Back in March, we wrote a long post about incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian of 5WPR calling his former HR director Melissa Weiss a "stupid cunt," and being generally disreputable. The lone defender of Ronn in that case was one of his employees, Christine Garabedian. She wrote in to say Ronn is a great boss, and called (the victim!) Weiss a "jealous" single girl, ending with, "PS Melissa I just got engaged- Now are you even more jealous of me :)." LOL! At the time, several people urged us to go after Garabedian for her meanness, but we refrained, because she seemed like a peripheral figure. Well, we tried. But now she's out there pitching her own wedding to celebrity magazines as a "great story." Poorly! Oh, this is just pure gold:

Fox Television has noticed that there is a wide, wide world out there that hasn't yet been the recipient of Fox's unique brand of entertaining and educational TV programming. So they're going to bring it to them, and if they make a little money in the process, all the better! In the meantime, Conde Nast is launching a version of Wired magazine in the UK, and they've already launched some of their premium titles in India (Vogue India! GQ India!). What's going on here? The world is flat. And it's a great place to set a television, magazine, and big pile of money.

Bonnie Fuller was axed last month from her job as editorial chief of American Media. But the company gave her $2.4 million in fiscal year 08, which is 50% more than even CEO David Pecker got. And AMI, which is facing some serious financial challenges of its own, was planning a $2 million severance package for her if she left by the end of March (since she didn't, they haven't revealed her actual severance—but it's surely in that ballpark). Fuller's rich, but she's still a well-known neurotic about money issues, dating back to her own mother's rough period of being broke after a divorce. Understandable—but it doesn't really give one the right to start yelling at the good people from the freaking Make-A-Wish foundation, as Fuller once famously did when she thought they were being too stingy:

Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, died today at the age of 80 after an extended illness. The Missouri native got his start in journalism as a magazine writer for titles like LIFE, Time, and Esquire, but he will go down in history as the man who codified a method for chronicling the elite of New York, while providing a platform for the city's best writers. He's responsible for creating the only real glossy city magazine that is also a good magazine on its own merits—unapologetically elitist, but not blinkered. And slick enough to justify it all.

It's Anna Wintour's 20th anniversary as editor of Vogue, and the be-bobbed one has certainly earned her title as one of the most feared figures in fashion. But it's worth remembering that she hasn't had a smooth ride. In fact, Wintour was beset by a salacious—and probably false—sex scandal rumor as soon as she took her job. Here, from the pages of Jerry Oppenheimer's biography Front Row, is the story of the alleged Wintour love connection with her boss, Si Newhouse—and how Wintour's reaction became a rare and fleeting moment of feminist pride inside Conde Nast:

Internet freedom advocates—a group that includes just about every blogger—are up in arms at the revelation that Boing Boing, the incredibly popular this-and-that blog, has purged its archives of all the works of Violet Blue, a blogger who also contributes to Gawker sex site Fleshbot. The reason for the disappearance is unclear; but whatever it is, it can't fit in well with Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow's free speech crusading. But you can file it under one of the great universal truths: Media People (of all stripes) Are Touchier Than Anybody.

Everyone is complaining that Sunday's Tom Brokaw-hosted Meet the Press was too boring. ("A little too much comity!" -Alessandra Stanley. "The Most Boring Meet the Press Ever!" -Jossip.) Is that bad? We didn't watch it, but we're still going to say "no." Look, Tim Russert, may he rest in peace, was a fantastic broadcaster, and yes, he made the show entertaining as hell, but if Tom Brokaw is ditching Tim's trademark "once you said this, now you say this, EXPLAIN YOURSELF" method, more power to him and to NBC. We realize it's not what the Sunday shows are "about," but let's not bitch about how "boring" a quiet, informed political debate is while we're all hand-wringing about how toxic and broken the campaign process has become. Deal? After the jump, a clip of Brokaw interviewing NBC analyst Chuck Todd. Tom's gentle admonishment of Chuck was apparently the most interesting part of the broadcast.

Press releases: everybody hates them. Reporters hate them because they are trite, condescending, unreadable, superfluous, or some combination thereof. The flacks who write press releases hate them because they know that their intended recipients have nothing but scorn for their hard work. And the public hates press releases because the lazy media uses them anyways, producing tons of craptastic non-news. Flacks recommend buzzwords to get a press release picked up: "green," "environment," "foreclosure," "toxic," and, in Idaho, "polygamy." Wrong! Buzzwords are why people hate these things in the first place. After the jump, five real live ways to put together a good press release:

Last week Charlie Rose wondered if Conde Nast was trying to buy Rolling Stone. Now Keith Kelly reports that they're actually trying to buy Us Weekly, Jann Wenner's other, more valuable but less cherished property. The "price tag could hit $750 million," according to the Post. Which would give Wenner enough cash to continue running Rolling Stone into the ground for decades to come. Us does seem like a more likely target for Conde Nast, but the high price and the overall print market these days are cause for skepticism. And though Charlie Rose may have gotten it wrong on that particular issue, that interview's main benefit stands: it is still accurate to call Graydon Carter a "self-described pussy." [NYP, Previously]

For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here?

Now even Matt Lauer is doing it! In a report on a forthcoming report on how George W. Bush forgot to capture Osama bin Laden for a couple years and is now trying extra hard to finish that up before finals, Lauer called the terrorist mastermind—three guesses—"Obama." He quickly corrected himself, of course. Look what Fox has done to us! This is why everyone should just call him "Barry Hussein" like we do. Because this makes it official: everyone who is on television regularly has now made The Slip.

Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, still remembers when his show got pulled from Fox. Then it came back, and now it's one of the network's biggest hits. But even though the FCC lets him make edgy jokes now, it will never allow him to make edgy enough jokes. So MacFarlane is teaming up with Google to distribute a new, top secret internet show that will change everything and make him the most fabulously wealthy poop joke maven the world has ever seen.

As a savvy media person, writer Rob Kutner knows that you can't sell books anymore without making some funny YouTube vids to promote it. Lucky for Kutner, he writes for The Daily Show, so he was able to get the program's Aasif Mandi and Kristen Schaal (who is lovely!) to work on it for him. Oh yeah, the book is called Apocalypse How, and the apocalyptic video is after the jump.

Gorgeous and magical Alanis Morrisette stopped by "The Howard Stern Show" Friday, where she discussed her break-up with loser Ryan Reynolds-who her band, Howard, and Artie Lang all hate-as well her experimentations with lesbianism. Clip after the jump.

Today just got a whole lot more awesome as the coolest man alive, David Bowie, writes in the Mail on Sunday that he's putting together a CD compilation of his own favorite songs. Unlike the many "ChangesBowie" best-of CDs, this one is not full of his hits. Instead, he writes, "For this CD compilation I've selected 12 of my songs that I don't seem to tire of. Few of them are well known, but many of them are still sung at my concerts. Usually by me." He goes on to list them, and explains the process behind the creation of each one, after the jump.

A montage maker has weaved together clips from his favorite movies starting at 100 and counting down to first place. It's kind of like something you'd see at the Oscars, except it's under two minutes and doesn't have all the sucking. Check it out after the jump.

A 20 year-old model jumped to her death in Manhattan in an apparent suicide yesterday. "Ruslana Korshunova, 20, whose face has graced the cover of French Elle and Russian Vogue, apparently jumped from her ninth-floor apartment in her Water Street building in the Financial District just before 2:30 p.m. 'I heard what sounded like a gunshot or a bomb or an explosion,' said a stunned Con Ed worker talking to a cop nearby [...] Cops said there were no signs of a struggle in the one-bedroom apartment, where she lived for only two months. And the balcony from which she plunged had construction netting around it that appeared to have been deliberately ripped."

Friday brought to this city a wave of gays from across the country looking to party in anticipation for today's Pride Parade and related festivities. It also conveniently brought a police crackdown on gay-friendly nightlife venues. Marquee, Pacha, and Splash were all raided Friday, according to tipsters, with Marquee and Pacha shuttered until further notice.

If you've gotta go out, you might as well go out in a blaze of iconic glory. Let's all get a little bit sinister this evening and share our favorite film deaths. Mine after the jump.

Unfortunately for me, I don't roll around in the comment threads of other sites, so I am just now learning that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull haters have decided that "Nuke the Fridge" is the new "Jump the Shark." Because, you know, they couldn't handle the campy opening scene in which Indy escapes a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator. I guess it does lack the gritty realism of faces being melted by one Biblical relic and a gut-shot being instantly healed by another or, say, using an inflatable raft as a parachute, or a thousand year-old knight or... Anywho...