Marci Alboher, the New York Times blogger who wrote the Shifting Careers column about people doing exciting/entrepreneurial things after they got laid off, just got laid off from The Times. And then she blogged about it…in The Times. Because such is the strange, strange world we live in.

When Sarah Palin told Greta Van Susteren that the Eisenstadt hoax was started by "some blogger — probably sitting there in their parent's basement wearing their pajamas blogging some kind of gossip or a lie," a lot of people, myself included, took offense. I don't blog in pajamas! It's Juicy Couture or nothing, babe.

And besides, some of us don't have that $150k of taxpayer money to spend on ourselves and our families. So it's nice to see Rachel Maddow sticking up for us poor schmucks who don't have an office to go outside of our bedrooms while we sit and spin our evil lies that go unchecked by the MSM. Oh no, wait.

Gone are the days of Hunter S. Thompson tagging along on Nixon's press plane just for a goof while covering the election for Rolling Stone. Now, only the most affluent publications can afford to send their most reputable reporters into the sordid muck of the campaign trail, where expenses can run in the range of $10,000 per week per person. And even then, what you're paying for is the chance to rub elbows with top campaign aides that remain inaccessible from the regular press folks who don't have enough time to thumb-reply a BlackBerry response to other muckrakers. Well, there's also the flow of high-end booze.

But in the age of Twitters and newspaper profit decline, as Howard Kurtz points out, the only type of campaign coverage that might still be worth the cost is the outsider, Gonzo journalism of old:

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There is a certain kind of publicity stunt that cagey PR people sometimes employ for movie premieres and other openings, wherein extras are hired to stand in line for a product/movie/what-have-you and wait for the buzz to generate. The thought being: If you build anticipation, they will come. Nothing technically illegal about the operation, just some good old-fashioned wayward promotion advertising. Sometimes products just need a push.

Not everyone agrees. Orange, the Euro cell phone company, has been in the middle of a media/blogger frenzy of late because it supposedly fluffed the lines for the new 3G iPhones released in Poland with hired help. Naturally ,Orange denies paying anyone to stand in line. And the blogs are calling bullshit. The industry? They've mustered a collective shoulder shrug.

The real story, then? The unnecessary outrage from the American digerati (spurred by Reuters, who broke this maybe true story) and its feelings toward Orange, and in a broader sense, Poland in general, for not being so super-enthused by the glorious Apple products they would take off work to stand in zombie lines waiting for their phonestuffs.

CNN's "expansion" program, which they've heralded by introducing all-platform journalists (read: less than bloggers), actually involves cutting staff and headquarters. Crazy, huh? The Chicago HQ will be closed, and the journalists there will answer to the LA office. Likewise, CNN staff in Dallas will answer to their Atlanta office. Which makes tons of sense, even though "Chicago is closer to Atlanta and farther from Los Angeles than Dallas is." You have to give props for ingenuity though; by calling their cut-backs "expansions," CNN is trying to reassure Time Warner shareholders, and media onlookers like us, during a particularly trick time in the news where everybody is forced to cut staff, yet the upcoming elections require a more constant news cycle. The solution? These all-platform journalists will work for basically pennies just to see their name on the screen, even if it means working by yourself as the only CNN operative in Boise, ID.

CNN has plans to supplement their staff with non-traditional (read: not real) reporters, who will gather all their newsiest news armed only with a laptop and their bookmarks to The Drudge Report. Typically we call these people bloggers, but what do we know, we would never have called Richard Quest a reporter either and apparently he is.

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