If not in the news then be on the news, you know? Next week the television’s first family, the Kardashians, are taking their first swing at primetime, Bruce Jenner, Kris Jenner, Khloe, Kourtney and of course Kim each having a turn as Hoda Kotb‘s <em>Today</em> co-host. Whether or not they should be being no matter, the Kardashians can really do anything!

Today, ABC announced the line-up for the upcoming (and 13th) season. The 12 “celebrity” crew, motley as ever, includes George Clooney‘s ex-girl friend Elizabetta Canalis, Kardashian brother Rob, and Casey Anthony obsessive Nancy Grace, among others. And with the competition still several weeks away, the announcement page has already attracted hundreds and hundreds of commenters, the majority of whom seem concerned to see Chaz Bono‘s name on the list.

Film director Michael Moore, in an exclusive interview Wednesday with The Wrap, said Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed, but executed. “Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children,” Moore told The Wrap’s Brent Lang. “I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, ‘There was a firefight.’ ‘He used a woman as a shield.’ Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed.”

TheWrap.com – “a unique primary news source focused on the business of entertainment and media” – has experienced a spike in traffic over the last couple of months. Quantcast has the site bringing 732,000 uniques for the month of February (chart provided below) – a rise of more than 30% over their performance at the same time last year. And Google Analytics, which generally provides a more complete assessment of a site’s performance, shows 1.1 million uniques – a whopping 45% jump from last February. Which got us wondering: What’s their secret? What strange voodoo rituals have they been performing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine? In our case, the way you get (cue: horn tooting) 9.3 million unique visitors to come to your site is by by… Well. We’re not going to tell you.

Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC,) the parent company of Nikki Finke‘s Deadline.com, has issued a cease and desist against The Wrap, the industry news and gossip site created by Finke’s sometime friend and longtime rival Sharon Waxman (pictured). Merely Googling “Nikkie Finke Sharon Waxman” brings up a laundry list of articles breathlessly (and, often, sarcastically) covering their ongoing feud.

Nikki Finke is often referred to as the “most feared” or “most hated” woman in Hollywood, not only for exclusive gossip she publishes on her industry news site, Deadline.com, but also because, using come combination of wilyness and blac magic, she’s managed to accomplish that rarest of feats in today’s online age: make it through her career with only two photos of her available online, one from a college yearbook, and the other her fairly ubiquitous black and white headshot. Well, Rupert Murdoch‘s fledgling iPad news source, The Daily, may have changed all that.

With all the talk about what Keith Olbermann’s move to Current TV means for Keith, the bigger question is what it means for Current. If you’re to believe the network’s chairman Al Gore, it means a lot. Gore gave an interview to The Wrap in which he claimed that, ever since yesterday’s announcement, people have already begun looking for the channel.

Does the departure of Keith Olbermann mean the soon-to-be-under-new-management MSNBC will tone down the partisanship or even move away entirely from the perceived leftward lean of Olbermann’s Countdown? MSNBC boss Phil Griffin says simply, “nothing changes.”

In an interview with Tim Molloy of The Wrap, Griffin declined to get too specific about the details of Olbermann’s sudden evacuation from 30 Rock, but was firm that the network’s mission remains unchanged: catching Fox News, and using the deep bench–like Rachel Maddow, whom Olbermann brought onboard–to get it done:

Dylan Stableford of The Wrap’s Media Alley blog looked around on Twitter to find out which national magazines had the most Twitter followers. After analyzing his findings, Stableford was surprised to find that “the biggest magazines in terms of print circulation have a shockingly puny presence on Twitter.” For example, Good Housekeeping (4.4 million circulation, 4,683 followers) didn’t break the Top 25. Neither did AARP The Magazine (24 million circ., 358 followers), which, really, should shock nobody. Meanwhile, Time (3.4 million circ., 2.2 million followers) and the embattled Newsweek (1.9 million circ., 1.2 million followers) both placed in the top ten.

A few weeks ago, when Arianna Huffington announced on The Daily Show that she would provide busing for New Yorkers going to the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” it was apparently a completely spur of the moment decision. We had our doubts at the time (a couple are probably still lingering), but The Wrap has an interesting post up about the shock the announcement caused. Not only was Jon Stewart surprised, but also all of the folks back at the Huffington Post – who had to figure out how on earth this was going to happen.

Living in New York, it is sometimes easy to forget that people elsewhere in the country have to drive themselves places instead of just whistling for a cab or dipping into the subway. In Los Angeles, however, driving is an integral part of the Angeleno identity, a fact that was reaffirmed this week when President Obama caused a massive traffic jam and enraged some L.A. commuters.

HollywoodLife, a website that has an entire section devoted to Justin Bieber, thinks they have an “EXCLUSIVE!” – that Piers Morgan is “probably not” going to take over for Larry King on CNN!

They’re wrong. All signs point to the Morgan-to-CNN announcement coming soon. > Update: And…the link is now down – post has been deleted.

Last week, five independent investigations cleared the scientists involved in the Climategate scandal from allegations that they had tampered with their research in order to prove global warming. But CNN’s Howard Kurtz, notes a disparity between the amount of coverage Climategate received when the controversy first broke last year and the amount of media attention it’s getting now.

Vice President Joe Biden, a favorite of the media for (among other things) his reliable ability to produce a headline-friendly gaffe, was less popular with a planeloads of passengers stranded at LAX on Friday including the Wrap’s Sharon Waxman who penned a fuming piece on the incident.

Hollywood may have met its match here. The Wrap is reporting that Hollywood — or to be specific, The Writers Guild of America, West — is attempting to strong-arm IMDB into removing birthdates from its entries. Did you just laugh out loud? The idea that one is able to erase personal information for the Internet, let alone one of its most used sites, does seem laughable but nevertheless they are apparently giving it a shot.

Michael Wolff has written a column today on Newser hitting back at comments made by Sharon Waxman of The Wrap and also at the cease and desist letter The Wrap’s legal team sent Newser yesterday. We’ve been following the growing feud between the two all week as well as the developing debate over the ethics of news aggregation or curation. The Wolff/Waxman fight has been particularly fun as it combines the intellectual interest of a fascinating debate as well the slightly less high-brow enjoyment of some really catty insults. This latest column doesn’t disappoint on either facet.

Recently, The Wrap and Newser, both esteemed purveyors of news, have been locked in a battle over proper journalistic crediting on the web, the practice of writearounds, and the general state of Internet citation. Their tet a tete has recently culminated in a cease-and-desist letter, which is sure to become the haute accessory in the coming fashion season. Therefore, we’ve created our own automatic generator of your own Cease-and-Desist letter!

The battle over the legality and ethics of news aggregation has been heating up all week. This morning we collected all of the punches thrown in the massive fight on Twitter between four journalists that went on yesterday afternoon. That all appeared to end amicably enough, with the main combatants, Nicholas Carlson and Anthony De Rosa, seemingly laughing about it this morning. Unfortunately though, the other fight on the subject, the one between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff of Newser, has not ended nearly as well.

Sharon Waxman of The Wrap and Michael Wolff of Newser are currently in the midst of a heated war of words about the ethics of news aggregation and the citing of sources. This is an interesting debate (definitely of interest to us here) and one that could go on forever. Here we have collected the punches thrown in this round of the argument.

It’s — finally — official: Conan O’Brien is leaving NBC. The fifth host of the Tonight Show will have that title until 12:35 a.m. early Saturday morning EST, when his final tonight show will end and he will officially be done at the network.

The price tag for NBC: $40 million-plus.

Double your pleasure, double your fun? It’s just been announced that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will co-host this years Oscars. Here’s what the producers and the upcoming co-hosts had to say about the decision. Plus, a video preview…sort of.