By Hype Stalker

The latest episode of the Me, Me, Me fest known as “Conversations With Michael Eisner” was actually one of the former Disney chief’s best shows. In one show, Eisner played host to Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, CNN founder Ted Turner and HDNet creator Mark Cuban. So many billions on one stage was bound to produce some unseemly throne sniffing, and product shilling, but the broadcast was surprisingly watchable. The stealth bomb of the night was when “The View’s” Rosie O’Donnell herder Barbara Walters emerged from the audience to ask Redstone a “question,” which actually turned into a 45-second infomercial for her own ABC talk show. Later, Redstone responded to Walters’ question about his plans as CEO (i.e. when the hell will you quit already). The ornery exec pronounced that his daughter was, in fact, not in line for the CEO job and that he planned to be around “forever!” He then cackled madly, the lights dimmed momentarily, and he vanished suddenly in a puff of smoke (we joke, we joke). 

Some newsrooms are casual about who gets a look at their prepress pages, and some are not. In the case of BusinessWeek magazine, prepress pages are apparently a hot commodity on the media spy circuit. The New York Post recently reported the prosecution of 25-year-old Nickolaus Shuster for his role in feeding prepress copies of Business Week to Wall Street hustlers for cash. According to the report, Shuster met Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin in Manhattan’s Union Square to conjure their plan that eventually came to involve strippers, corrupt Merrill Lynch bankers and a Croatian underwear seamstress. Shuster’s sexy slide into media infamy may cost him up to 25 years in the clink. The last BusinessWeek embarrassment happened just a few months ago when the magazine published a cover story claiming Digg news founder Kevin Rose had “made” $60 million in just 18 months. The only problem was, he didn’t make anywhere close to seven figures in that time and, according to Rose, still hasn’t. The gaff was a minor blow to the pub’s credibility but, more importantly, a nod to the new round of Internet overkill sweeping the media. Now we hear that the mag’s publisher, McGraw-Hill Companies, has cut around 600 jobs. Ouch. Not a very good business week. 

We’re all for the runway hijinks of “Project Runway” (ah, the bitter sweetness of a Laura scorned by Jeff’s delicious win!), but Bravo may be overdoing it with new shows called “Top Chef,” co-hosted by Satanic Verses wife Padma Lakshmi, and now “Top Design,” an interior design show hosted by couture master Todd Oldham. There is a limit (hopefully) to the amount of everyday minutiae a network can repackage as entertainment. That said, we’re betting that Bravo is already considering shows such as “Top Celebrity Pooch,” “Project I Need My Teeth Cleaned,” and of course the new programming line up wouldn’t be complete without “MILF Wars!” 

Once upon a time Wired magazine was the geek world’s must read monthly tome, chock full of the latest news on how to grow an extra thumb to improve your XBox scores to the best way to hack your telephone so your boss will think you’re at home when you’re really on holiday in Budapest. But with the sale of Wired magazine to Conde Nast back in 1998 for $85 million—just in time for the quick boom and bust of the Internet—the magazine gradually moved into the hecker-free land of mainstream vanilla content. Today, under the stewardship of Chris “Long Tail Hustle” Andersen, the magazine has become more well known for its entertainment and “who’s the hottest new billionaire” coverage rather than breaking stories about genetic research and government-funded space colonies. Following the new Wired formula of hype over substance, the magazine just brought on Nancy Miller, formerly a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly and a contributing editor at Details, Maxim and Marie Claire. While we’re sure Miller has the credentials to whip up great lad mag fodder, we doubt Marie Claire prepared the new staffer for the ins and outs of VOIP, PHP and OMFG-speak that permeates the pub’s pages month-to-month. 

The New York Times, faced with declining revenue (a reported 39 percent drop in third-quarter profits) has decided to scale back its dreams of grandeur and admit that it needs some help paying the rent on its new structure on 8th Avenue. Specifically, the paper needs tenants on the 23rd through 27th floors, occupying roughly 155,000 square feet of media void left by Arthur Sulzberger’s old Grey (and increasingly slow and fat) Lady.

Finally, yes folks, it’s question time again in the big city … Did someone forget to tell John Spencer that when you allegedly call a former president’s wife (even if that wife is Hillary Clinton) ugly, your chances of holding any higher political office in the future are kaput? Speaking of the political Look Book, why did it take New York magazine for us to finally see how hot the currently embattled AG candidate Jeanine Pirro was when she was a wee youthful prosecutor back in 1978? Exactly who was Time magazine trying to convince when they published their recent cover story “Why Barack Obama Could Be The Next President.” Facing new legal pressure from Universal as well as a consortium of Japanese media companies, will Mark Cuban’s dark predictions about the newly acquired YouTube turn out to be true? Now that Vogue’s Anna Wintour has been crowned Editor of the Year by Advertising Age, will all those indie zine publishers finally get the message and bow at the altar of Conde Nasty, or just shrivel up and die?