In your soggy Monday media column: Salon's sad sale talks fall through, Oprah's network is unpopular, Lorin Stein is the Hot Sexxxy Literary It Boy of the moment, Tina Brown is provincially famous, and John King's future is murky.

In your sweat-drenched Friday media column: Newser's traffic plunches, Rupert Murdoch's paycheck plunges, the likelihood of Sam Zell staying at the Tribune Co. plunges, and The Progressive's bank account plunges.

• It's been two years since Ben Silverman became co-chairman of NBC Entertainment. And what a two years it's been, huh? [LAT]
• The largest union at the Boston Globe will vote on a new contract on July 20, even though it's yet to iron out a deal with the New York Times Co. [BG]
• Reader's Digest's plan to remain relevant: It's going to become even more conservative and old-fashioned, and embrace religion and stuff. [NYT]
• How are some newspaper reporters dealing with unemployment? They're turning to careers as go-kart racers. Just as you suspected. [Fortune]

Newser, the news aggregator co-founded by intern-shagging media blowhard Michael Wolff, has secured $2.5 million in first-round funding. The source is reported to be numerous individual investors, who must have been unfazed by the Wolff goat-molestation rumors. [Paid Content]

Michael Wolff has a habit of surreptitiously offering meta-commentary on his own untidy life via his Newser columns. Today's headline: "Here's Why I Like Silvio Berlusconi." At this point we have to assume he's just fucking with us.

A staff writer at Michael Wolff's Newser, Victoria Floethe, is rumored to be having an affair with her boss. Who knew there were any media jobs still worth sleeping your way into?

Esquire has a profile of every liberal's favorite Fox News jockey Shep Smith this month. It's cute-ish and funny, but a bit murky. Just who is this guy? Is he friend or foe?

Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago.

Why oh why did Michael Wolff ever abandon the comfortable world of print journalism to try his luck again at the internet tables? The Vanity Fair columnist, who documented his last business failure in the best-selling Burn Rate, is getting questions about the audience for his internet news venture, Newser. (Answer: actually, not hopeless.) But the new-fangled electronic mail can be so confusing. When briefing a colleague on a response to interrogation by Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, Wolff made a common mistake: he hit the reply button, rather than forward.

Last night Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn was host to a party for Napeolonic media mufti Michael Wolff and former New York mag honcho Caroline Miller's new project Newser, the web 1.0 news aggregator. Ten years ago, Michael Wolff wrote Burn Rate; it chronicled the spectacular failure of his first web venture, NetGuide. Along the way, Wolff seriously burned his backer Alan Patricof and nearly everybody else he worked with. So when if Newser fails, will there be a Burn Rate II?