"Philadelphia news anchor Larry Mendte has been fired by CBS amid the FBI probe into allegations he hacked into former co-anchor Alycia Lane's computer and leaked embarrassing stories about her to Page Six." [Post]

Remember the big paparazzi beat-down by surfers in Malibu this past weekend? Well, there's now supposed to be a big Saturday rumble between the two groups, who have been trading taunts in the comments of pap-run news site X17.com. The original clash pitted a mob of entitled white Malibu denizens against the rough-and-tumble paps, some of whom are ex-gang members and many of whom are immigrants, some illegal. The new fight promises even more fun ethnic tension under the sun:

Last fall, before she realized she would soon need every last scrap of sympathetic coverage she could get, Hillary Clinton ditched a Vogue interview and photo shoot because it might maker her look too elitist or feminine or something. Anna Wintour in January penned a bitchy editor's note about the incident. And now the poor writer who had to go through the excruciating, months-long process of setting up the damned interview is letting off some steam. Julia Reed is now free to tell how she really feels about Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson, and that's what she does today in Women's Wear Daily:

People still profess confusion about which ad man had his way with JC Penney's image, making an unauthorized teen sex ad and submitting it to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Neither the pissed-off retailer nor its apologetic ad agency would name names, and Ad Age yesterday concluded, "Just who is responsible for creation of the ad... is a bit cloudy." But it's not, really. Is it? It's got to be Mike Long, of Epoch Films. Read why, and watch one of Long's other "fake" Penney ads, this one a bit terrifying, after the jump.

Totally irrelevant newsweekly-turned-listicle-magazine US News & World Report brings you a straight-talking list of ten tips for managing an office full of 20-somethings, according to old business dude G.L. Hoffman. His pointers include "Add value," "Let them use their media," "They want standards," and "Expect varied, non-chain-of-command type communications." Whatever that means. As an actual 20-something, I'm communicating up G.L. Hoffman's chain of command that this list is straight up crapola. You are old and your advice is dorky, Mr. Hoffman! And too long—we 20-somethings have no attention span (or respect for our elders), due to drug use. After the jump, five real tips for managing an office full of 20-somethings, should you ever find yourself in such an unlucky position:

Raffaello Follieri always looked the part of the Italian aristocrat. Impeccably dressed and permanently tanned—like a more attractive version of Zach Braff—he arrived in New York as a dashing young business tycoon with inside connections to the Vatican and a plan to use those connections to make millions. In short order he landed stunning actress Anne Hathaway as a girlfriend and drew attention from some of the most powerful financial figures in America. His father was Pasquale Follieri, an Italian businessman and his son's partner in the Follieri Group, an shady concern that promised investors big returns from real estate dealings with the Catholic Church. But that's not all that Pasquale was; just two years after he helped establish his son in New York, he would be a convicted financial criminal, in an eerie foreshadowing of Raffaello's own fate:

Ring the alarm: the paper of record is treating rappers separately and unequally! In a surprisingly fresh piece of analysis, the Columbia Journalism Review unearths the NYT's sneaky tendency to "birth-name" rappers more than other musicians. (They also coin the term "birth-name," which I like, although for the sake of hip hop consistency they should say "government-name"). That means, for example, that RZA gets second-referenced as "Robert Diggs," but Marilyn Manson gets to keep his stage name throughout Times stories. That is so foul! Government names are nerdy. Plus, culture editor Sam Sifton gives a nonsense nilla explanation for the discrepancy:

People ask me this all the time, and I'm perhaps the worst person to consult. After being fired from a doll store and a telemarketing company, I started some internships (at age 26), which eventually turned into the incredibly glamorous job of blogging by the pageview. So what's a young, smart person just arrived in New York to do? A jobless and confused reader needs our help! "I moved to NYC in January. Gawker is about media news and that happens to be the field I am getting myself into. But I have one important question, how in the world does that happen in this city?"

The Smoking Gun has the entire criminal complaint against Anne Hathaway's ex-boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, the hustling con artist charged with fraud and money laundering earlier today. Much of the information came out in previous stories and investigations, but it's still pretty stunning to see the extent of the guy's fraud laid out all at once. Payoffs, luxury, deception, and a crooked reporter—all in there. And you can understand why Hathaway stayed with him so long; if your boyfriend had an unlimited pot of (other people's) money to fly you around the world with, you'd like him too:

Portfolio media reporter Jeff Bercovici cornered blogstress Arianna Huffington at a party and interviewed her. He asked, awkwardly, about Tim Russert. As you may recall, Arianna did not like the deceased newsman. She devoted a great deal of time and energy to criticizing his interview style, guests, questions, and status. To be fair, her points were often cogent and correct! But the other thing is that Tim's wife Maureen Orth wrote a terribly nasty story about Arianna back in the '90s and also called her then-husband gay (he was, and is). Then Arianna was accused of hiring a private investigator to tail Maureen and Tim. Which she denies. Still, she says, Russert Watch was nothing personal.

Atoosa Rubenstein was the youngest editor-in-chief in Hearst's history (of Cosmogirl), and later the editor of Seventeen. She dropped out of the rat race to have a family (see photo) and overshare her gyno visits like a normal person, as well as run her own multimedia "tribe," Alpha Kitty. We also hear she's tight lately with recently-quit American Media's Bonnie Fuller. She told the HuffPo that she's against the celebrity practice of baby-photo selling, but as her most recent Facebook photo shows us, she's about to have that baby any day now. Remember, life—and privacy—begins at conception!

Sarah Chubb is not just the president of CondeNet, the online division of Conde Nast—she's also a "nationally ranked cyclist." And she's damn tired of you plodding runners hating on her cycling style in the wild streets of Central Park, for real! "There is a lot of hate," she tells New York mag. "The Road Runners club can take over the entire park, and they get pissed at us if our races go past 8 a.m. The runners don't stay where they're supposed to stay, they're wearing headphones, and they'll scream at you if you ask them to get out of the way!" Fools. If you think that CondeNet president Sarah Chubb will hesitate to run you over at high speed, well, you don't know anything about making it in the media. [NY Mag. Pic via NYO]

Zimbabwean dictator and overall monster Robert Mugabe is one of the world's top bad guys. But if you're running an ad agency in Zimbabwe, hey, work is work. So a firm called Imago—owned by Young & Rubicam, the US ad giant—made a bunch of ads for Mugabe's "re-election" campaign. Now Y&R is falling over itself to cut its ties with Imago, possibly because Mugabe's wickedness has been front-page news in the US for the last week. The fun part: the ads sucked big time! Especially the one that looks like a wicked political acid trip. And we have the evidence:

Once monthly in April, May and June, Gawker examined the foibles of those most self-serious of journalists, television news anchors and correspondents. Video editor Richard Blakeley's compilations of the physical pratfalls, on-camera meltdowns and embarrassing lip slips of TV personalities have drawn, so far, close to 1.3 million page views. We present them here together, as a kind of boxed set of media fallibility:

Hockey star Sean Avery is "guest editing" MensVogue.com this week, which means that, technically, he is the one who decided to print a picture of himself shirtless (above) for the slideshow accompanying his essay about life as a Vogue intern. The essay itself details Avery's love of fashion — especially women's fashion, which he finds "especially interesting — there are so many options, and they can tell more of a story." Go ahead and make the gay jokes, Avery has already heard them. And they don't stop him from bragging that he added a "leopard-print Alexander McQueen vest" to a photo shoot he worked, and that it "pulled the outfit together."

That JC Penney commercial, which featured two teens practicing for a naked romp in the basement? The one that won a prize at the Cannes Lions Awards this weekend and spread quickly on the Web yesterday? It was an unauthorized fake, and executives at the department store are royally pissed. "It's obviously inappropriate and nothing we would ever condone," Penney's chief marketing officer told the Wall Street Journal. "We're very disappointed that our logo and brand position were used in that way." Thus began the blame game over who unleashed this mutant sorta-sex tape, one that will seem oh-so-familiar to anyone who recalls, say, the Miley Cyrus incident with Vanity Fair.

Salty old radio crank Don Imus may have moved from CBS to ABC (by way of shame and unemployment), but he's as charming and irrepressibly bigoted as ever! Just 14 months after getting fired for referring to Rutgers' women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos," Imus interrupted an announcer on his ABC show to ask about the race of a Dallas Cowboys cornerback who was arrested six times. "What color is he?" Imus asked. Told the cornerback was black, Imus said, "there you go. Now we know." To the casual observer, this might look like an open-and-shut case of racism, but Imus has basically never been held accountable for his many slurs against blacks, Jews, Arabs or gays, so he's probably assuming ABC will eagerly swallow his comically implausible excuse for these latest comments: "I meant that he was being picked on because he's black." Oh, Imus. We knew no 40-second delay could stop your wacky racism. Audio clip after the jump.

In this slow time of year in which there is no news—when even gossip mavens themselves are arguing that celebrity gossip is dead—could Barack Obama be the unlikely savior of the celebrity media complex? The candidate and his wife are on the cover of Us Weekly, and an insider tells us that the gambit "paid off" in terms of sales, even beating out some of the magazine's Britney Spears covers on the news stand. We also hear Obama covers have performed strongly across the board for magazines in more weighty categories. And now Versace is dedicating her new men's collection to Obama. Your next president: almost as significant as Lindsay Lohan. Click through to see five more glamorous BarackOmania covers, wow!!

The Miami Herald just laid copy editor Brayden Simms off. Amazingly, he also wrote a blog for them about saving money in this terrible economy. He wrote a depressing column about how they tricked him into taking a full-time job and then outsourced it to India. Now he is blogging-for the Herald!-about meeting with his financial planner to discuss how to survive without an income. This is just sick. Jesus, they're making him dig his own grave after his execution. Please forward this to every journalism student you know.

The Washington Post is having a big important meeting where editor Len Downie will probably announce his acceptance of a buy-out and his retirement. Or maybe he'll fire everyone else! That would be funny. Anyway—if you have the resulting Downie memo, send it our way. [FishbowlDC]