• Since she just landed a TV show, Amanda Peet thought, "hey, now would be a great time to get pregnant." [People]

• Greg Lindsay covers the most unglamorous aspect of Fashion Week: seating the editors. [Mediabistro]

• But they better not get too cozy in those seats. Fashion Week is in danger. Danger we tell you! [Page Six]

• Aw, Jim Nelson. As cute as Jann Wenner, minus the subtle hint of scary. (Click for images and scroll.) [WWD]

• Paris Hilton is pretty forward with ther "naughty bits." Yeah, like we didn't know that one already. [Gatecrasher]

Stop what you're doing right now and listen up. There is some major, breaking, important, life-altering news from the New York Observer today. Greg Lindsay got paid. He did it! He got his check, he went to the bank, he cashed it, and the money showed up in his bank account. Mindblowing, we know. But try to relax.

We guess the reason this is such a big deal that it deserves an entire page in the media column is because Lindsay got paid by Absolute. You know, the magazine for rich people that never actually pays its writers. The one that folded and will be now for distribution by subscription only? Andrew Essex's baby that never made it to kindergarten? Yeah, they were majorly holding out on their contribs. Until this week.

“Getting money out of Absolute, at any point during its incandescent rise, was always problematic,” said contributor Gil Schwartz, a CBS executive who writes under the pseudonym Stanley Bing. “I think all of us, to get anything at all, is pretty awesome, and relatively rare.”

The rare check which landed in Lindsay's mailbox just happened to come out to $954.70. Which, though it may not be quite enough to cover our average night at Per Se, can get you a hell of a lot of airport bagels.

Off The Record [Michael Calderone, New York Observer]

We, unknowingly, have been circulating the same parties as Dylan Stableford for months. Since joining Mediabistro as the newsfeed editor and taking over as head Fishbowler when the mysterious Greg Lindsay and lovely Rachel Sklar moved on, Dylan's been hard at work serving the ever insatiable media gossips of New York.

How does the man who decides what everyone will read in the morning pick his newsfeed items? What does he do when he's not blogging? Who's actually in the fishbowl? Just for Jossip, the laid back University of Vermont grad turned media gossip and blogger spills it all.

From Asian porn consumption to other "guy shit" the feeder of the fish even goes so far as to blow up our favorite little drink spot — and for the record, he did not sway us into this Q+A by buying us rounds at literati Nolita hang-outs. For the full dish, complete with the media members who make him want to "puke blood" after the jump.

CONTINUED »

When Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker original, set out to create a blog that would mimic the gossip overheard at a Wall Street party, we expected a swanky looking site with martinis clinking, lines of coke on marble tables, and high heeled stems.

We got a superman looking cartoon with a huge $ sign on his chest. (Hmm, not exactly the dreamy Wall Street prince we expected to swing by and buy us an apartment.) The site also welcomes its new readers with a flashing ad that reads "Like Finance? Like Blogs?" and then encourages browsers to read "Ron's Rant" on CFO.com. But, Spiers does welcome you to read her site, anyway — you know, since you're already there and all.

Anyway. Welcome to DealBreaker.

What? You were expecting flashing lights? Big ticker symbols scrolling across the middle of the page? Serious commentary? Stevie Cohen on a stick?

We don't really do that. But here's what you will find: posts about the precise size of the guitar collection on Paul Allen's yacht spaceship, posts about the disparity between what Aswath Damodaran thinks is the dark side of valuation and what we think is the dark side of valuation (hint: high-quality cocaine), banker body counts (thank you, John Mack), interviews with people about how much money they make and whether they sometimes buy things just so they can throw them away, sightings of Eliot Spitzer, pitchbook origami, fun with league tables, and so on. And occasionally we'll break news or do something that's otherwise useful. Which will be entirely an accident. We apologize in advance.

At first we though, oh, cool, no boring finance news … at least not a focus on boring finance news. Then we saw the five Mediabistro-type news feeds full of headlines we couldn't scan for gossip. But, despite this quirks, as the boss pointed out "this is the biggest blog to break since Office Pirates." (Even though we've only checked it about three times since it launched.)

But, if you know what's good for you, you know that Spiers works in mysterious ways. We'll be reading up on this one, for at least a week. In the off-chance we get invited to a Wall Street party, we don't want to look like idiots playing "where in the blogosphere is Greg Lindsay?"

Editor's Letter: Welcome to DealBreaker [Elizabeth Spiers, DealBreaker]

Fresh off his stint as the editor of Mediabistro's Fishbowl, Greg Lindsay is back at the site, explaining why reporters using their friends as sources is a big no-no.

Inspired by Village Voice reporter Nick Sylvester's recent reporting scandal, Lindsay concludes that only does quoting friends set journalists up for holes in their stories, but it is also some kind of psychological backwards way for journalists to insert their own opinion into their stories.

"It's endemic of the fact that we tend to interview people who look like us and talk like us," says McBride. "And if the cynic finds himself talking to the same people over and over for that reason, then there's something wrong with their sourcing."

Lindsay uses plenty of quotes and anecdotes from various to back up his story, making sure to point out that one of them, Poynter's Kelly McBride, is not his friend.

Apparently, all this friend on friend reporting "betrays an ultimately cynical view of the world." And to betray the cynic is to betray oneself. Hmm, how New York journo-psyche 101.

So, while we agree that using your friends as sources for the most part is a huge cop-out, we also think that maybe (just maybe) Lindsay's been hangin' out in the fishbowl a little too long.

Your Friends and Sources [Greg Lindsay, Mediabisto]

If you know nothing about Mediabistro, you at least know this: First, you will find at least one job through the site; second, their "How to Pitch" series is code for "How to Keep Mediabistro Afloat"; and third, Laurel Touby loves her boas.

What you may not know, however, is how they're producing any content on their own.

Sure, they've got their underpaid bloggers at the Fishbowl twins, GalleyCat, and a couple other cutesy titled streams of consciousness. But their features – like David Hirschman's "Don't Bother Writing For Print" and Greg Lindsay's "Credit Where It's Due: Online" – aren't exactly paid items.

Turns out it's $49 Avant Guild memberships and health insurance that are the real commodity. We hear from inside the 'bistro, writers like Lindsay are under contract to meet a specific annual word count (say, 30,000?) in order to receive comp'd health benefits. Turns out that in the case of Greg, he hasn't been holding up his end of the bargain, which is why you're currently seeing him spit on FishbowlNY after he and honcho Touby agreed the ex-WWDer's blog items would contribute to his feature word count. Now Greg can continue plucking around town on assignment for Business 2.0 without worrying about being hit by a cab (just Nick Denton).

Meanwhile, other writers aren't being paid even $.20/word for their feature items — they're being compensated with $49 annual AvantGuild logins, which means unlimited Revolving Door access!

As you'd imagine, nobody (including incoming editorial director Dorian Benkoil as well as Lindsay) was willing to speak on the record about the matter, and Laurel Touby has yet to respond to inquiries.

So why such a big deal? Don't get us wrong: free health insurance rocks our socks off. In fact, we're quite certain our own writers would enjoy the possibilities. But isn't Mediabistro the biggest cheerleader for writers getting paid with actual cash? Why yes, yes it is. (Unless you're Liz Spiers.)

• As Barbara Corcoran splits the real estate game she dominated, she's lined up three reality TV pitches to peruse under the auspices of her new TV production company. Ideally she wants to bring the housing market to the reality genre, but outside the Apprentice realm.

• Greta Van Susteren is hoping her Natalee Holloway ratings will shield her from an obvious conflict of interest with her sister Lise's U.S. Senate campaign in Maryland.

• EchoStar is hoping your town will want to be the next Half.com, Oregon, renaming itself to DISH in exchange for 10 years of free satellite TV service for all residents. Execs must be reading Mark Hughes' Buzzmarketing.

• Greg Lindsay finds no signs of the celebrity weekly bubble bursting, and for that we feel blessed.

• But aside from the celebrity weeklies, other magazines are continuing to see their circulations drop. House Beautiful is tumbling, folks, run for cover!

• Forget Microsoft. It's Google you should be worried about running your living room. But it's AOL who will keep you as a customer, always.