MTV

For a "reality" show that's supposed to be all about drama, The Hills hasn't really encompassed much of it over the past few seasons. It seems like the juiciest footage we get is stuff like: Uh oh! Spencer and Heidi sort of broke up, but actually they really didn't! CRISIS! L.C. ruined some expensive dress she didn't have to pay for because she doesn't know how to work a curling iron! Audrina won't come out of that shack she got forced to live in after Lo stole all of her camera spotlight! Snore.

What ever happened to gratuitous post-teenage binge drinking sessions that lead to crazy fights with blonde girls calling each other whores and fratty dudes giving each other bloody noses with their fists? Isn't that what reality TV is supposed to be all about?

Apparently on The Hills, the new season of which premieres on MTV on Aug.  read more »

Williamsburg and Greenpoint residents may soon feel like they are living on the set of a reality TV show. The cast of the Apprentice-style MTV show starring 50 Cent is moving into a three-story, newly renovated loft building on the Greenpoint waterfront, a well-placed source has informed us.

The series will follow 16 aspiring rap moguls as they compete in a series of challenges to determine their "savvy, street smarts, manipulation, power and the art of winning"--"the skills that took 50 Cent from the streets to corporate America." At the end of each episode, 50 Cent will eliminate a contestant. The winner will get a full scholarship to an undergraduate or graduate business program.  read more »

Sweet Transvestite! MTV is planning to remake the Meatloaf-and-Tim-Curry-helmed classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Goths everywhere are horrified at the thought.

According to Variety, the two-hour remake will use the 1975 version's original screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien but some new music may be added. Who will they hire to write new music for it? Please god don't let it be Avril Lavigne.

Director and casting haven't been decided yet but a producer said he'd like to see the movie premiere a year from this coming Halloween.

Producers are cobbling together a writing team for the new Office spinoff, and now an MTV sketch comedy actor has been chosen as the first cast member. Suit up, Aziz Ansari! Executive producers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur hired the MTV writer, executive producer and performer on Human Giant. Mr. Ansari also guested as a racist fruit vendor on HBO's Flight of the Conchords -- and recently opened for the Conchords on a series of concert dates. He is currently in Albuquerque filming scenes for the upcoming Seth Rogen feature Observe and Report. He'll also be seen alongside Paul Rudd and Jason Segel in I Love You, Man. He'll get jokes from a writing team including Everybody Loves Raymond alum Tucker Cawley, Late Night With Conan O'Brien's Dan Goor and South Park scribe Alan Yang, according to Variety. Will Rashida Jones be joining the spinoff cast? Unlikely...  read more »

Last month this reporter interviewed Amanda Lorber, one of the stars of MTV's docu-series The Paper. At the time, Ms. Lorber, a high school newspaper editor, was savvy enough not to reveal where she would be attending college in the fall. "I don't think I should tell you [where] yet because that's a plotline," she said, laughing. "I will be studying journalism, though."

Finally, her silence has been broken! Ms. Lorber will be attending New York University in the fall according to NYU's Washington Square News. (This fact had already emerged via a commenter on Jezebel last week.) Ms. Lorber tells the WSN's Sergio Hernandez, "I'm ready [for NYU]... I'm a little nervous now because the show has come out, and I kind of don't want to be recognized. I want to have a fresh start, and I want to be kind of a normal student, not a girl that was on an MTV reality show."  read more »

In an inevitable, perhaps even overdue collision of reality and lifestyle, this morning MTV announced it has green-lighted the 21st season of The Real World. It will be filmed in Brooklyn, the reigning home turf of post-teen drama, and broadcast in 13 one-hour episodes in early 2009. No word yet regarding in which neighborhood the attention-seeking hopefuls will reside and manufacture identity-based conflict. We are hoping for the corner of Smith and Carroll but will also settle for Bedford and North Sixth. We would also like to see The Real World: East New York, where things start getting really real, and surely City Councilman Charles Barron of that neighborhood would assist with locations. God speed, young funny-haired applicants.  read more »

MONDAY

There should be something wrong when high-schoolers in Florida start to sound like their geriatric counterparts in Boca Raton. But when it's the stars of MTV’s The Paper [10:30 p.m.], it’s downright heartwarming. Though society seems to be "heading to the Internet and to virtual whatnot," 17-year-old Amanda Lorber, an editor on The Circuit, the student-run newspaper of Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Fla. says she and her mates "really wanna keep print alive.” Aw, we feel you sister! Perhaps the staff of The Circuit will be the perfect compliment to that other popular MTV reality series starring misguided teenagers. The Observer’s Matt Haber summed it up quite nicely in a profile of the show and its cast:  read more »

Ask anyone in the business: These are dark times for the newspaper industry. Dwindling readership and shrinking profits; journalists quaking in their cubicles, wondering if their jobs will exist when the next quarter’s profits are announced. Readers who once looked to the morning paper (not to mention the dimly remembered but extinct evening editions) are distracted by other media that feed them entertainment in news drag.

“I don’t really like the trend of the media right now,” said Cassia Laham, a Florida-based editor. “I feel like we’re becoming too tangled in things unimportant. Like spending four weeks on Anna Nicole Smith or any petty news when there are bigger things happening.”

Her colleague Amanda Lorber worries about the future of their industry as well. “We’re all heading to the Internet and to virtual whatnot. … We really wanna keep print alive.”  read more »

Christina Norman, the President of MTV, will step down at the end of February, according to Variety.

Van Toffler, the head of MTV Networks Music and Logo Group, announced the news in an internal memo to staffers yesterday.  read more »

Via Gawker

Employees at Viacom's MTV Networks (which includes, in part, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo, and Spike) are threatening a walkout on Monday, apparently in protest at a new plan from management that would roll back benefits to the networks' legions of freelance workers.

Herein: a partial guide to the 2008 presidential race's new-media-old-media bedfellows.

(a) CNN and YouTube.

(b) ABC and Facebook.

(c) MTV and...MySpace!

To wit: tonight, MTV and MySpace are teaming up for "a dialogue with John McCain", in which viewers and browsers can rock the vote 2008-style by submitting questions to the septuagenarian Arizona senator via IM.

MTV The Hills reality show sweetheart Lauren Conrad, 21, exports her good-girl style to the runway with her upcoming collection.  read more »