Today in passive-aggressive media spats: New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg swears he doesn't mind that Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill block-quoted liberally from an article he wrote, it's just that Kashmir is wasting her life and selling her body for money.

The story started in whispers at a party. "You worked for Arianna Huffington?" I asked a new acquaintance. "Got any gossip?"

In your law-abiding Thursday media column: Martha Stewart shows kids how to do drugs, Mike Bloomberg explains the "new media," predictions for 2010, and Budget Travel is sold.

Last night a bunch of people who work in mainstream media arbitrarily divided themselves in half in order to argue over the vague, meaningless proposition, "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media." It was great fun to watch. Fake issue, real animosity!

We start working on Saturday's dick jokes at 9AM, while the mainstream media's still sleeping. Example: the Times - where people read about NYC bomb threats - was eight hours late to one that shut down LaGuardia Airport today.

As if paying out the snout for a graduate degree to help you land a low-paying job in the highly unstable field of journalism wasn't hard enough. Now, Inside Higher Ed reports, J-schools are adding "new media" concentrations and programs to their repertoire. That's right: THEY'LL TEACH YOU HOW TO BLOG.

The Huffington Post, that repository of crackpot rants and informed political debate (plus "verticals"! Lots of verticals) does not pay its bloggers. But they hypothetically might, sometime in the future. HuffPo CEO Betsy Morgan (formerly of CBSNews.com) was interviewed by her college alumni magazine. After the jump, probably the most obnoxious and telling new-media statement of our time about actually paying employees. (Hint? "So 1993.") (Mixed Media via CJR)

Kevin Rose started Digg specifically to give users the power to decide what's news. It must be a pain to see some of his top users quit the site and write an open letter charging him with "disregard for the Digg community," "lack of transparency," and "flagrant disrespect of top users." They were angry that a sudden change in the site had lessened their influence. This may seem like an intramural tiff, but these users are known for submitting thousands of stories to Digg, driving up to several hundred thousand visits to each story that makes the front page. Gawker Media alone owes millions of pageviews to Digg. And this isn't the first time top users have grumbled. So Rose and his CEO Jay Adelson made a surprisingly sensible move: Late last night, they chatted live with the disgruntled users. Here's why Rose frustrated his top users, why he bothered talking to them, and why it's a lesson for all online media.

Tumblr creator David Karp is being heralded as the "Internet's Boy Wonder" in Page Six magazine today. It's not like that bothers us or anything, but a boy wonder? The guy who invented the television was called a Boy Wonder. Karl Rove was called a Boy Wonder because he knew how to ruin the entire world. Karp streamlined a particular way to post things on the internet. We don't credit the inventor of the electric toothbrush as having pioneered the whole concept of teeth-brushing. All we're saying: if he didn't have that steely gaze and lived in Ohio, would Page Six give a shit? It's a question for the ages. After the jump, a disappointing list of other Boy Wonders time forgot.

The long-predicted but slow-arriving death of print media seems to be moving at faster clip of late. Yearning to break free of their dying medium, the UK's Guardian Media Group has hired an exec whose job it is to get everyone using the intertubes like their kids do. Yesterday, in a workshop, a group of Guardian executives all learned Flickr and the YouTube and even wrote some blogs and things. The session was webcast to show to other Guardian people that nobody died or even got hurt. High fives, guys! We knew you had it in you. [Buzz Machine]

Sony's all-horror all-the-time website and video on demand service FEARnet presents BURIED ALIVE, which is a terrifying show about people who are buried alive! It is the future of digital media entertainment!

Portfolio's website has mostly avoided the intense scrutiny that the Condé Nast magazine itself has sustained. True, it's still in Beta. (But so is Google Mail, and it's been around for ages!) We wondered whether the website would prove to be fulfilling the magazine's purported mandate of "serious business journalism."

This morning's opening session of the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention at the Marriott Marquis did not, for the most part, stray from the now-tired narrative about newspapers and their modern troubles. The publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, the rather improbably named Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., said that newspapers are preserving something called youth-oriented content. (Think of the children!) Journalism, he reminded the crowd, advances a great value to the nation. The crowd seemed to totally agree! John Sturm, who is the president of the Newspaper Association of America—whose board has five women among its 35 members, including Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson—made a joke about the Broadway play Spamalot, which some conference attendees are attending tomorrow night. Synergy! He also said that the Internet is the future. "When you add everything together, our audience is increasing!" he promised the crowd.

Dorian Benkoil, the former editorial director of Mediabistro, is serving out his last month on the job, whatever that job is. Hey, he lasted like 7 or 8 months longer than the 6 months we predicted! So we thought we'd take a look at his resume and see what he has to offer this beautiful world of new media.