In your risible Thursday media column: a new New Yorker publisher, Time Out NY cuts pay (with a pizza party!), Laurel Touby Twitters, and more:

The New Yorker was Conde Nast's biggest ad page loser last year, and now their publisher is leaving! Drew Schutte came to the NYer last year from Wired—now he's leaving to be "chief revenue officer" of Conde Nast Digital. He's being replaced by Lisa Hughes, publisher of Conde Nast Traveler. Which did better than the New Yorker last year. Needless to say. [NYP]


Last fall Time Out NY had some trouble paying its bills, but fearless president Alison "you can sign my name to that" Tocci assured staff that they'd pull through the tough times. Today, we hear, Tocci announced a new 5% across the board pay cut at a staff meeting. Allow our shamefully anonymous tipster to take up the story there:

[She said it's the] only way, they've done every single cutback possible and had instituted a hiring freeze. We were then invited to a pizza party — do you know how much money 50 large pizzas with toppings must cost? This is a week after they proudly sent an allstaff e-mail announcing their annual sponsorship of yet another NYAMBL bowling team, because god forbid we don't get back against Rachel Ray's team.

Oh, and that hiring freeze? Not ten minutes before she brought it up, she had introduced our ten new hires to everyone.

But she did so while using her real name, presumably. So cut her some slack.

Whoa, Philly Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, whoa! "Should Google 'pick up' (steal) our stuff, if we successfully sued them for $1 billion, two good things happen: 1) Our money problems are solved; 2) everyone else will stop stealing our content." And should Stu Bykofsky suddenly shit gold, his money problems would be solved as well. Whoa now.


Some dude from Tennessee wants to buy the six-paper Creative Loafing chain of alt-weeklies for $13.3 million. Sell. Sellsellsell! Quickly!

Finally, Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby is Twittering LIVE from the high-powered TED conference. What can you tell us, Laurel?




Thanks, Laurel.