Rather than train new bloggers on the mediabistro live site, I've been letting them play with elizabethspiers.com, which has resulted in posts like this one. Expect a few more in the next couple of days.

If you've come here looking for a smart, funny urban voice with wide-ranging interests and an intuitive understanding of the blog medium, you've come (temporarily) to the wrong place. I'm Rachel Sklar, invited by our charming hostess to practice my blogging skills in advance of assisting her at FishbowlNY. If you're wondering what I've done to earn this laurel, fear not: I'm an extremely professional journalist, very classy, and I write about only the most serious and pressing subjects. Prior to being a full-time freelance writer I was a lawyer who scorned the use of family connections to get ahead in my profession (evidently I was also not a very good lawyer, because a year and a half later I am still owed $1100 for this fucking article). Wow, now I can totally see how blogging could become addictive, but I'll stop before Elizabeth reconsiders the appointment and I have to go back to doing this.

Salon asked me to write a little piece about the departure of Joyce Wadler from the Times Boldface Names column:

Loyal readers of the column may argue that it was never a gossip report as much as a party report, but let's get one thing out of the way: The classic gossip column -- a column that actually, as the phrase implies, reports gossip -- is as dead as Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. It was tortured to death by lawyers, publicists and J-school moralists who painfully litigated, negotiated and preached it out of existence. Even Star magazine has fact-checkers nowadays. Things have changed...

"This is The Times' excuse for a gossip column" the New York Post's Liz Smith complained recently to, well, the Times. "They don't let what's happening be the story." What she meant is that they don't let what's supposed to be happening be the story. If they did, Tom Cruise would charmingly glide in and out of a Joyce Wadler column unscathed by double-entendres and notes about his publicist. He doesn't, because that isn't what happens, and Wadler wasn't for a moment going to pretend that it was...

Nick's launching Sploid.com (an anarcho-capitalist Drudge, according to Nick's description) today. It's being written by Choire Sicha and...drumroll...

KEN LAYNE. (Or "Ken Lane" as Joe Hagan calls him.) This means Sploid already has a huge advantage over Drudge: it will be funny. Drudge is not funny. Not wittingly funny, anyway.

Layne's a huge part of the reason I started blogging in 2001. I blame him for all of this. (Blame where blame is due: Tim Blair as well.)

Or, as Jim Treacher put it quite a while ago: "Hey, did you guys know that Layne was the first blog I ever read? He was like my gateway blog, so it's all his fault. Damn you, Layne. These could have been the best years of my life."

I'll be reading at the WYSIWYG Talent Show on Tuesday, April 19 with Dan Radosh, Jon Friedman, Michelle Collins, Brian Grosz, Frank Beekman and Andy Horowitz at 7:30 PM.

[These are otherwise meaningless links I need for a conference presentation tomorrow.]

MSM:
Koyen 1
Koyen 2
Gannon 1
White House
Wolff 1
Wolff 2
Graydon 1
Graydon 2
Zeta Jones 1
Zeta Jones 2

PR:
Perkins, pt. 1.
Perkins, pt. 2
blog pitch
EW Oscar Party
Vincent Gallo

Summer's almost here, which means that lease on my apartment is nearly up. (At some point, I'll plan far enough ahead to sign for a place that I actually like and want to live in for more than twelve months.) At any rate, I'm looking for a new apartment and need to find something by the beginning of June. I'm currently in an East Village studio with a slightly uneven floor. (Drop change in the middle of the room and it rolls to the south wall.) Something similar would be great--but, you know, without the uneven floor.