Normally when magazines need writers and decide to post on Craigslist, they put up some info about what they are looking for and an email address. Writers will email the editor clips, a resume and maybe a pitch. It's all very...usual.

Then there's this:

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It costs just $30 to turn your last 200 posts on Twitter into a book. As the TweetBookz ad says, "Get your's today!"

Proofreader not included in purchase price.

Well, it looks like the guys at BNO found out how to make money on Twitter before the guys at Twitter figure out how to make money on Twitter. Neat trick.

Here's the whole release:

BNO News launches news wire service International wire service will deliver news content aimed at U.S. news companies NEW YORK - November 23, 2009 - BNO News today announced the launch of the BNO News Wire, a business venture focused on providing comprehensive breaking news coverage to news media companies around the world. Msnbc.com will be the first of the service's new clients.

BNO News, a news service founded in the Netherlands, currently delivers breaking news alerts to a global audience through the BNO Breaking News iPhone application and its popular Twitter account, @BreakingNews. The news updates combine original reporting and headlines from multiple sources, and are among the most-followed on Twitter. With the launch of the subscription-based news wire service, BNO News will shift attention away from @BreakingNews to focus on building and delivering this new enhanced service to media companies and publishers.

Continued after the jump...

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So as you sit around the holiday table this week, looking at those spooky weirdos you call family, wondering if being associated with them makes you look bad, marveling how your knuckles don't seem to be dragging on the floor like the rest of them, think of poor self-described DJ, Matthew Roberts who found out it was Charles Manson who raped his mother 40 years ago.

Here's the pic of Roberts.

Roberts tells The Sun:

He says: "I didn't want to believe it. I was frightened and angry. It's like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father.

"I'm a peaceful person - trapped in the face of a monster."

Whole story is here.

The magazine sent us this release:

944 Media has appointed Brent Bolthouse and Jenifer Rosero, business partners in event production company Bolthouse Productions, as Publishers of 944 Magazine Los Angeles. Over the past twenty years, Rosero and Bolthouse have been instrumental in setting the tone of Los Angeles nightlife and have had their finger on the pulse of the ever-evolving industry landscape in not only events, but collaborating on many of the city's landmark hotels and fine dining establishments. As publishers the pair will focus on further developing 944's brand relationships in Los Angeles.

"We are not a typical media company, so we don't need typical publishers," says Marc Lotenberg, Founder and CEO of 944 Media. "Brent and Jen are brilliant marketers and influencers, and they have deep and longstanding relationships with celebrities, photographers, designers, vendors...everyone that we need to reach in order to continue to raise the profile of the Los Angeles edition."

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We asked LA Weekly's new editor Drex Heikes what was true in the Neon Tommy profile. Are they going to be hiring more reporters? What is the future of the paper?

"The kid who wrote it was first rate. I wish it had been more about the paper and less about yours truly. I asked him several times to focus on the paper because I could tell he was going all messiah, which is utterly misguided," Heikes tells FBLA.

Noting, "The websites advisors are both former Weekly employees. I wonder what happened in the editing."

But tellingly Heikes asks for patience, "I wish that crowd would calm down and give us a year."

Noted.

Previously on FBLA: LA Weekly Gets Defensive About Neon Tommy Report

Yes, Twitter is huge. Yes, in the case of the Iran election, it has changed history. Yes it's close to icon status. But it has yet to turn a profit. That should all end soon according to Bloomberg.com:

Twitter plans to start the ad business in early 2010, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said today at a conference in San Francisco. The current revenue comes from companies paying to use Twitter's data, such as Microsoft Corp. displaying Twitter updates in its search results.

Twitter -- a free Web service that lets people post 140-character messages, or tweets -- is starting to concentrate more on revenue. Since it was founded in 2006, the company has mainly focused on attracting users and improving its product. Twitter, which has more than 58 million users, has raised about $155 million in venture capital, Costolo said.

For perspective, News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Yes this Internet thing could not just be a salvage yard for newspapers. There's money and stuff there.

Via I Want Media

Last Friday, in response to an article by student-run Neon Tommy, the LA Weekly ran a post on its daily blog harshly critical of the paper prior to it's acquisition in 2006 by the owners of the New Times chain (now Village Voice Media). The author of the post, Dennis Romero, all but declared that a new golden era has arrived at the paper, rescuing readers from what they gladly picked up for nearly three decades. It's a strangely schizophrenic and defensive piece of propaganda, and probably not even worth addressing - but here I go.

Romero argues that "what's seen as a reduction of the editorial department is also a changing of the guard." That the new owners reduced the staff of the editorial department by more than half is not a perception - it's a fact. Romero should note all the empty cubicles around him in the Weekly office. Furthermore, the freelance budget has been slashed and the paper's page count has shrunk. But Romero would have you believe that getting smaller is a good thing:

While the Weekly of yesteryear was a place for old white guys to pontificate -- in 10,000 words or less -- about the state of the nation, the new Weekly is, ironically, more like a daily newspaper, where reporters and journalists are employed to report, dig and do research before putting it on paper in fewer, tighter, fact-driven words.

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Earlier this week, the USC student-run online publication Neon Tommy published a profile of LA Weekly editor Drex Heikes. The story was not unflattering, and I was impressed by Heikes' candor about many of the issues facing the paper. He openly acknowledged how grim things had become:

"Sometime in the winter, spring, it bottomed out," Heikes said gravely from his new desk at the Weekly's Culver City headquarters. "I wasn't here, but from what I understand, there were sparks on the pavement. The shocks were gone. There was just nothing left."

Of course Heikes is cocksure he can turn the place around. His assessment is ballsy and honest, and who wouldn't appreciate that? Well, LA Weekly staffer Dennis Romero, for one. Today he wrote a blog post titled, "For The Record: Setting Things Straight Regarding Neon Tommy Report On LA Weekly." And to be fair, the Neon Tommy story contained a glaring factual error. It reported an editorial staff of six, when it is in fact about three times that. But Romero is more eager to contradict his editor's acknowledgment of problems at the paper - or to blame them on the former staff.

Tommy's gives some ink to the notion espoused by the Weekly's critics -- mostly former employees -- that the paper has seen better days and is need of rescuing or, in the parlance of the Neon ones, that it needs saving -- a "Herculean task."

(The headline of the Neon Tommy story was "Heikes' Herculean Task: Save The L.A. Weekly.")

Herculean is not the word. Once we dust off the notepads that were rarely used by some of the Weekly's columnists of yesterday, it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

His attacks on the pre-New Times LA Weekly come in unbelievably broad strokes that are not only unfair but inaccurate. For every desk-bound opinion columnist like Harold Meyerson, there was a hard-hitting reporter like David Zahniser whose notebook was never, ever dusty.

As one of the former staffers being slammed indiscriminately by Romero, I'm admittedly a little peeved. I'm gonna take a walk around the block, punch a wall, listen to some Joan Jett - but I'll be back. And I've got a few things to say.

Ellen Degeneres reacts to the news of the end of the Oprah show.