In your awardy Thursday media column: the recessiontastic magazine awards are here, newspaper meta-layoffs, Lenny Dykstra's canned, more justice for Chauncey Bailey, and advertising brainstorming:

Get excited, because tonight are the National Magazine Awards, the most glorious event in all of magazinedom! Thanks to the recession, "no chocolate fondue will bubble." What a ripoff. You can read a preview here if you care about the winners, or, if you're a media reporter from an outlet that will never win one of these awards, just hang out in the back row and talk shit, per usual.


The Newspaper Association of America is laying off half of its staff and ending print publication of its magazine Presstime. Plenty of remarks about irony could follow that statement, if one were so inclined, but the way things stand today, that would make one a callous jerk.

Ballplayer turned magazine publisher turned failed magazine publisher Lenny Dykstra has now been canned as a columnist for TheStreet.com. But he reportedly made "close to $1 million a year" selling his stock picks for them, so don't cry for Lenny. If you do, he'll slide into you spikes-first and spit a big stream of tobacco juice on your nuts.


Yusuf Bey, the owner of Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery, has been indicted on charges he ordered the killing of journalist Chauncey Bailey, because he feared what Bailey would report about his shady bakery's finances.

Advertising execs are encouraging cable news stations to keep the news crawl at the bottom of the screen going even during the ads, as a way to keep people from changing channels. Instead, how about put an "ad crawl" at the bottom of the screen at all times?