The Wrap reports that, one at a time, the Kardashian clan will take over the fourth hour of Today next week. Khloe, the youngest, will kick things off on Monday, followed by her step-dad and Rick Perry‘s favorite Kardashian, Bruce, on Tuesday. Kris will “handle Hump Day duties,” Kourtney takes Thursday. Kim will bring us into the weekend, actually reporting on herself on Friday when she offers a preview of Sunday’s E! special, Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event.

As The Deadline points out, this special week has been made possible by the recent NBC Universal/Comcast merger. The Kardashian’s home station, E!, and Today‘s NBC are related now, and it only makes sense that they stretch their influence across as many properties as possible. Right?

Dancing With The Stars

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.

Bono, Sonny and Cher’s only child, was born a woman but has since legally changed his name and gender. He has said in the past that his decision to change genders was “a last ditch effort,” and that he “needed a male body” and that he had “underestimated the [positive] impact my transition would have.” Now, his inclusion on the popular show makes him one of the most visible transgendered people, a position that he seems to be slowly coming around to.

DWTS viewers will have to come around as well. The hoards of angry and offended commenters swarming ABC’s announcement page voiced concern that “this will not be a family show any longer,” “anyone that obese and physically grotesque is no picnic to watch trying to dance,” and “I just don’t want that lifestyle choice continually flaunted in the media.” While many more commenters took up Bono’s defense, plenty claimed they would be abstaining from this cycle of competition.

With their complaints, these vocal fans have broken through the show’s be-sequined gleam, underneath which we find a much darker fabric, woven with not just dance and smiles, but also intolerance and politic. A dance competition it might be, but light fare this is not. Nor is this the first time a competition show has drawn-up such feelings. As Tim Molloy points out on The Wrap,

“Gay American Idol contestants have opted out to announce their sexuality, perhaps out of concern about alienating intolerant viewers. And Bristol Palin’s Dancing casting two seasons ago led many to vote for or against her based on her mother’s politics. If Americans quickly vote Bono off the show — or keep him on despite a middling performance, as they did with Palin — it could reveal plenty about attitudes toward transgendered people.”

An audience’s pre-existing values tend to influence the way they watch– and the way they vote. It will be interesting to see if Bono’s effort, for which he’s already begun training, will actually have an effect on ratings.

In an official statement, GLAAD suggests that the inclusion of Bono, along with former Queer Eye Carson Kressley, has “created prime-time firsts that reflect the growing acceptance of gay and transgendered people in America today.”

H/T The Wrap

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.”

Moore, who has previously criticized the president’s action in Libya, says execution should come after a proper trial. Though Moore’s not saying the U.S. raid wasn’t heroic:

It was heroic. There was no need to embellish things. People in positions of power tread so gingerly around the electorate. Some people may not like it, but don’t bullsh*t us anymore about stuff like this.

The government, especially the Pentagon, has a poor track record of telling the truth, starting with Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman, that was all made up, and this firefight is going to turn out to be hooey.

Just know it involves a hedgehog, Jägermeister, and The Lion’s secret basement.

To gain more insight into The Wrap’s success as of late, we spoke with the site’s creator, Sharon Waxman. Might renewed interest in a certain Martian, animal-blooded warlock have anything to do with it?

While Waxman shares that the site has certainly been “aggressive” when it comes to covering the recent frenzy surrounding former Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen (For evidence, simply take a look at the “Charlie Central” section on the site’s main page), there are other factors at play. Waxman told us that, so far, the site’s best month in terms of numbers was January of 2010, with a solid performance throughout the end of 2010 as well.

The awards show, obviously, season saw a predictable influx of visitors to the Hollywood news and entertainment site, but those numbers have managed to stick through the beginning of March. Another contributing factor is the fact that IMDB.com – a go-to destination not only for determining whether your favorite C-list celebrity is still alive, but also for news on the movie industry and its major players – recently replaced The Hollywood Reporter with The Wrap as its main feed.

Speaking of The Hollywood Reporter… The industry news site posted an entry earlier today touting its record traffic for February – and boasting that its numbers for the month beat out those of its competitors, including The Wrap. The post lists The Wrap’s uniques at a paltry 256,000, based on comScore numbers. The problem with using comScore as a reliable measure of visits is that, well, it just isn’t very accurate, nor always a neutral source of information. (For more on how comScore works, check out this article from the Wall Street Journal. A quick Google search will also bring up various reports from disgruntled media types, bemoaning comScore’s metrics.)

Waxman shared with us that she contacted comScore for clarification, and promptly learned they “couldn’t defend their numbers” regarding The Wrap’s February performance.

That little bit of unpleasantness aside, Waxman is tentatively optimistic about what the future holds for her site. “I don’t want to believe it. Whenever a site gets a surge in numbers, it makes people like me nervous,” she laughed, sharing her worry that the rise in numbers might simply be a temporary anomaly. But, she said, instead of transparently chasing down more pageviews, the site is committed to keeping its balance of hard news relevant to entertainment industry insiders (a relatively small group, she says, but a growing one) and bigger stories (like those relating to Mr. Sheen, for instance), with a larger consumer audience.

According to the document prepared by attorney Bryan J. Freeman, The Wrap is accused of allegedly “borrowing” content from Finke’s posts. Writes Freeman:

I am contacting you because it has become apparent that TheWrap.com and its employees have engaged in a continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com, publishing that information on TheWrap.com, passing off that information as its own, and doing so without compensating or even crediting Deadline.com. In many instances, TheWrap.com’s misappropriation involves the wholesale copying of substantial portions of articles posted on Deadline.com.

Finke weighed in on Deadline, adding that using her website’s scoops and “merely calling a studio or network and saying, ‘Is this correct?’” doesn’t add up to journalism.

You might recall, that, in April of 2010, Waxman dealt with a similar issue when The Wrap handed Michael Wolff’s news aggregation site, Newser, a cease and desist of its own, taking issue with the manner in which Wolff’s site “free-rides on The Wrap’s sweat of the brow by publishing summaries of these stories without affording The Wrap appropriate credit and a prominent link.”

And so: It’s on. Yet again.

Gawker once offered a $1,000 reward for a recent photo of Finke – or, as they phrased it at the time, “the scourge of industry reporting” – but their endeavor ultimately proved fruitless.

Now, The Daily has published a photograph of Perhaps Finke, Possibly Maybe, depicting an older, platinum blonde woman seated in her car. Their story, by reporter Hunter Walker in the “Flash” section helmed by gossip veteran Richard Johnson, attempts to cover its tracks by asking “Is this the most powerful woman in Hollywood?” instead of outright declaring it an image of the elusive gossipmonger. Those asked by The Daily to verify that this woman is indeed Finke each replied that they couldn’t be sure.

Finke, for her part, has publicly (from the privacy of the home she rarely leaves – not that we blame her) stated that the photo is not of her. But, as The Daily reports, she has called several higher-ups at The Daily’s parent company, News Corp, threatening that her site’s coverage of News Corp’s media outlets might take a negative turn if the photo is not taken down.

Finke wrote to Gawker, attempting to set the story straight because, come on, like she’d be caught dead in a Yaris:

What is ‘preventing’ the Daily from publishing the photo in its possession is that, in fact, it is NOT of me. According to what the Daily tells me, it was taken of a woman driving a green Toyota Yaris and I not only have never owned, driven, rented, or borrowed a Toyota Yaris, but also not any Toyota since the 1980s. There are other details about the photo demonstrating it is not of me. Also, Johnson told me the photo was taken at a time when, in fact, I was not driving any car or outside my home. News Corp has not shown the photo to me.

As The Wrap – positioned as a rival to Finke’s Deadline – reports, Walker (formerly of The Wrap, now working at The Daily) had informed Finke’s boss, CEO of Mail Media Corporation Jay Penske, of his plan to hunt down a recent photo of Finke.

The Wrap has since heard that Finke’s outrage may be something other than frustration over her association with a Toyota:

We are told something slightly different: that Johnson mentioned an identifying feature of the image – a watch Finke was wearing in the photo – and that left her ballistic.

After talking about Olbermann’s passion and “formidable intelligence,” Gore was asked what impact Olbermann was making on the network’s subscriber numbers.

From The Wrap:

“Do you think he’ll create a groundswell of people asking their cable providers to make Current available to them?

It’s already started. Spontaneously. … Starting yesterday with the announcement, absolutely. You can look on Twitter and find it. It’s not something that — it began spontaneously.

Do you have any sense of the number of people who are reaching out to cable providers or cable providers that are reaching out to you?

This is a spontaneous thing that’s just emerging on its own. It’s a self-organized group and that’s the best kind to have.”

Of course, these comments should be taken with a grain of salt as they were given right before the upfronts with the network trying to sell to advertisers. Still, we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s truth there. We’ve written a lot about how passionate Olbermann’s fan base has gotten recently. While Twitter’s one thing, if Current comes out with specific subscription numbers showing a substantial uptick, it would be undeniable proof of his draw.

As we wait for his new show, we’ll also anxiously await those figures.

(h/t Poynter)

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:

“Change has happened, and we have a great bench, we’re deep, and we know who we are,” Griffin said. “Nothing changes. Our vision’s the same, our goals are the same. Fox is in front of us, that’s where we’re heading.”

For his part, Olbermann this afternoon has issued a tease-by-tweet, telling his Twitter followers to expect his “first tweet” post MSNBC exit at 8 p.m.–just as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell begins his first show in Olbermann’s old timeslot.

Gotta love the theatrics of it all.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Twitter users look to be more interested in lifestyle fare. People came out on top of the list with 2.2 million followers, and InStyle (1,788,266), WomensWearDaily (1,667,169), and Entertainment Weekly (1,445,083) all placed in the top five. The highbrow didn’t do badly either; The Economist (425,733), The New Yorker (373,155), and National Geographic (367,866) safely made the list.

Stableford’s realization that high circulation counts don’t equal high follower counts is nothing new, particularly when it comes to news publications. Millions of social media users do look to Twitter for news, but rely more on the feeds of individuals, blogs, and other sources that can move more nimbly and provide breaking news with less editorial red tape (if any at all).

See the complete list here, or, for AARP The Magazine subscribers, go to http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/top-25-magazines-twitter-21868.

And it’s not going to be easy…or cheap. The trip is estimated to cost around $250,000 with with 100 buses taking all of the eager, ‘sane’ folks (11,000 of which have already signed up). You’d imagine this would cause a few furrowed brows in the HuffPost accounting office and The Wrap claims that insiders have said as much. However all of the quotes they received show a much cheerier disposition.

From The Wrap:

“HuffPo’s President Greg Coleman agreed that the gesture came a surprise, but denied that there was any internal tension as a result.

‘Arianna has a sixth sense for promotion, for capturing lots of attention,’ said Coleman in an interview with TheWrap. ‘We were surprised when she made that offer. She didn’t tell us. But inside the Huffington Post this does nothing to hurt our revenues.’

Coleman is working to entice sponsors to underwrite the gesture, and turn the surprise into a revenue bonus.”

I’m still not sure this wasn’t planned out before Huffington’s Daily Show appearance but we hope it wasn’t because that would totally give us a new goal in life: create a company, put my name on it, go on TV, and then make outlandish (and awesome) promises just to see if the people who work there could make it happen. God, that would be a good life.

Watch Arianna’s original promise on the Daily Show below. Read the rest of The Wrap’s piece here and sign up for those free buses here.

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.

This is what they “report,” which basically takes one small comment from Morgan and draws a false conclusion:

Piers Morgan was poised to take over the hosting gig, but he tells HollywoodLife.com that deal most likely won’t happen!

“That quite a big job to do,” the America’s Got Talent judge told us exclusively Aug. 10 at the launch party for Paris Hilton’s new perfume, “Tease,” in Hollywood. “It’s the biggest news organization in the world. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll be taking over.”

Everything we hear has Morgan continuing the negotiations with CNN, and an announcement coming shortly. The Wrap has more details:

An individual close to Morgan tells TV Hunter that those reports are “dead wrong” — and that an official announcement will appear by at least early next week… The individual who spoke to TheWrap said Morgan was misinterpreted while being bombarded with questions about CNN as he headed into the perfume party.

Nothing official yet – but it still most likely will happen.

—–

• Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

In a brief segment yesterday with The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman (video below), Kurtz wondered why the people who jumped on the “scandal” when it broke (Glenn Beck for example) have yet to revisit the debate now that the integrity of the climate research has been confirmed:

Glenn Beck didn’t report on this at all. Last fall, when the e-mails were leaked, he called global warming a big hoax and he said, ‘Why has no network covered this global warming fix?’ Why has Glenn Beck and others not revisited it?

Waxman argued that, sad and wrong as it is, the complexity of the investigations’ findings (in which the scientists didn’t tamper with evidence but were simple overly cautious and protective with their data) coupled with the politicization of the global warming debate make for confusing headlines and, consequently, don’t inspire the same media fervor.

But as Steve Benen from the Washington Monthly points outs, this media discrepancy with Climategate is indicative of a wider trend in media reporting:

This is, unfortunately, quite common. The right erupts with anger, the media treats the “controversy” as a legitimate story, and the public hears all about it. We eventually learn that the story was nonsense, but at that point, the media has lost all interest.

In other words, the media loves a scandal, and Climategate got a lot of media attention initially because it was so pertinent to a heavily politicized issue. But now that the controversy is over, the media has mostly lost interest. It’s a sad outcome, though not particularly surprising.

The VP was in town to do the Leno show and apparently the flight restrictions incurred by his visit screwed up traffic at LAX.

A spokesman for the vice president said he was unaware of the FAA temporary flight restriction that stopped flights coming in, and delayed those going out.

“I know we didn’t ask for anything,” Biden’s spokesman James Carney told TheWrap. “There was no sign of any stoppage. And there shouldn’t have been one.”

Oh, but there was. Passengers were stuck for anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours as a result (including this writer), leaving many of them fuming.

“I sincerely hope that the vice president was oblivious to the number of lives he inconvenienced by deciding to land at LAX and his attempted humor on the Tonight Show,” said Will Roos, the owner of an environmental company GreenUp who was on his way back from a business trip in Sun Valley.

The Biden people seemed puzzled by all the fuss:

”We regularly fly into large commercial airports. We work with the FAA and everyone involved to minimize the impact we have,” said spokesman Edwin Donovan. “Restrictions get put in place when the vice president flys into an airport. There’s going to be some impact on flights. But we have no information to show any great delay or any impact at LAX.”

All in all, sounds like a regular day at LaGuardia, Vice President or not.

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. From the story:

“The Guild has a contract with IMDb to provide credits information and does not release information on age,” Neal Sacharow, a spokesperson for the WGA, told TheWrap. “We have raised our concerns with IMDb about its listing of ages.”

Representatives from Hollywood guilds including the Screen Actors Guild have reached out to the site to see about taking down the birth dates of people who are not movie stars like Angelina Jolie or Leonardo DiCaprio, according to an individual knowledgeable about the talks. (A spokeswoman for SAG declined to comment.)

The guilds argue that not just writers and actors, but also below-the-line workers as they crest 40 face fewer job opportunities in a business that tends to prefer 25 year olds. Listing their ages publicly is exacerbating the situation, they say.

Apparently the IMDB is very touchy about making any changes, even correct ones, which is understandably frustrating for people interested in making their first Google result accurate. Another problem: Hollywood doesn’t like old people. But I am going to hazard a guess that IMDB has become such a necessary resource to just about everyone (when was the last time you watched anything without referring to it?) that removing information would result in an uproar and merely be an invitation for someone to launch a competing site.

For fun, let’s start with the insults. In his column, Wolff tries to discredit Waxman’s ethical high-ground claims by finding some skeletons in her closet. This is what he comes up with:

“When Waxman was a reporter at the New York Times, she wrote an over-the-top laudatory article about how Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz was making aggressive investments in the entertainment business. Waxman and the Wrap, in surely the appearance of trading the Times’ positive coverage for personal gain, became one of Schultz’s investments. “

We assume Wolff is talking about this article. While it is a bit of a puff piece, to imply that it was some kind of pay-off for Schultz’s later Wrap investment seems like a bit of a stretch since the article was written three years before The Wrap launched. It takes a while to create a website (SportsGrid coming soon!) a shady back room deal that far in advance that manipulated the writing of that article is a little doubtful. If Wolff wanted to attack Waxman for writing an “over-the-top laudatory article” about Schultz, he should have linked to this one. Of course, that was written after The Wrap launched and Waxman does offer a full-disclosure statement at the end explaining Schultz’s connection to her site so her hyperbolic praise is more icky than completely unethical.

But really, this all has very little to do with the debate at hand (despite what Wolff’s provocative Twitter post implied) and, fortunately, after only a couple of paragraphs , Wolff shifts gears and focusses on arguments that are more germaine and filled with more merit.

“Fact No. 1: Every Newser story contains two automated links to the source, as part of the dateline on our homepage pop-up windows (e.g. SOURCE: Associate Press), and under a red box that says SOURCES right next to the story. Along with that, we cite the source and link to it in the text of nearly every story.

Fact No. 2: Our business is not news gathering, it is news curation and summarization. We do what Jim Romensko does at Poynter, or what is done at Arts & Letters Daily, or Daily Beast, or Slate, or on virtually every daily television news show, or what Cliff Notes does. Simply: We believe that summarizing adds value. And we believe it is ethical: We don’t take words; we don’t take expression; we don’t take photos or video; what we do is reduce to the facts and then add our own headlines, and licensed photos and videos to improve the ability to immediately understand a story.”

These two points boil the issue down to their most important components: whether or not the collection and summarization of news stories from other sources adds anything and, if it does, how to cite and link to the other source. We certainly believe that, in this world of a million different news outlets, the curation of the most interesting ones for busy readers is important so we agree with Wolff there. However, like we wrote in previous pieces on the subject, he’d probably have a stronger argument if the Newser summarization posts added any kind of editorializing that would differentiate itself from the original writer’s work.

On the subject of link’s though, Wolff may be on shakier ground. While he’s right that Newser includes links on all their summarizations, the way they’re placed (on a grid to the side of the article instead of cited within) and the way the articles are phrased really don’t give much incentive for a reader to click through.

We will concede though, that Wolff gets off a good punch at the end of the post:

“The point is Waxman’s beef is trumped up. It is designed for huffing and puffing. It is self-promotion. In that it has succeeded: Waxman and I will be debating all this (if you can stand it) on Howard Kurtz’s CNN show at 11am on Sunday morning.”

While Waxman has made a lot of good points about the protocol used at Newser, we wouldn’t be surprised if much of her rage at this point was partly an act. Clearly this story has gotten both sites a whole lot of publicity. It’s certainly given our news site plenty of content to write about. Which is funny considering it’s a story about online news content.

But what on earth is Wolff talking about with that “if you can stand it” comment? Is he kidding? We can’t wait!

For those that missed it, we posted an interview with Sharon Waxman this morning.

In her post, Waxman gives an explanation of her feelings on the subject as well as a link to the full letter. Here’s a taste:

“Newser’s conduct violates The Wrap’s rights because: (1) The Wrap generates and gathers time-sensitive information at a cost, including, without limitation, original stories ferreted out and reported by The Wrap’s full-time employees and paid contributors; (2) Newser free-rides on The Wrap’s sweat of the brow by publishing summaries of these stories without affording The Wrap appropriate credit and a prominent link; and (3) Newser is in direct competition with The Wrap. Thus, Newser’s conduct, in addition to amounting to garden variety plagiarism, constitutes unfair competition and violates certain deceptive trade practices statutes. I refer you to the Davis E-Mail for appropriate ways to credit The Wrap when summarizing, i.e., re-writing, The Wrap’s stories.”

One of the most interesting items of note in Waxman’s post comes at the end, however, where Waxman states that she and Wolff will both be appearing on Reliable Sources on CNN this Sunday. We certainly cannot wait for that.

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.

• On March 28th, The Wrap publishes an article by Dominic Patten about Sony pulling videos from Beyonce’s YouTube page.
• The next day, Newser summarizes the piece and posts it on their own site.  They include a link to the original Wrap article to the right of the page in their sources column as is their protocol.
• Waxman takes umbrage at the amount of Wrap articles that Newser rewrites and speaks out on Twitter, accusing the other site of “stealing”.  Michael Wolff responds and soon the two sites are taking the conversation outside of public view.
• Private conversations apparently do not go satisfactorily and Waxman writes a column on April 1st charging that Newser’s aggregation techniques, that she says makes linking back to the original sources difficult for readers, are like “parasitism”.
• Hilariously enough, in a move that’s either bold or masochistic, Newser summarizes that column and posts about it.  Interestingly, they don’t list the source as Waxman’s column but actually as a short Huffington Post piece that also aggregated the story.
• Today, Wolff writes a response to Waxman in his column on Newser.  He makes the claims that Newser’s sources are readily apparent to readers and that there is a need for their “more efficient” summary pieces on news stories.  As comparison, he points out the aforementioned Waxman column and it’s 834-word length and the the brief 133-words of the Newser summary.
• Wolff continues the fight on Twitter, calling Waxman a “ghastly writer”.
• Mediaite does a wonderful job creating a timeline summarizing the story and making links to all pertinent sources highly visible and accessible to all.  Everyone applauds Mediaite on its class and skill.

Obviously news aggregation is a big business and, in our opinion, an important one.  There is definitely a place on the web for sites that search for stories relating to a specific subject (in the case of stories we link to, the media itself) and collect them for readers who are interested in that subject but don’t have the time for the searching themselves.  However, you must always make it clear who your sources are so that the people who do the original footwork can get the credit they deserve.  If this is done correctly, both sites should benefit, with news and new readers being shared between them.

In addition, perhaps this whole thing would never come up if Newser attempted to “curate” in addition to “aggregate”.  Readers need a filter to show them which stories, out of the millions out there, they’d like to read.  However, if the Newser summarizers also tried to add their own spin to the stories they share, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so much like the original sources were doing all the work.

Other people are already jumping into the fray. Felix Salmon of Reuters posted a piece earlier where he takes Waxman’s side, summing up:

The big point here is that Wolff and Murdoch have more in common than Wolff might care to admit: both aspire to being one-stop news shops in an era when people get their news content from hundreds of different sites, and neither has any particular interest in sending his readers elsewhere. It’s a strategy which not only annoys others but which is also, ultimately, self-defeating. A website which fails to leverage the enormous power of the external link is a website fighting with one hand behind its back. And in today’s ultra-competitive world, that spells doom.

Both Wolff and Waxman make legitimate points in their respective columns, and, we’ll leave it up to you, the all-important reader, to decide who made more. The one certainty to come from this is the expectation for more media critics to weigh in before this is all over.

The Wrap’s Josef Adalian broke the news at 4:15 a.m. EST — 1:15 a.m. PST — reporting that Conan’s manager Gavin Polone had confirmed in the wee hours of the morning that Conan and NBC had reached an agreement “after nearly two weeks of protracted, oft-bitter and highly publicized divorce proceedings.” The deal, wrote Adalian, is worth over $40 million.

Reports today were that the deal had been snagged on the issue of compensation for Conan’s staffers, many of whom had uprooted and moved their lives and families from New York to work on the most storied franchise in late-night comedy. Per Adalian:

“It’s signed. In the end, Conan was appreciative of the steps NBC made to take care of his staff and crew and decided to supplement the severance they were getting out of his own pocket,” Polone told TheWrap. “Now he just wants to get back on the air as quickly as possible.”

NBC reps couldn’t immediately be reached early Thursday.

Update: NBC has now confirmed the agreement, reports Willie Geist on MSNBC’s Way Too Early, 5:52 a.m.

NBC will presumably hand back the Tonight Show — what Adalian called “a brand badly bruised by a series of management missteps breathtaking in their ineptitude” — back to former steward Jay Leno following the Olympics. $40 million plus, a sparkling new studio for Conan and a whole lot of goodwill later, for their sake let’s hope it’s worth it.

In the meantime, Conan has two more shows to go — expecting to welcome guests including Barry Manilow, Will Ferrell, and Tom Hanks — and possibly spend a few million more of NBC’s money.

Other details from The Wrap:

• Conan’s can’t appear on another network until September 1, 2010.
• Jay Leno’s contract would actually have been more expensive to cancel than Conan’s.
• After Conan’s last show, both Conan and NBC will observe a brief press blackout.
• They can take the Masturbating Bear (which appeared tonight) — but they can’t take Coco.

More details — and there are many, kudos to fine work from the Wrap, which beat the NYT, and that’s gotta sting — may be found here.

Buenos noches, Conando.

Related:
Done Deal! NBC, Conan Officially Splitsville [The Wrap]
NBC’s Parting Gift: When Conan Became ‘Coco’ [The Wrap]
Conan’s Satisfaction: Blowing $1.5 Million of NBC’s Money [Mediaite]

“We think the team of Steve and Alec are the perfect pair of hosts for the Oscars,” said Oscar producers Shankman and Mechanic. “Steve will bring the experience of having hosted the show in the past and Alec will be a completely fresh personality for this event.”

“I am happy to co-host the Oscars with my enemy Alec Baldwin,” said Martin.

“I don’t play the banjo but I’m thrilled to be hosting the Oscars – it’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” said Baldwin.

Here’s a quick preview of the sort of thing you may be able to expect.