In your maudlin Monday media column: Magazines fail at drug-smuggling, sad layoffs at Videogum and Boston Magazine, newspaper reporters in Canada may strike(!), the NYT pokes the WaPo, and an update on the Milwaukee journalist-cop affair scandal.

A 70 year-old American woman tried to smuggle a half pound of marijuana into the country from Amsterdam by concealing it "inside a newspaper wrapped bundle of Der Spiegel magazines." Say the Feds in a laff-filled press release: "Unless she intended to write a book on German marijuana, the "reference material" an elderly traveler presented to Customs and Border Protection officers at Washington-Dulles International Airport on Wednesday afternoon won't help much anymore." Hahaha, Feds. Bucky Turco made the appropriate joke, which is, hey, another thing magazines aren't good for.

The talented Lindsay Robertson has been laid off from Videogum, the site she helped to co-launch. Her last day will be in a week or two. That leaves Gabe Delahaye as the last editorial employee at Videogum (Scott Lapatine and Amrit Singh remain at Stereogum, its musical counterpart). The owner of the site, Buzz Media, has been laying off other employees as well recently—including, we hear, two others at Stereogum. Although we hear traffic is doing well at the site, ad sales suck everywhere. Lindsay is maintaining a good attitude about the whole crap, in her farewell email: "Did you know the Chinese symbol for "crisis" is totally not the same as the one for "opportunity"? That's a complete myth. But I'm going to pretend like it is anyway, and take its meaningless "lesson" to heart. Onward and upward! When god closes a door he opens the garage door! I'm on this! Etc."

Elsewhere in layoffs: Boston Magazine has laid off its editor and five other employees, and is giving the rest of its staff one-week unpaid furloughs.

Reporters and sales staff at Toronto's Globe and Mail, the largest paper in Canada, are vowing to go on strike if management doesn't offer them a better contract deal by the end of the month (the current offer would slash pensions and cut wages by almost 30%). There is no possible good ending to this story.

The Washington Post published a 7,000-word two-part investigative story on an unsolved murder—a victory for endangered long-form investigative journalism!—and ran it online-only. This led some print subscribers to reasonably question why the hell they pay for the print edition. The WP said the story was so long they didn't have space for it in the paper, which is, eh, not so great of a reason if you think about it. But the episode did give the NYT a chance to uphold another journalism tradition: slamming your rival papers.

Journosex scandal update! Last week it was revealed that Jessica McBride, a reporter who wrote a positive profile of Milwaukee's police chief for Milwaukee Magazine, had an affair with that same police chief. Now McBride has finally come out and said that the affair started months after the story was written, and the editor of Milwaukee Magazine has slammed the "innuendo-laden" original story about the affair. There you have it. Technically not a conflict of interest, perhaps!