Ink-stained wretches, it’s not just you! The social media and Twitter elite fret about the future of journalism too — and wonder how it will survive the digital revolution. At SXSWi, there was no shortage of panels obsessively deconstructing this topic (and tweeting about it, natch).

“A mad reader is an engaged reader!” This we know. Everyone who has ever worked in media time-out-of-mind knows this. The blogosphere is built on this model. Cable News increasingly so. Still, knowing that didn’t stop me from being angry; angrier still that it had worked. And it does work. But why does it always seems to work best when women are shown at their marginalized worst? The answer: Sexism sells.

Actually it gets better. Turns out Rush Limbaugh only has nice things to say about Hamilton Nolan’s recent post ‘America Scared to Tell Wife It’s Unemployed, Just Sits in Park All Day.’ And then he reads it. Behold.

Everyone who’s paying attention knows that Condé Nast is in trouble. But given how little substantiation there has been as to the scope of that trouble, there’s been quite a lot of writing about it, often taking on tut-tutting moralistic tones. Why do media watchers so love to pile on Condé?

Two days ago Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan got his hands on a leaked email from the executive VP of PR giant Burson-Marsteller to staff suggesting they use Mark Penn’s (yes that Mark Penn) latest column on the subject of “glamorous camping” as a way to attract new clients in that industry. Mark Penn happens to be the CEO of Burson-Marsteller. Two days later the NYT picked up on the story, with notably slight attribution.

At the end of last week, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a profile of a niche consultant — a “generational guru” — who teaches clients to communicate with members of different generations. Later that day, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan picked up the story, snarked it down, added a few links — one at the top, one at the bottom — and posted it. Business as usual, right? Wrong.