The visual tribute to Hollywood’s fallen is one of a very few nonnegotiable Oscar rituals. This year’s montage was noteworthy for a few reasons. In a wise move, the Academy retained James Taylor, the most plangent pop-musician in recorded history, to accompany it. Rather less wisely, the Academy opted to forgo observing the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Bea Arthur. Even posthumously, for those who set their rest on the screen trade, the threat of the snub persists.

Like those who enjoy their car-chases, their full-frontal nudes, their dance-and-song ensembles, the strip of the populace tickled by the thought of Hank Paulson cringing over a toilet is now, evidently, sufficient to launch a movie.

On the shortlist for this year’s prize was Daniyal Mueenuddin, author of the collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Victoria Patterson, author of Drift; and Wells Tower, the Falstaffian author of the (still more) Falstaffian Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Those familiar with the Tishman might have questioned whether they would all fit inside. Meanwhile, for the contestants the stakes were considerable – but not zero-sum.

Not a year after wrapping up one of the more sanguinary house-cleanings in recent memory (even the cleaning-lady got sacked), The NYO has been reduced to running slavish retreads of articles penned months earlier by writers they once employed. And not just that: The NYO is affording these retreads marquee placement on their website.

Yesterday, an Italian court convicted three high-ranking Google executives of violating the privacy of an autistic child. The three were given suspended sentences of six months’ imprisonment.

Last Monday, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a piece on Andrew Sullivan, staff writer at The Atlantic, maître d’ of The Daily Dish, and all-around nabob of web journalism. It was not a very nice piece. Most of it is assigned to an insidious strain of anti-Semitism to which Sullivan, wittingly or not, is supposed to have fallen prey . . .

On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand sales for American consumer magazines “declined,” in the summary of the NYT, “9.1%, to 39.3 million, in the last half of 2009 versus the same period a year earlier.” Frightful as these numbers may appear, in the first half of 2009, newsstand magazine sales declined 12.36%. The decline is decreasing. The decline is in decline. Though far from stanched, though still voluminous, the bleeding, we are encouraged to believe, has slowed.

NBC had been counting on the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics to defibrillate its faltering ratings and break the pattern of myopia and ineptitude, culminating in the Late Night Wars, that has marked Jeff Zucker’s tenure as CEO. The president of NBC’s sports division, Dick Ebersol, now finds himself the author and guarantor of another ordeal for NBC – one that the network itself concedes may cost them upwards of $250 million.

Today, HollywoodReporter.com reveals that HBO has started developments on “Tilda,” a half-hour comedy series centering on the exploits of a ruthless Hollywood gossip blogger with an unmissable resemblance to Nikki Finke. Will Finke’s onscreen avatar will be faithful to the mix of bodilessness and omniscience that has defined the Finke of real life?

It seems the new ways of deluging the net with numbingly intimate details of one’s private life have overtaken, if not yet retired, the slightly older ones. On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a comprehensive study into the cyber-social mores of teenagers: Since 2006, the Golden Age of blogging, when 28% of 12 – 29 year-olds confessed to an active, not to say frisky, blogging regimen, that number has dropped by nearly half. Does this matter?

The question, koan-like in its infinitude and all-meaningfulness, of whether Rupert Murdoch‘s self-importance outstrips his actual importance at last seems capable of an answer. Today, one of Murdoch’s papers, The Australian, carries a story on a briefing Murdoch gave to announce the unexpectedly rosy results his media conglomerate Newscorps, enjoyed last quarter. The answer appears to be yes.

New technology invariably brings, along with change, a torrent of anxiety about what that change will lookl ike. This anxiety can be more or less poetic. “Twitter is crack for media addicts,” wrote George Packer in a recent blogpost. The new anxiety – induced, primarily, by the new media – is the prosiest prose.

Evidently its the season to heap vast amounts of shameful detail on sleazy politicians who were long ago buried alive in vast amounts of shameful detail. Not a week after Andrew Young, the malleable former aide to John Edwards, released The Politician, the New York Daily News has reported that Staying True , a memoir by Jenny Sanford, the soon-to-be ex-wife of the disgraced satyr-governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, will come out this Friday. . .

Sometimes intrusive journalism is just that: intrusive. It wantonly disregards a subject’s privacy in pursuit of the petty dividend of a byline. Yet with Salinger, the intrusions seem more than anything acts of generosity, if occasionally ham-handed. What tragedy attends on Salinger’s death is, ultimately, in the realm of PR: Salinger has missed the chance to explain himself.

Hardly two weeks have elapsed since Pat Robertson, of The 700 Club, made headlines for the unusual bit of theodicy with which he sought to justify the earthquake that routed Port-au-Prince. Yesterday, Robertson was again in the news, in an article on the denouement of the murder trial of Scott Roeder for the assassination of Dr. George R. Tiller, that Roeder claimed Robertson’s show spurred him to take up arms against abortionists.

We are now acutely aware of the romantic status of Ayla Brown, the bashful, basketball-playing offspring of Republican Senator-elect from Massachusetts’s. Ayla, who once achieved moderate non-negligibility as a contestant on American Idol, has released a CD – and, with it, a music video, which you can see after the jump

Yesterday, we carried a story about CBS’s precedent-upending decision to run a “pro-life” advocacy ad by Focus on the Family during the Super Bowl. The ad is to feature Tim Tebow – the Heisman award-winning QB renowned, among other things, for his habit of quoting Hebrews with his eye-black. In it, Tim and his mother recount, allegedly without visible embarrassment, the saga of Tim’s conception, career as a fetus, and birth. You will be slightly less than astounded to learn that news of the ad has gone over very well with some, and very badly with others.

Robert Gibbs — who is well known for the frequency with which he gets very angry about Fox News — appeared on Fox and Friends, a show well known for sometimes getting fairly angry about Robert Gibbs. The ostensible purpose of the interview, which was conducted remotely, was to discuss what, exactly, Gibbs’s boss plans to tell the nation tonight. Shockingly, they all seemed to get along!

In an effort to quell, or at least reduce to a calmer pitch, public concern over the imperilment of consumer privacy, the Future of Privacy Forum, an independent privacy advocacy group, today unveils, after many months’ stewing and tinkering, “the privacy i”. Henceforward, advertisers will be encouraged – if not quite compelled – to include the natty little icon in a corner of any advertisement targeted at specific consumers on the basis of behavioral data collected about them. If clicked on, the “i” will refer them to a webpage where the relevant data is on view.

No matter what he does on Capitol Hill, Scott Brown has already done enough never to be forgotten, as he’s discovered a new species of political scandal: daughter-pimping. Or should that be daughter-pimping-gate? Fresh off his upset victory, Brown announced that both his daughters – wait, no, sorry, ahem, just one – were available. For about five minutes, it seemed like maybe no one had noticed. Like maybe things would be, you know, OK. Then Brown sat back, a newly minted senator, and watched his glory disappear in a monsoon of horny jeering . . .

We know that things had gotten rather grim on set by the time Rosie O’Donnell left The View. But if the following interview is any guide, the usual cabin fever and paranoia that attends the implosion of any high-profile showbiz experiment here reached Hitler-in-the-bunker proportions. Repeatedly noting, with all possible incredulity, how incredibly old Barbara Walters is — Rosie goes on to describe an incident in which she – all “200 pounds” of her – physically menaced the matriarch of American talk-TV. Video ahead:

Back on January 13^th, Valleywag, the Silicon Valley subsidiary of Gawker Media, cut the ribbon on a “scavenger hunt” for information about the Apple Tablet, which led to Apple’s rather predictable response of sending Gawker a cease-and-desist letter. As the rumored release date of the Apple Tablet nears (January 27^th, according to numerous sources), so too, it would seem, does the end of Nick Denton’s mad quest to make Steve Jobs get serious about their relationship and sue him already. It promises to be interesting.