You know how PR agencies are—always looking for a way to do some selfless charity work. So international PR machine Porter Novelli came up with a great idea: round up a bunch of its young staffers and offer their inexperienced services free to those who need it most: fashion companies, models, and Penn Badgley's mom. Paying it forward is what it's all about! The little "pop up agency" within PN is called "Jack and Bill," and it displays its digital new media online internet publicity chops with a microsite, Facebook page, and a Flickr page! Needy (heh) fashion clients had to audition to win the services of the eight young 20-something staffers. They graciously picked a lawyer-turned-stylist, an apparel company, a model, and this dynamic duo:

Congratulations to the John McCain campaign, which has now officially been told off on all three big cable news networks! Attached is a video of MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell taking some hard swings at McCain's sacrificial spokesman, Tucker Bounds, about campaign lying Monday. Also attached: Video of Fox News's Megyn Kelly doing the same thing on right-leaning Fox News Channel. Wow. Remember when CNN did this to Bounds, so McCain cancelled a Larry King interview in a snit? Guess that won't work anymore. Bounds has become a human piñata like Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan before him, as the media hold him responsible for the crimes of his boss, who they can't get at. It's awesome to see, but still all too rare — on all the networks. Click through to watch a compilation video of Bounds getting creamed.

When you cut through all of the (self-imposed) clutter surrounding Julia Allison—the oversharing, the wacko pictures, the grandiose self-fascination—what you get, fundamentally, is someone who really knows how to get publicity. Today PRWeek (my old employer) interviews Julia on her PR strategy, and you might be surprised to discover she is way more savvy than 90% of the "new media" specialists actually employed in the PR industry. The guiding principle that has taken her this far: "I think that saying yes to things is smarter than saying no to things." See, Julia has actually prospered (in a publicity sense, okay?) by not following the advice of PR agencies:

Gadzooks: at Bloomberg LP, the financial news company owned by NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, six dozen women—"about one in seven of the roughly 500 female employees who became pregnant in the last six years"—are now suing the company for being treated unfairly. That's up from an initial plaintiff count of three. It's almost as if there's some sort of unfolding pattern here:

Rob Shuter may be single most well-qualified man for his job in all the celebrity media. His job, of course, is editor of photo-happy, celebrity-friendly, "What interview questions would you like to answer, Britney?" pseudo-magazine OK! But set aside your revulsion at the existence of this pair of celebrity culture warriors, and you come to realize that we can all learn something from the way the man does business. His reputation is (grudgingly) improving along with his personal appearance (pic: old on left, new on right). Shuter told CoverAwards that his magazine is "celebrity-fair." Classic, classic. Break it down: Shuter was a celebrity flack before he came to OK. So when he got the job, some of the esteemed journalists at the magazine were angry at this publicist interloping on their territory. But really, a PR guy is much better suited to the job than someone with a history on the editorial side. The editor of OK essentially works to broker deals with celebrities and their managers and publicists. That was Shuter's gig before, on the other side of things, so he knows just how to make this work. His competitors, who came up as reporters and editors, will never have that experience. He could be functionally illiterate. No problem! Celeb magazines are driven by photos—exclusive photos. Who fucking cares what OK's brain damaged stories say? People want to look at pretty photos of famous people that they can't get anywhere else, and that's what they get from Shuter. Plus, appearance on shows like ET and Access Hollywood usually materialize only after the exclusive magazine deal has been closed, meaning that celebrities have to deal with one of the mags no matter what. And since OK is the friendliest and one of the most financially generous, bingo. Rob Shuter is a shameless man in a shameless job. Many lesser people would be embarrassed to be him. But Shuter can say with a straight face that he's "proud of the product" and dismiss competitors as "haters" and be totally genuine. He's worth every penny. "Celebrity-fair" is the new "right-sizing."

Several months ago, Brad Pitt fired his flack. His other half, Angelina Jolie, doesn't have a dedicated, full time PR rep herself either. The fact that the couple generally gets great press anyhow raises the obvious question: if Brangelina doesn't need a publicist, who does? The nuanced answer has to do with the changing nature of the celebrity media and the shifting balance of power among various types of Hollywood insiders. The blunt answer is, "Very few Hollywood people need flacks any more." Disintermediation is the new black! When you think of celebrity media today, think of two words: OK! magazine. Its entire business model is based on working *with* celebrities to come up with the nicest, most agreeable presentation possible. OK! is so celebrity-friendly it is edited by a former celebrity flack.

It has been months now since Fox News' PR machine issued one of its trademark slams of a critic, and we, for one, are happy that they have come off their summer vacations and gone back to work. The target this time: Jon Stewart, darling funnyman of the liberal elite. Surprise! The best part about this new spat: the person who comes off looking worst of all is not Stewart, nor Fox's flack, but rather the Washington Post's vacuous conventional media wisdom purveyor Howie Kurtz. A fight to admire, and a symptom of increased media fragmentation and public alienation! A full recap: The Democratic convention is such a news-bereft wasteland that Stewart was apparently giving a press conference, consisting of him riffing to a roomful of eager reporters. During the course of this, he said that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan is "the biggest 'fuck you' to people with brains that I've ever seen in my life" and that Chris Wallace is the network's only legit anchor, and that Fox is biased against Obama. Stop the fucking presses, right? But Howie Kurtz, trooper that he is, put in a call to Fox, and came back with this paragraph for his story:

Media relations is a delicate cat-and-mouse game full of silver-tongued gurus with their fingers on the pulse of the news cycle. It's not something to be left to-for example-bumbling fools. Unless, of course, you hire a firm called MEGA Marketing & Media, which sent out the following actual pitch we just received from an actual reporter at a major news outlet. The persuasive hook, designed to lure the journalist in: "I figured with such a political week, such the the democratic convention just ended, and the republican starting this week." Uh, what?

Former LA Times editor Andres Martinez's new lawsuit is a sad story of betrayal that should convince any journalist never to date a publicist, unless she can somehow find one who is not crafty and constantly scheming to leverage the relationship. Martinez left his job editing the editorial page amid scandal. He tried to have film producer Brian Grazer guest edit his section even though his girlfriend Kelly Mullens was flacking for Grazer. Dirty and stupid and unethical, right? Well, hold one one second: Martinez says in his suit that Mullens promised him she had recused herself from working with Grazer, a client of her firm, at least on this one project. This turned out to be an awful awful lie. Writes Matt Belloni at the Hollywood Reporter:

Drew Kerr, the carrot-spewing former Radar flack, has seen his firm Four Corners Communications shrink to essentially a one-man shop in the past year. But the savvy Kerr, who specializes "in online and offline media" (that covers it all!), knows how to get good PR for himself in these lean times: by crushing PR bloggers from bigger PR firms in a "blog competition" and then bragging about it while spamming his contacts relentlessly for more votes! Kerr's spamtastic bragadocio, featuring a haughty dismissal of megafirm Edelman, after the jump-join his quest for PR blog domination!! PRWeek (my old employer) is having a tournament of PR blogs, and the PR blogosphere hasn't been this excited since some shit happened with Apple's PR department about some gadget one time, probably! Thanks to his campaign of vote-trolling spam, Kerr's spitballed blog about license plates and delis defeated PR tech nerd/ Edelman blogger god Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, and Kerr is taking the opportunity to tell Edelman-the Wal-Mart-flacking superfirm that surely makes Kerr's annual income in about an hour-that they suck the big one:

When a Hong Kong paper said earlier this week that it had gotten its hands on a 21-point memo from the Chinese government's propaganda unit telling the national media how it must cover the Olympics, the head of the Beijing Olympic committee scoffed, "There is no such 21-point document. Chinese media, according to the Chinese constitution, are free to report on the games." But then the Sydney Morning Herald got the same document, and published it in full. Witness the worldwide free press in action, propagandists! Highlights of the edicts to the proud nation's "journalists":

Our effort to catch up on the glamorous life of party boy celebutard flack Jonathan Cheban has yielded an entertaining nugget! In June, Jacob Arabov (pictured)-a.k.a. Jacob the Jeweler, the "King of Bling" and go-to jewelry maker for rappers and celebrities of all stripes-submitted a memorandum to the judge in his money laundering trial describing what a great guy he is, in hopes of getting a lighter sentence. Among those vouching for for the crooked diamond merchant: Jonathan Cheben [sic]!

Page Six is not just a gossip column; it's the ultimate favor trading tool. Boss Richard Johnson can (within reason) make the in-crowd believe that a particular restaurant is a great place to see and be seen-whether true or not. We took a look back through all of Page Six's coverage for the first six months of this year, and put together the chart you see above, tracking the most-mentioned restaurants. It conforms to one's mental list of New York hot spots, with one exception: Cipriani, whose 21 mentions (for three locations) took the top spot. Now, Cipriani is prestigious in its own musty old way, but it hardly fits in with the rest of the list, which is full of buzz-worthy celebrity nightspots and the odd mogul hangout. Favor trading illustrated? Below are some of the more press release-like Cipriani "gossip" items P6 saw fit to print this year; judge for yourself: 6/22/08

Sometimes we come across a PR item so ignorant, misguided, and inexplicable that we just have to shake our heads back and forth and sigh in a dramatic manner. We have one such item right here. If you ran a newspaper that had been terribly embarrassed for treating a racist publicity stunt as front page news just weeks ago-so embarrassed, in fact, that the editor responsible was quietly fired-would you not, in the future, do everything possible to distance yourself from the bad designer who fooled you with with the stunt? Metro NY decided: instead of that, why don't we just sponsor this guy's next fashion show? The press release for the upcoming L.E.S. Fashion Flipside show is below. As you can see, Metro is listed as one of only two sponsors for the show. And [bad designer], last seen trying to sell a copy of his poetry book "America, My Whore" to a reporter from Jewish Week, is listed as the first name under "boutiques." Urgh:

Calvin Klein has produced an ad campaign featuring a sultry actress flashing a nipple. That ad has now been banned from TV in America, resulting in a heap of free press for CK and its new fragrance. Could this standard-issue fashion PR masterstroke have been purposeful? A CK exec says it's "not entirely" a surprise that the ad showing Hitch starlet Eva Mendes writhing around naked on a bed (covered only by a strategically rumpled sheet) has been rejected by US networks. (It shows her nipple, duh!) The creative director behind it is maintaining a sense of righteous outrage, but this is clearly a well-executed textbook case of manufacturing controversy for publicity. Yes, we have the ad after the jump.

Celebrity publicists are definitely busy. They're often liars. Sometimes they try to control media coverage. But are they really a "dark breed of fixers, stuntsters and arch media manipulators"? Do Hollywood flacks count as "an invisible army of Machiavellian schemers"? No, they're more like a very visible army of bumbling media whores and hustlers. But the Times UK has several even more exaggerated descriptions of the prowess of idiot flacks. This story's hyperbole makes it the stupidest article ever written about PR, which threatens to destroy the media forever:

The story we're about to bring you is sad on so many levels. Well, two levels. First, it illustrates the disappointing and kind of disgusting decline of a legendary civil rights institution, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), former home of Martin Luther King, Jr. Second, it shows what a farce half of the things you see on editorial pages are, if they come from public figures. We'll give you a condensed version of this ongoing media vs. advocacy group vs. PR firm controversy-as you read it, ask yourself whether MLK would have found himself caught up in this crap. Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees-a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees). Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele. Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen. But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

Earlier this month we wrote about how New York socialite Emilia Fanjul (pictured) hired as an executive assistant and charter-school press contact one Chloe Black, who marries and otherwise travels in white supremacist circles. The story was picked up by the Post and down in Palm Beach, and boy did the shit hit the fan! Among neo-Nazis, that is. Chloe Black, you see, told the Palm Beach paper, "I... do not agree with extremist or racially prejudiced views," even though she was once vice president of the Louisiana KKK and has attended a variety of white supremacist conferences recently, including one in Alabama in June. Perhaps she was trying to appease her boss Fanjul, who according to a Post source did not know about Black's history and who, as of July 18, has not fired her. In any case, commenters in racist Web forums — like the one run by Black's current husband! — are enraged at Black's professed non-bigotry, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports. A sampling:

Everyone is out to get Bill O'Reilly! First Scott McClellan, the elven former White House press secretary, said on MSNBC last weekend that he and his minions used to feed Bush administration talking points to O'Reilly and other Fox News shouting heads. "It was done frequently, especially on high-profile issues," he told O'Reilly nemesis Keith Olbermann following an appearance on Chris Matthews' Hardball. Then CNN covered the allegations as though they were news! Clearly a conspiracy is afoot. O'Reilly said on his show tonight that McClellan and MSNBC "look to be partners in this enterprise," while CNN picked up "garbage." So O'Reilly can presume MSNBC is in cahoots with McClellan simply because it aired and editorialized on his statements, but MSNBC can't say O'Reilly was in cahoots with McClellan even when McClellan himself says that's what happened. Watch this twisted logic unfold by clicking the video at left.

Oh, hey, look who got a blog or column or whatever on the Huffington Post — Joe Dolce! How convenient that is for the thoroughly obnoxious former Star editor, because it turns out his new PR business, shepherded into existence by patron and fellow sometime slimeball James Frey, is promising clients it can "guide you through the new media landscape — ensuring that the attention you receive is the attention you want." The HuffPo slot will surely prove useful in that regard! Or at least it will once Dolce and business partner Davidson Goldin scare up some clients. For now, Dolce appears to be using his column to do some ambitious prospecting. He suggests a "summit" between celebrities and paparazzi, which will never work, especially given who Dolce suggests might host it: