Mobile Rules, a business-plan competition for wireless startups, is promising winners the ultimate booby prize: their photo on the cover of Red Herring magazine next March. One small problem: With printing and distribution bills reportedly unpaid, the Herring has given up on the paper-magazine business. An online-only magazine cover somehow seems unsatisfying. But give Herring publisher Alex Vieux this much credit: It's a very economical prize.

Ooh, Guardian America is here, new today! Now we can get American news with that punchy English flair. It's sort of confusing because it's just like the Guardian only with fewer names that you don't recognize? But now, should we ignore the "foreign" Guardian? But what if we want to read about the Kurds? Guardian American won't write about the Kurds any more than any other American publication! Isn't this sort of like (but in reverse?) how BBC America doesn't actually carry the super-trashy English programs we really crave? [Guardian America]

Even though he's never quite been able to match the profound national mindfuck he laid down when he went live with Monica Lewinsky a couple minutes before everyone else, Matt Drudge's bizarre story sense and predilections still drive the larger political media narrative. Except for his weird weather obsession. But when he puts a semi-comprehensible political headline in 72-pt. font, people take note. The fact that he's a weirdo Crypto-Liberti-Publican has always been something of a problem for the liberals who used to control the media, but now, finally, they have a candidate craven enough to play Matt's game: Hillary Clinton!

Men's Health's editor Dave Zinczenko has peered into the future of media, and he, unlike everyone else, is not worried. Nothing to feel, everyone! Magazines will be around forever and people will always buy them, even though everyone's circulation keeps sliding. How does Zincetera know this? Because it already is the future, and no one dresses like they're in Logan's Run. Think about it!

"No one reads newspapers anymore" was a line I heard over and over at this week's Web 2.0 Summit. "Did you see that one session where that one guy asked people to raise their hands?" Talk about a skewed data set. Buried in Valleywag's gloating over a tiny dip in print ad revenues at The Wall Street Journal was a more telling stat: The paper's print readership went up 8 percent in the past year after its publishers cut subscription rates. Average income for the Journal's two million-plus daily readers is around $200,000 a year, their average net worth over $2 million. Sixty percent are classified as "top management." If the wantrepreneurs packing Web 2.0 don't read the Journal, here's another way to look at it: Maybe they should start. (DISCLAIMER: I freelance for the WSJ. It always makes me laugh when Om Malik tells friends I don't have a real job.)

Author Dan Lyons saw our excerpts from Options, his fictional novel as Fake Steve Jobs, and alerted his publisher. A nice young man from Sub Rights (whatever that is) rang my cellphone and, after checking out our posts, had one word: "Awesome." After the jump, a bonus three-fer.

One last excerpt from Options, the fictional novel by Fake Steve Jobs poser Dan Lyons.

Another excerpt from Options, the fictional novel by Fake Steve Jobs poser Dan Lyons.

Another excerpt from Options, the fictional novel by Fake Steve Jobs poser Dan Lyons.

The way News Corp. monarch Rupert Murdoch manipulates his many newspapers is enough to make Charles Foster Kane blush. It's one reason integrity-laden Wall Street Journal reporters lobbied against his takeover bid. But now it seems the mockingly self-righteous crew is starting to revel in their deal with the Aussie devil.

Another excerpt from Options, the fictional novel by Fake Steve Jobs poser Dan Lyons.

Options, the fictional novel by Fake Steve Jobs author Dan Lyons, is out already if you know where to look. To help you blow off Friday I'll post the best passages as I hit them. The novel, spun out from Lyons's insanely great Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, tells Steve's side of the stock options backdating scandal. Here's the first of our excerpts:

An informant reports that high-energy Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's early morning razzle-dazzle outpaced one reporter:

I'm always hearing that no matter how bad it gets for newspapers, icons like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will be fine. Don't count on it. Dow Jones announced earnings today, and it looks like even the Journal is in trouble. Print ad revenues sank 2.9 percent in the third quarter. And worse yet, while print circulation increased 7.8 percent, ad revenue dropped 0.5 percent. Advertisers had to spend less to reach more readers. Online ad revenues were up 7.8 percent in the quarter, however. And there's your solution? Rupert Murdoch should go with his instinct and set WSJ.com's content free. The plan appears to be working for the Times. (Photo by Claire L. Evans)

I hate watching people suck up to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. But I enjoy watching Arrington, a law-trained entrepreneur before he began posting in 2005, learn the ropes of reporting as he goes. Last night, News Corp. media overlord Rupert Murdoch's publicist circulated an advance notice to reporters. It detailed Murdoch's planned onstage announcement that night with MySpace head Chris DeWolfe at the Web 2.0 conference. Arrington did what career newsmen do: He wrote the story ahead of time. He published it as soon as Murdoch and DeWolfe took the stage. Arrington's post falsely claimed the pair had "announced some of their plans during a Q&A with John Battelle" for about 15 minutes before it actually happened. Still, TechCrunch wins! And Arrington has once again accidentally exposed another behind-the-scenes game that delivers fake "breaking news" to trusting audiences. I'm sure journalists and bloggers will lecture TechCrunch today. They're really saying: Damn, that scoop should've been mine. (Photo: TechCrunch)

Microsoft and several large media companies — Disney, CBS, NBC Universal, Fox and MySpace, Viacom and Dailymotion — will announce plans this morning to use technology "to eliminate copyright-infringing content uploaded by users to Web sites, and block any infringing material before it is publicly accessible," according to a Wall Street Journal report. The Journal says Google, which separately announced its own automated piracy detector yesterday, isn't part of the group.

Reporting is hard work. So why bother? That seems to be the rationale behind a new Q&A session scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit. Program chair John Battelle will answer questions for journalists who can't be bothered to actually, y'know, attend the conference. Another option for even lazier hacks: Just read Valleywag's minute-to-minute coverage. Special correspondent Paul Boutin and I, we've got your back. Hit the bar instead. Your editors need never know.

"It's not a TED-type thing, where they scare you with the opulence of the food." — O'Reilly Radar editorial director Jimmy Guterman, the only other guy in the Web 2.0 Summit press room with me on the morning the show opens. EXCLUSIVE BREAKING MUST CREDIT VALLEYWAG: Reporters in Silicon Valley are kind of slackers.

Looks like the New York Times's decision to kill off TimesSelect, its inexplicable subscription offering, is already paying off. A month after freeing its op-ed content and archives, the Opinion section reportedly doubled its readers since September 15, while NYTimes.com as a whole grew 10 percent. The Gray Lady couldn't have done better pulling a Marilyn Monroe over a subway grate. Details and a pretty graph after the jump.

Scripps, the cable-TV, newspaper, and Web conglomerate, will split into two publicly traded companies, its board announced today. Scripps Networks Interactive gets the growing cable-TV channels, including HGTV, and all the Internet properties. E. W. Scripps gets stuck with 10 broadcast television stations and newspapers in 17 U.S. markets. The lucky Kenneth Lowe, Scripps' current CEO, will keep running Scripps Networks. And in the worst loss ever recorded for a rock-paper-scissors game, Richard Boehne gets to helm the company slated to be destroyed by YouTube and Craigslist. (Photo by neurmadic aesthetic)