Oops, she did it again. Anne “Mellons” Schroeder, the recently-wed gossip columnist of The Politico, has referenced the reporting of columnist Lloyd Grove in the context of her own reporting for the dozenth time today since she started writing for the paper in late January. Grove, you’ll recall, is Schroeder’s former boss at the Washington Post. Don’t get us wrong, we talk about other reporters’ work all the time — but we’re just curious, does Grove send her tips to point out about his work, so she’ll then shill it, or does Schroeder just always have stars in her eyes for Mr. G? If that’s the case, she’s a whole lot different than Hud Morgan, who worked as Grove’s beleaguered assistant at The New York Daily News.

Related: Some Lady Had a Dream About Anne Schroeder

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Lloyd Grove, one of the best WaPo tattlers who ever lived (there’s only been a handful, after all), has begun contributing a column called “The World According To…” to the much gossiped about Conde Nast business pub Portfolio. He must be on staff, too, since he’s got his own caricature on the site and everything. Fancy!

He’s holding his cards close to his chest regarding the Washington power players he’s bound to cover, telling Big Head DC that he “wouldn’t want to spoil the drama” by sharing any of his future column plans. (Maybe he’s just worried about how many columns he’ll be able to pen before Portfolio folds!)

One person you can expect Grove not to cover: His former gal pal Amy Holmes, a one-time Reliable Source source who went on to become a GOP strategist, a former aide to ex-Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, and a talking head often seen on FOX News. Boy, his back must have been sore after she stepped on it!

Good luck, Lloyd. But just don’t let them pull a New York Daily News-type trick on you!

Earlier: Lloyd Grove Was Sexier in Washington?

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In-the-know Washingtonians may recall a sassy young lass named Julia Baugher, a former Georgetown University sex and dating columnist who disgraced the school’s student newspaper The Hoya because she plagiarized portions of a column from iVillage. But give the go-getter gal a few years in New York and, suddenly, she has a spiffy new name, “Julia Allison” and will now be earning upwards of 100K per year as the editor-at-large of the well-known Star tabloid/magazine.

“Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I remember back when being outed as a plagiarist carried the stigma of getting charged with rape,” a DC journalist familiar with Allison’s past misdeeds told Big Head DC. “It would ruin you. Now you have Baugher a budding celebrity…”

So, did Baugher change her name to avoid being known as a plagarist?

Perhaps fortuitously, there will be little journalistic prowess involved with Allison’s new job: “She won’t be editing or writing, but she will be appearing as a talking expert whenever TV comes calling for someone to go on air to comment on the latest celebrity gossip or scandal,” according to the NY Post.

Allison has said in the past that she much prefers doing TV to writing because it takes less effort.

Unless you just copy and paste, that is!

Bonus fun fact just because it’s Thursday: Back when Allison was still Baugher she had a scandalous relationship with politico Harold Ford, Jr., (and current FOX News talking head), which was first reported in WaPo’s Reliable Source column by the paper’s ex-gossip Lloyd Grove. Later, Allison had a not-so-discreet affair with - you guessed it! - Lloyd Grove.

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Amy Holmes - a GOP strategist, a former aide to ex-Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, and a talking head often seen on FOX News - made a couple of surprising revelations while co-hosting The View today: She is registered as an Independent and is adamantly pro-choice – even though she’s said she’s Republican in the past.

So, why does the Black Entertainment Television personality tout conservative values, while espousing some pretty liberal views in private?

“Because she quickly learned as an African American woman today what would be the quickest route to air-time,” an associate of Holmes told Big Head DC this morning. “She definitely wouldn’t have been hosting The View today, if she was a liberal.”

No party line, it seems, will hold the 33-year-old Holmes back in her quest for fame. She’s said in the past that she’d like to have her own television program like Charlie Rose, has appeared as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful,” and, we’re told, worked her sources hard to score an appearance on Bill Maher’s program in April.

“I love photo shoots,” Holmes, who once dated the former Reliable Source writer Lloyd Grove, told her alma mater’s newspaper in 2000. “I understand now why celebrities get addicted.”

But who knew that becoming addicted to the GOP would get a gal everything she ever wanted?

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From the AP wire: 

We also learned that Lloyd Grove, former columnist for the New York Daily News, had attempted a much longer Paris Hilton blackout. He began it a year into his “Lowdown” column and stuck to it, he says, for two years until the column was discontinued last October — except for a blind item (no names) about Hilton crashing a pre-Oscar party.

So was Grove attempting to raise the level of discourse in our society by focusing on truly newsworthy subjects?

Well, not really. “The blackout was a really heartfelt attempt on my part,” he says, “to get publicity for myself.”

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The Politico’s gossip columnist Anne Schroeder (formerly of Capitol File) had Washington media insiders all over town laughing with glee (and embarrassment) yesterday. 

Not only was her debut column (which she literally had two months to work on) a dud, she created a strange video of herself lurking about the Politico’s office to boot! In fact, the video quickly became the most viewed content on the new Web site – I’m guessing because it’s so bad. In it, she brags about being hung over while writing, frequently going to bars to chat up sources, and being a “busy girl” with “eight arms.” Plus, as of this very minute, the site’s editors still have her name spelled wrong.

“It really is all about interpersonal relationships, at the end of the day,” the cliche-loving Lloyd Grove protege announces within said vid. “Sometimes you can see my Jack. You can’t see my Ace.” Schroeder also says she sees herself as a combination of Maureen Dowd and Dave Berry. Ahem.

At one point in the video, a circus announcer booms that one of her biggest scoops was about Jessica Simpson thinking the Interior Department Secretary decorates the White House. Um, that’s the best story of your career? And you worked at the Washington Post? How sad.

One Schroeder pal who asked to remain anonymous said the video made her cringe with embarrassment. Another media insider summed the whole train wreck up best: “horrible!” 

Better luck in the future, Anne. Break a leg — or, an arm, I guess, in your case. You’ve got eight of ‘em!

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We’ve grown so tired of gabbing on about male gossip columnists, including Lloyd Grove, Paul Bedard and the Examiner newbies, that we decided to cure our Cocktober blues with –what else — a visit with Karen Feld.  Yes, she and her pup Campari are the only souls that we can always count on to make us smile as the weather turns to pumpkins.

And thank goodness we did. Always on the hunt for good gossip, Feld recently caught up with Joan Rivers who told her all about her new BRAVO show modeled after Barbara Walters’ The View — that will star all gay men (and Rivers, too).

“Our show, called ‘Straight Talk,’ will be me and four wonderful, wonderful, wonderful gay men—I went through (I swear) 5,000 to find them—plus former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who’ll be coming on as our special correspondent for politics and current events,” the QVC queen recently wrote on her blog. ”He’s adorable, funny, and at a real crossroads in his life.”

Rivers explained to Feld that McGreevey is the first she signed on to do the program, and her people consider it to be a “real coup.” No word yet on what Mrs. McGreevey thinks.

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Soon after we read the now-former NYDN’s “My Life as a Gossip Columnist” op-ed in the LA Times yesterday (and poked fun at Patrick Gavin, of course), a couple of in-the-know Washingtonians were quick to point out that Grove had already written a behind-the-scenes gossip tell-all for the WaPo Magazine five years ago.

Unlike his latest tome, in which Mr. Grove failed to explain how in the hell he got Mort Zuckerman to offer him a 300K per year contract to write NYDN’s Lowdown, for the WaPo piece he went on and on about how the Reliable Source fell, er, into his somewhat sorry lap circa 1999:

I was in a rut. For a couple of years, I had been living in limbo as a separated guy — in a shabby one-bedroom apartment where my two children slept in the living room on cots during their weekend visits. I had been mired in the messy, draining malaise of an expiring marriage while trying to make a new life for myself. There was definitely allure in the shock of the new, not to mention the promise of endless supplies of chilled shrimp and spicy cocktail sauce on Washington’s social circuit. Manhattan media titan Graydon Carter, who had published a few of my movie star profiles in Vanity Fair, was among the sages I consulted. “You should do it,” Carter intoned. “You’ll be a babe magnet.”

I took the job.

Within his WaPo speak easy, Grove implied that he was, indeed, a ladies man while headquartered (and hindquartered?) in Washington. But was he a “babe magnet” in NYC? We don’t know. He offered nary a bit of dirt about his personal conquests in yesterday’s op-ed (from what he wrote, it seems the sexiest beef he attracted while at the NYDN was a stern lecture from Tom Brokaw). However, in the WaPo piece, he explained how he once slept with a source and then the Reliable Source wrote about her, which — shocker – got him in a tish of trouble:

The Reliable Source published a brief interview with a 26-year-old policy analyst and television talking head named Amy Holmes, the only D.C. resident on People magazine’s popular “50 Most Beautiful People” list. Amy and I had recently started dating, but that didn’t seem like good and sufficient reason to ignore her success. The item was a no-brainer…

The consequences came quickly. Around lunchtime the following Thursday, gossip columnist Mitchell Fink left me an urgent message to call him back at the New York Daily News. When I reached him, he cut to the chase: “Someone told me that you’re dating the woman you wrote about in your column last week. Is this true?” I was paralyzed by fear — my head swimming, my palms cold and clammy. For several seconds I couldn’t speak. I felt as if I was suddenly at the center of a grotesque Washington ethics scandal. Finally, I stuttered, “Er, Mitchell, c-c-c-can we talk off the record?”

If he did cork any sources while on the Lowdown, we want to know, and damn it, Grove should have told us. Now we’re left to do all of the grunt work ourselves.

Indeed, working at the Daily News has apparently made a once wild and crazy guy much less willing to wax poetic about his own financial and sexual profits. Who knew that the city that never sleeps could tame Lloyd Grove in ways that, it seems, our fair Washington never could? 

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Update, 12:30 p.m.: Gavin’s still trying to make sense of Grove’s op-ed. Ha. Patty, we thought you were so confident that Grove would return to DC. (Until Big Head Rob got the scoop that you couldn’t, straight from the source.)  

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9:42 a.m. entry: Laughed our asses off when we read Patrick Gavin’s triumphant link to Lloyd Grove’s LA Times Sunday opinion piece on being a gossip columnist. Wrote Grove:

The most satisfying gossip column offers a dollop of drama, conflict and misbehavior, along with a dash of hypocrisy and humor. It views this complicated world through the prism of personality – and makes things, if temporarily, accessible and comprehensible…

We think it might be called ironic, or something, that the so-called “gossip” site FishbowlDC – mainly a site that links to other sites and one that tends to break no real gossip — would even dare to bring attention to Grove’s very true words.

Gavin himself performs somewhat better at being a gossip with his the help of his colleague, Jeff Dufour, at the Examiner’s Yeas and Nays, but why doesn’t any of that ethic wear off on the Mediabistro fishstick enerterprise? Where’s the fuckin’ beef?

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Today was Lloyd Grove’s last column with the New York Daily News, despite his surprising declaration (see Gawker link) to Big Head Rob just last month that he had “no plans” other than to continue writing his column at the newspaper. (Tongues had been wagging for months that his pricey contract — reportedly 300K per year — had not been renewed.)

Grove said that it was a tough learning curve to go from being the Reliable Source at the Washington Post to one of several piranha-like gossips in NYC just over three years ago. “New York is not Washington, obviously,” he told the Times today. “There are about 20 different major industries that are headquartered here, and I am still on a New York learning curve. It takes time, learning about them, writing about them, so I am still on a learning curve, but it is not as steep as it once was.”

The Times also notes that many New Yorkers speculated that Grove wouldn’t last as long as he did. “Before he started, one Page Six reporter said, ‘We will not rest until we send you back to Washington on a stretcher,’” according to the paper. “That was from Jared Paul Stern, who was carried off the field first after being accused of trying to blackmail Ronald W. Burkle. Mr. Grove at least outlasted him.”

In his column today, Grove insisted he’s not ready to reveal his next step, but few are speculating that it will be in DC’s direction.

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