• Another ex-Post staffer has filed a salacious lawsuit against the paper. [HP]
• Yet another magazine is no more. Giant gave up the ghost today. [Gawker]
• Rupert Murdoch's son, Lachlan Murdoch, is teaming up with media investor Jimmy Finkelstein to bid on a handful of media trade titles owned by Nielsen, including The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and AdWeek. [NYT]
• The guy who runs Clubplanet.com says that if Maxim's owners don't sell him the mag, it will go bust by March. Maxim isn't impressed. [P6, AdAge]
• One sector of the magazine biz that's doing well: Airline publishing! [WSJ]
• Did BusinessWeek just replace Maria Bartiromo with Charlie Rose? [BI]
• The good news for Jay Leno: His ratings seem to have stabilized in recent weeks. The bad: More people are watching shows they recorded on their DVRs rather than tune into NBC's misguided 10pm experiment. [THR, NYP]
• New Moon topped the box office once again this weekend, as expected. [THR]

• France's first lady, Carla Bruni, will star in Woody Allen's next movie. [AFP]
• Time Inc. is shutting down InStyle Weddings and laying off nine people in the process. The company also let 15 staffers go at Fortune today. [Gawker, NYP]
• Adam Lambert's racy performance at the AMAs has stirred up some drama, in case you haven't heard; ABC says it's been flooded with complaints. [NYT]
• In related news, Lambert will not be appearing on GMA due to the fallout, but he will be on the Early Show and the Late Show with David Letterman. [HL]
• The Washington Post is closing its NYC, LA, Chicago bureaus. [WaPo]
• Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst are setting up a company to "allow them to take the digital future into their own hands." Better late than never! [NYO]
• Sarah Palin's Going Rogue sold 700,000 copies in its first week, sadly. [AP]

Quick, get to a TV! General Hospital starts at 3pm and you don't want to miss a minute of Hollywood A-lister James Franco's historic role on the show. Here's a little bit of context so you won't be totally lost.

• Lou Dobbs is leaving CNN! Tonight's his last show! Happy Wednesday! [NYT]
• Condé Nast magazines have lost a collective 8,359 pages of advertising in 2009, which represents a 31 percent decline from a year earlier. [NYT]
• One thing that Hearst has going for it: lots of cash in the bank. [NYP]
• Banker-turned-media investor Jimmy Finklestein is reportedly buying the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, and a few other Nielsen titles. [Wrap]
• Current TV is keeping current with the times and laying off 80 staffers. [LAT]
• TV: Joss Whedon's Dollhouse has been canceled by Fox; meanwhile, ABC has decided that Kelsey Grammer comedy series Hank will exist no longer.
• Détente? President Obama has agreed to give Fox News an interview. [HP]
• The New Yorker sure has lots of writers and editors! [NYO]
• Reality TV is slowly killing us. So says Vanity Fair's James Wolcott. [VF]

When the new ABC sci-fi series "V" premiered last Monday, everyone wondered if its titular Visitors were an allegorical critique of the Obama administration. Tonight's episode proved without a doubt that the creators of "V" hate Barack Obama.

In a time of chaos, the wise mogul keeps his enemies close, and his off-their-rocker trainwreck creations closer.

ABC's new sci-fi series V kicks off tonight. It concerns a charismatic leader who comes out of nowhere promising a bright future and a better life for all Americans. Is that leader Barack Obama or is it a space lizard?

ABC is developing an extreme reality weight loss show for the morbidly obese.

For the first time, 25-year-old researcher Robert Thomas reveals to Gawker how earlier this year he and Richard Heene drew up a master plan to generate a massive media controversy using a weather balloon. To get famous, of course.

Richard and Mayumi Heene, the parents of Falcon, who is missing after having apparently floated away in a helium balloon-craft built by his parents, have left a long and wide internet trail. Here's what we know.

• It's been two days since Condé Nast announced plans to shut down four of its magazines, but the bad news continues to trickle in. According to some number-crunching by Newsweek, the magazine giant could see ad revenue drop by $1 billion in 2009; rumor has it additional layoffs went down today; and the decision to shutter Gourmet is still generating controversy.
• CBS execs must be breathing a sigh of relief. Despite the insane media attention focused on David Letterman's sex scandal over the past week, Late Show advertisers appear to be sticking by him. [NYT]
• TV news: NBC has canceled the cop drama Southland. And ABC is picking up three show for the full season: Modern Family, Cougar Town, and The Middle.
• A Project Runway videogame is coming to the Wii next spring. [Variety]

When sometimes Columbia/NYU student James Franco was thinking about his next project, at what point did he think, "I know: a soap. Eureka!" Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is really going to happen. Thank God for DVR!

We've gotten most of the new series premieres out of the way, and a funny thing happened—most of them are doing pretty well. What does all this mean?

John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick has been a book, a film, a sequel and people have twice tried — and failed — to make it into a television series. Now ABC has done just that, but is it wise?

• Barack Obama's appearance on David Letterman's show last night helped the Late Night host score his second-highest ratings ever. [NYT, WP]
• Dan Rather scored a couple of victories in his suit against CBS: A motion by the network to dismiss the case was denied by a judge; and Rather's lawyers will be permitted to question Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone. [Reuters]
• Yesterday, activists handing out fake copies of the Post outside its offices were detained by cops. Today, the paper says it was "flattered" by it. [NYP]
• Book deals: Jenny Sanford, the estranged wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, is writing "inspirational memoir" for Random House. And Andrew Young, an aide to former Senator John Edwards, has landed a deal with St. Martin's Press' Thomas Dunne Books to publish his tell-all memoir.
• In an effort to keep more viewers tuned in, ABC plans to reduce—yes, reduce—the number of commercials in the premieres of its new shows. [LAT]
• Fox won the opening night of the fall season, a first for the network. [THR]

Is there anything Arianna Huffington can't do? Well, we'll all see, for the Internet queen's about to jump into prime time television. And, of course, she;s not jumping too far from her roots.

Hipster Grifter Kari Ferrell is speaking out, from the Utah jailhouse! Okay, she admits, she shouldn't have stolen all that money. But she's always been too smart and attractive for society to handle.

Ad agencies and network executives have long decried the the digital age's assault on commercials and, thus, revenue. And now they're forced to adapt, a move that brings writers into the fold and gives product placement an even bigger spotlight.

• Who's going to replace Diane Sawyer now that she's leaving GMA? No one knows, really, but expect the changes to the show to be significant. [NYT]
• Time is shutting down its fashion-centric spin-off, Time Style & Design. Editor Kate Betts will remain with Time; six other staffers have been let go. [WWD]
• Magazine publishers are bending over backwards and offering to design ads themselves in order to keep their advertisers from fleeing. [NYT]
• A frontrunner may have emerged to acquire the Boston Globe. [NYP]
• ABC and CBS have agreed to air President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress next Wednesday. Fox, however, probably will not. [THR]
• Hollywood writers just aren't earning the cash they used to, it seems. [NYT]
• Simon Fuller, the man who brought you American Idol, now has his sights set on fashion: He's one of the people behind a new site called Fashionair. [VF]
• One more reason to hope Jay Leno's new nightly show on NBC fails: If it succeeds, you can expect every other network to dump pricey one-hour dramas and replace them with crappy live events and even crappier reality TV. [Time]

And here's ex-House Majority Leader and known American Criminal Tom Delay promoting his upcoming appearance on ABC's Dancing With the Stars on ABC News program Good Morning America.