[Updates after the jump]

Yesterday The Atlantic ran an excerpt from a book on Jay-Z that shows the rapper in some rather unflattering light. Now that article is nowhere to be found (here’s a reposting of it). The author, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, writes that Jay is receiving millions per year for endorsing a sparkling wine called Armand de Brignac.

The problem is that everyone affiliated with the wine – as well as Jay-Z – denies any business ties. If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, check the mathematics:

The production cost per bottle of Armand de Brignac is about $13; the wholesale price is $225. The maximum output is 60,000 bottles per year. If Jay-Z splits the $212-per-bottle profit evenly with Cattier and Sovereign, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests his annual take would be a little over $4 million. One of my sources confirmed that number, and added that Jay-Z may have received equity in Sovereign Brands worth about $50 million. All for dropping a few lyrical references and featuring Armand de Brignac in a couple of videos.

As you can see, if authorities ever confirm the ties between Jay-Z and Armand, they will definitely try to knock the hustle. Which leads FishbowlNY to wonder: Did Jay have his people pressure The Atlantic to pull the piece?

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The L Magazine, because it loves you and wants you to be happy, is giving away free tickets to hear Hova himself, Mr. Jay-Z, speak at the New York Public Library this coming Monday.

To participate for a chance to win, simply follow the magazine’s new music-focused Twitter feed, @LMagMusic and Tweet @ them with a question for Jay-Z to answer… with but one caveat: “Creepy Beyonce q’s will be jeered at and disqualified.” So don’t act a fool. Alternately, you can like the magazine on Facebook.

You may have 99 problems, but winning tickets to cool stuff ain’t one! Haha…ha… Fine. Done.

The latest incarnation of revived hip-hop magazine Vibe may be debuting with a controversial cover model, Chris Brown, but its new owner’s plans for the pub seem pretty sound.

Today, mediabistro.com got a chance to pick the brain of Leonard Burnett, co-CEO and group publisher of Uptown Media Group, part of the group that purchased Vibe earlier this year and is working to reposition and relaunch it. In an interview with David Hirschman, Burnett explained where he thought Vibe had gone wrong in the past and laid out the new publisher’s plans for the future:

“Vibe thrived off of urban fashion, music, and automotive — and then when you go into ’05, ’06, and ’07 [the advertising] just kept deteriorating. First it was a shift over to digital [for advertisers] and then when the dollars started to even back out, the dollars that you are counting on for the print side in certain categories just started to evaporate at a much faster rate than we were able to break new categories.

The book also didn’t lend itself [to these new categories]. [Vibe's] aesthetic perspective and editorial focus [originally spoke] to a very broad and important perspective of what urban music and culture meant (which really wasn’t just rap, but R&B, reggae, and gospel, and anything you can move and dance to — and even where the consumer was going with the blending of Jay-Z and Coldplay, and this sort of rap and alternative rock). We went from being the kind of Rolling Stone of urban culture to competing with The Source and XXL. These are great books, but…Rolling Stone is really the music and culture magazine that has stood the test of time — and when you look at the breadth of what they have with the core of it being rock ‘n roll, mixing the old with the new and the influx of urban, and the political scene, the fashion scene.

So now, from an editorial perspective, we are going back to an editorial discussion that was much broader than it was. It has a lot better visuals. We’re going back to great photography, which was always such a big component of the editorial product. The book will be much more visual and have a better quality of paper. The consumer should look up to Vibe — Vibe is showing them something that they don’t know about, and give them something to aspire to. Not like Uptown, but something new and on the cutting edge.”

Read more of Burnett’s interview for more on Vibe‘s new digital product and the decision to hire a new editor.

Earlier: Vibe Relaunches With Maybe Not The Best Cover Celebrity

— DIANE CLEHANE

As I’ve been reporting for weeks, it was SRO at Michael’s today as the movers and shakers, undeterred by the unsettling economic news, were out in full force plotting their next big move — or looking for a safe place to land. On the menu today: plenty of talk about President Barack Obama‘s speech last night and the Oscars. There was a strong consensus that one was a big winner, while the other got surprisingly mixed reviews. While everyone in the audience on Oscar night thought Hugh Jackman killed, plenty of folks here were less than impressed. “Movie people don’t like Broadway,” sniped one Hollywood insider. “And it was too Broadway.” Okay then…

Everyone I talked to about President Obama’s speech felt his oratory skills are nothing short of amazing and that he struck just the right tone where he basically told us its time to pay the piper and think of our children’s future. Personally, I was impressed at his unflappable ability to mix his formal and seemingly off-the-cuff remarks with ease — and he didn’t even blink when he forgot to follow protocol and let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduce him. She had to stop him mid-sentence, but he never faltered. Talk about cool under pressure. But here’s what wowed the women in the dining room — his affectionate introduction of the First Lady Michelle Obama and her mouthing, ‘I love you’ back to her smitten husband. “They’re marriage is obviously hot,” one divorcee told me. I’m telling you, no one wants to admit it, but that’s what people are really talking about.

As for the president’s remarks, “Inspirational but realistic,” is how one media summed things up. Others were scratching their heads asking why Wall Street wasn’t feeling the same way. More than one person said, “With everyone feeling a little bit hopeful, I don’t get why the market is down.” (It had dropped by more than 100 points by lunch). A question for the ages, no doubt.

On a much lighter note, I asked the always dapper Dr. Gerald Imber what he thought of the Botox-ed beauties on Oscar’s red carpet. But this plastic surgeon to the stars never cuts and tells — “I didn’t watch,” he confessed. He laughed when I asked him why he’d pass up the chance to admire his handiwork and did offer his assessment on why movie stars make better plastic surgery patients than mere mortals: “They come in with headshots saying, ‘I’ve changed a little here, I want to fix this here.’ They know what they want. There’s no whining.”

Here’s the rundown on today’s crowd:

1. The ‘Imber Gang’: Dr. Gerald Imber, Jerry Della Femina and Andy Bergman. Here’s a fun fact: A little birdie told me that Andy wrote the screenplay for Blazing Saddles. Now you know…

2. Hallmark honcho Henry Schleiff with two other well-dressed fellows

3. No one puts a lunch together like ‘The Mayor’: Joe Armstrong, Glamour editrix Cindi Leive, George Stevens and Kerry Kennedy. I was thrilled to meet George (who was sporting a very patriotic red, white and blue shirt and tie ensemble). He’s the man behind the television broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors and the amazing broadcast of the concert on the Mall in celebration of President Obama’s inauguration. Kerry and I met once before at a lunch given by Henry Schleiff in this very dining room, where we talked about her then yet-to-published book, Being Catholic Now. I was so fascinated by her interviews with the likes of Bill Maher and Gabriel Byrne (who spoke about being abused by a priest) that I got through the terrific tome twice. Today the conversation was all about how stirring and inspirational the group found the president’s speech last night. “It made me proud to be an American,” Kerry told me. And we both totally melted over the young school girl who was seated next to the First Lady having written to the White House looking for aid for her school, which is in a serious state of disrepair. “I had tears in my eyes,” said Kerry. She wasn’t the only one…

4. An early-arriving Matt Blank who chatted with Joe and I before The New Yorker‘s David Remnick and Lisa Hughes joined Showtime’s head honcho for lunch. I was happy to reconnect with Lisa. Way back when, she was my sales rep at Self when I was the marketing honcho for a fashion company. I knew then that Lisa was destined for big things at Conde Nast, and she’s risen through the ranks like the pro she is. Well done and congrats!

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Ahead of his new novel’s summer release, recovery community persona non grata — or is that exonerated mag-world feature-bait — James Frey is the subject of Evgenia Peretz‘s latest Vanity Fair profile opus in the mag’s June issue. Bookish bro GalleyCat politely implies that Frey’s claim of not doing any further media is about as sound as Jay-Z saying he’s doing just this one last tour/album/impromptu club date.

Amid the 7,000+ words Monday-morning quarterbacking how Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was intended by the author only as a semi-memoir yet was billed by his publisher as memoir gospel to the heartbreak of Oprah and actual addicts everywhere, causing it to blow up into, well, you know, this part struck us:

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Sports journalist and ex-Sports Illustrated editor Roy Johnson had the rumor scoop, and now we see he was right: Beyoncé is the 2007 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover model. The “model” part is the point of contention for some media machers like Nikki Finke, who uses the occasion to note that Hollywood is knocking legitimate models off covers across the newsstand.

This is hardly a new phenomenon — recognizable faces sell magazines, at least that’s the industry’s prevailing thought. Who created the rule that you have to be a “model” before becoming a “star”? Sports Illustrated is doing a few things with Beyoncé — trying to sell magazines (which isn’t hard — the swimsuit issue has averaged roughly 1.2 million copies sold since 2004) and, of course, sell ads. A partnership with iTunes, for instance, could explain why the magazine decided to also make it a “music issue.”

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