Just a few short hours ago, Martha Stewart unceremoniously pulled the plug on Blueprint. But the post-fold publicity spin frenzy has already begun!

"We plan to grow Blueprint digital content across our Web sites," explains disingenuous CEO Susan Lyne.

See, they're not folding the sad, unread shelter title because it failed! They're just totes expanding it! By firing the full-time staffers, relegating it to a tiny, tear-out section in Martha Stewart Weddings and permitting it to exist (in perpetuity!) on the world wide web.

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Blueprint nine that day;
The circ numbers were low, dwindling somewhere in the realm of 350K
And then when October's ad sales came and went, and November's did the same
An incensed publisher intervened, looking for someone to blame.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, 'If only Martha would wait 'till after the New Year
To deprive us of our health insurance, our dental and holiday cheer.'

CONTINUED »

After two years of charging us $7.95 per month to read about Maureen Dowd's personal life, the New York Times has finally seen the error of its ways and agreed to cancel the odious TimesSelect service. And despite pulling the plug, the always obstinate NYT still refuses to acknowledge that the short-lived TimesSelect experiment was a profit-draining, money hemorrhaging failure.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

Which is to say that they didn't actually lose money so much as they made exponentially less than they would have made in online ad sales had they not made a HUGE FUCKING MISCALCULATION and started charging for their content.

A month after reports that Time Inc. execs were considering shutting down Business 2.0 comes official word that the mag will be closing, with many of its staffers heading to Fortune instead. "A benefit of the magazine’s recent purgatory is that most of its laid-off employees now have other jobs lined up," writes the Times. Or, as one cheeky soon-to-be-former staffer puts it, “One good thing having our carcass dragged through the streets for the last month is that it gave everyone ample time to find something.” [NYT]

"For three years, under various pseudonyms," writes journo Stan Sinberg, "I 'reported' that the real reason for global warming was that teenage space aliens were stealing our glaciers for party ice, that the judicial system was in chaos because a thief stole 'the book' that judges throw at them, that leftovers from the Last Supper were found in a man's fridge, and that a man who killed a fly was arrested for 'pesticide' (the police chief chided, 'That's why we have a SWAT team'). And several hundred more 'scoops.'"

Now, Weekly World News (the self-proclaimed "World's Only Reliable Newspaper) has published its last-ever issue,

And the supermarket checkout lines will be, as Sinberg laments, "an emptier, less imaginative place."

Have you heard? Jane's folding. Which is extremely sad for everyone (except Jane's original EIC, Jane Pratt, who's rather pleased). And what better way to go out with a bang than by having the Eva Mendes pose topless for the last ever Jane cover, and a pregnant Milla Jovovich show off her giant belly only months before she (promptly) loses all the baby weight with the assistance of an extremely expensive personal trainer?

Eva Mendes, Kate Mara, Joss Stone and pregnant Milla Jovovich are among the stars baring all for a provocative new Jane magazine shoot.

Actress Mendes, who appears topless on thee cover, covering her breasts with pink flowers, admits she was honoured to be asked to appear in what will be Jane's final issue.

She says, "It's such a girl-friendly magazine and I feel completely honoured to be on the cover and just really comfortable in my skin… I worked really hard for my body and I'm really happy with it."

We think Jane's definitely ending on a high note. After all, nothing screams social relevance and post-feminist sass so loudly or clearly as a picture of actress Eva Mendes, with pink carnations hiding her naughty-parts.

You know what it's like watching the magazine you created get flushed down the toilet several years after you "voluntarily" left the offices of Conde Nast kicking and screaming? According to the crazy (and not at all bitter!) Jane Pratt, it's kind of like watching your second develop an incurable substance abuse problem. Or something.

"I feel like Sassy was my baby; I feel like Jane was my second baby," said Ms. Pratt, who started Jane in 1997 and was the first editor of Sassy, a ground-breaking title for teen girls, before that. "I feel like I abandoned that baby and it went off and got on drugs or something. I do have guilt about that. What I really would have liked would have been to have kept more of a connection to the magazine."

And by "I would have liked to have kept more of a connection to the magazine," Pratt really means "I'm still pretty fucking pissed about getting fired, thrown out on the street and unceremoniously replaced by an incompetent stranger who's named after a boy." Or something.

After yesterday's announcement that Jane magazine was unceremoniously shutting down, we realized we were far more interested in hearing founder Jane Pratt's reactions than those of new (and now-former) Jane EIC, Brandon Holley.

This is because (a) we're hoping Jane somehow finds a way to tie this all back to the time she had hot, ladysex with Drew Barrymore in the early 90's, and (b) we're counting on Jane to muster up the appropriate level of schadenfreude.

And while we were sorely disappointed on the first count [Ed: Seriously, Jane, if this doesn't trigger flashbacks to your intermittent lesbianism, we don't know what will] Jane totally delivered on the "inappropriate gloating" front.

CONTINUED »

A day after Bauer inexplicably shut down production of Cocktail magazine, everyone (a.k.a. a handful of nerdy media types) is trying to figure out what happened to cause the future weekly's premature demise.

Some say distributors may have balked at the thin profit margins, which would make more sense had Cocktail not been priced fifty cents above glossy powerhouses In Touch and Life & Style.

Others say that Jane's folding was an impossible-to-ignore indication that obnoxious teenage girls would rather spend their allowances on cigarettes and fake IDs than print magazines these days.

And still others (because, apparently, a lot of people care!) contend that Bauer CEO Hubert Boehle was "less than thrilled" with the test issues of the mag. (Which is weird, because if anyone would appreciate a weekly version of Glamour-slash-Cosmo-slash-Us Weekly, it would totally be him!)

Either way, all we know for sure is we'll have to get our 'Cocktail' fix elsewhere. Fortunately, we're indiscriminate borderline alcoholics in walking distance of a Stop Deli.