A Michelle Obama Glamour cover for December? We know that coming up with new and original content for women’s magazines that doesn’t feel old hat is hard, but something about Condé Nast‘s special recognition award of Michelle Obama in their “Women Of The Year” issue feels a little bit like Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize: A little unwarranted.

We know that Obamas on the cover sell copies and win prizes, and Si Newhouse certainly needs that these days. Maybe he thought enough time had passed since all the other Michelle covers that Glamour‘s issue could be considered fresh all over again?

Below, a partial gallery of Michelle covers in the last year.

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BayNewser: The New York Times has launched a Bay Area blog to go along with its recently launched Bay Area section in its local print edition.

Mediaweek: Playboy will cut is rate base starting in January from 2.6 million to 1.5 million.

New York Post: Jann Wenner has made it official: Michael Steele, who has been leading Wenner title Us Weekly since Janice Min‘s departure this summer, can now remove the word “acting” before his title of editor-in-chief.

New York Times: In an effort to look for new forms of revenue, Condé Nast Traveler is pairing with upscale discount online retailer Gilt Groupe to sell discounted travel deals.

Don Draper may not have been in attendance, but Monday’s panels on advertising and the Internet at the Social Ad Summit at the New World Stages certainly had its fair share of slick sellers. Did you know that one in three people working in new media are developing Facebook applications? That might be an exaggeration, but you wouldn’t have known it from the breadth of panel topics, which ranged from “Facebook Fan Page Success: Superpowered Fan Growth” to “Show Me the Money!: Measuring Social Media ROI.”

The main speaker of the day was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Though Wales espoused on topics from Everything Bad is Good for You to why he hates the term “crowdsourcing,” his most interesting answers involved the scrubbing the Wikipedia entry for David Rohde when New York Times journalist was captured by the Taliban last year and held for seven months.

“It was a matter of national safety,” Wales explained. “The Times asked us to, and we agreed. It was a very complicated situation, and I had to think to myself, ‘What would I feel comfortable doing?’ When I realized a man’s life was in jeopardy if I allowed this information to be disseminated, I was not comfortable with it.”

As a counter-point to what some could seem as a Big Brother-ing of the user-edited site, Wales provided the example of Wikipedia’s policy on some of their entries on China. Since China just recently lifted a nation-wide ban on the site, but still closely monitors and blocks certain pages on their citizen’s computers, Wales and his team had to make the decision to just scrub the entries completely.

“But we decided that we wouldn’t be the ones to limit users’ rights on the subject,” Wales said, though it would certainly improve his relations with Chinese officials. In fact, knowing the amount of threatened lawsuits and libel cases Wikipedia and Wales have come up against since he co-founded the site in 2001, there’s an argument to be made that the more rigorous the editing on the user-created encyclopedia, the better. But then again, it just wouldn’t be Wikipedia.

After the jump, a look at how Facebook pages are helping magazines from the founder of video marketing firm Involver.

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FishbowlDC: The Washington Post has paired up with Bloomberg to launch a new global news service.

New York Post: Jann Wenner has switched distributors for his Us Weekly magazine, from Condé Nast and Hearst-owned Comag to Time Warner Retail Sales.

Denver Business Journal:The Rocky Mountain Independent, the second online publication launched by former staffers of the shuttered Denver paper The Rocky Mountain News, has announced that it will stop producing new content citing the “economic reality” of the publication.

New York Times: A good round-up of all the David Letterman news that has developed today.

GalleyCat: The organizers of the Thurber Prize for American Humor couldn’t narrow their short list down to the usual three candidates — so this year there are four authors competing for the $5,000 prize: Sloane Crosley, Ian Frazier, Don Lee and Laurie Notaro.

FishbowlDC: FBDC’s founding editor Garrett Graff has been named editor of Washingtonian.

Observer: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has purchased a $1.7 million three-bed on Riverside Drive.

WWD: For the first time, Us Weekly‘s Web site has surpassed People.com in number of unique visitors. The magazine seems to be getting along fine since longtime editor Janice Min‘s departure: acting EiC Michael Steele‘s first issue sold 1.1 million copies on newsstands.

Guardian: You can now buy single copies of The Economist in the U.K.

Well, it’s official. Jon Gosselin‘s love has driven the Star magazine reporter assigned to cover the “Jon & Kate + 8″ star to quit her job over fears of a “conflict of interest.”

Star reported the news that senior reporter Kate Major had resigned this morning and Us Weekly tracked down the journalist, who was last seen with Gosselin in the Hamptons on Tuesday.

“I didn’t mean it to happen, it just did,” Major told Us. “I went to do a story on Jon and ended up falling for him.”

What is up with this guy that makes 20-something blondes fall head over heels in love with him? We’d love to know.

As news broke this week that Major had been seen out to dinner with Jon, we thought she was definitely going to be getting a great scoop. In fact, Major is one of the writers of this week’s Star cover story, “Kate & Hailey Catfight!” Now that Hailey Glassman is seemingly out of the picture, we can’t wait to hear what she has to say about the matter.

Oh wait, People magazine already talked to Hailey. And told her about Jon’s new main squeeze. “That’s news to me,” Glassman told a People reporter who told her the news. “I still love Jon and Jon loves me.”

(Note to Hailey, you used to date my roommate’s brother so we are practically related. Come tell us your story here! We’ll be waiting for your email.)

Our question is: how often do reporters fall for their subjects? Would you quit your job over an affair with a subject? Would you quit over Jon Gosselin?

Earlier: As Jon & Kate Head Toward Divorce, Is It Time To Back Off?

Yesterday, we learned that celebrity editor-in-chief Janice Min was stepping down from the top slot at Us Weekly. The question on everyone’s mind is: what’s next for Min?

WWD scored an interview with Min and, although they couldn’t get her to give a hint about whether she has a new gig lined up, the editor did admit she doesn’t think she’ll be staying in magazines.

“I don’t think magazines are in my future,” Min told WWD. “I would be surprised if I worked for another magazine. Us Weekly is the ultimate magazine experience. And I now have the freedom to talk to people and figure out what I’ll do next.”

WWD also has some ideas about who might be in line to replace Min, if Michael Steele, who will step into her role for the time being, takes the editor-in-chief role on only temporarily. Some names mentioned include Us‘s Los Angeles bureau chief Melanie Bromley and the magazine’s news director Lara Cohen, rival pub Life & Style‘s editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford and In Touch eic Richard Spencer; People magazine’s Peter Castro, former editor-in-chief of British OK! Nicola McCarthy and ex-Min staffer Colleen Curtis.

Janice Min, longtime editor of celeb magazine Us Weekly said yesterday that she will be leaving her post when her $2.5 million contract expires at the beginning of next month.

Min told The New York Times she didn’t know what she would do next, “But I’m 39 and I’d like to have another career. I felt like I’d done every possible thing at Us Weekly to make it successful.”

In a letter to her staffers, obtained by Mediaite.com, Min said she had “decided it was time to try something else in my life, do a little Gosselin detox and occasionally go out on Monday nights.”

Executive editor Michael Steele will be taking over Min’s spot, the magazine’s owner Jann Wenner told the Times.

Former Us editor Bonnie Fuller hired Min as her number two in 2002, and Min took over the magazine’s top editor slot when Fuller left for Star a year later. Last week, Fuller was named editor-in-chief at celebrity Web site HollywoodLife, becoming the latest big name journalist snapped up by the site’s owner Jay Penske for his growing media empire. Might Min be eyeing a spot on Penske’s team? Or, conversely, does Penske have a place for the successful editor? It’s certainly possible, but no matter where she goes next, all eyes will be on her.

New York Observer: Newsweek‘s recent redesign has yet to improve newsstand sales. Sales for the first six weeks after May’s revamp were flat compared to the previous 18 issues in 2009, and the following four weeks showed a pretty steep decline. Is this a reflection of readers’ summer buying habits, lack of interest or a rejection of the magazine’s new look?

Page Six: Is US Weekly editor Janice Min ready to pack in her million-dollar-plus pay check and head to greener pastures? One source told Page Six, “She’s had enough,” and she’s reportedly taking meetings with TV execs while vacationing in Los Angeles.

AdAge: A preview of ad page numbers for September issues, with magazines like Elle and Essence predicting declines, although they say they’ll be down less than they were in March. In other news, who is ready for Vogue doc, “The September Issue”?

The Daily Advance: Newspaper publisher Cox Enterprises has sold a few more newspapers, this time from North Carolina: The Daily Advance, The Daily Reflector of Greenville, The Rocky Mount Telegram and 10 other non-dailies based in Eastern N.C.

Time: BusinessWeek‘s sale raises many questions, including whether there is a future for business journalism.

She once helped celebrity magazine Us Weekly become a must-read and guided American Media, which publishes Star. Then Bonnie Fuller left the world of magazines last year to launch her own company, Bonnie Fuller Media. But now she’s put those plans on hold, returning to a role as editor-in-chief — of a Web site.

Yesterday, David Carr of The New York Times reported that Fuller had been named editor and president of HollywoodLife, a celebrity site based in Los Angeles owned by Mail.com Media Corporation.

Mail.com made a splash last month when it purchased Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke‘s Web site DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com. Carr also has a profile of Finke on today’s front page of the Times, in which he reveals that she “stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years,” from the sale of her blog. “And her deal could go as high as $10 million,” Carr added, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the matter.

So is Mail.com, which also owns Movieline.com and OnCars.com, finished snapping up big name media personalities, or are there more to come? And what exactly does Mail.com owner Jay Penske plan for the future of his media empire? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

(Photo from Fuller’s Twitter page)