Around 15 newsroom staffers at the NY Daily News were laid off today, including Joanna Molloy and Christina Boyle. One insider called today "horrible."

Media companies love to wrap themselves (ourselves) in the cloak of "ideas" just as much as advertising firms love to burnish themselves with the patina of "creativity." In both cases, it is self-flattery disguised as public celebration. We the media are not simply engaged in telling you stuff that happens; we are in the more lofty business of propagating ideas. Ideas! Who doesn't love ideas? What sort of ideas? Oh... all types of ideas!

What comes next after unpaid microcontent? Try 4,700 words about foreskins, at about $3 a word. That, according to a source, is what Sloane Crosley supplied to a new project called Medium, from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Williams won’t pay you for a Tweet but, for now at least, he might pay you depending on who you are.

One might think that a newspaper called the New York Times, which employs contributors from around the world, in war zones and dictatorships, would be less in awe of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a small patch of concrete just across the East River from its headquarters. And yet this week, the latest Brooklyn joke wasn't so much a joke as it was a 2,000-word New York Times essay about Williamsburg. Get it? Hipsters!

Life as a newspaper journalist is a crushing series of indignities ending only with your final layoff from the last print newsroom within a hundred miles of your (foreclosed) condo. For California's Pulitzer-winning daily the Press-Enterprise, today's comically tragic news is that the paper's headquarters is being sold off for $30 million, with the remaining employees destined to be shuffled over to some leased office space in Riverside.

Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murdering her roommate while studying in Italy, is back on television. Amanda Knox, who was exonerated of the charges, has an anticipated tell-all memoir coming out. Amanda Knox, tabloid obsession, is being tried again for murder in Italy. Amanda Knox has a lot of nick-names:

The Koch brothers, billionaire funders of the Tea Party and libertarian all-stars, are reportedly interested in buying several newspapers across the country, including the The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and The Orlando Sentinel. They might also be exploring the possibility of buying Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the United States.

Following the clusterfuck that was—and continues to be!—the media's coverage of Monday's Boston Marathon bombing, the latest disaster being CNN's completely false scoop that a suspect had been arrested, the FBI is finally sick of everyone's shit. This afternoon, the federal police body released this statement, which explains that there have been no arrests and that the FBI thinks the media is a bunch of rubes:

Jeff Bezos, Time magazine man of the year 1999, has invested $5 million in the news and slideshow website Business Insider. Bezos' net worth is something like $25 billion, so in real-people money, $5 million to Jeff Bezos is... about 15 bucks. But it's a lot to BI, which has raised around $13 millon so far, and will "do eleven million dollars in revenues this year," according to a New Yorker article from this week. Update!: Bezos is not, actually, investing a whole $5 million; rather, $5 million is the total sum that Business Insider just raised, between an unspecified investment from Bezos and money from previous investors chipping in again.

David Brooks, a clumsy amateur sociologist who has improbably turned a talent for adjusting his glasses in a wise-looking manner into a gig as a nationally respected opinion columnist, is a busy man. He's teaching a class at Yale, okay? He can't be expected to come up with his own ideas every single week. Today, he hit on a novel solution to his quandary: just have one of his students write his column! You can hardly tell the difference.

Spring is in the air. The birds are birding. The bees are abuzz. And somewhere out in America's dusty far reaches, a red-faced college administrator is trying to censor a rather tame "Sex Issue" of a college newspaper.

From the Spanish-American War all the way up to the 40 Hottest Women in Tech, the past century has borne witness to some epic trolling, bro. This amoral art form—loosely defined as "the media fucking with you on purpose"—has defined our modern era of outrage. It is time that we honored the very best trollings of the past 115 years.

After Ann Curry was unceremoniously fired from The Today Show last year, nugget-headed everyman cohost Matt Lauer was demonized as the driving force behind her ouster. But did Lauer really deserve to become morning TV's most hated man? According to a new New York magazine profile by Joe Hagan... yes, he kind of did.

Henry Blodget, a full grown adult who's held a highly compensated job in finance and founded a multimillion-dollar media company, still retains his ability to be astounded by the little things in life. Like airplanes: what is it like to ride in one? Or women: are they too lazy to get good jobs? Or Jews: why do people hate them so much? Today, Henry Blodget, who has retained the wonderful ability to see the world through a child's eyes (which so many of his cynical peers have lost), has found something outside of his hotel room door. But what??

Esquire magazine's editorial philosophy can be summed up as "Booze, Bacon, Bourbon, Books, Broads, Boobs, and Bros Talking About Fashion But Uh, Not in a Gay Way." Actually, we're just giving them a hard time. The real editorial philosophy of Esquire, as stated by Esquire's UK editor, is simply: "Women are objects."

"It's so good," the actress Christine Baranski told a film crew at the Four Seasons last night, "to have another paper in town." The paper in question was the New York Observer, celebrating 25 years of publishing. The camera crew was from the New York Observer, reporting on itself.

Tunku Varadarajan is resigning as editor of Newsweek Global just three months after it went all-digital. What now, Tina?

When you think "The Montezuma (Iowa) Record," you think "just good journalism, as befitting the town that is home to Iowa's best competition motocross race track, Fun Valley Motocross." I'm sad, and chuckling, to tell you that you may be disappointed in the Record's latest effort, however. (Unless you are racist).

The Boston Globe reports that venerated alt weekly the Boston Phoenix is shuttering after nearly five decades. Very sad.

Page Six reports today that Scott Sassa, the president of the entertainment and syndication division of publishing giant Hearst, is "quitting" (in the sense of "being ordered to quit") in the wake of a horrifying scandal. What is the scandal that is so bad it abruptly ends the career of a high powered media executives? He was sending text messages of a sexual nature to a consenting adult female.