Here's one easy way to figure out who your magazine is going to have to lay off: trace the big spelling oopsie on the cover of your latest issue back to the poor copywriter who spelled Ashlee Simpson's name the way God and the rest of America intended, with a "Y." Then fire her and everyone up the totem poll who missed the blunder and let it go to print.

One of Page Six's myriad of anonymous sources at the newly helmed Susan Toepfer's OK! managed to sum up everyone's sentiment thusly, "It is highly embarrassing and, sadly, someone will probably be fired."

So if you are applying to one of the five jobs that Kent Brownridge has available at the magazine, make sure you put "excellent speller" under the Skills portion of your resume.

You looking for a job a job working for a magazine? Shoot, get in line, or go apply for Stylista Cycle 2. Because times are tight, but you already knew that.

So you'll be pleased to know you can start sprucing up your resume: OK!'s Kent Brownridge is looking to hire five full time staffer, two on the business side, three on the editing.

Brownridge is telling insiders that he's using "celebrity" friend's recommendations, like that of Bonnie Fuller, to help vet potential applicants.

Wait, is that the same Bonnie Fuller that was originally supposed to be taking over at OK!? Right after Brownridge fired editor-in-chief Sarah Ivens and executive Rob Shuter?

Well, at least now you know whose position you'll be taking if you get the gig.

The triple murder tragedy of Jennifer Hudson's family wasn't going to be ignored by the celebrity weeklies. Sadly, multiple deaths are what it takes to get a black girl on the cover of a tabloid. The editors of each weekly, then, had to consider how the competition was going to play the game. Only People and Us gave Hudson A1 treatment, while every other magazine at least included her in a sidebar or footer.

Life & Style and OK! ended up with the same photo. Only the Globe went with a picture of Jennifer with her mouth closed — because nothing says tragedy like eyes staring into the horizon and a mouth agape.

And the honor of Going Full Exploitative goes to, not surprisingly:

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"It’s very important for advertisers to know that they can participate in integrated ad packages if they want to. Everything we do has to at least have the potential to be multimedia and work across print, online and television. This kind of marketing is all very fresh and new and fun for our growing list of advertisers." —OK! publisher Tom Morrisey to Folio yesterday talking about "selling beyond the page," which helped Morrisey boost ad pages 34 percent in Q3.

And get him fired this week.

It wasn't the $2 million-plus Bonnie Fuller, nor Janice Min's former No. 2 (and former British OK! chief) Nicola McCarthy who will be replacing Sarah Ivens (who says she gave notice back in June) atop OK!. Instead, new-ish general manager Kent Brownridge opted for Susan Toepfer of Hearst's recently shuttered Quick & Simple, a might-as-well-be eponym for the tabloid biz. More interesting, though, is Brownridge's unexpected shakeup on the publisher side: Out is Tom Morrissey, in is Lori Burgess. Nevermind that Morrisey brought ad pages up 34 percent through September in an industry where that type of thing is usually rewarded with use of the corporate jet. Burgess, meanwhile, left her SVP spot Niche Media in March, where she landed after publisher gigs at House & Garden and Elle.

So what does all of this say? Common wisdom might suggest Brownridge selected Toepfer and Burgess because he got them on the cheap — in an effort to reduce owner Richard Desmond's growing fears of having sunk too much cash into his American tabloid spinoff. But Brownridge can often be overheard spewing his arithmetic model: The tabloid business is full of fixed costs (printing, checkout aisle pockets, photos), and any publisher knows those costs before getting into the game, so it makes zero sense to skimp on the talent, who are responsible for trying to fashion OK! into a leader among the competition. That is: Cutting costs over staffers doesn't make much sense.

Oh, and all this nonsense about Brownridge trying to woo Bonnie Fuller with that consulting gig? Apparently not much truth to it.

Ooooh, they've gone and done it. After shafting them last week by releasing news of the divorce after the tabloids hit newsstands, Madonna and Guy Ritchie are being paid back by the celeb weeklies with less than favorable reports. Only People, long in bed with Madonna's camp via rep Liz Rosenebrg, attempts any sense of kid glove treatment with the coverline, but inside they detail the "battle" over David Banda and Rocco. Us Weekly and OK!, running with nearly identical photos as People, are notable for what they don't provide: Neither sides with Madonna nor Guy here, instead painting them both as loathsome characters.

But most interesting this week are the Bauer tabloids take: In Touch went with a Jennifer Aniston-Courteney Cox "Yes We Had Plastic Surgery" tale and Life & Style opted for Angelina Jolie "admitting" to a love affair. And that's half the job of a celeb weekly editor: Predicting what the other magazines are going to run with, and either trying to do it better, or move on another angle. Bless them, because a world without obsessing over Madonna's divorce is one we'd choose to live in.

JOSSIP REPORTS — The story behind Clay Aiken's coming out cover for People goes something like this: Lots of magazines were in the running for the photo exclusive, but People outbid them all for a cool $500,000. That's the way MSNBC's The Scoop reported it last week, and that's the story Page Six carried this morning.

Except as our sources tell it — and these are the type of sources who were, let's say, involved in the actual transaction — OK! didn't have a shot in hell at the pictures. In fact, no tabloid did. Not Us Weekly, not Star, and certainly not In Touch or Life & Style.

Despite what OK! might have you believe, the only way Clay's coming out would be told was in the pages of People. And that's exactly how it happened. Here's why:

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Despite OK! publicist Brian Strong's insistence that everything at the tabloid was A-, uh, OK, the ushering in of Kent Brownridge has brought real turmoil. Two weeks ago we told you executive editor Rob Shuter had been fired, but the tabloid tried playing it off as a "resignation." And today, on a news dump Friday, editor-in-chief Sarah Ivens hand delivers to Keith Kelly her own "voluntary resignation" — she'll be gone by Christmas, she says, and insists she made the decision in June before Brownridge ever showed up — which only fuels speculation that Brownridge is looking to team up with a one Bonnie Fuller, who was editing Us Weekly back when he was Jann Wenner's No. 2 at Wenner Media, to fill the top slot at OK!.

Oh, and if this series of coincidences isn't enough for you — the same day Ivens silver-platters her exit scoop to Kelly, an "anonymous source" tells Page Six that OK! that owner Richard Desmond & Co. are turning off the endless cash stream that's kept the American tabloid afloat since its inception three years ago. Shocking!

If Ivens is the plant on that one — and all sources point to a strong possibility — what a nice send-off it is to paint OK! as a tabloid in peril, with tightened purse strings and no cash on hand to pay for big photo exclusives.

Oh, and one final dig:

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How great would it be for Sarah Palin to just man up and take her shirt off for Playboy come election time? She is just such a sassy hockey mom, she's really going to shake things up for those boys in the White House, blah blah blah generic rhetoric WHOOPS there's some breasts. Old guy Hugh Hefner has the right idea on how to really grab the interest of the American public:

"Palin would make a great centrefold. I don't know what it is, but there's something about a really sexy-looking woman wearing glasses. Imagine what she's like when those glasses come off. It would be a new definition of the word vice in vice president."
-Hefner in OK!

Isn't aerial wolf hunting already a vice? Or is that more of a hobby?

There's been a lot of press recently (and okay, not so recently) about the deluge of the nouveau-razzi; those underage shutterbugs that freelance for Star and Esquire, berating their subjects and telling them to go eat a sandwich.

But with the rise of photo sites like Last Night's Party and Cobrasnake, as well as the recent profiles of the paparazzi themselves, the once faceless mob is now entering its own era in the spotlight. Suffice to say, once Adrien Grenier makes a documentary about you, you're officially your own subgenre of alt-celebrity. At heart though, still just terrible:

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Has OK! already hired a new executive editor to replace Rob Shuter? Yes!, according to one source rebounding off our earlier item. Or: No!, according to OK!'s publicist Brian Strong, who tells us things are just super at the magazine. Which has to be true — Sarah Ivens is still in engagement (and pregnancy) bliss!

Within a week of Kent Brownridge arriving at OK!, executive editor Rob Shuter was ousted, and senior writer Laura Schreffler, formerly of the Daily News, quit. The tabloid has tried spinning the news to Keith Kelly as an "everything is fine" scenario.

It isn't. Since Brownridge's arrival, we've heard there's much turmoil at the tabloid, despite OK! publicist Brian Strong's assertions otherwise.

When Richard Desmond brought Brownridge in to head the magazine — even editor-in-chief Sarah Ivens reports to Kent — he likely had little idea just how much calamity there would be. But staffers are picking sides, and most are sticking with the home team; Brownridge is seen as the outsider installed to right a not-exactly-sinking-ship. One source tells us the feeling inside HQ is that his hire was done more so because he needed a job, not because OK! had a place for him. And you didn't hear it from us, but there's already an informal office pool going on how long he'll last.

Oh, and also, Keith:

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JOSSIP REPORTS — We're hearing lying ex-publicist-cum-OK! exec editor Rob Shuter was just fired by the tabloid's new daddy Kent Brownridge. Not even two weeks on the job and already he's shaking things up. And Rob just got done saying, "Everyone is excited about Kent joining the team … Kent is here to add additional experience to the amazing talent we’ve already got in Sarah [Ivens] and Tom [Morrisey]. He’s joining the magazine in a time of growth (19 percent at newsstand, 12 percent in circulation), where we are standing out from the crowd, but the new challenge is to go further. We’re not satisfied with resting on our laurels. We want to continue to grow." Aw, sad.

Further details?

Update: Says OK! publicist and resident hottie Brian Strong: Shuter "resigned" and will be leaving to pursue other options, "whatever they may be." Shuter will "be with us for another couple weeks." And the notion that Brownridge axed him? "Absolutely untrue." Because nobody ever fires anybody; they just leave of their own accord.

Once upon a time, you would open a magazine like OK! or Cosmo and see an article that ended with the magazine's website address, ostensibly so readers could find more information about the subject. "More information" usually just meant extraneous lists or irrelevant facts, but more importantly, tons of ads and pop-ups that brought in extra ad revenue.

Well, that was before the era of plummeting newsstand sales, falling at a rate that makes Jann Wenner stay up at night counting solid gold sheep. Now that most celebrity news of the "breaking" variety is fed to the public through blogs and websites, the gossip-mongering print industry fights to keep their newest issues moving off the shelves. Thus, the tried and tired gimmick of offering only glimpses of stories online, with the rest found exclusively in the print edition. Good tactic sure, but it's too bad the pitch will help Sarah Palin/John McCain get elected:

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After leaving Jann Wenner's side as the publishing maestro's No. 2, Kent Brownridge went over to Maxim, after private equity firm Quadrangle bought it and Blender from Dennis Publishing, renamed its parent Alpha Media, and appointed Brownridge leader of the lad mags. Then, heh, he got sacked last month amidst investor unhappiness. But it's not like Brownridge is just going to comb over and play dead — he's got a new gig. Richard Desmond, he of the British publishing empire Northern Shell, hired Brownridge to lead his American tabloid OK!. So much trust Desmond has in Brownridge, he's having founding and sitting EIC Sarah Ivens and publisher Tom Morrissy begin reporting to him. But it's not just that Brownridge has found another last act that firms up his shock and awe campaign — it's that his gig at OK! means he's in direct competition with his former buddy Wenner, whose Obama-leaning media empire publishes the tabloid Us Weekly. And that is awesome. How to make this do-si-do even more interesting? Mr. Brownridge: Might we suggest you getting firmly behind a one John McCain?

Britney definitely has some deal going on with OK! and this apparently includes online exclusives of her at home with the children, looking terrified/furious/uncomfortable. Jesus, turn the gritted teeth thing down a notch Brit; you're on 9, but they need you at 1:

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What's this? Britney Spears is gracing the cover of OK! for the second time in as many weeks? Just last week the tabloid scored the first interview in something like two years — paparazzi shouting questions at her doesn't count — with the pop star in a cooperative arrangement, and this week Ms. Spears is showing off her new body in a clear "I've totally turned my life around" cover story. We don't have any firm evidence, yet, that OK! signed a cash deal with Spears like the one they did with her sister Jamie Lynn, but if it looks, acts, and sounds like something shady, isn't that enough?

Newspapers are choking out their final goodbye, while the magazine world, by all accounts, is not fairing much better. Overall, the industry is slimming down after a rough first quarter, and many publications are trying to combat the effects with the largest cover price jump in history. But those numbers are skewed toward bigger competitors who average the most readers yearly, while all but ignoring the smaller trades whose hurt has not been as wide. And not all the mags have been having a hard-go of it: Trash bags People and OK! both saw revenue and units increased, despite an increased sales price. Why? Duh, quality, or inferred quality, of the product:

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This is the new cover of OK! magazine. It's the one Britney Spears agreed to participate in after a two-year hiatus. It's the one Britney Spears did not walk out of after ruining a Gucci dress and letting her dog shit on a Zac Posen gown. It's the one where she says she's "rather not" have her sons, Jayden and Preston, get into the entertainment industry while also pimping them out on the cover. It's the one where Britney, who gets like 4 hours a week with her kids, decided to spend her limited mother-son time in front of somebody else's camera. This, folks, is career resuscitation.

Now that's she's remaking herself into a pop star (it's 1999 all over again!), a cleaned up Britney Spears is filming promo spots for MTV's Video Music Awards (thus hinting that she'll return to the awards show) and, more importantly, delivering a sit-down interview to describe what life is like when you don't invite the paparazzi into your life and battle in court over custody of two children whose pregnancies you may have smoked through.

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