Can you destroy — or cement — your professional reputation in 140 characters or less? On Twitter, it's easy! Watch and learn from ABC's Jake Tapper, ex-Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon and others:

Today in Twitter, Spanish speakers confused Karen Tumulty, Touré was ready to sell out, Nick Douglas needed the money more, Bonnie Fuller believes celebrities and Patrick Gavin saw the bright side of soup kitchens.

Today in the magical land of Twitteronia: Jimmy Fallon schmoozed the Twitter-loving press, Ana Marie Cox cried because of Jake Tapper, and a tuna-melt experiment went badly awry.

Every communication medium, from the telegraph to instant messaging, develops its own peculiar lingo. But the lingo of Twitter, the status-updating tool which has infected Internet hipsters, media types, and Hollywood, is ahistorically vile.

Did you hear Twitter is now bigger than Digg? That's because you can't vote on Obamanaugural headlines by text message. More OMG Barack!!!!!!1!1!! tweets from the media elite:

Was it the sad news of Steve Jobs's ailments? Or just bad fish-oil capsules? Something was off in the Twittersphere today.

Original Wonkette Ana Marie Cox has landed a gig at Air America radio. Maybe all those appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show finally paid off. With a job!

We gratuitously mocked Times columnist Nick Kristof's Twitter feed last week. But the truth is that he's in good company. Lots of big-shot media people—including many Gawker "favorites"!—have Twitters, despite the fact that Twitter is proven to destroy journalism. We haven't been paying enough attention to their various tweets about this and that. After the jump, we condense the offering of five famous media twits into bite-sized packages:

Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette blogger, left our cozy Gawker family two years ago for a big gig with Time. A regular on TV and in wonky political magazines I don't read, Cox has been blogging for Time from John McCain's plane. But now Ana Marie is in trouble: Turns out her $1,000-a-day expenses on McCain's plane weren't fully covered by Time. Cox was making ends meet with paychecks from Radar, a pseudoinfluential New York magazine. Radar goes out of business every couple of years to stay trendy. Last week, the mag dutifully shut down for a third time. Cox, despite a "mid-six-figures" book deal in the works, was reduced to pleading for donations on her personal blog. There's a big lesson here, and I think it's: Owen, I want my travel paid in advance.

What is the saddest thing about the death of Radar? Its current weird zombie TMZ state? The way they locked everyone out of their computers and kicked them out on the streets? Here is a sad and oh-so-poignant symbol of how basically we are all fucked, in this industry: Wonkette founding editor and terribly famous, talented, and successful blogger Ana Marie Cox, who is often on TV and who still writes for Time, has set up a personal fundraising drive whereby donors can pay for her to cover the end of the McCain campaign and receive, in exchange, AMC's AIM screen name and, for big spenders, a post-election dinner! This is, appropriately enough, a political fundraising method, where donors get special access and personal attention for their cash. All it is missing is cute names for each tier, like Bush's "Rangers" and Hillary Clinton's "Hillraisers." As a model for the future of professional journalism, it is perhaps worrying! But you know we're all "marketing" our "personal brands," right? Now we are microtargeting, too. And once we are finally out of work, when Nick Denton decamps to his secret underground fortress to ride out the End Times, we will gladly email you, personally, 200 words on why Rachel Maddow is so popular in exchange for a hamburger. But who will donate to the commenters? The system is unsustainable!

On the whole, the journalists who've TURNED AGAINST their former boyfriend John McCain are some of our least favorite journalists in the nation, embodying as they do everything insular and adolescent about the Washington Press Corps. They loved John McCain when he could convince them that he was only bullshitting to the voters, not to them. Now, he won't speak to them! And hey, he's lying about shit, too, but whatever. Today, another media person handed McCain back his class ring and ran home, weeping. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, explain yourself!

This morning distinguished political commentators Ana Marie Cox, Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNichol filed a slumber party-themed video dispatch from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. At the risk of crushing you with intellectual heft I had the video department cut it down to its thirty-two most totally totally crucial seconds. I cannot overstate how much you like need to watch this like right now. And because I was forced to cut some of its meatier moments I have distilled the main arguments after the jump.*
FINDINGS: 1. Michelle Obama's hair is newly "swingy" and thus patriotic. 2. Wolf Blitzer is Batman. 3. Michelle Obama's brother "looks like a basketball." 4. Caroline Kennedy's appearance qualifies her a cabinet position if not the vice presidency. 5. The Obama daughters' appearance qualifies them for residency the White House.** 6. The Brady Bunch is for white people.

When there's no new story about Twitter and all of its users — this week anyway — what's left to say? Reporters, they Twitter just like us! Today's Washington Post rounds up journalists covering the Democratic National Convention with Twitter, like former Wonkette editor and Time.com blogger Ana Marie Cox and the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar. (Who found her new boyfriend through Twitter, whee!) We boiled down the whole thing into only what's fit to Twitter itself.

At a party thrown by Wired in June, I teased Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen for eschewing the online publication's mid-1990s bravado in favor of his just-a-journalist aw-shucks routine. I fear the man has taken my jibes seriously, to his employer's peril. He is talking up Wired as a software developer, competing with Google, and thinking about the launch of a sports blog. Remember Adrenaline? Exactly. Neither does Hansen, or anyone else at Wired, the magazine which spawned the ill-fated sports website, which shuttered shortly after Wired Ventures' failed attempt to go public.Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate? If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox). What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill. And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

HBO announced it was moving forward with a pilot for Washingtonienne, based on the book that lightly fictionalized Senate staffer Jessica Cutler's adventures as an anonymous blogger who took money from politically-powerful men for sex including, famously, for lots of ass fucking. The show, whose development has been previously reported, is to be a half-hour comedy. Cutler sells her body, wacky hijinks ensue, presumably. Sarah Jessica Parker is executive producing, so it sounds like it will basically be Sex And The City, but in DC. Filming is set to begin soon. Does this mean casting has already occurred? Who will play Cutler? Who will play Gawker Media alumna Ana Marie Cox (who publicized Cutler's online diary in 2004)? Vote on this critical civic issue in the comments, even if it's the only vote you cast all year! [Variety]

Yep, the inevitable: agency Trident is hawking a book proposal by the self-revealing former Gawker writer and controversial New York Times Magazine covergirl. The working title is And The Heart Says... Whatever; "I assume it's 400 pages of the word me in different fonts," says one publishing industry spy. Dewy Gould's latest career move isn't that surprising: Ana Marie Cox went out to publishers the week after the Wonkette editor appeared on the front cover of the same Sunday supplement. Gould's outline is being messengered rather than emailed to prevent a leak to a certain website. But I'm sure someone can sneak at least a few pages to the scanner. Email us.

Tonight, spokesmonkeys from the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns will debate technology related issues on Twitter in an online event from the Personal Democracy Forum. Former Wonkette and current Time editrix Ana Marie Cox will moderate. Cox once participated in an old HotWired feature called "Brain Tennis," where debaters traded wordy emails. Now, a decade later, progress means candidates will be breaking complex policy arguments down to 140 characters or less. Kind of like the mindless soundbites on television!(Photo from Jimmy Wales)

"I'm just happy to have a place that's as good as Radar for the kind of writing I want to do. I've never been good at judging a publication's longevity." [Observer]

Wonkette founding editor Ana Marie Cox is a permalancer! She broke the news on Facebook and Twitter, natch. She's not leaving Time, where she's currently the Washington Editor for Time.com, but she's now a contractor instead of a staffer. She'll still blog it up for them at Swampland, as most Gawker Media alums are generally forced to do, but she now has "more freedom to write in other print outlets," according to Time. AMC says the change was her suggestion. Oh, and Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers is now a contributor to Fortune. This news was broken properly, in a newspaper column, and not on an Internet thingy. (Spiers has a column in this week's Fortune about inflation and the price of steak. It's probably good and smart but we didn't understand any of it except the steak bit.)

You know the Colbert Report, and how it's really successful? And how other forms of news are less popular and some are dying? CNN noticed that too! So their Headline News channel will soon be airing Not Just Another Cable News Show, a weekly program with a light take on hard news using memorable gaffes from the past week. Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox, of Wonkette fame, and noted Canadian/Huffington Post contributor Rachel Sklar will be commenters. The show, whose concept is stolen from the first segment of the Daily Show and whose title is stolen from the Wayans brothers, begins April 5. [AP]