Jesus, it feels like every week the New York Times finds a new "trend" involving Second Life, the virtual world that lets people interact with avatars to blah blah blah ugh. In the 65th Times story about SL, it's virtual job interviews, which even the Times knows are nearly non-existent, admitting that Second Life owner Linden Labs "doesn't keep statistics" but "says the number has grown exponentially" in the world's five-year history. Which could mean, since we're given no parameters, that there are all of thirty-two employers using a technology half as useful as AIM and a webcam. Also, the Wall Street Journal did this story, but better, last June. Bad enough, but here's what makes the Times's coverage of Second Life such an epic failure.

Today, TMZ vampire Harvey Levin visited NYU's journalism department to talk about how he practices his craft and the entire self-aggrandizing mythos of journalism reportedly ate its own tail and then puked it back up in disgust, forever. Our favorite quotes:

The only two videos on Matt Drudge's YouTube account both feature Hillary Clinton having a coughing fit. Weird thing is, he used his account once last May to show her coughing at a commencement speech, then again today to show her hacking it up on TV. While the old video has actual footage, the new one is just a camcorder pointed at the TV, which would be déclassé even when copying last night's Family Guy. Both videos are below, if you share Drudge's Clinton-cough fetish.

Mark Steyn reviewed a book about a Broadway songwriter for the Wall Street Journal, and there was just no way for the National Review contributor to write on that topic without somehow dragging Islamic militants into the whole thing, so he wrote this hackneyed lede about how this one Muslim Brotherhood founder hated on Broadway showtunes in like the 1940s or whatever. To return to the book from the topic of Muslims Hating Our Precious Freedoms, Steyn wrote probably the worst transition in the history of literary criticism, in any language, on any planet, ever. It is, at best, a terrible joke puking its own awfulness all over women, gays, Israelis and anyone who remembers exactly how the Wall Street Journal lost a reporter in Pakistan eight years ago. It reads as follows:

Actually no. Reuters' story today, "Porn to spice up cell phones," is just a rehash of a trend story that was never fulfilled, despite plenty of publicists planting the story to promote clients' phone-porn ventures. Take, for instance, the 2004 Cox News story, "Can you see me now? Porn coming to U.S. cell phones," a result of Playboy expanding into mobile phones. Of course Playboy was late, as there was already a story about the struggling phone-porn industry in 1992, when cell phones were actually larger than a naked woman. Click through for the full-size screencap from the Lexis Nexis archives &mdash and the real reason Reuters ran this story.

News flash: CNET's "ad sales team carries more weight than the editorial team," writes Alex Petraglia, editor of Primotech, a videogames-news site. In the wake of Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann's firing, should anyone find this shocking? No. But in an attempt to jump on the Gerstmann story, Petraglia has posted a long-winded rant about a new ad campaign plastered all over the Gamespot website.

A recent piece on Yelp written for San Francisco magazine by one Karen Solomon roughs up the local-reviews website, but Solomon's critiques are mostly on target: The site's audience is insular and dominated by Bay Area residents; it has struggled to expand to other cities and define a business model. Just one small problem: San Francisco magazine reviews local businesses. In between throwing lavish parties, Yelp runs a website which lets its users do the same. So the two compete, at least in theory.

Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October.

Today was tumultuous for the stock markets, and the up-and-down swings took their toll on one MarketWatch editor, who typed "oh shit" into a subhead on the homepage. Whoever it was, we salute you for honesty in financial reporting. Rupert Murdoch, your new owner, should be proud.

Agence France-Presse, which previously prohibited the use of Wikipedia as a source by its journalists, has extended the restriction to Facebook. Imagine that: banning reporters from Facebook. Who do they think they are — Mark Zuckerberg? [Journalism.co.uk]

Yes, there's some truly bad man's-inhumanity-to-man stuff going down in Kenya. No, Robert Scoble and his echo chamber are not morally obliged to figure out some tech angle and post about it. The fallacy made by political correctards is that if Robert Scoble doesn't blog about something, he either doesn't know or doesn't care about it and neither do his readers.

Corey Worthington, the 15-year-old Melbourne boy who threw a wild party at which over 500 guests terrorized the neighbors, vandalized cars, and chased off the cops, is still attracting a ricockulous attention spree from the media. Since his first interview on Australian tabloid show A Current Affair, Worthington (sometimes called Corey Delaney) appeared on the show again after ACA tracked him down to the beach where he's hid from his parents since the party this past weekend. The video, including highlights from the interview that got over a million viewers on Break.com, is below. Meanwhile, Worthington's been interviewed by Fox FM and tracked by MSN, which reports he's refused to remove his sunglasses all week, ever since he told the ACA interviewer that the glasses were famous.

By "world news" I mean "the current favorite video being passed around online." And by that I don't even mean it's the most-watched video of the week, but that this video of an unapologetic Australian hipster ruffian is being passed around every pass-stuff-around site until it seems it's taken over the Internet. Below, a summary of the video and a timeline of how it spread (and of course the video itself).

A big-league reporter emailed us to imply that he (or was that she? I forget) has inside info on today's Macworld product announcements, and that my hunch that there's a MacBook with AT&T wireless built in is totally wrong. Of course, the real point of the email was nyah nyah I'm special. But thanks for the tip.

Has Fox Business Network put a scare in CNBC? Not by the numbers, but by the channel's content, we'd say so. CNBC has picked up on Rupert Murdoch's "sex sells" business-network strategy. As part of its "Keeping America Great" series, CNBC aired a segment on "Sex and the Tech Revolution" from the AVN 2008 (NSFW) adult-entertainment convention in Las Vegas.

Give Samir Arora this much credit: The founder of Glam Media is an excellent salesman. Especially when pitching a gullible press corps. Folio is the latest to take the bait. The magazine swallows Arora's line that as an ad network, Glam deserves comparison to wholly-owned media properties. (Such as, I should mention, Jezebel.com, the women's site published by Gawker Media, the owner of Valleywag.) It's nonsense, of course. But when Deborah Fine, CEO of NBC Universal's iVillage, points this out, she's portrayed as a disgruntled rival, not a voice of reason. Too bad Folio didn't listen to her, or talk to stock analysts, or do anything, really, besides transcribe what Arora told the magazine. Brokering ads on thin margins is a rough business, and one in which Glam competes with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. And now, NBC.

No one expects the fannish inquisition. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can breathe easy; he has nothing to fear from 60 Minutes after all. From the looks of the teaser CBS News is running for his upcoming interview, the hardest question Zuckerberg got asked was if he got in trouble at Harvard for launching Facemash, a predecessor of Facebook built from photos he hacked out of school servers. The venerable news organization even got his net worth wrong — he owns 27 percent of Facebook, making him worth $4 billion on paper, not $3 billion. So much for factchecking. Here are the questions we wish CBS's Lesley Stahl had asked — but doubt she bothered:

Portfolio magazine takes diversification to a new extreme: The mag leads January's issue with Robert Reich's admonition to "get corporate money out of politics" since companies often "set the agenda" and "pour millions of dollars into the system." Flip to the back pages, and veteran business journalist Roger Lowenstein is slamming a book on responsible investing with the argument that corporate "donations seem too small to encourage any meaningful and lasting shifts in government policy."

The press's shaky grasp on Facebook usually manifests itself in opinions: "It's the new Google" (it's not), "it doesn't have the ad-clog and spam problems that plague MySpace (it does). But this time the French press got the entire story wrong. When the 28-year-old French man unaffiliated with Facebook claimed to be the company's new president in France, the country's press, including L'express and Le Parisien (which later front-paged a retraction), ran with it. Techcrunch.com has the long version, I've got the short version.

I'm sitting in the CES press lounge when my editor, Owen Thomas, sends me an email: