"Questions are being raised around the halls of 4 Times Square about Flip.com, Condé Nast's new teen networking site. Pointing to small traffic numbers and a whispered lack of enthusiasm from higher ups about the project, despite a heavy financial investment in the site's technology, naysayers believe Flip has so far been a bit of a flop. 'Thank God it wasn't my idea,' said one insider." Shockingly, publisher Jane Grenier claims not to be worried: "Our determination of whether this site is successful is not based on a panic check of [unique visitors]." Good luck with that! [WWD]

Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo pride themselves on getting photos of new cell phones and MP3 players before anyone else — even the lightning-fast wire services. And to protect their scoops, they've taken to watermarking their photos. A wise practice. Reuters has apparently run, uncredited, a composite image, above, incorporating three watermarked photos from a post that ran last week on Engadget detailing Verizon Wireless's new holiday line. Product photos are generally seen as fair game by gadget bloggers, of course — but for Reuters to carry Engadget's watermark but not acknowledge the blog in any fashion seems not just ungracious but clueless. (Photos by Engadget, not Reuters)

Josh Quittner, the former editor of the late, lamented Business 2.0 — where, I'll disclose, I worked for seven years before joining Valleywag — has gotten one more kick in the pants from Time Inc., the tech magazine's publisher. In a cover wrap sent to subscribers with the last issue, he's listed as the magazine's "managing editor," even though he's always gone by the title of "editor" in the masthead.

There have been days here at the office when news has been so slow, and we've been so desperate for an item, that we've shouted "When is Lindsay Lohan gonna fucking die already?" Apparently, we just weren't industrious enough: "A TV journalist in India desperate for a story tried to persuade a depressed businessman to kill himself and his family on camera. But Punjabi police intervened in time to stop the man and his three daughters from drinking poison. Now the journalist with a local news channel, known only as Vipin, has been arrested and charged with abetting suicide." [Guardian]

Magazines, whose bread and butter used to be breaking news (exclusive photos) or making news (silly pronouncements like "Person of the Year"), are scrambling to beef up the security wall between their content and the Internet. But let's face facts: The exclusive is dead. Embargoes are pointless. Computers isolated from the Internet, armed guards, and nondisclosure agreements do nothing to sate the public's insatiable appetite for content. Blogs, on the other hand, are all too happy to feed it. Rather than increasing useless security measures, old media would be better served going with the flow by building open communities. Fortunately, at least one magazine editor, Richard Stengel of Time, gets it.

What celebs move the most magazines? "We looked at the newsstand sales of the six leading celebrity weeklies—People, Star, US Weekly, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and OK!—over a six-month period ending June 30, as supplied by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. We eliminated all non-celebrity and collage covers as well as special issues with exceptionally large rate bases. Then we counted how many more—or less—issues the celebrity's cover sold, as compared with the magazine's average newsstand sales." Your top three, in order: Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Scarlett Johansson. The big loser? Britney Spears. [Forbes]

Brad Stone of the New York Times has picked up, belatedly, that the Industry Standard, the fast-falling standard-bearer magazine of the dotcom boom, will be reborn as an online-only publication. A source tells us that IDG, the publisher of the new Standard, had pegged a relaunch date in less than a week. One small problem: As Stone points out, IDG has yet to hire an editor-in-chief. In fact, we hear that the initial plan for the website didn't even include a top editor. [Bits]

Last week, Josh Gerstein explained how the information control freaks at the National Security Agency conducted secret "seminars" for reporters—basically, little classes on how and when the government would like them to keep their mouths shut about top-secret and not-so-secret information. What's funny is that no one seems to remember the sessions, which went down at NSA headquarters between 2002 and 2004. Maureen Baginski, who was listed as a presenter at the seminars, said she had no recollection of being present. Why would she? She was only the FBI's "intelligence czar" back in 2004, before she left to work for SPARTA, an employee-owned defense contractor of utmost secret-government-like creepiness. Likewise? Not a single reporter has yet come forward to claim attendance.

Have Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and daughter Shari resolved this summer's feud? Maybe not! "[A]ccording to several people close to the two, relations between father and daughter are anything but lovey-dovey, and their conflict appears very much alive." [LAT]

Fox Business Network "could end up looking a lot like CNBC, at least during the trading day." Roger Ailes "tried to entice superstar Jim Cramer... Ailes will probably approach the network's other brand name, Maria Bartiromo, whom he first put on air in 1993, when her contract expires in two years... And he may be interested in hiring Liz Claman, the former CNBC anchor, after her noncompete agreement ends in mid-October." Also: Rupert Murdoch might be considering a cash settlement to end the exclusive arrangement between CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. UPDATE: Well, that may not be true about Jim Cramer. Apparently no one wants him, no matter what he puts out there! [BW]

The Financial Times has seen the writing on the wall — the pay wall, that is. That's the term bloggers use for the barrier newspapers like the FT and the Wall Street Journal put up around their content, preventing nonsubscribers from reading it. With the Journal, one of the few success stories in charging for content, contemplating getting rid of its pay wall, it's no surprise that the FT would follow suit. But the British financial daily is taking a surprisingly clever tack in doing so.

Former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston's suit against the City of New York goes to the Supreme Court today. "[T]he central question of the case: Must parents of special-education students give public schools a chance before having taxpayers reimburse them for private-school tuition?" Freston's son has attention deficit disorder; Freston thought that he couldn't perform in math class (the City disagreed) and then asked the City to foot the $21,819 tuition of private school Gaynor. Expect to see the phrase "$85 million dollar severance deal" appear in most of the coverage of the trial. [WSJ]

Gossip gal Courtney Hazlett left OK! magazine last week, we heard, but we didn't know where she was off to. Now we hear she's going to MSNBC, to replace their long-missing gossip columnist Jeannette Walls—Jeannette stopped writing their "Scoop" column more than a year ago to become a fulltime authoress. Hazlett (fun fact: once upon a time an intern for The Smoking Gun, while she was at Columbia!) will also continue her T.V. talking-headness.

Nary a kind word for Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore in Keith Kelly's 1,200-word Sunday New York Post profile. Well, she has overseen the elimination of 1,000 jobs at the magazine in the last year, so you'd expect bits like this: "I think she's a one-trick pony," one 'former executive' told the Post. Moore aims to make Time Inc. a leader of the digital age—so, her groundbreaking vision for the future? "Page views plus minutes spent will be the new gold standard." Eureka! Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey's take? "I wouldn't be the best judge of morale today, [Ed. You don't say!] but I sense that we're on the comeback trail." Here's a better judge of morale: "Remember, the layoffs may not be over," warns Keith.

As part of a settlement between Conrad Black and the convicted fraudster's bankrupt Ravelston Corp., the convicted fraudster will pay nearly $400,000 to buy back a portrait of himself painted by the late Andy Warhol. "Andy used to take a Polaroid shot, blow it up, put it on four silk-screens of different colours, and sell them. We got on very well, so he sold me all four for the price of one.... He was a very entertaining character." [The Globe & Mail]

Will superfine motorcyclist George Clooney be the latest celebrity to participate in the U.K. Independent's gimmicky Famous Guest Editor campaign? According to the Guardian, the Ocean's Eleven star is in negotiations with the paper. He'd be following in Bono's footsteps. [Guardian]

"Ink-on-paper magazines" are having a "long slow sunset," according to Felix Dennis, fun-loony former Maxim owner—but they're not making up the cash on the web, in part because publishers just won't lower their standards far enough. Time Inc., the Economist says, "has stuck to its big magazine brands with People.com and with SI.com, its website for Sports Illustrated. The price, competitors say, is that Time Inc cannot do the sort of sarcastic, bitchy celebrity gossip that people like on the internet for fear of tarnishing the brand of People, and therefore cedes first place for entertainment to TMZ.com (also owned by Time Warner), which excels at it." Well, that doesn't mean they're not gonna try to take on TMZ! After all, not only did People hire Alyssa Shelasky, Glamour's former dippy blogette, they hired David Caplan, the mad ungenius behind the now-defunct 24Sizzler, the worst celebugoss site to ever tarnish the internots. So surely they're up to some secret standard-lowering project?

Keith Kelly: "CONDÉ Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. sat down Wednesday with Portfolio Editor-in-Chief Joanne Lipman to take a very serious look at every page in the upcoming November issue of Portfolio, his $100 million pet project. When the meeting was over, a flurry of Newhouse-dictated changes ensued, and that had some staffers concluding that Si was not happy with the original incarnation of Portfolio issue No. 4." Shockingly, Condé spokesfolk deny it. [NYP]

Reaffirming Gawker's claim that the New York Times is just a fancy blog, the paper experienced a three-hour-long network outage Wednesday that screwed up the publishing schedule for the Thursday edition. It could be worse: They could be stuck using Google's Blogger, which — along with YouTube — is the worst offender for downtime among Alexa's top-20 sites. [Gawker]

This week, motorcycle enthusiast Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, said that his department is starting a new blog, "The Board." It'll join the paper's 14 other Opinion section blogs, including the Opinionator, which discusses the op-ed pages of other newspapers and will benefit from being freed from the Times now-dead paywall, TimesSelect. The Times looks to be the newspaper blog leader—they have 40 active blogs, not counting seasonal blogs like David Carr's movie awards season craziness, beating the Guardian with 18, the New York Daily News with 22, the Wall Street Journal with 16 active blogs, the Los Angeles Times with 27, the San Francisco Chronicle with 26, the Miami Herald with 31, and the Chicago Tribune with 33, for a random sampling. But. Do you read any of these blogs?