Last Friday, we ran a report about poor wages and business practices at Vice Media. Many cast this as a "fight," or took it as an opportunity to choose sides. That's fine. We're used to that. There was one response, however, that we simply cannot let stand.

In your traditional Tuesday media column: a new racket for News Corp, a new editor at Men's Journal, a new features editor at the NY Daily News, a new name for Medill J-school

When the newspaper industry is crumbling along with the American economy in general, the smartest people in all of journalism are the Northwestern J-school professors who packed up and decamped for Qatar. They left dreary Evanston, Illinois for beachfront condos in an oil-flush Middle Eastern paradise. There, they have only 39 students in total. And they don't talk back, because no one in the country really knows what journalism is all about:

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, is offering to pay the tuition for hackers who want to turn themselves into hacks. "Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences?" More to the point, is your startup running short on funding? The official deadline has passed, but the school takes late applications on a space-available basis. Quick, grab this alternative financing before Ted Dziuba, the supremely sarcastic Pressflip cofounder who has a column in The Register, snaps it up.

The formal final word on the Northwestern University J-school scandal that rocked the world has arrived. As you'll recall, the scandal arose after Medill Dean John Lavine couldn't snappily produce hard evidence of the origins of some anonymous student quotes he used in the alumni magazine. This led to an uproar, which was inane. Now, the formal investigation of this serious matter has concluded. The letter from the Provost has a satisfying undertone of prickliness: the investigative committee said Lavine "could not reasonably be expected to have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter; nonetheless, the committee advised that in the future such meticulous archiving might be desirable given the heightened awareness of the problems that can result." FINE, we'll save all the paper scraps for you annoying students! Lavine has also promised not to use any more unattributed quotes in "Medill publications," thereby obliterating the small chance that some newsworthy investigation would ever be printed therein. Truly a step forward for journalism. The Provost's entire note is below.

For reasons fathomable only to the smart people who went to grad school, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism And Other Minutiae is still in an uproar over J-school Dean John Lavine's use of some anonymous student quotes in a letter promoting the school. A letter in the freaking alumni magazine. And for god's sake these J-school people just CANNOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT. Allow us to whip off our green eyeshades, set down our press passes, and smack some book-learnin' outta these kids, after the jump.

The Dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, one of America's most [self] important J-schools, is starting to regret drilling that punctilious attention to "ethics" into students. The Dean, John Lavine, sent out a letter with quotes from anonymous students talking about how great all these new Medill programs are. But another cheeky young bastard-in-training there remembered that the school teaches students not to use anonymous quotes, and started trying to track down who those quotes came from. When he couldn't find them, he wrote a story questioning the almighty Dean. Now it's been picked up by the Chicago Tribune, and Lavine comes off like kind of a dick, especially with quotes like "I am not about to defend my veracity." The lesson: Never work at a J-school for any reason, because you'll suffer all the karmic payback for the time you spent as an annoying journalist yourself. Full version of Lavine's controversial letter after the jump.