered the slur, nor did he use an even more incendiary phrase, "half-breed n——r," surfaced on Daily Kos and Hybrid Nation this week. OK, nice way to clear Jackson's name, but the denial is also going to kick up a fresh round of chatter about Jackson's comments, since the question now becomes what other than the n-word was so awful that host Bill O'Reilly saw fit to call it "more damaging" than talking about tearing off someone's testicles. Apparently, Fox won't be showing any more footage "in the immediate future." Right. You have to save this stuff for the convention! [TVNewser] UPDATE: Fox News chief Roger Ailes also denies the "half-breed n——r" slur.

Spanish-language TV journalists out in California are getting paid about 25% less than their English-language counterparts, despite— in many cases—attracting more viewers. How can this possibly be? We'll summarize all of the lengthy explanations for you: "The viewers they attract are brown, and therefore worth 25% less." We're a full 15% more equal than we were in 1787! [via Guanabee]

Brit Hume, who is sort of one of the least objectionable Fox News personalities while also embodying all the terrible and wrong things about that network (it's a corrective to liberal bias!!) (that's rich coming from a formerly "objective" reporter with plum gigs at the broadcast networks despite his open conservativism), is leaving the network. Sort of. He's quitting his job anchoring Special Report every night but he'll still be on the channel as a panelist on Fox News Sunday and whenever else he feels like appearing. It's not clear why he's quitting now, except that his contract is up. Also maybe Megyn Kendall broke his heart when she ended their affair and married some other dope in March. [NYT]

Brangelina spawn photo war update! We hear that Getty is scheduled to do the photo shoot of Angelina Jolie's new twins on Monday. Knox and Vivienne are officially entering the celebrity media machine, and it's about time! The twist, of course, is that the bidding war between OK! and People for the rights to the photos is still ongoing. The price was hovering between $11 and $12 million this morning, and we hear it hasn't been decided yet. We know you are dying to know who will walk away the victor. A speculative look, and a guess:

Everyone at the Washington Post loves the Grahams, the wealthy family who've owned the paper since the Depression. Specifically, they loved feisty Katharine Graham, who published the Post during the years when it was good and successful. But she died. Now she's been replaced by her granddaughter Katharine Weymouth (who is related to Tina Weymouth!), who recently replaced editor Len Downie with former Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli. Former WaPo gossip Lloyd Grove profiled Weymouth as she attempted to rescue the newspaper industry.

Were you confused when you woke up Monday and some members of the elite were outraged about something and other members of the elite were not outraged? Internicene elitist warfare! Confusing! If you were like everyone on the internet, your reaction to that New Yorker cover satirizing the rumors about the Obamas went through five steps, from shock on Sunday to acceptance earlier this afternoon. Let us explain!

Nonpartisan journalist Bill O'Reilly is a man who calls em how he sees em, and that means that he's not afraid to give credit to the liberal lie-mongering site HuffPo when credit is due. When former Bush flack Tony Snow died last weekend, the AP ran an obit that was not 100% positive. Even worse, "The LA Times website allowed loons to post vile things about Tony Snow." O'Reilly condemns these examples of factual reporting and free speech, respectively; but he actually praises foreign-born socialist Arianna Huffington for scrubbing her site of all Snow smears. Truly a bipartisan lovefest! Watch the clip of what happens when you look up "Fairness" in the dictionary, below:

A-list stars are extremely selective about how they're portrayed in pictures. They routinely have specific language in their contracts for movies and photo shoots dictating just how much flesh can be shown, and in what way. But magazines have figured out a way around this: get one of the world's most prominent photographers to do the shoot, and hey, the stars let it all hang out! New York got Lindsay Lohan to strip for Bert Stern, the photographer who once shot Marilyn Monroe in the same poses. And Vanity Fair used Annie Leibovitz's cachet to goad the young Miley Cyrus into a creepy come-hither pose. And now, sadly, supermodel and man-curse Gisele Bundchen has fallen victim to the same trend. Oh no!

Times columnist Joe Nocera is a busy man, and he doesn't have time for flackery and foolishness. But he recently got one press release "so brazen, so craven, so mind-bogglingly inane" that he had to put it on his blog for the world to revile. And coincidentally it's from a flack who also blogs at Huffington Post! Do you need to make sure all the other moms in the park are insanely jealous of you and your stylish little drooling brood? Let Amanda Christine Miller tell you how to turn your children into mere fashion accessories!

I got some good news on the Facebook front last night: I am now friends with one Robin Gunningham of Bristol, UK-also known as Banksy, the formerly undercover world-famous street artist who was outed as Gunningham yesterday. (Or was he? No official confirmation yet, although the case is strong). Gunningham's Facebook page sports the same schoolboy picture that appeared in the Daily Mail's investigative story. And it has further evidence that he is, in fact, Banksy-unless the whole thing is part of a clever hoax, or the product of a third party with ulterior motives. Words and photos straight from the guy who might be a legend, after the jump: