The big news today is that Anderson Cooper has finally stepped out of the glass closet. While the newsman has never denied his homosexuality, until now he’d never publicly acknowledged it either.

His reasons for staying mum on the subject, despite being out to friends, family, and colleagues, went beyond a basic desire for privacy. Cooper felt that keeping a low profile helped him be a better journalist. As he explains to Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast:

Since I started as a reporter in war zones 20 years ago, I’ve often found myself in some very dangerous places. For my safety and the safety of those I work with, I try to blend in as much as possible, and prefer to stick to my job of telling other people’s stories, and not my own. I have found that sometimes the less an interview subject knows about me, the better I can safely and effectively do my job as a journalist.

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In the space of just a few hours today, all media hell has broken loose. On what was supposed to be a lazy holiday-week Monday.

Via Daily Beast email-share exclusive, Andrew Sullivan has officially confirmed CNN newsman Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation. In a tease for their August issue interview cover story by Todd S. Purdum, Vanity Fair dangles a hellacious quote from Alec Baldwin about TMZ’s Harvey Levin. And on the front page of the LA Times, Republican TV ad guru Fred Davis reveals to reporter Mark Barabak that Obama regrets, he’s had a few.

Add in the Cruise-Holmes mess and this is about the wackiest July media kickoff in recent memory. Without even counting New York-based Susan Candiotti’s weekend CNN bomshell about some apparent Penn State, e-mail cover-up orchestration.

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Andrew Sullivan is leaving The Atlantic and bringing his wildly popular blog The Daily Dish to Tina Brown‘s Newsweek/Daily Beast love child. Sullivan broke the news late last night.

The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime. Barry was the person who first introduced me to the Internet in the early 1990s, and we have remained friends ever since. Tina Brown needs no introduction, but to see her in action as we have discussed this new adventure over the past few weeks has been quite a revelation. The Daily Beast, in a mere two years, has made its mark on the web, with 6 million unique visitors last month, and an eight-fold jump in ad revenue over the last year. It will give the Dish a whole new audience and potential for growth and innovation. I’ll also be contributing columns and essays to Newsweek.

This is a huge get for Brown but it’s a tidal wave of a catastrophe for The Atlantic. The magazine posted its first profit in a decade last year, thanks largely to online revenue. It has until April, when Sullivan starts at NewsBeast, to figure out how compensate for the loss of Sullivan’s web traffic.

We’d argue that when you are a struggling weekly news magazine – all bloggers to you are “notorious.” Or nefarious. Usurpers. Whatever.

The magazine says Perez Hilton, Michael Arrington, Andrew Sullivan and Michael Wolff make the list among others.

Read the whole piece here.

Andrew Sullivan‘s essay in the Atlantic, “Why I Blog,” is interesting enough for bloggers — and mild enough for their grandmas, as evidenced by his lede:

“The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog.”

Still awake?

On Point provides Sullivan’s take along with a few opposing viewpoints by Nicholas Lemann and David Carr in what amounts to a panel discussion on blogging.

A pretty good read — unless you’re one of the 100 SoCal print reporters who just lost their jobs in the last week. If you are, maybe don’t read it.

FBLA approves of people stretching themselves, creatively. But Andrew Sullivan might be a poor candidate for Elasto-boy, juding by his “Best Movie Lines” contest.

Monday’s selections were abysmal. Fortunately, On The Waterfront won.

I coulda had class… I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am–let’s face it.

Today’s choice should be a slamdunk for Apocalypse Now, although it is up against Jaws, The Godfather and Network.

But best and best known aren’t the same thing.

FBLA’s current favorite is from White Men Can’t Jump:

All I care about is getting out of the Vista View apartments, because there ain’t no “vista”, there ain’t no “view”, and there certainly ain’t no vista of no view.

Ain’t it the truth?