The last time we put Entertainment Weekly (a.k.a. The Bible...for now, anyway) under the Mediator microscope, we made it clear how much it pained us to do so, because we really love the magazine. And we had genuinely hoped that would be the last time we'd have to subject it to our most ruthless scrutiny, and that we wouldn't have to mention EW in The Mediator again until we could triumphantly report that they had jettisoned all their deadest weight (a.k.a. Jim Mullen, Joel Stein, and Jessica Shaw). Unfortunately, the April 11 issue has forced us to give EW a little more tough love, in the hopes that it's not too late for them to realize what a mistake they've made, and reverse it.

In a nutshell, EW has renovated its front-of-book section, "News & Notes," to make it as much like Us Weekly as is possible without driving away all of EW's functionally literate readers. Obviously, EW's managing editor, Rick Tetzeli, does not describe the change in those terms, but the result is unmistakeable. Instead, Tetzeli promises "more humor and opinion," "more reported stories," and "[b]igger, better photos." And they're not kidding about the photos: the section's new editors, Jason Adams and Ari Karpel, have added two new features, each of which amounts to a full-page photo accompanied by a brief caption. We have nothing against a nice photo in a magazine, obviously, but it's not as though EW, as a weekly magazine, has the time or budget to commission the kinds of luscious double-page spreads you see in the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair. Full-page photos in a weekly magazine are going to look either like they were taken in a twenty-minute photo shoot by a photographer you've never heard of (as is the case with the portrait accompanying Mekhi Phifer in "The 5-Year Plan"), or like they were taken with a telephoto lens (like the apparently exclusive "First Look" of Angelina Jolie and Jan De Bont on the set of the Tomb Raider sequel -- a photo that just happens to depict Jolie in a bikini. BENDING OVER). Hey, you know where else we tend to see a lot of full-page photos taking up a lot of real estate that is normally occupied by a bunch of words and stuff? Us Weekly.

So, you might think that with the new emphasis on great big photos, there'd be less space for the "more reported stories" we were promised, and you'd be right. Back in the good old days of the issue before last, the lead "News & Notes" story was about 1000 words -- full of verifiable facts and actual news -- on...you know, something newsy. While it would generally have the mildly snarky EW slant, it was primarily a news story and not an opinion piece. In the new "News & Notes," the lead story is, at first glance, the kind of thing you'd see in the old "News & Notes" -- a story speculating about the future career prospects of this year's four winners of acting Oscars. Only, the story is about 250 words shorter than average (with space on the two-page spread taken up by four photos and a quarter-page photo illustration for the next story), and though author Nancy Miller supplements it with expert comments from an agent and a casting director, both anonymous, most of the article is made up of her snarky opinions, i.e.: "And as for those ambitions [Adrien Brody has] to make a hip-hop album with P. Diddy? Russell Crowe and Billy Bob Thornton can guarantee: You'll be missundaztood." It's not that it's untrue; it's that this is supposed to be a news article, so watch your tone, and leave the snark to the professionals.

The second story in the latest issue is closer to the kind of "News & Notes" lead we're accustomed to: a news story reporting on the firing of creator Larry Wilmore from The Bernie Mac Show, and the possible future firing of creator Aaron Sorkin from The West Wing. This gave us hope, on our first flip-through, that the redesigned section wouldn't be as bad as we feared. Then we turned the page to see (a) the art director thought it would be a good idea to add a sidebar along the bottom of the page, in the manner of a cable news network's "crawl," and (b) they had the chance to ditch Jim Fucking Mullen's Fucking Hot Sheet, and they didn't! It's still there! Although the redesign has resulted in its being five items shorter than it used to be, they've also stuck a pull-quote with much larger text in the middle of it, making it harder to ignore. As for the Hot Sheet: well, we've already registered our complaints about it, and the fact that it's survived this redesign suggests that Jim Mullen must have naked pictures of some highly placed AOL Time Warner executive or other. But the crawl -- now, that's just dumb. It's got all these little carets along the bottom of it, too, to make it look more dynamic, but EW is a magazine, and that little conceit doesn't work in a print publication.

Okay. Next page. The crawl continues. That's bad. There's a short-ish story about how entertainment products have responded to the war -- such as Warner Bros. airbrushing out Amanda Bynes's peace sign on the What a Girl Wants posters, and Madonna pulling her "American Life" video. The story's fine -- it's exactly the sort of thing "News & Notes" is for, and in the older incarnation, it might be even longer. But no, they have to make room for some of the "more humor" we were promised, in the form of "Hollywood Haiku, by Tim Carvell: Barbara Walters and/ Adrien Brody need to/ stop with the kissing." I swear to God, I didn't make that up. It's real. A national magazine paid someone to write it and set aside an eighth of a glossy page to publish it. There's also "To Do List," the point of which escapes me; there are five items on the list, none of which has anything to do with any of the others. I think they're trying to be funny, maybe: "Put on Lisa Marie Presley's debut...while scarfing down her daddy's fave: fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches." But then: "Make like Oscar winner Eminem and lose yourself." What? Also crammed onto the page is "Hooray for..." It's a sidebar in which TV critic Ken Tucker tells us all to watch three previously unaired episodes of Robbery Homicide Division on USA, which...fine, although wouldn't it go better in the TV section? And since "Hooray for..." isn't mentioned in Tetzeli's Letter from the Editor, we don't know exactly what the feature's mission is, or whether it will recur.

Moving on -- and to the most Us Weekly-y page in the section thus far. There's the fucking Shaw Report. There, in the top left corner, is "Pop Culture Crib Sheet," which is apparently (according to Tetzeli) to arm us "with choice insider tidbits for the next water-cooler klatch." I would argue that knowing the pronunciation of director Hayao Miyazaki's name doesn't exactly indicate that one has specialized insider information, considering that you can hear it in any of the TV spots for Spirited Away. Also: "The villain, Yubaba, is a nasty old wench with an identical twin sister (just like Phoebe on Friends!) and a supersize mole between her eyes." None of that is a choice insider tidbit: it's basic information one gleans if one sees the movie. And furthermore, what the hell does the Friends reference have to do with anything? Is that thrown in for people too dumb to conceptualize what an identical twin is? Or is the "like Phoebe on Friends" bit meant to refer primarily to the antecedent "nasty old wench"? Regardless: we are not stupid, EW. Please do not treat us, like Us Weekly does, as if we were. (The rest of the page -- featuring a short box about Pee-wee's Big Adventure references in Head of State and "The Deal Report" -- is fine.)

The next spread is about 50% good old "News & Notes" stuff, and 50% stupid crap. The "stupid crap" part includes the aforementioned "5-Year Plan." Mekhi Phifer tells us what he was doing five years ago, what he's doing now, and what he'd like to be doing in five years. I have nothing against Phifer, but seriously, who cares. If you want to write something about him, do a proper story. If this whole exercise is a pretext for getting more photos in the section, then the photos you run should look a lot better. On the facing page is "The Cash Register," which is a faux-Harper's Index list of random dollar amounts of random...uh...things. Like "Unclaimed lottery jackpot going to [Virginia's] state Literary Fund" or "Starting bid for a pair of tickets to [Third Eye Blind's] upcoming tour, for which all tickets will be sold on eBay." Huh? What? Which? Actually, never mind. We don't care.

The next page is "Monitor," recording births and deaths and lawsuits and whatnot. It's basically the same, except for a new layout, and a sidebar on the many arrests of this year's American Idol contestants, which is inexplicably accompanied by an extra sidebar to the sidebar, comparing the "Percentage of Americans booked for battery/felony theft/assault" to the percentage of AI semifinalists arrested on the same charge. Except that the percentage in the general population, as you'd expect, is greater than that of the AI people, so...so? If the percentage among AI contestants were higher, it might be kind of funny. But it isn't, so it's a waste of space.

Finally, "First Look." Oh, hello, Angelina Jolie's cleavage. I had almost forgotten what you looked like.

I don't pretend to have insider knowledge as to what goes on at EW. For all I know, they have done extensive market research proving that their average reader does wnat her EW experience to be more like that of Us Weekly. I mean, I hope it isn't true, but I suppose it could be, and that's why they've torn down "News & Notes" and rebuilt it into this half-assed Us retread. But, much as we didn't appreciate what a fine little sorbet "Encore" was until they replaced it with the Hydrox that is Joel Stein, so too did we fail to appreciate the tidy, cohesive, informative and occasionally funny package that was "News & Notes" until we got this sprawling mess with a haiku in the middle of it.

Frankly, I blame Jessica Shaw.