I’ve been covering  Wednesday’s at Michael’s for five years and have never seen anything like the head-spinning scene that unfolded there today. Harvey Weinstein and Steve Tisch threw a pep rally to end all pep rallies, and the media A-list all came out to cheer on their favorite team. Peggy Siegal and her minions descended on the place before the crowd rushed in with plenty of New York Giants paraphernalia, transforming the California cool decor into an indoor tailgate party.

By noon, I counted at least a dozen paparazzi staked out at the entrance, and they certainly weren’t disappointed. Drew Nieporent was the first to arrive (“What’s for lunch?”), and in short order the lounge was flooded with famous folks, including Brian Williams, Gayle King, Piers Morgan, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb (wearing newly identical red dresses and looking fabulous), former governor George Pataki, Matt Lauer and various members of the Tisch family.

Everyone’s mind was on the big game; conventional wisdom says the Giants will be this year’s Super Bowl champs, but it’s going to be a close one.  (All except Jerry Della Femina, who predicts the Patriots will take it 27-24.) “I think it’s going to be a squeaker,” offered Andrew Ross Sorkin. “At least I hope so because it will be a better game.”

Not surprisingly, Giants legend Frank Gifford, who will be watching the game from his home in Greenwich with family and friends, predicts a 30-10 win for his former team. “Eli Manning has really come into his own as a quarterback,” he told me. “But a quarterback is only as good as his team. They’re a great team. If you were playing for the Giants, you’d be a great quarterback.” Doubtful, but we appreciate the sentiment. Brian Williams, who’ll be going to the game, refused to speculate on the final score for fear of tempting the gods. ”You just don’t do that,” he told me.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yesterday we reported on MediaNews‘ trial of Steve Brill‘s JournalismOnline pay wall platform Press+, which seeks a way for writers to maybe one day get paid for Internet reporting. Today, new details have emerged about the experiment, which will launch on two of MediaNews newspaper websites — York Daily Records and the Enterprise-Record — and which VP for content development Howard Saltz has already compared to The Financial Times pay model. So which content will we be coughing it up for in the future?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Is this the turning of the content tide? For months now we’ve been looking forward to seeing Steve Brill‘s model for regulating content with his new company JournalismOnline, which will be using a platform called Press+ to standardize pay walls for websites. We have yet to see JO work in practice, but other media companies are already jumping on the Press+ bandwagon, most recently the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the Enterprise-Record in California, which should be ready for the content provider come April or May, and be the first sites to test the new system. Both papers are owned by MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper holders in the country.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

WWD: The Wall Street Journal‘s glossy magazine WSJ. is planning to add two online issues to its quarterly print run.

The Observer: The New York Observer is moving offices. During the first half of next year, the pink paper is scheduled to move to a building that is already part of owner Jared Kushner‘s portfolio: 321 West 44th Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. The Observer‘s new home is a 10-story office building whose ground floor is leased by Birdland Jazz Club.

Brides.com: And speaking of Kushner, Brides.com has an inside look at his wedding to New York heiress Ivanka Trump, including sketches of the one-of-a-kind ring designed by Kushner.

Poynter: A Sacred Heart University poll reveals that a large majority of the American public think the media played a significant role in getting Barack Obama elected president and are intent on promoting his presidency.

Legal Rebels: AboveTheLaw.com founder David Lat interviews American Lawyer magazine and Court TV founder Steve Brill about how he came up for the idea for the magazine, the AmLaw 100 and the magazine’s business model. You can check out the first part of the three-part interview above, or see it all here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

FishbowlLA: LA Weekly writer Daniel Heimpel responds to a blogger’s negative commentary of his medical marijuana article.

Daily Intel: New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are engaged and she sat down with New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog to discuss the relationship. They both sound like workaholics, but him even more than her. Says an enamored Trump: “Every night when he goes home, he works for about an hour and a half and return[s] e-mails he hadn’t had a chance to return before. He’s just very diligent…Even when we first started dating, I’d call him at 6 [a.m.] when I’m getting up, and he’d be awake; he’d definitely be awake when I was going to sleep. And all Sunday he’s in the office.” Mazel tov, you crazy kids.

AOL DailyFinance: Jeff Bercovici talks to Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz about their Journalism Online project, which seeks to help newspapers and media companies charge money for their digital content.

The Week: High praise for Andrew Sullivan, blogger for The Atlantic‘s Daily Dish. “With the help of a couple of assistants, Sullivan produced a journalistic tour de force that was more comprehensive, informative, provocative, and addictively compelling than anything produced by news organizations with hundreds of professional journalists on staff and coteries of experts on speed dial,” says Francis Wilkinson. “His Iran coverage was the blogosphere’s moonshot, a feat of grit and daring heralding a new era in cyberspace. It was a preview of the future of journalism — and it worked. Or seemed to.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Times reports that the company “aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees…The company, which says it may have a product ready by the fall, says the advantages are that publishers would not have to develop their own systems and readers could use a single system for many different publications.”

The details are still being sorted, and no one has yet signed on, but the idea is that publishers will be able to choose how they want to make their content available, i.e. subscription, micro-payment, etc. And while the micropayment system has thus far been a great conversation topic, it’s not been lauded by media types as being all that practical. Still Journalism Online could provide a great testing ground for newspapers to explore what customers are willing to pay for (or not) when it comes to content.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.