Oh god, these spoof magazine covers must stop! Or they can keep coming and we will continue to post them!

First and foremost, the geniuses at Showtime who created the Dexter mocks win the creativity award, but there have been a slew of real magazines spoofing each other all in good fun … and free publicity.

The New Yorker's "fist bump" cover has been done 100 times already, so it's nice to see a new meme.

Earlier this week, notoriously anti-GOP Vanity Fair went after John McCain by mocking up In Touch Weekly to become Out of Touch Weekly. Brills!

Now, the folks In Touch are returning the favor. Introducing Vanity Unfair:

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As dozens of CosmoGIRL! staffers suddenly find themselves without jobs after today's shuttering — or being "transitioned" into gigs at Seventeen, which Hearst will probably make them re-apply for — it's worth remembering that this office was the same one cheering when competitors like Teen People (July 2006) and ELLEgirl (April 2006) folded.

A knowledgeable insider who worked in the teen category at the time tells us that some, but not all, CosmoGIRL! staffers "danced in the hallways" when they saw these magazines fold. Which, on the one hand, makes sense: Down with the competition! But also, mags like Teen People and ELLEgirl didn't fold because they were terrible magazines (or only because), but because the category was crumbling.

And that isn't exactly something staffers at CosmoGIRL!, which relied on those same advertising dollars and tween readers, should have been dancing the Macarena about.

Rather, they should have been panicking, since the shuttering of your peers "is a clear indication that your shared audience is shrinking and you could very well be next." All that said, we're assured editor-in-chief Susan Schulz did not lead the rally cries.

We continue to pour one out for our CosmoGIRL! homies: the zine covering the teen beat will definitely be closing after their December issue. Even though their title is terribly annoying to write (don't use exclamations unless you really mean them!) the world will be a little less helpful in giving you the top ten ways to prep for prom w/out CosmoGirl!

Started as a teen spin-off of Cosmopolitan (duh) in 1999, CosmoGirl! fit snuggle into the gaping wound that Sassy left behind when it went to the snarky catalog in the sky in 1994. Whereas Sassy was accredited with finding Chloe Sevigny and making grunge look sheik, CosmoGirl! found its niche with a more giggly 2.0 version of it's parent company. Instead of sex tips and ten ways to please your man, CosmoGirl! gave advice to teens worried about sex and had Scarlett Johansson spout her political nonsense all over their pages.

Looking forward: Is there anything left in the magazine industry for HS girls?

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JOSSIP REPORTS — That's the word we're hearing from inside Hearst. Blame the economy. Blame Susan Schulz. (Or blame Cathie Black.) Blame Friday. Who knows more? We're waiting on official word, but we're going to guess CosmoGIRL!'s shuttering has something to do with the "marketplace" and "advertising climate."

Worth noting: When other teen girl mags folded, like ELLEgirl in 2006, know who was the first office to celebrate? CosmoGIRL!'s. Something about bitchin' karma?

When it comes to magazines, their fiscal health, and the economy, some fair better than others. Time Inc.'s People, for instance, continues to amaze on-lookers with its ad page gains. Conde Nast's Portfolio, meanwhile, continues to bleed cash while trafficking only in embarrassing anecdotes and circumstance. Hip Hop Weekly apparently believes it is immune to things like payroll and can publish a magazine without paying costs.

And now Haute Living, the uppity lifestyle magazine that fashions itself a Gotham competitor, is revealed by a former staffer to be yet another cesspool of unpaid laborers, horrendous working conditions, and a completely transparent attempt at living the life by publishing a glossy version of it. Founded and still operated by a one Seth Semilof, Haute Living doesn't so much represent luxe lifestyle as it does a publishing sweatshop.

And here are all the nasty details.

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Vice is going in a new direction: they cut off their Letters section because no one was writing them nice letters anymore, founder Gavin McInnes was cut loose for "pushing too many buttons", and now the former gross-out hipster mag is all about the war in Iraq? Or something? Who knows, does anyone read Vice anymore?

But in an effort to become more McSweeneys-esque, Vice is cleaning up it's act with a New York food guide. And it's a bunch of pig-tripe (which they suggest you try):

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"A copyright lawsuit brought against a Web site launched earlier this year allowing users to share digital copies of hundreds of magazines has been settled. Lawyers representing a large swath of consumer and b-to-b publishers—including Time Inc., Hearst, Hachette, McGraw-Hill, American Media Inc., Reed Business Information, Bonnier, Ziff Davis and Forbes, among others—settled their case against the proprietors of Mygazines.com on September 8, according to court documents obtained by FOLIO:. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. [...] But according to a source with knowledge of the terms, confirmed later by additional court documents, Mygazines has agreed to remove all of the publishers’ copyrighted content, review and screen uploads for any content not authorized by the publishers and open a channel to allow Mygazines to be notified when copyrighted content appears." [Folio, earlier]

Hey guys, remember the success of Vogue India? The publication that got called out in the NYT for using "local" models, i.e. homeless people living at the poverty level, to promote haute couture for a nation where fifty percent of the population lives off less than two dollars a day? And then the editor for the magazine was all like "Lighten up?"

Yeah, totally not one of the magazine industry's finer moments, but hey, every PR crash-and-burn has a silver lining. In this case it was to alert the public that just because it's cheaper and more lucrative to produce words in India, doesn't mean you should necessarily just move your entire operation over there without taking the local culture into account.

But apparently the lesson that Condé Nast learned from all this was "stop featuring poor people," because the corporation is going ahead with the first issue of GQ India, featuring not legions of nameless poor but Bollywood megastars.

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Surprise! If you put a pair of smooth, tanned legs, a whisper of cleavage and a cute face on the cover of a magazine marketed toward tech geeks who are better at running the world than getting laid, it's going to sell well.

How well? Julia Allison is the fourth-best selling Wired cover model in the history of the Condé mag. Not good enough for the medal stand, but good enough to provoke about 103,000 smitten nerds to grab copies off of newsstands.

Moving on…

Time Inc.'s magazine subscription Maghound launched (quietly!) this week, and new customers are welcome to begin signing up for a $9.95 monthly membership that entitles them to seven titles a month that will smarten up any coffee table or knapsack. Interestingly, Maghound doesn't offer any titles from Hearst, nor do they seem to have signed on titles like The Atlantic, Conde Nast's Wired, the much-envied The Economist, or school-appropriate porn rag National Geographic. The service is inevitably compared to DVD-rental service Netflix, which is famous for what it doesn't charge: late fees. Except Maghound works slightly different: You don't have to return the magazines, which means each one sent to you counts as a single-copy sale, while movie studios don't get to count Netflix rentals as individual sales of their DVDs. This also saves you the hassle of having to tape back in the pages you tore out when every album Blender reviewed reminds of your asshole ex-boyfriend, and that garbage should not be in print! Also:

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You'll be forgiven for feeling how this girl looks

Ad pages are down, readership has flatlined, blah blah. Magazines are in peril! This you know. What you don't know is that the industry's trade group, the Magazine Publishers of America, will not sit idly by handing out Ellie Awards without trying to do something about it. So they're got a lovely new ad campaign to remind readers, "Hey, glossy pages don't come cheap!" They're going to start running it on the Information Superhighway and in print, where, based on industry trends, nobody will see it.

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By now you've probably flipped through the fall fashion books, and made your way to a bikram yoga class to work out all the kinks in your back and shoulders that tend to afflict persons carrying an extra 21 pounds — because that's how much weight you were lugging around if you picked up the September issues of Allure thru W. (For what it's worth, it's lighter than last year's load.) The crowning jewel of the heavy mags was, of course, Vogue, whose 798 pages weighed in at a whopping 3.74 pounds. [Folio] It's just Anna Wintour's way of telling this year's runway models how much weight they have to lose if they plan on walking in this season's shows.

You already knew that Barack Obama was outpacing John McCain's magazine covers 20:1. What you didn't know, however, is that Barack Obama's tie is outpacing John McCain 20,000:1. (Scroll to the 1:00 mark.) This, from a guy who was on the cover of Men's Vogue — where at least he was wearing a slightly different tie.

Pastor Rick Warren was the guy who moderated the debates where McCain's cone of silence fell off. Now the popular evangelical with odd taste in facial hair is getting his own magazine with the Reader's Digest people. Maybe!

Everyone is keeping pretty mum about the possible project, which will center around the ideas he promotes in his book, A Purpose Driven Life, which you needn't read or even scan on Amazon to figure out its premise.

But with the magazine industry enjoying a massage from a cheese grater, will religious articles from the guy who thinks churches will solve AIDS be the injection that the flailing biz needs? Actually, yes:

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Aw, cute! Hallmark Magazine is currently thriving in a veritable print depression, while every other magazine has cut corners. Rolling Stone is left scratching it's head and shrinking its size while circulation for Hallmark is expected to rise by another 100,000 units this year to bring in a total of 800,000 readers (double of what the mag started with in 2006). So why is a magazine that doesn't even put human beings on the cover all the time bitchslapping the competition? Several theories from the people that work there:

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