Attached to this post, the party calender for the forthcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions in Denver and St. Paul. As everyone has acknowledged, there is no news at these conventions, at all. They are just excuses for partying. So this, really, is all your average conventioneer journalist needs to know. We'll tell you which ones to attend and which to skip in favor of unorganized drinking, below. Click to view Attend, in Denver: Any and all "VIP" or "Cocktail Receptions." At night: Creative Coalition, GLBT Unity Dance, Distilled Spirits "Spirits of Denver" Party (alt: Maker's Mark party), Kanye. Attend, St. Paul: Distilled Spirits, the Maker's Mark thing. Honestly, unless an hour or two of shitty cocktails at an open bar means that much to you you are then advised to go drink with the locals. Skip: Everything else.

So who is, like, winning all the medals this Olympics? Besides Michael Phelps I mean. It's a tricky question! If you're watching at home in U.S. America, you're probably inclined to think "America!" because not only does your capacity for snack food consumption mean NBC is raking in the most ad revenue in broadcasting the games, US media outlets conveniently ranks the countries in terms of "medals won," whereby the U.S. wins (by a hair!) and sits atop the official Medal Count, whereas over in China — and Hong Kong — they're ranking the countries in terms of gold medals scored, and China's winning that race by like 96. (Okay, 17.) In search of true journalistic objectivity we decided to consult some news sites representing countries without a proverbial "horse" in this race. Al-Jazeera!And guess what, Osama Bin Laden's mouthpiece says we won. They know what side of the balance of superpower their anti-hegemonic crusade is buttered (guns-ed?) on! Al Jazeera China Daily (Please note the awesome animated flame on this site!) Related: Did Bush Really Want To Bomb Al Jazeera? [The Nation]

Oh joy: another 'homage' cover from a magazine industry that appears to be running as thin on new ideas as it is ad pages! We will be sure to save this one in the hyperbaric chamber in which Gawker Media stores valuable artifacts of the dying days of print media alongside last month's Esquire's Stephen Colbert cover homage to Esquire's 1968 Mohammad Ali cover and that New York Marilyn Monroe homage cover featuring Lindsay Lohan and Esquire's homage to that disturbing (if your mom ever told you shaving your face would make you grow hair there anyway) 1965 Virna Lisi cover featuring Jessica Simpson and also Esquire's February homage cover ripping off that 1967 Angie (yes that one!) Dickinson photo to which they already paid homage to back in 2003 when Britney Spears could sell magazines not named OK!…are we missing any? Most certainly!It's not as if mid-century was such a golden age for magazine circulations. Esquire got up around a million during its heyday, sure, and now it's probably about 25% off that, but Sports Illustrated is actually significantly more widely read than it was in the seventies. But editors back them were at least a little less the prisoners of cover-testing and circulation departments. So it's no wonder that their more conservative descendents hark back to an earlier era when every tired cover gimmick was still new—and when Mark Spitz somehow convinced the International Olympic Committee to give him his medals on gold chains (check the photo) and the world was cooler then.

It's bad enough that 500 bloggers are wasting time and energy "covering" the pointless media spectacle of the upcoming political conventions. Can't tightly-orchestrated pageantry and vacant messaging be left for the television networks and political trades while top bloggers find important actual news that would otherwise go ignored? Apparently not. But the bloggers are making themselves look even more silly and co-opted by accepting a package of goodies, and an embarrassingly nerdy one at that. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

As first noted by the tenacious John Edwards-hounders at Deceiver.com, it seems Times readers are mighty interested in the philandering Democrat, even though many journalists said they simply shouldn't care about the scandal. As shown in the screenshot above, "John Edwards" is the most popular search term over the past week on nytimes.com. If the newspaper was crass enough to actually shape coverage around such reader-interest metrics, it might admit as miscalculation the assertion by the Times' campaign coverage editor last week that while the Edwards scandal was "fair game for journalism," it wasn't a "high priority" because "there are a lot of big issues.... and we have finite resources." After the jump, CNN congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin on why her viewers neither wanted nor needed Edwards scandal coverage:

Did you read Sunday's Times piece about how people are getting their news from Jon Stewart these days? Because I sure as heck didn't! I don't need the Times to tell me to stop reading the Times and turn on my cable box — mainly because I was pretty sure I had read that same exact story in the Times before. But this morning, as the story was still carrying the top of the "Most Emailed List," I decided to go find that old Times story I remembered. Well, it wasn't easy. There are 102 stories listed in "Past coverage" of Jon Stewart (the original Michael Phelps!), about nine of which employ the phrase "get their news from." And yet I could not for the life of me find the one I remembered actually reading. Turns out it is because, like the former "young people" who started this whole "getting news from the Daily Show" trend, I am now very very very old…Because they've been doing this story since September 2000.

Last month the New York Times announced it would be raising its cover price from $1.25 to $1.50, and there were several alarmed articles full of ominous grumbling. But the increase didn't actually come into effect until today, and there appears to be not even a peep of outrage online from readers who are short a quarter. Have we all grown 20% more appreciative of the Times in the last month? Or-more likely-is it just that no one who owns a computer has bought a copy of a newspaper today?

"There's a new Star Wars movie, and no one cares," announced New York Times Opinionator blogger Chris Sullentrop in a Friday afternoon post, about which we would not have cared if it hadn't been closely followed by sixteen ominous words: "(Warning: if you click through the link there will be language that The Times frowns upon.)" (Warning: Spoiler alert: "Fuck.") Okay so: every newspaper has anachronistic decency standards, but the Times is the most stubbornly prudish. One time, for instance, they refused to print the name of the bar The Cock. Another time, Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to "Fuck off" on the Senate floor on the same day the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act" and everyone printed the word then — except the Times. One special historical figure has been directly quoted uttering those four letters in the Times's database-searchable history and it is:Monica! Duh. Remember the Starr Report? Bet you never thought you'd look back on that era as one in which the mainstream media seemed less disingenuously pious.

In the most recent issue of ESPN: The Magazine, 15-year sports journalism veteran Stephen A. Smith responds to the torrent of hate mail he received following his inaugural column for the magazine. The basic thrust of the criticisms is that Smith is an angry black man who doesn't understand any sport besides basketball. Smith defends the work he put in to earn his byline: "See, contrary to popular belief, ESPN didn't hand me the privilege of working here overnight. That opportunity arrived after years of blood, sweat and tears. A lot of people choose to ignore this. Fine! Especially now that I've got the last word. Or the last word of the first round, anyway." His column is immediately followed in the magazine by a story on the Buffalo Bills authored by a young up-and-comer named Luke Russert. Sigh.

The Olympics: yay, a thing I don't need to add a contextual sentence lest you haven't been watching! Of course you're watching! At this point not having watched the Olympics is like not having heard of September 11. DMX himself knows about it! And NBC just got its best Saturday ratings in 18 years, restoring every last eight hundred forty seven million dollars they fronted for the thing along with the whole notion of American mass media. How did NBC do it? New Yorker television columnist Nancy Franklin has an answer: by appealing to the "lowest common denominator"! (Which is funny, because we thought appealing to the lowest common denominator didn't actually work on the Nielsens anymore unless you multiplied the Nielsen rating by some mysterious inflated self-importance multiplier reflective of the proportion of viewers employed in the New York media.) Franklin kvetches that 2008's "not painfully handcuffed but handcuffed nonetheless" Olympics coverage has been the shlockiest yet in an anachronistically curmudgeonly review that sounds… very New Yorker circa 1990!

MSNBC is still not comfortable with the idea that it is the liberal counterweight to Fox News. Executives at the cable news network bristle at the comparison, claiming that while individual "point of view" shows like Keith Olbermann's Countdown skew leftward, the network as a whole has no unifying ideology, as at Fox. But demographics may be making such a bias inevitable. The Times points out today that, amid heightened political activity among young, mostly liberal voters, MSNBC has added nearly 40,000 18-to-34-year-old viewers during prime time, far more than either Fox News or CNN. It is now number one among the young in those hours, while Fox News is dead last. That makes sense politically: Republicans are, as a group, significantly older the Democrats. Perhaps most revealing are the news nets' seemingly bizarre choices of internet partners.

The National Enquirer is having an amazing week thanks to its coverage of John Edwards' philandering, but the supermarket tabloid is probably still going to die along with troubled parent company American Media Inc., the Times' David Carr reports for tomorrow's paper. It doesn't seem to matter that three of the best papers in the country all ran stories about how the Enquirer was right about Edwards and they were wrong or that the tabloid still owns the probably-not-finished scandal. AMI is so deep in the hole — nearly $1 billion! — that most analysts aren't even keeping track of the Edwards coverage or anything else about the company because they've written it off. One gave this fairly devastating quote to Carr, anonymously:

In these uncertain times for the newspaper industry, it pays to think "outside of the newspaper box" when it comes to coverage of breaking news events. So the Chicago Tribune is trying its hand at live-blogging! And they picked the perfect unfolding story: Droopy-eyed comedian Bill Murray's parachute jump at the Chicago Air and Water Show! Which we would make fun of, except that that is, sadly, the most important piece of news occurring in America at the moment (we've looked). Let's check in on the up-to-the-minute coverage of Capt. Zissou's perilous skydive:

BusinessWeek wonders if American newspapers could learn anything from the success of Europe's biggest newspaper, Germany's Bild. Which, you may recall, is the paper for whom resourceful journalist Judith Bonesky (pictured, and "heh") staked out Barack Obama at the gym. (Attracting the attention of Maureen Dowd, who got to ask the politician she once described as "diffident debutante" [and a butterfly! -ed] if he thought it "creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like 'fabric softener with spring scent.'") "It's tempting to credit Bild's double-digit profit margin solely to sensationalism," concedes BW. How entrenched-old-media; we would never do something stodgy and dismissive like that! Instead we sought out someone German-speaking, who explained the subtler points of the Bildstyle:

Here was the Spanish Olympic basketball team, minding its own business by posing for a full-page newspaper ad in the "Slanty-eyed Chinaman" pose, which, as all Spanish basketball players know, is funny and endearing. Then the scurrilous English-speaking media goes and writes a news story about it, twisting it into some sort of "racist" gesture. Despite the fact that Spanish athletes have many Chinamen friends! Spanish nationalist outrage has risen up at the foreign misinterpretations of this widely practiced gesture of eye-based friendship among Spanish athletic teams. So it's only fitting that the (English) reporter who broke the story has now had to write a groveling piece defending his decision to cover this Spanish leisure activity:

When a Hong Kong paper said earlier this week that it had gotten its hands on a 21-point memo from the Chinese government's propaganda unit telling the national media how it must cover the Olympics, the head of the Beijing Olympic committee scoffed, "There is no such 21-point document. Chinese media, according to the Chinese constitution, are free to report on the games." But then the Sydney Morning Herald got the same document, and published it in full. Witness the worldwide free press in action, propagandists! Highlights of the edicts to the proud nation's "journalists":

The precious Times has finally condescended to do some original reporting the John Edwards scandal, pulling from the tabloidy muck a scoop establishing that Edwards loyalist Fred Baron, who can't quite recall these things clearly, admits he maybe set Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter and Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young up with two separate lawyer buddies of his, and also maybe paid their legal fees?? All this happened right before one of the lawyers announced that his new client Hunter was not carrying Edwards' love child, and then the other lawyer announced that her new client Young was the father of the love child. And you know, funny thing, both of the lawyers forgot to mention their ties to one another via Baron. Here are some great quotes where swaggering genius lawyer Baron (pictured) pretends he's an Alzheimer's patient, to the Times:

Lewis Lapham's forthcoming Harper's column on Tim Russert is not entirely unexpected, given the cranky literary liberal's public pronouncements on the late host of Meet The Press. But Lapham, sometimes slammed as insufferable bore, has spun a compelling essay out of his rough initial pronouncement that "1,000 people came to [Russert's] memorial service because essentially he was a shill for the government." Maybe Lapham's thorough disassembling is so tasty this time around because the reverence for Russert (not to mention his son Luke) was so completely over the top: two days and three nights of televised memorial, or some 96 hours of airtime, by Lapham's count. Lapham's column is called "Elegy For A Rubber Stamp," entertains the concession that Russert was probably a good father and friend and Catholic, and then swifty moves on to saying Russert had "the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter," that his "stock in trade was the deftly pulled punch" and that Russert was a "pet canary." Further excerpts after the jump.

So remember how Gawker became obsessed with the Montauk Monster, and everyone was like, "Ho ho ho, isn't that funny and delightful, let's laugh at the 'monster' all summer until it kills us all in our sleep, LOL'?" And then CNN did a story but even Wolf Blitzer had trouble maintaing his usual humorless melodrama because he was about to bust out laughing? Well, no one's laughing now because monsters are eating the Main Stream Media alive. The terrified reports keep coming: Newsweek, as we just reported, launched a panicked, desperate effort to claim the Montauk Monster is a Photoshop hoax. CNN aired video of a Chupacabra in Texas. And now multiple cable news networks have picked up on a Bigfoot discovery that even we laughed off initially. BUT NO ONE IS SCOFFING NOW OH NO NOT ANYMORE.

In a word, don't. As Jack Shafer says, the political conventions are stupid and pointless pageants. Free publicity for candidates and parties with absolutely no real news to be found. Faker than the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. But, you know, the press swarms on them because it's a party. Except twice every four years tens of thousands of journalists get to act like people with white collar jobs who go to "conventions" to hang out in hotels in cities where they don't know a soul and spend a long weekend getting wasted with their peers. It's a little vacation! But it's bullshit. So. How to cover the conventions responsibly—or, rather, entertainingly? Shafer's advice, and ours, below. Skip the Official Nonsense Don't bother reporting on what happens on stage, or even on the floor of the convention hall. Because we all know what will happen—it'll be in the press releases. Don't even bother rewriting them. Why not, as Shafer suggests, "go searching toilet stalls for somebody with a wide stance"? Everyone's away from home! Delegates, party operatives, and journalists are enjoying nightly hotel parties, and probably more. Why not report on the sex and drugs consumed? Try to catch someone with their pants down! Carry out your own little prostituion sting or something. Skip the Convention The best convention reporting would probably come from someone who didn't even have press passes (anyone want to buy us a plane ticket? Business class, SERIOUS OFFERS ONLY). The parties: don't just attend them, report on them! Who's getting drunk, with who, and why? THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW. And the protests! Why not do a scary think-piece on one of our favorite pet topics, the militarization of the civilian police forces? Compare the DEPLORABLE treatment of dissenters in Beijing right now to whatever nightmares will go down in St. Paul and Denver? OR just write some funny color story on the stupid hippies, either one. Make Shit Up You totally overheard John McCain call Jenna Bush a painted trollop? Sure!