Last night Kanye West went on a Twitter rant for almost two hours about a variety of things (The Jetsons got a mention!), most notably his declaration that he was going to launch a company called DONDA. Donda, as most people know, was the name of West’s mother, who died suddenly due to complications from plastic surgery in 2007.

One of those people who probably — hopefully? — didn’t know that, was Gawker writer Seth Abramovitch, who wrote a post summarizing West’s tweets. In that article, he thought using the n-word would somehow be funny.

“DONDA will be your everything,” wrote Abramovitch. “Just you wait and see. And what is DONDA? It’s an acronym for Dis Original N***a Dresses Aight.” We added the asterisks. Hilarious joke, right? Nothing causes guffaws quite like a white guy calling a black guy the n-word!

Of course no one really got Abramovitch’s humor, so he issued a non-apology apology:

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In a year of Adele on the radio, Bridesmaids at the box office, Jay-Z and Kanye on the Throne, and Charlie Sheen on another planet entirely, how the hell do you pick the definitive Entertainer of the Year?

Surprisingly, the folks at Entertainment Weekly say their choice for the top spot was a shoo-in: Daniel Radcliffe. “He’s proven that he’s going to have a career outside Harry Potter,” said executive editor Kristen Baldwin in our Media Beat interview.

Baldwin also discussed the magazine’s editorial process for churning out such lists on a weekly (daily for EW.com) basis. “Well, it’s never come to blows,” she said with a laugh. “I mean, it’s entertainment. Nobody’s really getting worked up about it, but you’re in a room with a lot of smart, funny people. So, it’s sort of like ‘one liner, one liner, one liner’ as people try to make their case and put down other people’s cases.”

So, which pop culture trends will define 2012? Watch the full video for Baldwin’s predictions.

You can also view this video on YouTube.

Part 2: Kristen Baldwin on Bringing EW to Tablets: ‘We really wanted to wait until we got it right’
Part 3: EW‘s Kristen Baldwin on the Ryan Gosling Factor

We’re big hip-hop fans here at FishbowlNY, so we greeted the new Forbes list of hip-hop’s top earners with great interest. The list – titled Cash Kings – accounts for earnings from May 2010 to May 2011, and measures the artist’s income from “record sales, digital downloads, films, merchandise sales, endorsements, books and other ventures.”

This year Brooklyn’s own Jay-Z topped the list, bringing in $37 million over the past year. He barely edged out Diddy, another New York native, who earned $35 million even though he’s never made a good song that didn’t include Biggie. Maybe people liked Loon after all. Kanye West rounds out the top three earners, raking in $16 million.

Check out the top 10 after the jump.

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Think you’ve got it bad as a writer? Try being a music journalist when not one, but two of the industries you rely on are struggling.

“If you want a career writing about music, my advice to you would probably be medical school, maybe law,” joked Billboard editorial director Bill Werde in our @MediaBeat interview. “Music journalism was one of the hardest hit forms of journalism, I think, because once upon a time, you really needed a critic to tell you if you wanted to spend money on an album… Obviously today, you can hear everything all the time, usually even before it’s released.”

Watch the full interview for @bwerde‘s tips on scoring that Beyonce byline, and to find out why the  Kanyes of the world are making his job (and Matt Lauer‘s) just a tad more, well, interesting.

You can also watch this video on YouTube.

Part 2: Billboard‘s Bill Werde Takes On Idol, Reality TV
Part 3: Bill Werde: ‘iTunes’ Success Does Not Equal Billboard‘s Detriment’

More lists! Maybe itemizing things makes the terrible year media we just suffered easier to bear. Also it’s a fun way to fill the time between now and opening the champagne. Anyway, here’s the final installment:

• Rex Sorgatz has put together a very smart list of this year’s most notable blogs. Parts of which made us wonder if we spend enough time on the Internet! The list includes the notable likes of, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nate Silver, NYT.com, Kanye West, Ana Marie Cox, and something called Single Serving Blogs — Rex explains it all here!

• Twitter! And lots of it, in the form of the top twenty Twitter posts of 2008.
• Over at TVNewser you can take your pick of any number of lists and polls. In fact you might call it a list and poll bonanza! We’re not kidding, go see for yourself.
• Meanwhile over at Galley Cat, you can find a round-up of 2008 stories divided into months. Seriously industrious.
• Andrew Sullivan is posting the winners of the 2008 Daily Dish Awards.
• Of course if none of this will suffice, there is always George Bush’s reading list.
• And speaking of reading lists, here’s a sort of list of memoirs that didn’t make it past the ever vigilant guardians of the publishing world.
  

Via Denzeen, a rendering of rapper Kanye West‘s nearly-completed New York apartment, designed by minimalist architect Claudio Silvestrin.

More here.

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