Top Design’s second season should start with a bang–the first elimination challenge finds the design hopefuls working in teams of 4, armed with $2000 to be spent at a thrift store, a junkyard, a hardware store and the “Top Design Showroom”.

India Hicks is the first guest judge, and Jonathan Adler, Margaret Russell and Kelly Wearstler are back. Their criteria for this first challenge, at least, are “overall style, originality, taste, creativity, arrangement of merch”–and the judges are experts in these areas, allegedly.

Judging by the overflowing dumpster, the 80s never left. There’s wallpaper, flooring, fabric and junk food wrappers. We’re breathless with anticipation–could Cheetos be a real design trend?

In today’s Morning Call Time podcast, HBO enrolls in Summer Heights High, Justin Timberlake gets sporty at the Nokia Theater, and Warner Brothers loses Debbie Miller and Cale Boyter to CBS and MGM.

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Top Design, Bravo’s other competitive reality show, is back for a second season. Magical Elves is the new producing entity, but for some odd reason, the show is shooting at the same empty loft space as last year’s dull finale. This season is supposed to be more accessible, designwise. Can’t be more accessible than across the street.

Former LAT reporter Michael Flagg has joined public relations firm Manning Selvage & Lee in D.C.:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — March 26, 2008 — Michael Flagg, a veteran business reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Washington Post, has joined the Washington, D.C. office of Manning Selvage & Lee (MS&L) as senior vice president. His appointment is effective immediately.

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FBLA has just confirmed that Hollywood Reporter Features Editor Christy Grosz resigned yesterday. No word yet on where she’s going. Idle question: Is there going to even be a Hollywood Reporter next year?

Sam Zell has sent out a company-wide memo, soliciting ideas from his employees, according to L.A. Observed. Remember the last time an employee expressed an idea?

Deadline Hollywood Daily reports:

“Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders gave a statement to the media this AM trying to extricate himself from a sticky snafu: why he told federal court yesterday that Bert Fields was taking the Fifth Amendment if called to testify, and why Fields himself told me yesterday he wasn’t taking the Fifth and is willing to testify (see my previous, EXCLUSIVE! BERT FIELDS WILL TESTIFY (…And Won’t Take The Fifth):

‘I was advised by Mr. Fields’ personal counsel Mr. John Keker that he [Fields] would be invoking the Fifth Amendment. We since have been informed by Mr. Fields’s firm’s general counsel that he will not invoke the Fifth and that Mr. Keker is no longer representing Mr. Fields. We have not decided if we will or will not call Mr. Fields. It will depend on the testimony of a couple of witnesses next week.’

Rabbi Rushfield Quotes Hardy: We are totally and completely in love with Rabbi Richard Rushfield and his ever-weirder recaps of American Idol. This week, he quotes Thomas Hardy’s poem Convergence of the Twain and generally makes us wonder whether he’s writing under the influence of God or scotch.

Kiss of Death: Richard Widmark, the dashing leading man of 40 films (and father-in-law of Sandy Koufax) died after a long illness. He was 93.

Clint Eastwood Canned: Clint Eastwood and Bobby Shriver have a laugh about the fact that their friend (and in Bobby’s case, brother-in-law) Arnold Schwarzenegger yanked them from the state parks commission.

“I talked to him the day we were not reappointed, or as Donald Trump would say, ‘You’re fired,’ ” Eastwood said in an interview, his gravelly impression of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent producing a kind of Dirty Harry-meets-the Terminator effect.

We live in a weird state.

The Smoking Gun reports that the records the LAT used to uncover “new details” in Tupac’s murder were fake. According to the LAT:

Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton said today he will launch an internal investigation into the authenticity of documents used in a story last week asserting that the newspaper had uncovered new evidence implicating associates of rap impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs in a bloody 1994 assault on hip-hop superstar Tupac Shakur.

Stanton ordered the review after the editor of the celebrity-centric website, The Smoking Gun, told the newspaper that he had reason to doubt The Times’ account and in particular the FBI records that were supposed to buttress the story.

The website this morning posted a story saying the records — purportedly statements by an unnamed informant to an FBI agent, which the newspaper posted on its website — appeared to be forgeries. The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com ) said the documents seemed suspicious for multiple reasons, including the fact that they appeared to be written on a typewriter, rather than a computer, and included blacked-out sections not typically found in such documents.

Oops.

AJR ran a piece titled “Maybe it is Time to Panic“. A fluffy little article:

Today’s newspeople know they have forfeited the edge on breaking news and lost the buzz in the online marketplace. They have been outflanked and out-thought by portal sites, aggregators, social networkers, indexers, video hosts, auction and classified sites and many others. They see advertisers retreating, and readers fleeing and Web viewers waffling.

Robert Niles at OJR, asks about how J-schools can help their students:

My question: What do journalism schools need to be doing to prepare their students for a more entrepreneurial industry?

One response changed the way that I approached this issue. It promoted me to trash what I had planned to write and instead simplify my advice to other journalism educators.

Blame Nick Denton. (And, I know, many of you probably have blamed the Gawker Media publisher for a great many things….) In a public response to my query on his Gawker blog, Denton replied: “I can think of no answer except this: close.”

And the NYT reports on how the industry as a whole has cut back on reporters following the candidates:

Among the newspapers that have chosen not to dispatch reporters to cover the two leading Democratic candidates on a regular basis are USA Today, the nation’s largest paper, as well as The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer (at least until the Pennsylvania primary, on April 22, began to loom large).

But remember, AP is going to hire 21 new reporters to be on Britney Watch, so put that in your free market pipe and smoke it!