Ms. Obama and the girls. Photo Courtesy of AP/WWD.

Word has gotten out from publicists and fashion news authority Women’s Wear Daily that first lady Michelle Obama has endorsed yet another one of Barbara Tfank’s ladylike designs for a heavily monitored public appearance. It is said to be the fifth time that the first lady has donned a Barbara Tfank frock. She wore the ravishing outfit at a meet-and-greet in Gainesville, Fla., for a young girls’ after-school program called Girls' Place on September 17.

"A friend, who Tfank had shown the unusual fabric to, spotted the dress on C-SPAN and called the designer to tell her the news,” reported WWD.

According to our perhaps inaccurate tally, this means that Ms. Obama has worn Tfank to more public appearances than any other high-end American fashion designer, which leads us to ask: Is Barbara Tfank Ms. Obama’s new designer of choice? Has Ms. Tfank overtaken the feminine and playful aesthetic of Jason Wu?

With the election fast approaching, this would come as no surprise. Back in February, during New York fashion week, Ms. Tfank told The Observer, “It really interests me that the people who gravitate towards my clothes ... they’re women that are communicators—they have very strong opinions. I think that my clothes allow for women to show themselves, their power.”

Barbara Tfank at her New York Fashion Week presentation on September 10.

While Ms. Tfank would not comment specifically on her working relationship with the first lady, respecting her privacy, she did tell The Observer in an email today that “she represents all that is good about America.  Her inherent luminosity and warm personality can only enhance the quality of any designer’s work.”

The cerulean, marine and sky-blue mosaic print dress was reported to have been made of vintage fabric from Bianchini-Férier and is silk twill, according to WWD. The newspaper stated that the print fabric was created by artist Raoul Dufy and that Ms. Tfank had purchased the material at auction.

“I am honored that she chooses to wear my designs,” Ms. Tfank concluded in her email.

We’ll have to wait and see what else comes from this dynamic design duo. Best keep your eyes on the red-white-and-blue podiums.

Huffington at the Time 100 Gala. (Image via Getty)

New Age/New Media guru Arianna Huffington's love of sleep is well documented. There's the "sleep your way to the top—literally" TED talk, the sleep challenge and the famous AOL nap rooms. That story that she hides her three BlackBerrys in the bathroom while she sleeps is inextricable from her personal mythology. 

Repeating it to WWD at the Time 100 Gala this week, she revealed that her PDA brood has grown since the New Yorker profile.

"When I sleep, I put all my devices in another room to charge," she said, "I have four BlackBerries, one iPhone, two iPads."

And it seems the increased connectivity demands a new mode of relaxation. She told WWD she's launching an app called "the GPS for the Soul."

"It’s a way for us to identify our stress levels and course-correct," she said. "You would download the app, you would tap on the stress sensor, and it would give you your heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure. And then you would program it with the things that help you de-stress.”

Like this 103-slide slideshow of the worst celebrity jeans of all time, for example.

Memo-Padded: The long-running media Memo Pad column at WWD has filled the empty space recently vacated by crack media reporter John Koblin as he decamped for Deadspin: we hear one Erik Maza of the Baltimore Sun will be replacing him. Maza, reached by phone, told us: "Koblin got in touch with me and asked me if I was interested in being a media reporter. I'd been a big media nerd for a long time [Ed. Indeed!], and I was excited to get into it," he noted, with the sincerity not yet eroded into bitterness after his first New York City apartment hunt. He starts May 14th.

Mr. Smith Goes Home: Talking Biz News reports that longtime Wall Street Journal journalist, Pulitzer-winner, and possibly the only journalist to ever score 799 on the math portion of their SATs, Randy Smith, is retiring from his job at the Wall Street Journal.

USA Today Goes Hard In The Ink: As a journalist, when The Pentagon goes after you, you're probably doing something right. Tom Vanden Brook and his editor Ray Locker of USA Today are being retaliated against, and USA Today stood behind its journalists in the loudest way possible: By running a story on them. This is when you ask for a raise.

May The Odds Be Ever In Her Favor: As noted by Curbed publisher Lockhart Steele, here is a video of Martha Stewart playing ladder golf (known better by its informal name, "Redneck Golf"), a sport famous, like Cornhole and Washers, for its concrete place in the great pantheon of Drunk Hunger Games.

The Perks of Being a Vanity Fair Blogger: Look at all these scissors!

Smutty Site, Scalped: Only a few weeks after Camille Dodero's fantastic Village Voice cover story about Hunter Moore, the proprietor of a nasty little site that posts the naked photos of young people anonymously and maliciously sent in to it, Moore has taken the site down. Adrian Chen over at Gawker—who has also been on the Hunter Moore beat since about November—wrote of the site's demise. Nowhere is there a direct link for causality between Moore killing the site and Dodero/Chen's coverage, but the time frame's enough to raise the question. Either way, the two of them have done great writing and reporting on a curious and frightening internet phenomenon (one you'd be hard-pressed to believe we've seen the final iteration of).

Smutty Site, Sold Short: Now only if the Voice—or at least the Voice's parent company, Village Voice Media—would ever relinquish their grip on Backpage.com, the classifieds of the alt-weekly publishing network famous for its prostitution ads (or the recent assault on its prostitution ads). As Joe Pompeo at Capital New York reported yesterday, two more advertisers have pulled their ads from VVM papers. Yes: Even High Times has higher standards than that. If you haven't read Tom McGeveran's piece about why someone needs to buy The Village Voice, don't: Not that it isn't great, but the harsh reality that the Voice will get sold over Mike Lacey's dead body is pretty depressing.

Fox Goes Beaucoup for Bill and Sean: Your Republican Baby Boomer Parents' favorite Fox hosts who aren't Shep Smith, the LeBron and Wade of Fox—Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity— are getting contract extensions.

The Jim Stewart Rule: Forget Warren Buffett! Even Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter and Den Of Thieves author James Stewart is making more money these days, and paying less taxes. Somehow, this story is still more compelling when Warren Buffett tells it.

Times Burnings: Speaking of which, the Times earnings call was yesterday, and as we all know by now, net income is up, circulation revenues are up, ad revenue is down. This is going to encourage a lot of people to consider paywalls! This is misguided, because a lot of people who would consider paywalls are not the New York Times. Meanwhile, the company still only has an interim CEO in Arthur "Pinch" Sulzburger Jr., who isn't quite opposed to going full-time. Given now-retired CEO Janet Robinson's golden parachute, they could use someone they could get on the cheap.

Crain's Freeze: Without knowing much of what's going on at Crain's, firing the editor seems like canning the chef but keeping the same awful recipe book.

Got any tips? It's Friday, we're listening...to Peter Tosh.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The auction for the patents began last fall, part of the company's long term plan to "unlock value" for shareholders. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012, and the company says it plans to return a significant portion of the proceeds to shareholders.

Meanwhile, WWD caught AOL and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington at her book party for Kathy Freston (Ms. Freston introduced Ms. Huffington to her business partner Kenneth Lerer), to find out how she felt about about her growing influence at AOL.

The news that Ms. Huffington had acquired more responsibility at the home of AIM was first reported by The New York Times—and vaguely. The next day, Business Insider conjectured that the Times had been spun by a former NBC publicist decamping to Huffington Post, pointing out that Ms. Huffington had lost quite a bit of editorial responsibility in the reorganization, including over TechCrunch and AOL.com.

At the book party, Ms. Huffington backpedaled on the notion she'd gained more control of AOL.

"I don't see it that way," she told WWD. "Changes are necessary because of the growth of the Huffington Post. Being able to integrate technology and marketing with editorial is going to make it easier for us to grow much stronger."

The Post is currently planning a seventh anniversary party, she added.

“We’ve never had an anniversary party. I think it’s time. There will be clowns and face-painting. That’s what you have for a seven-year-old, don’t you? We never had one before because we were always working.”

Any profile on Ms. Gerwig appeals to The Observer as a reasonable thing to aggregate. The actress is very much of the moment. Ms. Gerwig has both cult cache (queen of the mumblecore movement) and big-in-2011 buzz (upcoming roles in Arthur with Russell Brand, and Whit Stillman's long-awaited comeback Damsels in Distress). 

Also, The Observer met Ms. Gerwig at an after party for No Strings Attached, in which she plays Natalie Portman's best friend. Ms. Gerwig arrived wearing a neat black skirt, black tights and a black coat, which she kept on even when safe in the warm confines of the Soho Grand Club Room (warm in more ways that one! -- the Club Room has the comforting wood-wrapped look and feel of an Ivy League secret society lounge). Guests picked at a light salad, hors d'oeuvres and cream-sauce ravioli. Ms. Gerwig was exceedingly nice to us. 

But the WWD profile's most notable quality, and the reason The Observer chose to aggregate it, is the self-aware way in which it subverts the profile formula.

It begins like this:

Interviews with hot, young actresses tend go something like this: starlet arrives wearing borrowed togs, artfully disheveled to look like hers; starlet offers the requisite sound bites on how lucky she feels between sips of Diet Coke; starlet teeters away on heels, leaving in her wake a cloud of sycophantic gushing and untouched food.

It takes Greta Gerwig — a hot, young actress, to go by just about every film critic and editor — all of 30 seconds to upend that time-tested script...

But the profile does, in fact, follow the standard protocol for a downtown starlet's profile -- it makes crutches of the grungy-chic choice of locale (Schiller's Liquor Bar), the selected food and drink (huevos rancheros and coffee with -- gasp! -- whole milk), and the outfit ("A cozy, salt-and-pepper Jil Sander cardigan and purple Theory miniskirt with tights").

At least it was self-aware about the limitations of profile writing. If only aggregators could be the same about aggregating.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Wired never again came close to its 100,000-sale first edition, and now appears to be leveling out around 22,000. Glamour app sales dropped 20 percent from September to October and another 20 from October to November. Vanity Fair sales dropped significantly in November too.

WWD says publishers are hopeful holiday-gifted iPads will boost magazine app sales. We hope they are asking Steve Jobs very, very nicely to enable "push" subscriptions for the iTunes store. Push subscriptions would deliver magazine apps automatically (you know, like a real magazine), as opposed to making readers request, download, and pay for them individually. It could potentially facilitate print-digital bundling, too, which would appease the print subscribers publishers are alienating by making them beg for the iPad version. 

Newsweek made their digital subscription work by giving the app out for free but charging for in-app content subscriptions. They pay Apple 30 percent of the revenue. The glossy print subscription model, which gives away print subs cheap to keep up circulation, and therefore ad rates, probably can't sustain that kind of pay cut.

The push subscription is rumored to be ready for NewsCorp.'s iPad-only paper, but there's no word on whether it would be available to all publishers.

kstoeffel@gmail.com :: @kstoeffel

Lindgren has been instrumental in helping Moss build his reputation as a master magazine editor. The pair began working together in 1999 when Moss, who was editor of the Times Magazine, hired Lindgren to join his staff. When Bruce Wasserstein hired Moss to edit New York shortly after he purchased the weekly in December 2003, Moss brought Lindgren in to be his right-hand man/editorial director.

Eventually Moss and Lindgren began to have regular editorial disagreements, including one in February 2009 that, according to Koblin, culminated in a shouting match that was "the magazine equivalent of a domestic dispute."

Lindgren left New York for Bloomberg Businessweek in January.

Lindgren told Koblin that the tension between himself and Moss was a natural result of a long working relationship.

"I have no grudges. Our differences were the by-product of working together a lot ... It’s time for us to have different situations and it’s worked out pretty well for both of us," Lindgren said.

"Hugo became unhappy in that job for whatever reasons ... It became unpleasant for him and it became unpleasant for me. Hugo knew himself well enough to realize he should go and do something else," Moss told WWD.

Now, the two former colleagues are doing battle on magazine racks all over the city. Lindgren is planning significant changes at the Times Magazine.

So far, it seems like this will be a relatively good-natured media feud. Moss even told Koblin that he gave Lindgren "a glowing reference" when he was being considered for the Times job. But even if they do manage to keep things civil, the competition between Moss and Lindgren will be endlessly entertaining for media watchers next year. We'll hesitate to name a favorite just yet, but the New York media's version of the Subway Series is definitely heating up.

Currently, Ms. Stewart and her Martha Steward Living Omnimedia Inc. oversee her daytime television show, the magazine of which Stewart is the publisher, a home furnishings line, book titles, a wine label, and more. The merchandising arm of Stewart's brand-building empire has 40,000 products in the marketplace.

The conversation also included talk of the iPad app that will launch with the November issue of Martha Stewart Living. The app will feature numerous cookie recipes to coincide with the "Cookie" issue of her magazine, The New York Post reports. It arrives the first of the month, giving iPad fans plenty of time to whip up batches of sweets in time for the holidays — using Martha Stewart kitchenware, of course.  

WWD reports:

Also: Hearst canceled its Christmas party.

The Today Show wondered if it was racist and the AP found a magazine analyst to say he's King Kong to Gisele's damsel in distress.

WWD's Stephanie Smith made a round of calls to get some more opinions.

Roy Johnson, editor of Men's Fitness, said that while the appearance of a black man on the cover of Vogue was an encouraging sign, "we have very far to go to continue to educate people within our industry regarding the power of images."

Emil Wilbekin, editor in chief of Giant, said virtually the same thing; a "step forward" but a little one: the delivery was "a little" disappointing. He said the image didn't fit James' personality—he's a nice guy, not a goon.

The spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said, "In some ways, it's obvious that Kong poster type image is there." In the piece, Ms. Smith also brings up the Jennifer Hudson Vogue cover from last year, over which the actress was splayed with her "mouth open, baring heavy cleavage."

It was all pretty measured stuff; Mr. Wilbekin criticized the Hudson cover, but was careful to say that "mainstream magazines" in general have the problem.