Idolator

Attention aspiring publicists hoping to get your up-and-coming bands name-checked in the new issue of Vanity Fair: Lisa Robinson of Vanity Fair has had it with your unsolicited promo CDs, according to an e-mail she allegedly sent out to publicists today. Why? Because looking around at piles and piles of unlistened-to CDs fills her with an existential dread about the seemingly insurmountable tidal wave of music simply in existence as of the present second? Nah, that's boring. Instead, she's going green like the magazine that employs her and asking promo companies to stop clogging her inbox in the name of the environment! More »

And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the Conde Nast Movies Rock supplement: More »

It's been a bad week for magazine-rapper relations: First, Entertainment Weekly's Lori Majewski had an allegedly awkward encounter with 50 Cent, and now it appears that Vanity Fair's Lisa Robinson and rapper Ludacris had an equally sqiurmy sit-down during a New York City panel discussion Wednesday night. From Radar: More »

Now that he's conquered the worlds of screenwriting and papal fashion, Bono is getting into the glossy-magazine game, volunteering to serve as guest editor of Vanity Fair's July issue: More »

The good news about Ultragrrrl's latest piece of rapturous press-praise: It's in way-late-to-the-game Vanity Fair, meaning that the backlash can be only a few weeks away. The bad news: Considering that the glowingly sycophantastic piece is credited to Ultra's long-time friend Marc Spitz, VF no longer believes it's a conflict of interest to allow IM best-buddies to write about one another. In one of the weakest disclosures ever, Spitz notes that he and Ultra (we can't believe we're calling her that) are merely former Spin magazine "co-workers," conveniently leaving out the fact that they're actually late-night party pals who sometimes DJ together. That probably explains why the item contains not even the slightest trace of skepticism—and why no one at the magazine bothered to ground the rather lofty claim that Interpol or My Chemical Romance would never have made it without Ultra's help. Yay, bestest friends working together! Yay, bad journalism! More »