Variety and The Hollywood Reporter historically battled as the movie industry's two top trades, but THR, in the era of editor Janice Min, has become a more general-interest magazine, while sites like Deadline garner the scoops that the trades once received. Variety has valuable real estate but a precarious position--it's the last of its kind.

Pogue's Phone Goes Rogue: New York Times technology columnist and living Times standards exemption David Pogue has lost his iPhone! He is a known fan of Apple products (and has also written some books about how to make the most out of them) but Apple has yet to respond to this crisis in the form of a Black-Ops Phone Recovery Delta Squad. Instead, it is the Gawker Media blog Gizmodo: Nerds With Attitude™ since 2002—that roguish buyer of secondary market iPhones and Apple's Public Enemy #1—that has come to the rescue. Lo and Behold, with the forces of Apple, David Pogue, Gizmodo, and The Police-Surveillance State, this crisis has been resolved amicably. [Gizmodo]

Power Editor Eats Proper: The Editorial Director of Fairchild Publications, Peter W. Kaplan, has a grapefruit—the august King of the Citrus Family—and coffee, black—really, the only way it should be consumed— for breakfast every morning. Someone get this man a serrated spoon. [BonAppetit]

Most Disturbing First Sentence 2012 Nominee: Former xoJane beauty columnist and current VICE columnist Cat Marnell, shine on, you crazy diamond. Shine on. Readers, you've been warned. [VICE]

Televised News Still Not Up To Sorkin Standard: Either cable news networks or their viewers are too stupid to understand the LIBOR scandal. [Huffington Post]

More Than Enuffington: The Huffington Post's tablet magazine went from "$1.99 a month" to "Free-Ninety-Nine a year" in just five issues. [Capital New York]

Local Paper Makes Administrative Changes: Lady and man leave jobs, man to take lady's previous job. Rumors about other man assuming newly-created fake position are thus far unconfirmed. [New York Observer, @George_Gurley]

Peacock Just Don't Give a Care: All your noise about how awful NBC's coverage of the Olympics has been? Your petitions and your blog posts and your Tweets? Sorry, but NBC could care less. They think this thing has just been going gangbusters. [All Things D]

Young People To Eat Old People, Who Will First Eat The Young People's Words: What's the future of the Observer's dining desk look like? How about: Someone trying to figure out what this 17 year-old editor-in-chief of his own food magazine is doing correctly, and shamelessly replicating it so they don't trample us on the way up. [Chicago Reader]

Ever Upstream: Habitual gambler and erstwhile Portfolio blogger Felix Salmon offers his keen-eyed commentary on the events of the day. [Felix Salmon's Tumblr]

Brooks and Robbers: Former Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks was formally charged with doing scandalous things to produce scandalous news. [BNO News]

New York Post Brass Snubs Hard-Nosed Underling: When the Post's Media Ink columnist Keith Kelly called this writer at his desk this afternoon to discuss various administrative comings and goings, he was helpfully referred to speak with the actual parties about whom he had inquired. We also took the opportunity to learn from Kelly that The Daily's Editor-in-Chief and New York Post executive editor Jesse Angelo sat next to Kelly as a plucky young Post-ie, and yet, Mr. Kelly was not, in fact, invited to Angelo's wedding (but Maury Povich was?!). He had to learn about it from the paper's Administrative Weddings section. [Page Six] 

Local Newspaper Makes Further Administrative Changes: New York Observer managing editor Michael Woodsmall has been rotated out of the local weekly newspaper's softball lineup against The Nation tomorrow night, for which he provided some terrible excuse about having to go watch Ichiro Suzuki play against his former baseball organization, the Seattle Mariners, later in the evening in The Bronx, at Yankee Stadium. Observer alumnus and 2011 Media Power Bachelor Nate Freeman has been rotated into the lineup as his interim replacement, but his fielding position has yet to be decided. De facto Observer softball captain Daniel Edward Rosen declined to comment on the lineup change.

Please send your tips, legal threats, unused Williams-Sonoma Gift Cards, internal memos, nominations for 2012's Media Power Bachelors, and conspiracy theories about the inventor of Formsping.Me right here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"Since 1919," he wrote, "the Daily News has served working-class families throughout all the communities of New York. For more than 90 years, we have been the voice of the people – celebrating our readers’ diversity, defending their interests, and protecting them from exploitation as we have worked to help them achieve the best-possible quality of life in New York."

According to the Post’s Keith Kelly, that struck some reporters as hypocrisy. Mr. Holiber had just laid off 20 working-class-ish reporters and photographers, including those whose work held the government accountable to the working class, like a police bureau chief, a federal courts reporter and a city hall reporter. The overhaul coincided with the rollout of the paper’s new website, with which News brass hoped to create a leaner, digital-first news operation.

Without mentioning the layoffs explicitly, Mr. Holiber paid lip service to the paper’s rocky transition from print tabloid to “platform agnostic” news source. The memo likened the News to a wayward twenty-something, still figuring out what it will be when it gets around to maturing.

“We are still in the early stages of our transformation,” he wrote, “but we are making excellent progress towards finding the business model that best suits us.”

He was adamant, however, that the business model will involve print, despite the increasingly digital newsroom. In light of reports that Mort Zuckerman’s $150 million investment in a top of the line printing press on the eve of the recession was a mistake that the News is now paying for in jobs, Mr. Holiber mentioned a few of the business opportunities the top of the line four-color presses have provided.

According to the memo, the company has launched a “commercial services” division, which has yielded a new “Sunday Values” opt-in circular, and business with the Long Island Press, Queens Courier, Tablet, The Forward, Amsterdam News and The Independent.

“This new business division has made a wonderful contribution to our business, he wrote. “We anticipate a lot of commercial-services growth over the next several years.”

During the first week of Newsstand--the Apple iOS 5 feature which is making marketing iPad publications much easier--News Corp.'s Daily was the top-grossing app.

“It’s intriguing that an upstart publication is beating Condé Nast titles and the New York Times,” editor Jesse Angelo told Keith Kelly yesterday.

Indeed, The Daily outsold National Geographic, WIRED, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Martha Stewart Living, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, which have both much larger print circulations and a higher monthly price point.

The confidence is contagious.

Today the Daily's Tumblr posted a screenshot of The New York Times iPad app, which had not been updated to include the breaking news about Qaddafi's death.

"It’s 1:00pm. Something is missing from the front page of the New York Times’s iPad app…" they wrote.

Mr. Angelo also told the Post that of the 130,000 readers of The Daily (10k more than Edmund Lee reported last month), 85,000 pay for it, and they convert free trial-ers to subscribers at a rate of 12-15%.

The New York Post

"Separately, [Adweek parent company] Prometheus bosses have been apologetic about some of the public stances taken by the outspoken Wolff in his columns on the media business," the article notes.

The Post doesn't go into any more detail about the "stances," but they don't need to. Since taking over Adweek, Mr. Wolff has really just expounded on one--that Post parent company News Corp. is rotten to the Murdoch nuclear family core.

The Post's doesn't mention that Mr. Wolff wrote an unauthorized, aggressive Rupert Murdoch biography—The Man Who Owns The News—instead choosing to identify him as "a former Vanity Fair contributing editor."

The Post did not return request for comment and Mr. Wolff, reportedly also on vacation (Why does anyone even bother reporting in August?), tweeted this:

By way of disclosure—or something—there's a quote from an April interview with Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers in the Post piece too.

Why, then, are the multiple Kate + Will covers not flying off the racks? Keith Kelly says that though People copped decent numbers for its pretty pretty princess issue, US Weekly, Star and OK! didn't do as well.

Perhaps, Kelly suggests, the different publications Kate-blocked each other by all having the same subject on the cover. The solution is simply, people: buy all four. It's totally worth it.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Latona became embroiled in controversy last month when she placed country star LeAnn Rimes on the magazine's cover wearing a bold red bikini. Many wrote to Latona infuriated; for LeAnn to show that much skin and don a red bikini after admitting to an affair — with her TV movie co-star, no less! — flaunted her adultery to an offensive extent. At this point, someone with a habit of making strained literary references would make a connection to Hester Prynne's scarlet letter. But that's not neceessary. 

Anyway, Latona called the cover a "terrible mistake" in an email responding to the complaints. Rimes did not take kindly to this and canceled her appearance at an AMI party, even as Latona attempted to retract her statements. 

"As I have always said to Shape's readers, it's important to take risks in life and try new things, and now I'm taking my own advice and heading off into my next adventure," Latona said in a statement.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Update 4:53PM:  Romenesko got his hands on the official memo confirming Kelly's Tweet. Staffers appear to have been blindsided by the news. 

"'U.S. News & World Report' is shutting down. An internal announcement just went out," wrote Kelly. 

According to Kelly, the upcoming December issue will be the last one mailed to subscribers. Kelly said the magazine will still publish digitally in addition to eight newsstand-only issues. 

When The Observer called the U.S. News & World Report offices in D.C. to ask about Kelly's report, the man who answered the phone angrily said, "It's a lie, nothing like that is happening here," before hanging up the phone. He declined to give his name or identify his title beyond confirming that he worked in the editorial department. Subsequent calls to the D.C. office and calls to U.S. News & World Report's corporate offices in New York were not returned.  

U.S. News and World Report was created through the merger of two publications, United States News and World Report in 1948. United States News was founded in 1933 and World Report was first published in 1946. In recent years, U.S. News & World Report has struggled financially along with the other major newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, which was recently sold by The Washington Post Co. for just one dollar after years of losses. 

The full internal memo announcing the changes at U.S. News & World Report is below:

From: Kelly, Brian 
To: INSIDE 
Sent: Fri Nov 05 15:31:30 2010
Subject: Digital Strategy

To: U.S. News
From: Bill and Brian
RE: Completing Our Shift to the Digital World

Colleagues, We're finally ready to complete our transition to a predominantly digital publishing model with selected, single-topic print issues. This will allow us to make the most of the proven products, useful journalism, and great audience growth we've been sustaining. Thanks to all your great work, we've been able to maintain our core values of creating high-quality content while establishing a new, healthy business model. This puts us in a strong position to continue building the U.S. News brand in the new media world. As you know, we've been a leading innovator in adapting to the changing environment -- and we don't intend to give up that lead.

The December issue will be our last print monthly sent to subscribers, whose remaining print and digital replica subscriptions will be filled by other publishers. Going forward, our non-subscription print offerings will be for newsstand sale and targeted distribution. They'll include the college and grad guides, as well as hospital and personal finance guides. In addition, we’ll publish four other newsstand special editions, focusing on history, religion and some of the other subjects that have been a success for us in the past. And of course we’ll continue to expand our audience and products on the various usnews.com channels and grow the digital U.S. News Weekly.

All of us at U.S. News Media Group have been aggressively responding to the changing habits in the media marketplace, and these latest moves will accelerate our ability to grow our online businesses and position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging platforms for distributing information such as the iPad and Android tablets. We'll discuss this in more detail in meetings starting next week.

With an average unique audience of 9 million and counting, we've become a significant publisher in the digital space, creating content that people want and an audience that advertisers will pay for. Each of our channels -- Politics & Policy, Education, Money, Health, Autos, and Travel -- are now fully-formed business units that are developing on their own best course. By working both in the vertical channels and horizontally across them, the company has diversified its revenue beyond display advertising to include e-commerce products, lead generation, licensing and other sources.

Our emphasis on rankings and research content is the right path, making us an essential information source in a commoditized marketplace. We provide information that helps people make important decisions. Whether they're picking a college or voting for a senator, it's clear from the response of our users that accurate, searchable information is something they value highly. The proof is in the audience. People come to us every day, all day, for information they can’t get anywhere else.

We can't sit still. We have to keep improving the existing products while selectively creating new ones. In addition to upgrades in college and hospital rankings, we’ll refine and expand the data and tools that allow consumers to evaluate mutual funds, high schools, cars, online education, health plans and more. Travel is getting ready to come out of beta. Politics & Policy is developing its extensive database allowing citizens to examine the records of every member of Congress and is part of an expanding group of public policy tools. The iPad and the next generations of tablets and mobile platforms will create a brand new set of opportunities for us. We know that the creative energy and team spirit of everyone at U.S. News will continue to keep us ahead of the pack.

Bill and Brian

But don't go mourning the death of the king of the tabloids just yet! David Pecker, chief of American Media, claims his company will stand tall, shed debt and make it out of the darkness in 60 days. AMI will file for Chapter 11 within the next two weeks, Kelly writes. 

So, you're among Pecker's cadre of writers for some crazy reason? You should be in the clear! If the deal holds up, "all employees, vendors and other creditors will be paid 100 percent on the dollar." Devotees of the Enquirer's relentless brand of "journalism," then, should be able to rest easy knowing that this stuff will stay on newsstands.

In addition to its bread and butter of fat celebrity pictures and death-mongering, the Enquirer played a key role in breaking the story of the lovechild of John Edwards and mistress Rielle Hunter. And they were almost sort-of considered for a Pulitzer! 

Intrepid political investigation, however, is not always the paper's forte. The headlines on the tabloid's website today include "LISA MARIE MELTDOWN," "HOPELESS O.J. SUICIDAL" and "HIDDEN HORRORS: WHEN JESUS WAS A VAMPIRE!"

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"There’s one thing that I get paid for at the Post is scoops. If you’re gonna give scoops to someone else, you’re taking food off my kids’ table," Mr. Kelly said.

Accuracy is important, too, but sometimes there isn't time to get the story totally right. “You’re getting paid to be right but nobody’s right 100 percent of the time," Mr. Kelly said. "I think they realize that none of the stories are personal.”

Mr. Kelly said that if somebody gives a scoop to one of his competitors, he might print unsubstantiated rumors in his column to get back at them (he also said being a media reporter in New York is like being a police officer in a small town).

“One time, there was somebody giving what I call the gift-wrapped scoop to one of my friendly rivals at a broadsheet paper. and I said, ‘Look, I was on that story and you gave it to them. Here’s what i’m going to do. Every story from now on, every cockamamie rumor that comes out of your company is going in my paper. I’ll call you at the end of the day and say you deny the report...and then you deal with the consequences.”

Sometimes News Corp. politics can also ruin a scoop. In The New York Times' post last night about Michael Wolff taking over e5 Global Media's Adweek Media Group, Tim Arango noted that Mr. Kelly had the same story about Mr. Wolff last week. But Mr. Kelly's story never ran, probably because of tensions between Mr. Wolff (author of The Man Who Owns the News) and Rupert Murdoch.