You remember Cat Marnell, right? The xojane.com blogger who famously infused her writing of lipsticks and beauty balms with tales of her own drug use.

Well, Mediabistro caught up with Jane Pratt, founder of xojane and Jane and Sassy before that, to find out if she had any regrets about hiring such a controversial scribe. 

“I was definitely doing everything I could to get her into rehab, which she did do, and encouraging her to get better for herself,” Pratt said in the latest So What Do You Do? interview. ”But I don’t think that her writing about it is what made her do it. I think it’s a lot deeper than that, and writing about it was cathartic for her and helpful to other women who were going through that.” 

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Jane Pratt, Editor-in-Chief of xojane.com?

With the local media swirling like vultures for the latest morsel in the case against resigned WCBS anchor Rob Morrison, FishbowlNY turns to attorney Paul Callan, who represented former WABC weather anchor Heidi Jones during her scandal last year.

She eventually was fired for falsifying a sexual assault. We spoke to Callan yesterday, hours before Morrison announced his resignation.

• Related: FishbowlNY, Morrison Resigns From WCBS Amid Wife Choking Allegations

Morrison was arrested Sunday on a felonious charge of choking his wife, Ashley Morrison during a fight at their home early Sunday morning. A judge ordered Morrison to stay 100 yards away from his wife.

“There have been indications that his wife wants to drop the charges, so ultimately this will be a decision by the Connecticut prosecutor as to whether to try to informally resolve the case with a dismissal,” Callan tells FishbowlNY.

That doesn’t automatically mean Morrison will be cleared.

“Prosecutors can serve a subpoena on her. They can force her to testify under oath,” Callan says. “Sometimes the wife is placed in a difficult position as she tries to deny the charge.”

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AOL is the latest advertiser to pull dollars from The Rush Limbaugh Show in response to his verbal attack on Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, whom he called a “slut” and “prostitute” because she supported health insurance coverage of contraception.

“At AOL one of our core values is that we act with integrity,” Maureen Sullivan, an AOL spokeswoman said to the Huffington Post. “We have monitored the unfolding events and have determined that Mr. Limbaugh’s comments are not in line with our values. As a result we have made the decision to suspend advertising on The Rush Limbaugh Radio show.”

Here’s part of Limbaugh’s apology, if you want to call it that.

I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line?

“I don’t think that a statement like this issued, saying that his choice of words was not the best, changes anything, and especially when that statement is issued when he’s under significant pressure from his sponsors who have begun to pull their support.”

John Mailer, son of writer and Village Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, has joined the campaign on Change.org calling on Village Voice Media to shut down the adult section of  its Backpage.com classifieds site where individuals have advertised children and teens for sex.

According to the petition, started by Groundswell, a “multifaith social action initiative”:

A Georgia man was arrested for pimping two 17-year-old girls around the Nashville area. Detectives responded to a suspicious ad on Backpage.com and drove to a motel. There, they found the teens and their 37-year-old pimp, as well as a laptop computer, likely used for the online advertising. Just four days prior to that, four people in Denver were arrested for forcing a teen girl into prostitution. They also advertised her sexual services, including semi-nude pictures, on Backpage. And last year, a South Dakota couple was arrested for selling underage girls for sex on …. wait for it … Backpage.com yet again.

Here’s what Mailer, just one of the petition’s 80,000 supporters, had to say:

“The Village Voice was born out of the desire for an independent media voice for the people, a voice that had the freedom and authority to hold those who abuse power accountable for their actions. While I understand firsthand the financial difficulties facing all print publications today, the fact of the matter is that Village Voice is making money from selling advertisements that others have used to buy and sell minors for sex.”

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Whether it’s Marie Claire and Mike and Molly or airbrushing at Newsweek, readers are using the Web to talk back to their favorite mags like never before, and not even legacy pubs like Essence are safe.

The stuff hit the fan for the Black women’s bible in 2010 when it hired a white fashion director, and a similar controversy erupted recently over its hiring of a white managing editor. So, in the second installment of our Media Beat interview, we asked editor-in-chief Constance C.R. White to address whether the criticism was valid.

“My take is that Essence has always had a diverse staff,” she said. “That was last year… and I’m moving forward.”

White said her main focus in the fashion section, and all of the book, is to focus on what the reader wants, not to reflect the opinions of her editors.

“If you start to think of it as an editor as necessarily your concept of the situation, you can really get off-track. What we really do and what I really encourage my editors to do is be a proxy for the reader.”

Part 1: Essence EIC: We Are ‘Absolutely’ Looking for New Writers

Part 3: Want a Job at Essence? Be Curious.

This video can also be viewed on YouTube.

If you haven’t heard, News Corp. has been deeply mired in a phone-hacking scandal that came to a head earlier this week when Guardian‘s Nick Davies and Amelia Hill reported that News Corp.’s News of the World journalists may have hacked into the voicemail of a 13-year-old girl who went missing in March 2002. Jack Shafer at Slate pens an entertaining column that provides a big picture look at the scandal for those who want to catch up, and makes Shafer’s feelings toward Rupert Murdoch, the beleaguered head of News Corp., very, very clear.

If you’re no Murdoch fan yourself, here are our favorite of Shafer’s gleeful takedowns of the media mogul for your reading pleasure:

1. If Rupert Murdoch could be slain by a mere scandal, he would have been embalmed and entombed long ago.

2. We expect the worst from Murdoch, and he lives up to our expectations.

3. The genocidal tyrant has successfully swept away every scandal—major and minor—he has ever faced because of his special skill at normalizing his malefactions.

4. Murdoch’s instinct, of course, will be to sacrifice [Rebekah Brooks], but I doubt that the mob that is gathering will be satisfied with one body. They’ll want strong, tough, old meat, too. Something that’s fit for grilling on the barbie.

5. Send recipes for grilled Murdoch to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for a prayer for Rupert’s soul.

For those of you have been following every sordid detail about the Anthony Weiner scandal, one major piece might have caught you off guard: how quickly mainstream media outlets like the New York Times reported that Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin was three months pregnant, based on the word of several sources. It’s a huge story, but normally details like that are left to the tabloid trade. Politico’s On Media takes a look at the difficult decision news outlets faced in reporting this story.

The news that Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is pregnant had been known and agonized over in newsrooms, including this one, for more than 24 hours before it was reported on Wednesday night… For the New York Times, which broke the story, the decision was not a quick one. The paper published the story a little after 5 p.m. Wednesday night on its City Room blog after Gawker published an item saying it had heard that Abedin was pregnant.

Phil Corbett, the Times’s standards editor, emailed Politico: “We try to be sensitive to privacy concerns, and we weighed that issue here, too. But Weiner’s problems were obviously a big story, and his actions and words had clearly put himself, his private life and his marriage squarely into the news.”

He also made clear that the decision was the Times‘ own. “We don’t take our cues from Gawker on a story like this.”

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A big story broke on the Daily Caller today with a series of leaked Twitter direct messages from top Sarah Palin aide Rebecca Mansour mocking major political figures like Mitt Romney and even Palin’s own daughter Bristol Palin. Mansour sent private messages calling Romney’s fans “wacky as hell,” and said conservative blogger Erick Erickson of Red State was “a total douchebag.” She also said about Bristol: “She will hold her at arm’s length. Even Thatcher was never able to disown her screw up son Mark. It’s a Mom thing,”

But an intriguing part to this story is how the direct messages were leaked in the first place. Politico’s Ben Smith wrote that he has been waiting for this story to break for a few months, as somebody tried to sell him the same emails last fall.  “Does Politico pay for exclusives?  Cause I’m looking to sell. I have 122 direct messages from Sarah Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour,” the person “Toki de la Vega” emailed.

When Smith responded with a counter-offer of “lunch and ‘undying gratitude,’” he received this response:

“Sorry, Ben, but it’s going to take more than a happy meal and a hand shake to get me to betray someone’s confidence. Only freshly printed 100 dollar bills help me get over feelings of guilt,” wrote the emailer, who continued, “Would it violate some fake journalistic ethics and standards to get me in contact someone who does pay? I know that the thought of blogging about this is making your panties wet. The topics range from Chuck Hagel to Ricky Hollywood and everything else in between. It’s a f***ing blogger’s gold mine.”

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New York newspapers and TV stations rushed to the Intercontinental Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen last night after news of the brutal murder of Portuguese journalist Carlos Castro and the arrest of his model companion Renato Seabra. The Daily News story:

The naked body of Carlos Castro, 65, was found lying face-up in a pool of blood inside his 34th-floor room at the InterContinental New York Times Square on W. 44th St. about 7p.m., the sources said. The prominent gay activist had been bludgeoned in the head and his scrotum cut off, sources said.

Castro, a gay rights advocate, has written for newspapers, magazines and performed and produced for television and radio stations in Portugal. He’s built a media empire that also includes international modeling competitions, according to his Website.

The suspect, Seabra, turned up at Bellevue hospital where he was taken into custody. Whoever administers Seabra’s Facebook fan page has changed the ‘info’ tab to:

Portugese model Renato Seabra (inset) was in police custody early this morning a person of interest in the slaying

Monica Gaudio was rather surprised when a friend wrote to her asking how she went about having her story — originally titled “A Tale of Two Tarts,” and curiously renamed “As American as Apple Pie – Isn’t!” — published in a New England-based cooking magazine called Cooks Source. Guadio, who had never so much as heard of such a magazine, decided to investigate. Upon finding that the magazine had lifted her original story without her knowledge or consent, Gaudio decided to write to them. After trading several emails, Cooks Source‘s editor finally asked Gaudio what it was she wanted. Simple, she responded: a public apology on Facebook, an apology in the magazine itself and a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment coming out to $0.10 a word.

The following is an excerpt of the response she received, posted to her LiveJournal:

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