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Remember that time Bloomberg News got caught using subscriber information from Bloomberg data terminals to spy on the financial industry?

Oh, right, that pretty much just happened. But conveniently for Bloomberg, a bigger journalism-related scandal -- the revelation that the Justice Department was spying on the Associated Press (a story that will haunt the Obama administration forever) -- broke, overshadowing the Bloomberg scandal.

So you may have missed Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler's admission and apology, titled "Holding Ourselves Accountable," that was published in the dead of the night last Monday -- at 12:11 a.m. ET. In it, he owned up to the fact that Bloomberg News reporters had access to "limited client information" for Bloomberg's financial-data-terminal business, a sibling division of the Bloomberg empire that serves more than 300,000 subscribers on Wall Street and beyond.

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Advertising Age makes a cameo appearance in Reddit's new ad-sales pitch deck in the form of a quote grabbed from my recent column about the social-news site: "Reddit has become, simply put, mainstream media." (See slide 3.)

Reddit's new sales and strategy boss, Mike Cole, sent me the whole deck last night and I'm sharing it with you here because, well, it's pretty funny. It tries to make the case for Reddit's reach, cultural power and user engagement using the lingua franca of Reddit: goofy images.

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Greg Karber -- a self-described "writer, performer, video-maker, cultural critic and entrepreneur" based in L.A. -- doesn't mince words. His YouTube video titled "Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless," starts with the words "Abercrombie & Fitch is a terrible company," and things only get more harsh from there. Scroll down below the video for the back story.

Though Abercrombie-bashing has been in fashion for years now, Karber appears to have struck a nerve with the media stunt his video outlines: He's started a campaign to get people to donate Abercrombie & Fitch clothing to homeless people to punish the teen and collegiate clothier for its elitist attitudes.

Karber's video shows a screenshot of a headline, "Abercrombie Says It Would Rather Burn Clothes Than Give Them To Poor People," from a site called Elite Daily ("The Voice of Generation-Y"), which cites a two-year-old interview with an unnamed A&F district manager who said the chain declines to donate its damaged and defective clothing to the needy because, well, Abercrombie is an aspirational brand that doesn't belong on the poors.

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1. Google CEO Larry Page will rethink default privacy settings for Google Glass after embarrassing Google Glass video footage of him pleasuring himself -- by Googling himself (Larry Page net worth, Larry Page private jet ...) -- leaks to Valleywag.

2. In the wake of President Obama's joke at the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner about the rise of BuzzFeed as a media phenomenon -- "I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m." -- congressional Republicans will launch a formal investigation into exactly what post-toke munchies Obama consumed at Columbia and Harvard (chips? candy bars? day-old pizza?) in an attempt to get him in trouble with first lady Michelle Obama, who is famously an advocate for a healthful diet.

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1. Reddit has become, simply put, mainstream media.

As noted in Ad Age recently, Reddit closed out 2012 with more than 37 billion page views and 400 million unique visitors. Even people who don't check the so-called social-news site regularly -- or at all -- constantly experience the Reddit Effect because ...

2. The mainstream blog media is almost ridiculously (even pathetically) dependent on Reddit.

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You probably saw this coming: New York Magazine's Hurricane Sandy cover, dated Nov. 12, 2012, has just been named the Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. ASME's citation reads:

Shot on the Wednesday evening after Hurricane Sandy hit, Iwan Baan's photograph of Manhattan, half aglow and half dark, captured the larger story of a powerful city rendered powerless. A true viral phenomenon, the image became an instant icon of the event -- [and a] magazine cover that many New Yorkers have saved for posterity. In fact, a poster version was offered for sale by the Museum of Modern Art.

How did Baan capture the image? At the time of publication, New York magazine's The Cut blog offered the back story. During half an hour spent circling over the city in a hastily rented helicopter, Baan took "between 2,000 and 2,500 shots -- 80 percent of the shots are a blur, 10 percent are maybe useable, and 1 percent were really sharp."

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Awhile back an elderly relative of mine told me about an outing she went on. She belongs to a senior center, which organizes trips to nearby restaurants for regular group lunches. One time the bus full of seniors arrived a bit early, so they were able to witness the restaurant staff mid-prep. From a distance, they saw waitresses frantically removing the salt-and-pepper shakers from all the tables where the group would be seated.

Why? I asked.

"Well, senior citizens are on fixed incomes and they like to ... borrow things," my relative explained.

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As my colleague Natalie Zmuda reported last week, Kmart recently got in touch with its inner fifth grader and scored a viral-video hit. Initially a web-only spot, "Ship My Pants" has proved so popular (12 million YouTube views and counting as of this writing) that it's being ported to TV this week. Created by DraftFCB, it shows delighted Kmart customers enthusing about the department store's free-shipping program. (Can't find the pants you want in-store? Kmart will ship them free to your home.)

"I just shipped my pants, and it's very convenient!" says an old lady. "I can't wait to ship my pants, Dad!" says a little boy to his proud father.

As Natalie noted, clearly America loves a good poop joke.

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At various points last week, it seemed as if there were a couple parallel, intense manhunts going down: first and foremost, the Boston Police Department and the FBI's search for the Boston Marathon bombers, but also the media's manhunt for the miscreants, rumormongers and incompetents in its ranks and beyond who turned last week into an orgy of misinformation and flawed reporting. In fact, sometimes it seemed as if a lot of the media spent much of last week trying to obliterate any remaining trust in media.

Let's examine the media-world suspects and their guilt. OK, alleged guilt.

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Last December in this space I published a column titled "The Most Damaged Big Brand of The Year Is" -- with the answer being Apple. I dwelled on some of the tech giant's problems in 2012, including its Apple Maps catastrophe and the growing scandal over the brutal conditions at the factories of its China-based subcontractors.

At the time, I noted that Apple's stock was trading at around $540 a share, down from a 52-week high of $705.

As of this writing, it's at $435.

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In February of last year, Mike Proulx and his co-author Stacey Shepatin published the book "Social TV: How Marketers Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media, and Mobile." As senior VP and director of digital strategy at Hill Holliday, Mr. Proulx knows what he's talking about -- and, in just a few weeks, he and a few hundred other social-TV obsessives will talk even more about where the industry is headed. The third edition of Hill Holliday's annual TVnext Summit, an event Mr. Proulx created, is coming up on April 29 in Boston. As the event approaches, Ad Age's Media Guy Simon Dumenco spoke with Mr. Proulx as part of the ongoing Dumenco's Media People series of in-depth interviews. What follows is an edited version of a longer conversation.

Simon Dumenco: Talk to me about what's changed in the social-TV space since the publication of your book -- other than everything.

Mike Proulx: The biggest change we predicted was that consolidation was going to be the theme for 2013, and that certainly has come true. In Chapter 5 in the book, we talked a lot about the social-TV analytic space, and since the release of the book Nielsen bought SocialGuide, and Twitter bought Bluefin Labs, so that leaves an interesting landscape where you have Trendrr as really the only independent social-TV analytics company now.

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Here's a short (true) story about the times we live in:

1. A few weeks back, a Rochester dad named Greg Pembroke decides to take to Facebook to share photos of his 21-month old son Charlie crying about... well, everything. His friends are so amused that they suggest he create a Tumblr blog about the wailing toddler. His first Tumblr post, captioned "He is out of pretzel sticks," shows Charlie crying as he crawls on the kitchen floor; it appears on April 2 on Pembroke's exceedingly spare Tumblr blog titled "Reasons My Son Is Crying."

2. The Tumblr community goes crazy for Charlie. Or, rather, for his dad's wry little conceptual-art project, which shows shot after shot of Charlie, always in tears, with dryly hilarious captions like "I wouldn't let him drink bath water," "He is bad at eating yogurt" and"I wouldn't let him eat Buzz Lightyear's head."

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Since movie critic Roger Ebert died last Thursday, tributes and remembrances have been flooding the internet. (See, for instance, my colleague Nat Ives' video round-up of some classic Ebert outtakes, review and slams.)

Here's one you may have missed: a clip of Ebert and his old "At the Movies" co-host Gene Siskel on the Sept. 5, 1982 episode of "Saturday Night Live," doing, as Siskel put it, "history's first live review of a television show still in progress." (I first spotted this clip on the offical "SNL" Tumblr.) Yep, nearly a quarter century before Twitter launched (in 2006), Siskel & Ebert were doing what millions of people would ultimately become obsessed with doing: commenting about TV in (near) real-time.

In this brief clip, you can see the hallmarks of modern-day Social TV: snark, drive-by opinions, a certain meta sensibility...

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I never have to go far to examine the TV industry's bloated, dated business model. Sometimes I can just look out the window and spot it. Or even just sniff the air and breathe it right in.

I live in downtown Manhattan, which is one of the more popular areas in New York City for location shoots. Over the years, I've come across shoots-in-progress for at least a few dozen TV shows, not to mention another dozen or two film shoots.

We're all used to the idea of huge budgets for major motion pictures, but what's really astonishing is how much is still spent, in 2013, to shoot episodic TV, even as the industry's business model continues to come apart at the seams.

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Feeling heartbroken that the release of Steve Jobs biopic "Jobs" (formerly "jOBS") has been pushed back from April 19 to a date still unknown? Here's something to tide you over: the just-released trailer for "iSteve," the forthcoming Steve Jobs movie from Funny or Die.

The full "iSteve," starring Justin Long (or JUSTiN LONG, as his name is rendered on screen), is due to be released online April 15 and to run roughly an hour. Long, of course, is the "Mac Guy" from Apple's long-running "Get a Mac" spots.

The trailer is everything you'd hope it would be: cheesy, cliched, breathless, overwrought, overheated.

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If you haven't seen it yet, here's a hilarious parody commercial titled "The First Honest Cable Company" that you'll totally relate to. (Unless you're a highly paid executive at a cable company. But even then you still might.) It was posted on YouTube last Tuesday by Extremely Decent Films, but it only really went viral over the weekend, adding more than a million views between Saturday and Sunday, for a total of 1.7 million as of this writing.

With its twee soundtrack, perky pitchman and jazzy typographic animations, the faux spot nails the aesthetic of cable-and-internet-provider commercials, but takes a quick, dark turn with some blunt talk.

NOTE: The video includes a bit of strong language -- including a "f*ck you" at the 0:17 mark -- so if you're watching this in an office setting, maybe wear your headphones.

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The media coverage last Wednesday came in great, rolling, panicky waves: "Massive Cyberattack Hits Internet Users" (CNN.com); "Global Internet Slows After "Biggest Attack in History'" (BBC); ""Largest Cyberattack Ever' Is Happening Right Now, Threatens Rest of Web" (wired.co.uk); and so on and so forth.

It had something to do with a digital pissing match between a European anti-spam group called Spamhaus and a Dutch website-hosting company called Cyberbunker, and the effects were said to reverberate throughout the web. Except they didn't, really.

Gizmodo's Sam Biddle, ever the contrarian, volleyed back with a post titled "That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie"; he actually bothered to check with a couple of the companies that pay very close attention to cyberattacks: NTT, a massive, multinational internet "backbone" company, and Renesys, a global internet-monitoring firm. Neither firm, Biddle reported, saw evidence of the Spamhaus-Cyberbunker beef amounting to much.

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UPDATE!: SocialVibe will be live-streaming the Kitten Race finals at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT on Friday, March 29 at socialvibe.com/kittenraces. Four kittens -- Fifi, Shadow, Pepe and Flash -- will race (more or less) in a benefit for the L.A.-based non-profit group Kitten Rescue.

Late last night I spotted a photo titled "So we held kitten races today at the office" (that's it on the left) on image-sharing site Imgur, via Reddit.

Naturally, my head just about exploded from the sheer cuteness of it. And from jealousy. (No office I've ever worked in has staged kitten races, which is just totally unfair.) A little digging through the comments on the image revealed that the office in question is the Los Angeles headquarters of ad-technology firm SocialVibe, which my colleagues have covered quite a bit.

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See the headline above? That is verbatim advice given by the Uniformed EMTs, Paramedics & Fire Inspector's Union to its members in a recent newsletter, according to the New York Post. Some good advice right there -- particularly given the Post's recent rampage through union members' social feeds.

If you pay attention to the Murdoch tabloid, you probably noticed that Twitter has made its cover three days out of the past week -- for all the wrong reasons. On March 18, in a story coverlined "SON BURN," the paper trumpeted the "Vile, racist rants of FDNY commish's EMT kid":

The first-responder son of city Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano has unleashed a sickening slew of tweets that target everyone from Jews to blacks to the poor.

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I've been keeping an eye -- a skunk eye -- on Mitt Romney. Or, rather, @MittRomney, his Twitter identity and his official Facebook page at facebook.com/mittromney.

If we're to believe Klout, the self-described "standard for influence," the former governor of Massachusetts and failed presidential candidate is still hugely relevant in social media. As of this writing, he's got a lofty Klout score of 88 out of 100 -- the same score that Kim Kardashian has (though both Kim and Mitt are below Kanye West's 92).

How has Mitt maintained such remarkable influence? Let's go to the tape:

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1) November 1936: The U.S. government starts issuing Social Security numbers.

2) June 8, 1949: George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is first published.

3) Some time in 1971 (the specific date is lost to history): IBM engineer George Laurer creates the Universal Product Code (UPC).

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The inevitable just happened: Somebody's developed rudimentary ad-blocking technology for Google Glass.

Here is a top-secret image of the prototype that was leaked on image-sharing site Imgur earlier this afternoon. Already, leading experts -- such as me -- are expressing concerns about the safety of this device, if, for instance, worn while driving, operating heavy machinery and/or making miniature dollhouses.

Sorry, comedy isn't pretty! But easy visual jokes like this one -- combined with the recent news that a Seattle bar has become to the first establishment to announce a ban on Google Glass ("Ass kickings will be encouraged for violators," per the bar's Facebook page) -- suggest that the pre-backlash against Google's high-tech specs is only going to intensify leading up to the planned consumer launch later this year.

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Once again, in keeping with the spirit of this, the Regulation Issue of Advertising Age, your Media Guy has instituted a whole bunch of new laws, bylaws, bi-laws, in-laws and bi in-laws. For the betterment of media, marketing and mankind.

YOU MUST READ THESE UPDATED TERMS OF SERVICE TO PROCEED: By reading this "ARTICLE," you irrevocably consent to abide by a "LICENSE AGREEMENT." License Agreement is between "AUTHOR" (Simon Dumenco) and "READER" (you or your authorized representative, or your authorized representative's representative or your unauthorized representative's old college roommate -- or James Franco, acting on your behalf, with or without your consent). Subject to the terms and conditions of this License Agreement, Author hereby grants Reader the nonexclusive, worldwide right to skim Article distractedly. In return, Reader grants Author the right to resell Reader's likeness and/or personal photos to Instagram, which can, in turn, display such content in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions or James Franco, without any compensation to Reader.

1. Henceforth, the number of Geico commercials that run on Hulu shall be restricted (something less than 18 per hour would be awfully nice) in order to reduce: A) the Geico Gecko's exposure to solar radiation at nude beaches; B) the risk of the Geico Gecko falling to his death from George Washington's eye socket at Mount Rushmore; and C) the chances of me losing my freaking mind.

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A few weeks back I spotted a jpeg on image-sharing site Imgur with the caption "Told the barista my name was 'Bryan, with a y.' This is what I got back." It showed a Starbucks cup with a hastily scrawled "Briany" on it. Ha! When I shared the image on Twitter, I heard back from plenty of folks who also thought it was funny -- and were eager to share their own tales of Starbucks name-mangling. I just checked the stats on that image and it's been viewed 489,502 times as of this writing.

Coincidentally, around the same time I happened to publish a post on AdAge.com with a video embed of a "Saturday Night Live" commercial parody that also focused on Starbucks name-mangling -- within the larger context of Starbucks-employee incompetence. The faux spot was for the Starbucks Verismo home-brewing system and it showed a nice lady patiently trying to use her machine in her kitchen, only to have it botch her order and refer to her as "Amorfa" (instead of "Marsha"). My post about the commercial parody dominated AdAge.com's Most Read chart for a couple of days and has been one of the most-viewed things on our site so far in 2013.

This is comforting to me, because it suggests that my unhealthy obsession with Starbucks is a common condition. I mean, obviously plenty of people are obsessed with Starbucks -- people talk all the time about needing their "Starbucks fix" -- and of course it's normal to think a lot about drugs (like caffeine) before, during and after using them. But I'm not a big coffee drinker, and I actually rarely go to Starbucks (I'm not a fan of their roasts), which makes my obsession perhaps particularly unhealthy. You see, my fixation on the chain has more to do with Starbucks as a sort of inescapable, free-floating meme by virtue of its omnipresence in our lives and its unique status as the no-rent headquarters of millions of laptop-toting media-makers across the land.

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A few weeks back, in a column titled "For a Master Class in Trolling, Just Turn to The New York Times," my colleague Ken Wheaton gave credit where credit is due. While the likes of Gawker and BuzzFeed get plenty of attention for publishing obnoxious stories that seem engineered to gin up outrage -- and page views -- Ken suggested you take a close look at the Times' real estate, fashion and lifestyle sections:

There, you'll find a broad range of sufferers. If by broad, you mean middle to upper class and, as often as not, white women.

This, in turn, drives a certain sort of person (me) absolutely bonkers. And that's the secret recipe behind a perfectly viral New York Times article: a little bit of reader "service," a little bit of passable writing. And a heaping handful of trolling.

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Illinois state Rep. Robin Kelly is in the news today because she won a Democratic primary election held yesterday in Chicago. She was one of more than a dozen Democrats looking to fill the seat vacated by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and she came out on top with a little help from a friend: Mike Bloomberg. The New York mayor has thrown his financial support behind Kelly specifically because she's in favor of gun control. (Mayor Bloomberg has been especially vocal about the need for new gun-control laws since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.)

CNN reports that Kelly's chief rival for the Democratic nomination, former U.S. Rep. Debbie Halvorson, cited the nonstop barrage of negative ads against her in her concession speech. "There was $2.3 million dollars minimum spent against me," she said. "Someone timed it. Every seven and a half minutes there was a commercial."

What's remarkable about the negative messaging against Halvorson is not only that it made gun control a central issue, but portrayed the National Rifle Association as an unambiguous villain. For instance, in this spot from Independence USA, a Bloomberg-backed PAC, Halvorson and fellow candidate Toi Hutchinson are criticized for winning "A" ratings from the NRA. "They can't be trusted," a voiceover intones darkly.

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You've seen the "Goats Yelling Like Humans -- Super Cut Compilation" that's gone viral, right? Well, something's happened to make it even more magical: Somebody created a duet between one of the goats and Taylor Swift (see below). When I spotted it (via Reddit) on Friday, the day it was first posted to YouTube, it had a few thousand views. By the time I thought to tweet it on Saturday, it was up to a few hundred thousand. By Sunday afternoon around 2 p.m. ET, it surpassed two million views. By Monday afternoon it hit five million.

Here I'll note that a couple weeks back I published a post titled "Please, for the Love of God, Nobody Make a Harlem Shake-Themed Commercial!" That didn't work out so well, so I'm going to try a little reverse psychology and say -- indeed, shout -- HEY, EVERYBODY STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND MAKE A YELLING-GOAT DUET VIDEO RIGHT NOW! Just like Taylor Swift did! (OK, technically it was done without her involvement, but I still think it'll do wonders for her fledgling career.)

Actually, you know what? I take that back; that wasn't a reverse-psychology ploy. I really do want everybody to start doing yelling-goat duet videos. In fact, I'll give $20 -- in small, unmarked bills -- to the first ad agency that lets me know they've created a yelling-goat commercial for a client. The clock starts... now. (Offer void where prohibited by law.)

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Nate Silver, the man who predicted President Barack Obama's reelection and correctly called all 50 states -- and is included in this year's just-released Ad Age Digital A-List -- issued his Oscar predictions (for the top six categories) last week in a post titled "Oscar Predictions, Election-Style." His approach was to "look solely at the other awards that were given out in the run-up to the Oscars: the closest equivalent to pre-election polls. These have always been the best predictors of Oscar success."

How'd he do? Here's your executive summary:

Best Picture: "Argo" -- correct!

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Twitter's head of TV, Fred Graver, reveals in a blog post titled "A look back at the Oscars" (yes, this morning it does seem so very long ago) that there were nearly 9 million tweets about the 85th annual Academy Awards last night, including 2.1 million during the red-carpet pre-show, and 6.8 million during the big show itself.

According to Graver's numbers, Adele was arguably the night's big social-media winner. She appears twice in Twitter's Top 5 list of Oscar moments that prompted the most tweets-per-minute (TPM) -- and came within spitting distance of the inevitable most-tweeted moment (the announcement of Best Picture) with her performance of "Skyfall":

1. "Argo" wins Best Picture: 85,300 TPM

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