Earlier today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that it's cutting almost 200 jobs-8% of its total workforce-due to "tough economic times." This afternoon, the Wall Street Journal sent out a staff memo saying that the paper is eliminating 50 editing jobs for "strategic" reasons. Less than an hour later, word came that Greg Osberg, president and publisher of Newsweek, is stepping down with no clear successor. (Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's crusade to appeal to the youth apparently hasn't taken effect quickly enough for Osberg, a digital advocate). This has been an extraordinarily bad day for print media by any standards. But take a look at the chart above-an illustration of newspaper industry stock prices over the past five years. There will be many more bad days to come.

Manhattan residents often find themselves dreaming of the paradise that is Houston, Texas. The cars; the affordable barbecue; the murders. It's a working man's promised land. But why must some people have the bad fortune to get stuck in NYC, while others live the dream by breaking free and making their way to the sweltering heart of Texas? Luckily there's a Harvard economist to explain exactly how Houston came to be so much better than New York!

America's celebrity magazines are facing a grave situation: the interest in celebrities themselves is not great enough to move the millions of copies they need to sell. No, all that people really want to see are celebrity babies. That's where the money is these days. But the vital open flow of capital in our national celebrity baby picture market is being threatened by OK! magazine's blatant pandering and deep pockets. Can we accept a bunch of sleazy, credulous Brits winning the first $15 million-plus baby picture auction? It staggers the mind! Here is the nature of the threat:

Two years ago, two of the Washington Post's political reporters urged the paper to start a separate political website. The paper turned them down, and those two guys-John Harris and Jim Vandehei-left the Post and launched Politico.com. Now, the Post has decided it does want to launch a separate political site. But! There was a SLIGHT PROBLEM.

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has always resented the fact that peers made more money than him with what he deemed to be inferior films. These days, he's obviously overcome this problem by milking reality shows for millions to prop up his more artsy products; but he couldn't always be so sanguine. Here we have a priceless and EXCLUSIVE classic from the archives: a recording of a phone call between Weinstein and Disney exec Joe Roth, taped shortly after Michael Ovitz-a spectacular failure as head of Disney-was paid more than $100 million to leave the company in 1996. Weinstein is galled beyond belief (and perhaps a bit envious). "Let's quit today!" he jokes. Why, he works his ass off and what does he get? A fucking lecture. "Joe, you're a success, so therefore you're a failure in this business," Weinstein complains. Then he insults his fellow moguls: "Between Peter Guber and Mike Ovitz and everybody who fucked up...Everybody got wealthy on failure." Weinstein just cares too much about the films, you see; "We have character flaws that must be overcome," he sighs. Thanks to Project Runway, he's done so. Click to listen to the titan of Hollywood in all his expletive-spitting glory.

$8 million. Does that seem like a lot of money for a company to pay to have mediocre models use their hair products on a mediocre cable show for a few seasons? It kind of does. But that's how much The Weinstein Company, run by entertainment mogul Harvey Weinstein, is trying to squeeze out of L'Oreal for three seasons of sponsorship of Project Runway. Of course, Weinstein has a long history of pimping out the fashion reality show to every company on earth willing to pay a dime to be on it, using it as a profit machine to support his company's less sure-thing ventures. And he's still milking it for every cent. How do we know? Because he left all the evidence in a public trash can:

Fox Television has noticed that there is a wide, wide world out there that hasn't yet been the recipient of Fox's unique brand of entertaining and educational TV programming. So they're going to bring it to them, and if they make a little money in the process, all the better! In the meantime, Conde Nast is launching a version of Wired magazine in the UK, and they've already launched some of their premium titles in India (Vogue India! GQ India!). What's going on here? The world is flat. And it's a great place to set a television, magazine, and big pile of money.

Nerds may be polishing up their plastic light sabers and dusting off their Darth Vader helmets in anticipation of the new, animated Star Wars movie The Clone Wars, set to open in August. But you know who's not awaiting the movie? Pepsi, Kellogg's, and and Burger King, traditional Star Wars sponsors! Why not? "A spokeswoman for Pepsi, meanwhile, was unaware that a new 'Star Wars' movie was being released." Ha, this flick has BIG BUZZ going for it. Luckily for nerds, McDonald's and Toys "R" Us have stepped in to fill the void with all types of action figures fit for stockpiling by grown men. But it's never a good sign when key parts of corporate America don't even know your movie exists. Prediction: a big, animated suckfest. Still, fans are planning to line up at Toys "R" Us just for the release of the toys. Let's hope that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes it out to that one:

Media companies are all facing a fundamental quandary: They have to throw lavish, expensive events to impress advertisers, even as they slash editorial budgets in ways that upset longtime employees. Well, it's only a problem if the corporate suits are worried about perception issues, which they may not be. But you have to admit that it does look bad when People editor Peter Castro (pictured, at left) and other execs are partying it up in the Bahamas "getting a massage, being given a wii fit, jamming with some old dudes, being on vacation" at a fancy sales meeting while the company faces a hiring freeze. Hey, that's capitalism! Angry email from an insider, after the jump.

Don't feel too bad about the economy, members of the creative underclass: the superrich are still doing okay. While ordinary people like you fret over your outstanding subprime loans and plug the leaks in your rickety little rowboat with used chewing gum, the superrich are doing well enough to ensure that the Superyacht (an actual term!) industry is growing strongly. There are nearly 20% more requests this year for yachts longer than 130 feet. How many feet does one need? But god bless our economic superiors for providing the liquidity to fuel this crazy global economy. And don't be jealous; there's a benefit here for commoners, too:

Spam: it's not just nasty meat in a can. It's a leading economic indicator! Hormel has been selling the ground-up pig concoction for more than 70 years, and it's acquired quite a status as a gross American icon. Plus, economists have noticed that people seem to buy more cheap, crappy food products as the economy gets worse, and Spam's increasing popularity provides a nice hook for Freakonomics-type stories tying the whole miserable economic picture into the meat-purchasing choices of you, the consumer. Good theory, but, as Ad Age points out, it has one major flaw: Spam is not even cheap.

Listen, we know you're all excited about the news of InBev's $46 billion bid to buy Anheuser-Busch. But have you considered the possible side effect? Fewer beer ads! A-B spends half a billion dollars a year on commercials, and another $300 million on sports sponsorships. But InBev—the maker of fey non-American beers like Stella Artois—is run by Belgian cheapskates who do comparatively little advertising at all. Watch out, Budweiser Clydesdales, Spuds MacKienzie, and American sportsmanship: foreigners are coming to destroy you!

TV is dying, right? We read about it online. Kids these days spend all their time on YouTube, and television is left to geriatrics watching Depends ads, right? But no! One word, friends: Cable. Just today, news came out that the executives at Discovery Communications, home of the Discovery Channel, are some of the highest paid in all of the media—their CEO took home $20 million, right up there with the Viacoms and Time Warners of the world. How did little old cable get so rich? Good timing, good programming, and a little bit of luck. Learn and marvel!

Because the music industry is an even worse place to invest your money than the newspaper industry at the moment, everyone is looking for the next big thing. The closest they've come is "360 deals," where artists get a huge check in return for a big cut of all their different revenue streams. First, Madonna signed a contract like this with Live Nation for $120 million. Then Jay-Z signed a contract with Live Nation for $150 million. Live Nation wants to sign 15 more artists to contracts like this. Then everybody else in music can quietly retire. Hope you like the Jonas Brothers a lot!

Barack Obama made two moves recently that leave him open to charges of selling out. One, his selection of James Johnson to help select a running mate. Johnson is a former CEO of Fannie Mae, where he helped usher in the subprime lending crisis. Also he's a Bilderberg attendee! The other new hire, though, will surely upset many more liberal stalwarts: Obama named Jason Furman as his economic policy director. Furman is a former Clintonite economist who loooooooves giant retailer Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, he says, is a boon to poor Americans, because their prices are so low. They keep their prices low, critics charge, by fucking over their non-union workforce and aiding the export of manufacturing jobs overseas, but Furman argued in a 2005 paper that consumers saved enough money shopping at the store to offset the impact on wages. Obama's never quite been a champion of organized labor, but this selection does throw him open to accusations of pretty blatant hypocrisy (hooray electoral politics!):

You know how certain celebs are always screwing up their financial affairs? Then they have to do some really embarassing project to get some money back. The Toronto Star even posited that 60 percent of NBA athletes go broke within five years of retirement.) Brian Cuban (attorney for Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire blogger Mark Cuban's enterprises) has figured out why! It's because they lack life skills. They're not total idiots—they just trust the wrong people.

Sam Zell's Tribune Company is making drastic cuts in news pages, and adding more colorful charts and graphs. Analyst Ken Doctor says that strategy is doomed to fail, since it just weakens papers' brands further, and charticles haven't impressed anyone since the early heyday of USA Today. "People and paper" are business' two biggest costs. Our BOLD prediction: The four-day print edition (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday) will arrive in mid-major cities in the next 5 years. [via Romenesko]

The state of New York raised its cigarette tax by $1.25 per pack today, which has caused some of the more pricey Manhattan stores to start selling packs for $10.25. Outside of prisons, this appears to be the first time in US history that the cost of a pack has hit the four-digit mark. That sound you hear is the stampede of kids buying dime bags of weed. Or as they call it now, "saving a quarter." [AP]

These high gas prices are an absolute killer for the legalized sex trade. Truckers who enjoy paying for sex with hookers at isolated Nevada brothels have a lot less disposable income these days, so those brothels are being forced to do what once was unnecessary: marketing. Sex with anonymous prostitutes just doesn't sell itself these days! So the pimps, or whatever the legitimate business equivalent is called, are getting creative: not just billboards, but barbecue, beans, and trucker loyalty (to hookers) programs:

What with the nation struggling under soaring gas prices, foreclosures, and general tedious suffering, The New York Times' Sunday Styles section naturally wants to know how Manhattan's filthy rich are coping with the recession. "NANCY CHEMTOB, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, has found that her days have become crammed seeing clients, all worried about how an economic downturn will affect their marriages.But Ms. Chemtob's clients are concerned all the same, she said, because their incomes have shrunk, say, to $2 million a year from $8 million, and they know that their 2008 bonus checks are likely to be much less impressive. One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations."