TOC’s own Jake Malooley spoke live last night with a presenter on BBC 5 about Oprah’s imminent departure from broadcast television. Best moment: When they asked Jake if Oprah might go into politics and become a U.S. ambassador, he said no, because she’d have to take too big of a pay cut. Listen to the segment above.

The latest entry into the annals of great food debates—Trotter v. Tramonto, Levy v. Zarzour—concerns not the ethics of foie gras nor the state of pastry but rather the single most banal phenomenon of our time: Twitter. The discussion, which began with Steve Dolinsky’s tweets from Big Star’s opening night and evolved (or devolved, depending on your taste) into a back and forth between Restaurant Intelligence Agency owner Ellen Malloy, Chicago Tribune writer Kevin Pang and food writers Michael Nagrant and Ari Bendersky, took over Twitter yesterday and has moved over to Facebook today, which makes it significantly easier to follow, and significantly more…verbose.

At stake is the question: Is it okay for a food personality to tweet about a restaurant on its first night? (Responses included: Yes, if it’s positive. Yes, if the writer recognizes that people care. Yes, if the person wants to be relevant.)

We* followed along, but kept mum. Sure, as food writers, we’ve got opinions. (I’m completely neutral about positive tweets, which are—since the Tapas Valencia misstep—all that Dolinsky has ever trafficked in. But I think anyone tweeting negative remarks needs to know that the repercussions can be pretty fucking serious. Michael Nagrant, a bold participant in this conversation, has failed to mention that after he tweeted about the Publican’s bad service at brunch, servers at the restaurant lost their jobs.) But as an eater, and as a reader, I honestly don’t care. And neither does the vast majority of the thousands of Twitter followers accrued by this crew of food writers. These followers RT like crazy when they find out what kind of hot dogs Lula will serve as Hot Doug’s on Halloween or what the process was behind building the oven at Nella Pizzeria or whether the $5 burger at Primehouse is worth heading over for. But when a bunch of food writers tap away on twitter about how to use twitter? And do it in a way that betrays the fact that they’re really in the conversation not so much for the philosophical discussion but rather because they think it will “strengthen their brand”? Well, it’s then that we can hear the sound of one hand tweeting.

*This post was co-written with David Tamarkin.

UPDATE: A Publican spokesperson says that no one was fired as a result of Nagrant’s tweet. Other sources disagree. But we erred in not giving the restaurant an opportunity to present its side of the story before this post first went live, and we apologize for that.

Leave it to MSNBC to get their Twitter feed hacked right before the weekend. You’d think a prominent news organization of that stature might have its guard up against such sophomoric shenanigans, but it just goes to show that no one is safe from web trolls. Errant tweets like “ALL CARTOONS ARE FUCKIN’ DICKS! @DylanMSNBC, @maddow, @MADNews101 are all cartoons!” and “We LOVE Sean Hannity!! Cum all over us Glenn Beck!!”—are two of the less offensive tweets. Thankfully (for their sake, if not our yuks) it seems as though the network’s already caught on to the error. I can sympathize, as my Twitter account was hacked a few weeks back, and in the hour or two before I realized what had happened, my account had DM’d (that’s Direct Message, for you Twitterphobes) at least half of the folks that I follow. Needless to say, if you receive a DM from MSNBC asking you to check out some sweet pix, by all means delete immediately!

Update: TechCrunch reports that the Twitter account in question was fake all along, and the legit newsstream preceding the offensive tweets (obviously not included in the above screengrab) was only a cheap attempt to deceive overzealous media peeps (like your’s truly!). Here is the official link to MSNBC’s news feed.

When she was in town this summer, Ellen Degeneres tweeted that she’d be giving away tickets in Millennium Park to the taping of her TBS special. Well, Ellen was back in town this morning, and this time she tweeted that she’d be in Water Tower Park—and that she was bringing a friend. She and Oprah were passing out the latest issue of O Magazine (which features Ellen as a co-cover girl) to about 1,000 fans. Here are some photos from the scene.

Through a bureaucratic oversight, my nonprofit beer-and-sneakers-and-drumming blog was overlooked, but I won’t take that personally. Chicago news matters in the blogosphere, and we’ve now got the grant money to prove it. Today, it was announced (I read it on Gaper’s) that Gaper’s Block, Columbia College, Chicago News Cooperative and others will receive Community News Matters grants from the Chicago Community Trust and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Community Information Challenge. Windy Citizen is even getting money for technological upgrades. All together, this sounds like good news for community news gathering, and I find it particularly interesting that the grants are not limited to nonprofits.

One of the recurring reader complaints about the Chicago Tribune since the bankruptcy, layoffs, redesign and dramatic changes in editorial management went down has been that there’s simply less substantial, serious news reporting in the paper. Fairly or unfairly, that perception has been solidified by changes in the online product, including an embrace of community bloggers with ChicagoNow and a shift in news values toward maximizing page views (such as the recent prominent homepage placement of a slide show of images of ESPN sports reporter Erin Andrews right below stories about how her privacy was violated by a lecherous creep who video-recorded her in the nude through a hotel room peephole–an unfortunate juxtaposition of content that shows an almost-singleminded focus on driving traffic). Here’s the thing, though: For those older readers who comprise the paper’s most loyal subscriber base, and who have been most apt to complain about such shifts in focus, the Trib’s been the only game in town.

That equation may change significantly, however, with the addition of a Chicago-focused section of the New York Times filled with stories produced by a new local news consortium with an impressive pedigree. Key players include spurned ex-Tribsters Jim Warren and Jim O’Shea. (Wait: Wasn’t O’Shea serving as an adviser to the Reader?) I wonder if either Jim is entertaining thoughts of the “payback’s a bitch” variety. Because what do those essential readers–the gray-haired consumers of serious news who’ve been putting up with the changes at the Trib only because they felt chained to it–do when presented with an attractive alternative? I don’t think it’s really a question of whether readers like that will jump ship to the New York Times local edition if it’s a good product. The real questions in that case will be how many will leave the Trib (or go Sunday-only) and how fast.

And speaking of ChicagoNow (disclosure: my wife’s blog is hosted by that network), Vocalo.org, the community media-focused outlet of Chicago Public Radio, is raising its profile with a strategy that includes high-profile blogs, which might give the Trib’s online initiative a run for its money. That effort kicks off with the much-anticipated return of my pal Rob Feder, the distinguished former Sun-Times media columnist who will be showing off some new tricks with his Vocalo blog. I’m excited to see how that initiative turns out, but my bet is that the Trib faces its most imminent threat from the local edition of the Times. We’ll find out starting next month.

Onion A.V. Club editor Kyle Ryan just tweeted some troubling Chicago media news:

“It’s official: Our office has been struck by H1N1. I picked a good time to go away for the weekend–assuming I’m not next.”

That note follows these updates from earlier today:

“Vicious office bug has claimed 2 more victims. My cough has worsened. We’ll be lucky if ANY of us make it to Milwaukee for our reading Tues.”

And…

“Another casualty! Lesson learned: Our office key parties should stop when flu season begins.”

And then there was this from yesterday:

“Insane sickness sweeping the office @ alarming rate: 5 went home sick, at least three others feeling weird in the past 24 hours. H1N1?”

We wish everyone over there the best. It’s hard to be funny when you’re hacking your guts out.

When we put out a call last month for marathon runners to submit pictures of themselves along with a brief statement in order to have a shot at being included in this week’s marathon issue, we received an overwhelming number of responses from folks involved with an organization called Team M3. Among these emails was one from the Executive Director of MGRF (the overarching organization that runs the program Team M3), Vesna Stelcer, explaining what exactly it’s all about: pairing adult mentors in the community with Chicago Public High School students to train and run the Chicago marathon or half-marathon.

We feature a few Team M3 members in The Get this week discussing everything from their new favorite body parts to the biggest sacrifices they’ve made during the training season. Tomorrow at 10am you can hear about this amazing organization on WLUW’s Outside the Loop as I interview Stelcer about the history of Team M3, the participants and how you, too, can get involved.

According to the New York Times (linked to by a post on Grub Street), Gourmet Magazine will be shuttered. If you can’t hear the hearts breaking of everybody who’s ever loved food and/or magazines, you must have your iPod up pretty loud.

Bear with me while I get sappy: Gourmet has had a bigger impact on my life than any other magazine has or will. It was always in my house growing up, but I didn’t start reading it until I was 22. I was working in a newsroom in New York at the time, living in a dark studio apartment in the basement of a building in the not-yet-hipster Fort Greene, and Gourmet was the only luxury I could afford. Once an issue was released I would carry it in my bag until the next issue was out; by that time, it was tattered and torn and crinkled. (It wasn’t stained with food, though—I hardly had a kitchen to cook in.)

Eventually I realized that I was spending more time thinking about a food magazine than I was thinking about the news. (Of course, this was in 2001—I needed a distraction.) I found myself daydreaming about the careers of the writers in Gourmet—first Jane and Michael Stern, the incomparable duo behind the Roadfood column, then Ruth Reichl, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Like everybody else who reads the Sterns, I wanted to drive across the country and stop into random Pennsylvania truck stops to find the best cheesesteaks in the world. (I didn’t have a car, so I ventured out into New York instead, and started sending reviews to Time Out New York.) To satiate my appetite for Ruth, I started reading her books—Comfort Me With Apples was out in hardback at the time, and my then-boyfriend gave me a copy. Which probably wasn’t the smartest move, because reading about Ruth’s love affairs convinced me to dump that boyfriend with the quickness.

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The Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky has been one of the media’s most outspoken critics of the city’s 2016 bid, so I gave him a ring this afternoon to talk about what was missing from Chicago’s plan, what Daley was thinking and whether community groups that organized against the plan will have any lasting effects on Chicago politics. It was dense, fruitful discussion, but Joravsky’s key point was that the city’s plan was fundamentally flawed. Joravsky went so far as to say that Chicago should have either had a more expensive plan that went much further (redeveloping old steelyards on the South Side for example) or a “green” plan that required less development and the use of more existing spaces—such as the Olympic-sized pool at Portage Park. If anyone is interested, I’ll post more next week. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation to ponder over the weekend.

Ben Joravsky: I have two thoughts on the subject of an Olympics for Chicago, actually three. But the first point is that we are such a corrupt and inefficiently run city, in which there is no legitimate public discourse that I truly don’t believe we’re capable of putting on a games. I take a look at how the city’s been run for  the last ten years, and it’s really distressing in terms of the lack of oversight and the lack of discourse and there’s sort of an attitude inherent in Chicago that the way to get things done is to have one powerful person and so we’ll have to live with it whatever  consequences comes from that. And I just don’t think that’s the model for good planning. I truly don’t believe that. Now, people may disagree with me on that and think “Oh, you need a tyrant to do anything these days.” I personally don’t believe that so it makes it difficult to imagine any good plan coming out of Chicago, but that’s said, the two thing I would have liked to have seen is number one—the obvious one, is, if you have a great expanse of undeveloped land in Chicago that is baffling all planners—like some of the old steel yards on the South Side, well why don’t you try to put that to use? Now, the comeback, John, is that that’s incredibly expensive, to which I say “Yes. You’re absolutely correct.” But if you’re going to make an investment of this kind, if you’re really going to use the Olympics as a spark or development, for economic development to change the city, to improve it than it’s not. Let’s spend the money, you get what I’m saying? I don’t have a problem with spending the money if I think it’s going to be a wise expenditure or a wise investment.

John Dugan: That’s the thing— in my ideal version of the Olympics there would be lasting infrastructure.

Ben Joravsky: You know, John, the thing that struck me about this, this Olympic plan from the get-go— I sound like a broken record—internally it’s a schizophrenic plan. On the one hand, they didn’t want to spend a lot of money buying land and having to clear away, or clear away toxins out of land, so in order to save money they went to public land which is parks, and they treated it like it’s undeveloped acreage that can be just easily developed, and they were proud of that. “Oh, our costs will be minimal, because we’re using park land.” Like that in itself is not a sacrifice that people are being asked to make. The second problem though, the inconsistency is that if they were going to take park land, than they have to convince the public that they were not going to deprive the public of a valuable piece of park land. So they would say, “Don’t worry. We’re going to start the construction very late in the process”—which of course no one really believed, “And when we’re done we’re gonna immediately take away most of what we built, so it’s just going to be temporary.” So there is no legacy. If you watched the show last night where Mayor Daley and the Obamas made the presentation to the IOC, one of the gentleman from the IOC asked the question, “What is your legacy?” It’s a fundamental inconsistency, but I think really the IOC agrees with you. They want to see something left over from the Olympics. So it’s sort of like a calling card, you know, a city can say, “Look what we have because of the great Olympics.” The Olympics can then use that as a promotional piece. Chicago wasn’t giving them that. Chicago was promising to get rid of just about everything they put down so they could reassure people that they weren’t gonna lose their parks.