Bonnie Fuller (Photo credit: Patrick McMullan).

Bonnie Fuller, one time editor of Star and US Weekly and current editor of Hollywood Life, Jay Penske's celeb site, sent out an email today to share some "fantastic news" about the site's traffic and share her latest column in Ad Age, where she discovered all the ways that Baby Boomers are misreading millenials.

But despite the fact that she touts her insight into the youth demographic, Ms. Fuller made the same mistake as your Aunt Sue--she forgot to Bcc when she sent out a mass email to what seems to be a large swath of her address book.

Illustration by Fred Harper.

One weeknight late last month, TheWrap.com editor in chief Sharon Waxman sent an email to The Hollywood Reporter’s editorial director, Janice Min, shortly before 1 in the morning. Ms. Waxman asked Ms. Min if they could speak in person, privately, about how to improve the relationship between their publications. During the previous two days, Ms. Waxman had feuded with Ms. Min’s web editor, Joseph Kapsch, over a story on TheWrap that said Mr. Kapsch was considering leaving THR as part of an “editorial exodus” that saw three employees depart. Mr. Kapsch, who, as of this writing, remains employed at THR, blasted TheWrap, or, as he called it, “The Crap,” on Twitter and in a 600-word response he sent to the media blog FishbowlLA.

Prior to emailing Ms. Min, Ms. Waxman forwarded copies of Mr. Kapsch’s statements to two executives at THR’s parent company, Prometheus Global Media. She urged one to see how badly his employee was treating her. She told the other to watch his back.

“It’s kind of amusing, these blogger characters out here,” Ms. Min said, ever eager to remain above the fray. “They really enjoy ruminating and obsessing over what we do. It’s just part of the kooky Net landscape out here.”

Hollywood has always felt like a small town, but it may never have felt smaller than it does right now among the members of the city’s Hollywood press. For decades Daily Variety was the sector’s indisputed leader, the prime organ not only for scoops but for wild speculation, backroom smoke signals, trial balloons and brazen displays of wishful thinking as well. The Hollywood Reporter seemed content to take the number-two spot.

Then came Nikki. And Sharon. And Janice. And, never one to miss a party, Bonnie.

Never mind that the ad market is struggling and print is on the slab. Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily, which launched online in March 2006, has gradually become a full-scale news operation. In 2009, former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman launched a competing website, TheWrap. Later that year, Bonnie Fuller stepped into the mix with the gossip and lifestyle site Hollywood Life for Deadline’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation.

Ms. Min.

The digital threat led the legacy publications to adopt new strategies. At the end of 2009, Variety erected an online paywall. Last October, THR imported  Janice Min to revamp its website and relaunch the print publication as a weekly with a broader focus.

The result has been an increasingly brutal, fiercely personal competition replete with rampant poaching, vituperative blog posts and threats of legal action.

No one who knows anything worth telling comes without a complex history and connections. Therefore, like all good Tinseltown tales, this story must include a disclosure. For six months last year, this reporter was employed at TheWrap, where we were overworked, underpaid and regularly subjected to Ms. Waxman’s mood swings. The last straw was when Ms. Waxman consistently berated us over the phone on our first day off in ages—Yom Kippur. Ms. Waxman declined to comment on this story.

Ms. Fuller.

There’s more: During our time on the Left Coast, we also extensively reported on the work of Nikki Finke. Ms. Finke does not like this reporter, to the point where she insisted on relaying her comments for this article through an Observer editor. Also: We also had lunch with a THR editor and discussed a hypothetical job that never panned out. That editor is not quoted in this piece. We have friends and former colleagues at all four trades.

Between Ms. Fuller, the famously mercurial, famously successful editor, who displayed a magic touch at Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, before almost singlehandedly reviving the celebrity weekly with US, and the even-tempered Ms. Min, her former No. 2, who took over after Ms. Fuller left the magazine, there’s a natural competition.

More ferocious is the rivalry between Ms. Finke and Ms. Waxman, who were once such good friends, Ms. Finke used to go to Shabbes dinner at Ms. Waxman’s house and still praises the Moroccan tagine. However she told the Observer, “I won’t talk to her anymore.”

Deadline began as a column in LA Weekly penned by Ms. Finke, a former debutante who worked in the Associated Press’s Moscow bureau before covering the Hollywood beat for several publications, including Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and, yes, The New York Observer. Deadline launched online in March of 2006. Since then, Ms. Finke has developed a larger-than-life reputation due to her formidable influence, her highly placed sources, her catch-phrase “Toldja!” and her various eccentricities.

For example, Ms. Finke is never seen in public and has rarely been photographed. The one known image of her is a black-and-white glamour shot taken for a book jacket. “I don’t know why people make such a fuss about this,” she said. “In 2006 I needed a professional photo. I haven’t needed a photo taken of me since then.” Last February, this reporter was involved in an effort to capture a picture of the elusive Ms. Finke for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily. We published a photo of a woman leaving the gated underground garage at Ms. Finke’s apartment building that we felt confident was she. “The photo purporting to be me posted by The Daily was not me,” she said. We were unable to definitively prove otherwise.

Ms. Finke edits Deadline by working the phones from her home in Westwood. She is notoriously combative, particularly with certain reporters who write about her. When The Observer reached out to Ms. Finke to get her take on the trade landscape, she responded with a strongly worded email accusing this correspondent of “reckless disregard for the truth.”

Then another email came in purporting to back her claim. And another, copied up and down the masthead. A flurry of phone calls followed. Claiming that this reporter once declared an intent to “destroy” her, she demanded that the story be reassigned.

With an approach some call bullying but Ms. Finke prefers to call “being honest,” she managed to earn a reputation as both a crusading journalist and a bona fide Hollywood power broker. “If someone acts like a moron, I’m going to call them on it,” she said. “If someone lies to me, I’m going to call them on it. But I also take responsibility for my own behavior. Sometimes my passion gets the best of me.” In 2009, she made the leap from mysterious blogger to establishment player with the help of a deep-pocketed backer, a young heir named Jay Penske who purchased Deadline through a deal that gave Ms. Finke what is said to be an eight-figure contract and eight-year term. With Mr. Penske’s backing, in 2010 Ms. Finke was able to poach a pair of marquee talents: 20-year Variety veteran Mike Fleming and THR’s TV editor, Nellie Andreeva.

Ms. Waxman. (Getty)

Ms. Finke and her team have since been able to amass a monthly audience of approximately 1.6 million readers, according to Quantcast, and during Oscar and Emmy seasons even put out a print publication “that made a shitload of money,” she said.

In January 2009, Deadline found itself with a new competitor when Ms. Waxman launched a digital trade of her own, TheWrap. Their relationship quickly soured as Ms. Waxman encroached on what Ms. Finke considered Deadline’s turf. (TheWrap’s traffic was 1.1 million last month, according to Quantcast.)

Still, the THR writer we spoke with said TheWrap isn’t as important to keep up with as Deadline. “I just don’t think they’re breaking stories as much as they used to,” the writer said.

TheWrap’s work has also drawn endless criticism from Deadline. In February, Deadline’s parent company sent a cease and desist letter to Ms. Waxman and members of TheWrap’s board accusing the site of stealing scoops. “It has become apparent that TheWrap.com and its employees have engaged in a continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com [and] passing off that information as its own,” the letter said.

Ms. Finke gleefully announced the legal salvo on her site. “I will not, and can not, allow anyone to rip off Team Deadline’s exclusive coverage,” she wrote. “TheWrap.com has had many wholesale staff turnovers...and at present is operating with just a handful of reporters.”

Ms. Finke was correct. From April 2010 until the end of last year, Ms. Waxman lost at least six employees, including two reporters who went to Variety and this reporter, who joined The Daily.

Bert Fields, an entertainment attorney who represented TheWrap, responded with a letter to Deadline’s parent company, PMC (then called MMC). “TheWrap has not engaged in the conduct you claim and has done nothing that violates MMC’s rights,” Mr. Fields wrote. “By contrast, MMC has demonstrably and repeatedly violated my client’s rights, including but not limited to violations of the antitrust laws (giving rise to treble damage claims), as well as unfair competition and trade libel. Indeed, MMC’s attempt to monopolize newsworthy subjects by threatening spurious lawsuits is, in itself, violative of the law, as are its numerous attempts to threaten and coerce others to refrain from supporting or dealing with TheWrap and its repeated publication of false and defamatory statements about TheWrap.”

Seven months later, PMC filed suit against The Hollywood Reporter’s parent company, Prometheus Global Media, alleging that code from the PMC site TVLine.com was used for THR’s website. Prometheus responded by removing the offending code from THR.com.

It’s easy to see why THR’s website would be scrutinized by PMC. In the 13 months since Ms. Min has taken over the reins, her blend of consumer-friendly celebrity news and trade coverage has brought in record traffic. According to Quantcast, THR had a record month in October drawing approximately 6.5 million readers, a much larger audience than either TheWrap or Deadline attracts.

Ms. Min is not a fan of the traditional trade approach. “In some ways, the whole thing had evolved into some echo chamber where 1,000 people were talking to the same 1,000 people,” she said. Conventional wisdom on Ms. Min’s revamp of THR is that she has broadened the focus by adding more consumer friendly celebrity coverage. Ms. Min said her approach isn’t simply about mixing celebrity and trade media, instead, she prefers to think THR has “expanded what is considered to be an entertainment story pertinent to the business.” Still, getting away from inside-baseball trade news, she added, has felt “a little like being the first prospector in California.”

Ms. Finke has staked out the opposite approach. “We’ve always been a celebrity-free zone,” she told us. “And Hollywood tells us it’s grateful for that. We are an entertainment business site and proud of it.”

Meanwhile, Variety, which dealt with the new digital challengers in the trade space by walling off its online content, has largely disappeared from the conversation.

“In Variety’s case, it’s almost that we don’t even know it exists anymore,” a THR writer told us. “We don’t even care.”

According to the web traffic measuring service Quantcast, Variety’s online traffic of approximately 360,000 monthly readers is dwarfed by their competition. Web circulation may be down, but Kimberly Gebbett, Variety’s director of marketing, said the paywall has had other benefits like 6,000 new paid digital subscribers and an increase in paid print circulation.

“We believe our content is absolutely valuable enough to be paid for and our subscribers believe the same,” Ms. Gebbett said. “It’s absolutely profitable.”

Meanwhile, despite Ms. Finke’s success, insiders say all is not well in the House of Penske. Other sites owned by Penske Media Corporation, Hollywood Life, Movieline, Boy Genius Report and OnCars.com, aren’t enjoying similar growth, and the company recently suffered a spate of layoffs due to cash-flow problems. Morale is said to be low.

Focusing on lifestyle and gossip, Hollywood Life was launched by Ms. Fuller in the summer of 2009. Former employees say PMC has repeatedly had to warn the editor about budget overruns exacerbated by her lavish personal expenses.

We reached out to PMC for comment, and Mr. Penske emailed to tell us, “I feel very fortunate to be working with two of the most prolific and successful editors in entertainment journalism. Though Deadline and HollywoodLife are two separate businesses of PMC, and Nikki and Bonnie produce two very different editorial products each day—in their respective fields, there is no equal.”

According to multiple insiders, Ms. Fuller was repeatedly warned to get her budget in line. “They basically told her, between the freelancers and your expenses, it’s not working, so if you go over your budget, it’s coming out of your salary,” a former HollywoodLife employee said. “She spends a ton of money, she expenses every little thing,” our tipster added. “She’ll write ‘two dollars’ on a post-it and then she’ll be like, ‘This is from November, it was a coat check.’”

Our sources also said Ms. Fuller put family and friends on the payroll including one woman who was given a six-figure salary before being fired by PMC for chronic lateness and absenteeism. Sofia Fuller, Ms. Fuller’s college-age daughter, has also worked at HollywoodLife. Another former employee said Sofia also spent freely from her mother’s expense account.

“She said, ‘I went to go hook up with my boyfriend. I was so wasted that I expensed it to my mom’s account,” said our source.

Welcome to Hollywood.

hwalker@observer.com

Additional reporting by Aaron Gell

Update (4:47 p.m.): This story was updated to clarify current traffic statistics for THR.com, TVLine's role in the web code lawsuit and Mr. Kapsch's employment status.

Meet The Fleet. (Illustration: Joe Wilson.)

To hear Martin Clarke tell it, The Daily Mail accrued its online readership in America nearly by accident. Lining a landing page with paparazzi shots headlined with expressions of awe and outrage, making the bikini a newsworthy event—that was not transatlantic outreach, just British custom. “Originally we focused ruthlessly on our British audience because that was the easiest to monetize,” said the publisher and editor of the paper’s website, MailOnline, “but we found we’d ended up with a big American audience without really trying.”

They came for Demi Moore’s “incredibly toned biceps” and Gisele’s “perfectly toned pins,” but this growing U.S. audience has convinced the paper that an augmented digital presence here will pay off in Internet advertising revenue. “The way the web works,” said Mr. Clarke, “is that it only makes sense to be free if you’re big.” The untapped potential of 300 million Americans who speak roughly the same language and pay attention to mostly the same celebrities proved too much to resist. So The Daily Mail has set up shop in America: may the sun never set on Pippa Middleton’s derriere.

Media types stateside have so far welcomed their new competitor.

Bonnie Fuller, former editor of US Weekly and current president of Mail competitor HollywoodLife.com, professed her love for the publication, but warned, “It’s a mistake to think you can import people and think they can understand this market. Look at what happened to Cheryl Cole on X-Factor!”

Arthur Sulzberger, for his part, has commented that British newspapers fail to speak to the “American experience.”

“All I can do is point to the numbers,” said Mr. Clarke in response. “Clearly we do or we wouldn’t have a bigger audience than most newspapers in America.”

The paper quietly opened a New York office in Soho in February, filling it with six or so young staffers jetted over from England. The New York branch followed the opening of a showbiz office in Los Angeles last fall, and signaled that the web site was expanding its American coverage from the celebrity gossip to hard news as well. The local media were wary: the Mail has a reputation for poaching news without attribution, for one thing. In January, they were caught lifting sections of a New York Times article almost verbatim. And while a Mail executive claimed that was before they had staff in-country, another pattern has emerged: “For Edwards’s Adult Daughter, a Recurring Role: Family Glue,” was the headline on a New York Times article one morning. “Her mother’s girl: How John Edwards’ daughter Cate became the glue holding family together,” was on MailOnline only a few hours later, albeit with a credit to the Times for most of the quotes. And there’s another local custom MailOnline has chosen to ignore.

“They don’t physically link to websites from which they lift material,” wrote Tony Metcalf, the editor-in-chief of NY Metro, in an email to The Observer. “We’ve asked them to do this because we think it’s fair and right and when Metro refers to the work of others, we link as a matter of course.”

“They don’t link to anybody!” echoed Ms. Fuller.

“We link out to people where appropriate,” said the Mail executive.

Then there’s the reputation of Mr. Clarke, who splits his time between London and New York. According to profiles written about him in the U.K., Mr. Clarke is famous for profane rants and reportedly once yelled at an employee with such vigor that he gave himself a nosebleed. “We’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome here,” an employee of his at a previous job told London’s Independent. “He’s so focused, he can force people to do things they don’t want to, the least of them being working a 12-hour day.”

“We’ll hire people who want to work here,” said a MailOnline manager, when asked if Mr. Clarke’s style might not translate to accommodate needier American sensibilities (they are actively recruiting American reporters).

MailOnline has done well so far, with the most recent statistics from comScore placing it fourth in unique page views for news sites, beating out the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Whether that translates to brand recognition is unclear, however. Will headlines like “Jackass star Ryan Dunn dies in horror crash as $100,000 Porsche flies off road and explodes in fireball after night out drinking in bar” foment a loyal readership beyond search-engine hits and random Tweets?

“What they’ve done, which is clever, is to get a lot of traffic without spending very much money,” said an editor in the web business who has worked in both markets. “Whether or not they could become a respected right-wing populist news site is possible, but it’s not easy.”

But it’s not immediately apparent that the MailOnline will maintain its ties with the favorite paper of conservative middle-aged U.K. women. (“My mother-in-law and all the rest of it love The Daily Mail,” said Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor of The Financial Times.)

“It’s really quite different from the print version in the U.K.,” said John Gapper, a British business columnist at The Financial Times. “I don’t think they intend to bring over The Daily Mail, I think they intend to compete with TMZ, Gawker, and Huffington Post and just try to get more and more traffic.”

They will also face a more familiar foe: The Guardian has announced its own American expansion, with a vanguard editorial colony led by Janine Gibson, its most senior digital editor, and several reporters. The two papers might even bring their famous culture war stateside. “They spend a lot of time egging on their own readers to hate the other’s readers,” said Mr. Gapper.

But those worried about a resurgent British hegemony will feel encouraged to know that the Huffington Post—one of our own country’s most catch-all media concerns—is opening an office in London this summer.

ewitt@observer.com

"How about Mexican?" her friend offered.

"Perfect! But do you think they'd give me just the tortilla? That's all I really want."

It was agreed that the Mexican restaurant would comply. Next issue: how the writer should dye her hair.

"I have to do a celebrity hair-inspired video, so I'm thinking Blake Lively blonde!"

The office was also home to the mobile news site Boy Genius Report, the auto site Oncars, and the film site Movieline. Hollywood Lifers occupied the cubicles nearest the lobby, intently focused on their computer screens.

"Who used my curling iron?" shouted one young woman. "I just want to know!" The Observer was walked past a row of cubicles into a small conference room often used to shoot videos for the site, where we perched on a lipstick-pink director's chair. Before long, the site's editor Bonnie Fuller arrived, and perched in her own chair to talk about Hollywood Life, her most recent project, which launched in November 2009. She was dressed in a snazzy purple floral bandage dress. A glittering cuff bracelet adorned her right wrist.

"Our staff is very, very small compared to a magazine," she said. "But we aim to produce a lot of original content and break a lot of stories--and have opinions."

It's only the latest reinvention for Ms. Fuller, who in recent years went from being the well-paid evil genius of the magazine industry to its most gleefully observed cautionary tale. After first attracting attention for her stewardship of Flare, a Canadian fashion magazine, she went on to edit YM, launch the American version of Marie Claire and helm Cosmopolitan, where her numerically enhanced coverlines ("His Top 20 Sexplanations," February 1998) were legendary.

Also legendary were her high-handedness with her staff and alleged over-reliance on company black cars. A nasty 2004 Vanity Fair profile featured former employees chuckling over Ms. Fuller's gaucheness and boasting about spitting in her food.

In 1998, Ms. Fuller was brought over to Glamour, where she lasted less than three years. In a much-discussed miniscandal, she was fired for her brazen pursuit of the editorship of Harper's Bazaar, a job that eventually went to Glenda Bailey.

Ms. Fuller next landed perhaps her most memorable gig, revitalizing Us Weekly for Jann Wenner. Her cavity-inducing coverlines and demystifying take on modern celebrity ("Stars--They're Just Like Us!") pumped up newsstand sales, distinguished Us from heavyweight People, and spawned a number of copycats: among them, OK!, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and Star.

After walking away from Us Weekly at her peak, surprising colleagues and inviting still more biting press attention, it was on to American Media Inc., where she'd been hired as editorial director overseeing a number of titles, including Star. Ms. Fuller's fall was sudden and would have seemed almost random had it not made for such delicious wish-fulfillment among those who'd long rooted for her demise.

When she left American Media in May 2008, with plans to start a new company, Bonnie Fuller Media, few were heartbroken by the reversal of fortune. Ms. Fuller planned, vaguely, to take on cyberspace with a web startup that promised, as this paper put it, to "approach Ms. Fuller as a brand" and "feature her blogging about topics such as gossip, fashion, and romance."

It wasn't to be.

"My timing was terrible," Ms. Fuller said. "I was getting my business plan ready, and I was ready to start appointments the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed."

Despite that setback, Ms. Fuller eventually found a willing collaborator in Mr. Penske, the flamboyant truck-rental scion, web entrepreneur and serial actress-dater. Mr. Penske was soon to make a tidy sum selling his startup, Mail.com, and was busily assembling a media empire of his own, acquring Nikki Finke's Deadline blog from Village Voice Media in June 2009. He relaunched Hollywood Life, a defunct glossy, as a website several months later, with some design motifs borrowed from Us Weekly: a neon-colored palette, big pictures, eye-catching captions.

"Women love to look at pictures," Ms. Fuller said.

Though the site is not yet profitable, it attracted a respectable 3.5 million unique visitors in April 2011 and includes CoverGirl and Microsoft among its advertisers. Ms. Fuller added that a planned expansion and redesign of the site's beauty coverage is underway.

The shuttering of Bonnie Fuller Media meant focusing less on the planned Bonnie-as-brand organizing principle and more on celebrity news, Ms. Fuller's métier.

Nonetheless, she has become a personality on the site, penning a regular "Bonnie Says" column and maintaining a Twitter feed with some over 13,000 followers.

On May 11, she Tweeted, "RIP Bob Marley: let's not forget how u worked to end violence in Jamaica. Died far too soon of melanoma at age 36." She stridently points out that she loves her iPad, which she uses on the commute into Grand Central Station (no more Town cars).

Though one of Ms. Fuller's key deputies, general manager Will Lee, is the former New York bureau chief for TMZ, Hollywood Life's coverage tends to be considerably sunnier and more friendly than its more aggressive, sometimes apocalyptic counterpart.

Ms. Fuller's vision with the site, she said, was "to use celebrity news as the entry point into women's lives, to use it as a kind of a lens to talk about their relationships, and their diet issues, and their style and beauty issues, and their friendship issues, and their decisions about whether to have a family." Articles tend to end with questions, inviting reader feedback.

In a sense, the concept behind "Stars: They're Just Like Us" informs the entire site. Her audience, Ms. Fuller said, views celebrities "almost as their good friends." She elaborated, "If they look at J.Lo's issues with fertility and suddenly she has twins, it gives them hope that they could do that."

The leveling effect works in reverse as well, turning the site's writers into demi-celebrities. "I always felt very strongly that the reporters and editors, the writers, should also have name recognition on the site," she said, noting that contributor photos are also prominently featured. "They should be a part of the circle of friends: just as we see celebrities as part of our circle of friends, we're your friends."

The writers seem to appreciate the attention. Chloe Melas, an entertainment reporter who has been at the site since its inception (she previously worked at CNN after her graduation from Alabama's Auburn University), contributes news reports as well as a column, "Chloe Says."

"I just want to be a very relatable girl," Ms. Melas told The Observer. "I want to be our demographic. We have guys writing for the site, and Bonnie's more the mother-of-four role. I'm a girl in my 20's, out there dating and figuring stuff out."

Ms. Melas noted that her duties extend far beyond blogging. "I wear many hats," she said. "I have a lot of responsibilities and I really like it that way--you bite off as much as you can chew and then some!" She has a weekly on-air spot on Fox 5 news discussing celebrity goings-on and reports frequently at red-carpet events. "I love the adrenaline before I talk to a celebrity," she said. "I'm jealous of myself!"

Her staffers' challenge is considerable, Ms. Fuller said. "You have to do a lot more with a lot less," she said. "It forces you to focus on the content and the celebrities and the areas of interest that your audience is the most obsessed with."

As for her own celebrity obsessions, Ms. Fuller has none. "It's who our audience is most interested in," she said. "They're very interested in Kristen [Stewart] and Rob [Pattinson], Twilight people, Taylor Lautner, Kim Kardashian, a lot of the reality show people, Kim particularly. Sometimes Khloé. They're interested in her fertility struggle--her infertility struggle."

The web has allowed Ms. Fuller instant feedback on which stories work, a luxury she didn't enjoy as a print editor. Despite a reputation for keen instincts, "it was frustrating," she said. Publishing a magazine is "a one-way conversation at all times. You're always putting it out there!"

She added, "It's hard to gauge because the audiences today are so of-the-moment--so A.D.D.--that three months later, they forgot what they were interested in three months ago!"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The move makes Ms. Steindler the third reporter in just over two months to leave Page Six. Paula Froelich left in July shortly after her book was published; Bill Hoffman was let go in August. Neel Shah, who has been at Page Six for 10 months, is now the most veteran member of Richard Johnson’s rowdy fleet. Emily Smith joined last month from Life & Style, and we’re sure the search for new talent is already on.

Ms. Fuller's new web venture, which is based in New York and scheduled for a relaunch in late October, is focusing on celebrity and entertainment news for 18-35 year-old women. In addition to Ms. Steindler, Hollywood Life hired Will Lee, the former New York bureau chief for TMZ, last week.  The web site is owned by Jay Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation, the same place that recently bought Nikki Finke's web site.

Before Page Six, Ms. Steindler was an editor at Jossip, the now-suspended web site run by David Hauslaib, and prior to that she worked at Star magazine for Ms. Fuller.

We’re waiting to hear back from Bonnie Fuller and Page Six’s Richard Johnson.

More from John Koblin:

The Gilded Age of Condé Nast Is Over

Times Poaches Pulitzer Winner Shadid from Washington Post

The New Yorker Is Hiring

When Mr. Murray was asked about The Wall Street Journal's recently released social media guidelines, and insisted it was "a revision of a memo that has come out every ten years since the beginning of time and the big message is 'Don't be stupid.'" Journalists shouldn't tweet about going to an abortion rights rally, and if you write about that topic, for example. "If you're Bob Woodward and you're about to go meet Deep Throat at the garage, you probably shouldn't tweet about it beforehand."

"We've got 50 people on Twitter, I do tweets a dozen times a day," he continued. "I don't think people are that profoundly interested in my personal life, whether I'm eating a ham sandwich or where I'm eating lunch," but his personal life does make it onto the feed, he said. He and other Journal writers just need to be careful, he explained.

The memo was "just one of those exercises that happens in big corporations."

Mr. Denton insists that online publishing is still a good business. When asked if he would ever consider selling Gawker Media, which has been a rumor among some media gossips, he said, "I think as soon as you start to think about it, bad things happen."

Of course, this wasn't the only story on the News' front page: “GOTTI HOME A-LOAN” reads the largest type on the page (in a smaller box) at the bottom. Hm. So, what's happening here? Something about a Gotti, a home, and a loan; and a pun on “Home Alone,” a movie about a kid whose parents accidentally leave him unattended to deal with burglars. Is it supposed to sound like "Got a home loan" too? Why? Tell us what we're missing. After all, the News resorts to a subhead to do it: “The don's daughter faces eviction over 650G owed on house.”

The New York Post: The Post makes a meal out of the News' Gotti-snack this morning, taking over the entire front page with the news of Ms. Gotti's possible loss of the Long Island mansion that was the setting for the terrible A&E reality series, Growing Up Gotti in the early aughts. The Post has a long history of punning on the Gotti name: today's entry is “GOTTI GO!” Next: “Foreclosure whacks Don's daughter.” The Post also has a long history of gloating over Ms. Gotti's misfortunes. Somewhere in the mists of editorial strategies past, Post managing editor Col Allan was brought in from down under to run the paper, and installed Victoria Gotti, who had turned herself into a romance-mystery novelist, as a columnist (at Jack Newfield's old desk!). The stunt immediately seemed like a bid for the Post to mitigate its Manhattan-centric, elitist practice of the tabloid form. But somehow, after Sept. 11, the presence of people like Ms. Gotti in the Post stable made the paper look a little like the “drunk at the funeral,” in the words of former New York columnist and perpetual Rupert antagonist Michael Wolff. The paper sobered up again, and Andrea Peyser became the columnist voice that reflected the strange elitist-populist outrage of the new Post. Also, there was a bit of a fracas between Harper Collins (the Post's book-publishing sister in the News Corp. stable) when Ms. Gotti failed to deliver her book on time. She'd risen pretty high in the American Media stable under Bonnie Fuller and David Pecker at that time, and her reality show was starting to take off. No mention of any of this in today's story! We're also a little baffled about the news value of this piece. A Google News search will show you that Ms. Gotti's relationship to her mortgage bankers has deteriorated over the years in a slow burn. This latest decision, a reversal of a lower-court decision that sought to give Ms. Gotti more time to repair her relationship with her creditors, seems likely to be the fatal blow in her battle to keep that ridiculous mansion; but then again, we've thought that before, too. Anyway! Inside headline: “NOW SHE'S EVICT-ORIA GOTTI.” Remember when John Gotti Sr. was pretending to be senile? The headline back then was, “I FORGOTTI!” So kudos for finding a pun on the lady's first name.

General observations: We're a little stumped today. Our journalistic instincts generally require us to reward the News for pursuing its own crusading agendas on local institutions, but we're a little pressed to set too much store by today's development in the BRAIN DOCS scandal. Will readers be pulled in simply by the fact that the story feels so personal? Maybe. The fact that the Victoria Gotti story strikes us as pretty flimsy indicts both front pages, though arguably it slants against the News only in proportion to the amount of space it was given there. On the other hand: “HOME A-LOAN”? Terrible, just terrible. The Post, lacking a BRAIN DOCS scandal, gives the whole page to a dumb story. A dumb but pretty story, and a bit of a rubbernecky story. Perhaps a bit of an agenda is why the story squeezed everything else off the page? Who cares about Victoria Gotti as much as News Corp. does? Not clear. But the competition isn't offering much more.

Winner: The New York Post.

Provocative though it was, that question was not what had brought Bonnie Fuller, John Stossel, Adam Moss, Nick Denton, Sigourney Weaver, Ira Glass, Judith Regan, Wendy Williams, and a smattering of semi-bold names—some clutching notebooks, many clutching drinks—to this event. They were here at the invitation of The Atlantic, where Mr. Smith is president and James Bennet is editor-in-chief, to enjoy some chili and margaritas and listen to Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hirschorn address the question asked on the invite sent out by the magazine's P.R. team: "What is the Future of Media?"

No answer was supplied during the 30 minute discussion which had Messrs. Sullivan and Hirschorn sitting on a small stage overlooking a rapt—occasionally twittering (and Twittering)—crowd. Mr. Bennet, who moderated the discussion, informed everyone that the two men were once housemates in Washington DC: "The pertinent fact is that I've known Andrew so long, I knew him when he was straight," Mr. Hirschorn joked. (Apparently Mr. Sullivan had "an unreasonably hot girlfriend" at the time.)

Mr. Bennet started the discussion by asking Mr. Hirschorn about that day's New York Times Company quarterly earnings report. "It was pretty dismal," Mr. Bennet, a former Timesman, offered.

"We're in kind of in remarkable, uncharted waters," Mr. Hirschorn said. "There are scenarios in which The Times does not go out of business, but becomes a very different entity."

Mr. Hirschorn, no idle observer, had wondered In the January/February issue of the magazine if The Times could cease printing in May.

The magazine editor-turned-producer foresees "profound changes and they're gonna be unpleasant." Later, he told the crowd of media workers, "I think it might be that there will be a time in the wilderness where there will be a huge and wrenching, horrible fallout... I mean, it sounds like Road Warrior or something. I don't mean to sound like people are eating out of dog food cans. It's really not that bad!"

Apocalypse, soon: Well, that's one plausible future of media.

Mr. Sullivan, pulling on a bottle of beer, wasn't so much concerned with dying newspapers as he was with the promise of blogging, something he'd written about before.

The writer described what attracted him to blogging in the first place: "The thrill was, for me—this was when Clinton was President—you could go on at night and be mean about [a] Maureen Dowd column before anyone had read it... So she would never even get the pleasure of the, like, twenty minutes of praise." This was met with a big laugh from the audience.

Later, Mr. Sullivan told The Observer he posts 300 items a week to his blog, The Daily Dish, calling it "an obsessive compulsion."

The blog, which he started as an independent venture in 2000 according to his bio, was hosted for a period on Time magazine's Web site, before it was brought to TheAtlantic.com in January 2007.

"I'd do it for nothing!," Mr. Sullivan said. "I used to be incentivized for traffic, but we changed that. And I realized, damn, I gave it away."

Working for free: A very plausible future for media as well.

The former editorial director of American Media (Star, Shape, Men’s Fitness, Natural Health and Fit Pregnancy) is currently the CEO of Bonnie Fuller Media, which she founded with former Viacom interactive division head Russ Pilar. Once launched, the Web start-up will approach Ms. Fuller as a brand and will feature her blogging about topics such as gossip, fashion and romance, HuffPo reported in June.

In the meantime, Ms. Fuller--perhaps to flex her Web muscle--has taken to blogging on The Times' The Moment blog. And as of two weeks ago, she's even begun Twittering!

So far, she seems to be using the Twitter mostly to crowdsource: "OH guys -- I hear that since Wall St started crashing people are having more sex ie comfort sex. And if you're tight on money --it's FREE!" Ms Fuller posted four days ago.

Two days prior to that, she asked this of her 125 Twitter buddies: "doing some research: what's the last thing you'd give up in dire times? haircuts? color? facials? massages? new shoes?"

Lo and behold, yesterday afternoon, Ms. Fuller put up a post on The Moment called "Recession Sex."

"I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the stock market crashed and recently split-up couples like Jen Aniston and John Mayer, and Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel, are suddenly back together," the post begins.

Business is booming for the city's sex shops and lingerie retailers, Ms. Fuller informs her readers. "My bet is they’re buying lingerie because this is a time when they need to invest in their relationships," she writes.

The previous day, Oct. 15, Ms. Fuller had written about those beauty treatments that she was polling all her Twitter friends about. Women, according to Ms. Fuller, are continuing to spend $275 on skin cream, $260 on haircuts, and $2500 on Botox and Restylane fillers.

"Time will tell, I guess, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that New York women may end up living in a box on the West Side Highway," writes Ms. Fuller. "But we’ll still have fabulous highlights and perfectly shaped eyebrows!"

At least Ms. Fuller is trying to find the brighter side of things. After all, in the recession-according-to-Bonnie-Fuller world, the recent financial downturn has brought about better-looking people who want to stay home and have sex all day. And that's not so bad.

That's a lot of scratch for pictures of Katherine Heigl getting Starbucks, but according to Kelly, the magazine is not only "lucrative" (he uses the term twice), but profitable as well:

"Us Weekly is one of the more remarkable success stories in recent publishing history," Mr. Kelly writes.

Not mentioned in the story is Bonnie Fuller, the editor who helped reposition Mr. Wenner's People clone into a pink and day-glo weekly juggernaut. No fear: Ms. Fuller got her own lengthy profile on Sunday in The New York Times 'Business' section. (Though The Times points out that much of Us Weekly's phenomenal growth occurred under Ms. Fuller's successor, Janice Min.)

Writer David Carr checks in with Ms. Fuller—who left Wenner Media in 2003—after her recent departure from AMI and finds that she's on the cusp of becoming her own brand like Oprah—or Ron Popeil. According to Mr. Carr, Russ Pillar, "a former head of the interactive division of Viacom,"

As Ms. Fuller tells Mr. Carr, "It's going to be media by, for and about women ... I'd really like to take advantage of all different forms of media including Web, mobile, blogging and discussion boards to communicate with women."