Don't despair, laid-off media types: you could still land this magazine editorial job. You'll never guess how much it pays:

Sara Nelson, who was recently laid off as the editor of Publishers Weekly, so she's freelancing. But one mystery publication's asshole editor gave her so much trouble she outed him, blind item-style. Guess:

This is Nina Willdorf, currently the editor-in-chief of Budget Travel. Do you know anything about her? We're looking for info from those who've worked with her. We keep hearing stories.

John Walter was a longtime newspaperman and a founding editor of USA Today. He died last September, but not before writing this bullshit-free essay on the three guys who killed newspapers. The short version:

Tina Brown, who's edited Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and now the Daily Beast, wrote an essay this week decrying the "Media Zombies"—the "feckless bureaucrats" who spent money unwisely and are really responsible for all the media layoffs going on right now. That's a bit rich (ha), coming from a woman who is famous, above all else, for throwing money around like confetti. Let's take a wildly abbreviated tour of Tina's spending history, shall we?

Can Tina Brown and her newfangled "website" The Daily Beast singlehandedly provide refuge to all of New York's talented laid-off writers? Ha, no, of course not, not even a glimmer of a chance. She'll be lucky to get through the next two years without burning through tens of millions in start-up funds and flaming out like the Talk magazine of the internet. But there's no reason talented laid-off writers can't get a piece of that sweet monetary pie while it's here! The Observer notes that Tina's passing out freelance bylines to many deserving newly unemployed vets of dead publications like Radar and the New York Sun, like a blond Brit Santa with a media fetish. And the pay is not bad! Not by recession standards, at least:

Remember when people aspired to be magazine editors? So archaic. Editing a magazine has become pedestrian. Now one must be a magabrand curator, lording over an entire stable of loosely related titles that make up your own media mini-empire. Why should Anna Wintour settle for editing Vogue when she could become the "editorial director" of a whole slew of Vogue spinoffs? That was good aspirational thinking. Until yesterday. Yesterday, Men's Vogue folded. That was a major embarrassment for Anna Wintour. She was a force in the women's fashion world, but she thought she was destined to build her own fashion magazine empire in her own little corner of Conde Nast. MV was supposed to be a big part of that. Now it's dead, along with Fashion Rocks, the huge advertorial project that Conde Nast put on each fall. Teen Vogue is rumored to be shaky as well! That means fashion advertising is weak overall, and Anna's dream is deferred. If not dead. You know who this should be of concern to? Dave "Abs" Zinczenko! And every other aspiring magabrand mogul. Dave Z made his name editing Men's Health, but now he oversees a bunch of "Health" titles, writes ridiculous "Health" books, and goes on the Today show as an expert all the time. He's not an editor, he's a brand name. Until the advertising collapses! Then he's back to being just another dude checking copy and approving pages and hopefully getting out of the office in time to go to the gym, not so he can look good on TV, but just so he can feel good for himself. Don't worry. Pretty soon you'll be thankful just to have those editing jobs. [Pic via Reuters]

If there's one thing we're absolutely sick of it's journalists complaining about other journalists for no reason except to revel in the glorious, righteous contrarianism of complaint. And we are about to complain about it. Ha, cause we're so contrarian! Check out my surprising viewpoint, baby! I'd like to start off my complaint by telling Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple to shut up. Wemple's column, which I am now whining about, is him whining about the whining of the New York Times. Specifically, about the Times being disappointed at the fact that their pretty fucking awesome Sarah Palin blowout story last weekend didn't have the same resonance that it would have had in times past, because the media is overcrowded these days. ***WHICH IS TRUE.*** Okay then. Go, Wemple:

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller, who floats menacingly over the celebrity media like mist on a bog, has a new web venture in the works. She also has an insatiable thirst for money. And, of course, she has but a tenuous grasp on reality as a whole. Which of these is the explanation for the elusive question: Why the fuck has she spent the last several months writing the same meandering column over and over for increasingly unlikely outlets? It started earlier this summer with her ruminations in Ad Age about Madonna's celebrity conspiracy, Obama's celebrity conspiracy, and Sarah Palin's celebrity conspiracy. What appeal did these columns hold for members of the ad industry? Idle entertainment, we imagine. But now Bonnie's writing for MediaPost, for Christ's sake. About celebrities!

With all the layoffs that just about every major newspaper has gone through over the past few years, reporting staffs have already been chopped to the bone. Or all the way through the bone and out the other side, in some cases. So when the next round of layoffs inevitably comes, where do the cuts come from? A provocative, insightful, and obvious idea: How about firing some more of those freaking editors? Or at least making them do a little more work.

In 2007 the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize, Risser Prize and SPJ award for some serious regional reporting about ocean pollution and migrant workers and uranium mining. So what sorts of stories did latimes.com readers actually click on that year? A sex-change journal, Paris Hilton in jail, something about Kelly Clarkson and lots of national news. Obviously readers want a site "heavy on local news and politcs" an ingenious LA Times editor concludes. Riiight. The sorts of stories they should be running instead, after the jump.

Oh, fuck yeah.

• Today in articles we feel like we keep reading: Air America set to lose NYC affiliate. [Mediaweek]
• While storm clouds perpetually hang over the rest of Time Inc., Real Simple lives it up in Laguna Beach. Where, apparently, the weather was lovely. [WWD]
• Shape EIC to take over Fitness. But first — damned noncompetes! — she'll be special-projects editor at More for three months. [NYP]
• Conde to launch site for teen girls featuring user-generated content. Users will then get town cars home. [BizWeek]
• Dartmouth Review turns 25, and conservatives run the country. Coincidence? Hardly. [NYSun]

Just to bang the final nail in your coffin of self-esteem issues, Money magazine has their annual list of the 50 best jobs in America. Freelancers, take note: that paycheck you've been waiting on for three months? What ultimately stands between you and your money is a new pair of glasses.

As the Observer Mobsters reported yesterday, next week's New York mag will prostrate itself before four "Brainy Young Things," the "youthful, erudite whippersnappers" who had recently taken over some of "America's oldest and most venerable magazines. They're James Bennet of The Atlantic, Franklin Foer of the New Republic, The Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, and Roger Hodge of Harper's. We got a quick preview of the text, and we admit we're intrigued, especially by a quote from Hodge:

• New York to anoint hot young editors; those photographed rumored to include TNR's Franklin Foer, The Atlantic's James Bennet, Roger Hodge of Harper's, and the Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, who, at 44, calls the whole conceit into question. [Media Mob/NYO]
• The Times nominated Dargis for a Pulitzer, and no one there understands why; New York is pitching a Look Book book. [WWD]
• The Washington Post gets 88 New York Timeses every day, costing $18K annually. At least it's nice to know someone other than us isn't getting free papers. [WCP]
• Cargo was confused, and nobody will miss it. Um, yeah. [Slate]
• Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor badly wounded in Iraq, last night received the Radio and Television Correspondents Association's David Bloom award, named for the NBC correspondent who died while covering the early days of the Iraq war. [B&C]

Here's a Craigslist ad we noticed Monday night:

Without either William Shawn's New Yorker bang or William Whitworth's Atlantic whimper, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's for nearly 30 years, announced today that he's stepping down. They have no successor yet, he'll still be writing for the magazine, and, certainly, he's had an amazing run that deserves to be commended.

• At Puerto Rican confab, ASME updated its church-and-state guidelines on advertising. We're sure the one man in America who can't tell New Yorker content from a Target ad — and who happens to have a column in the Chicago Sun-Times — is still unhappy. [Folio:]
• And what's a media yakfest without a panel appearance by our slutty sister? She's in Puerto Rico, natch, this time commenting on Millerpalooza: "As I've said before, it's OK to be in bed with your source, but then you have to fuck him." [WWD]
• Now that his News Corporation is a U.S. company, Rupert Murdoch will stand for election to its board of directors for the first time ever. We bet he wins — but, then again, we also said that about Al Gore. [Bloomberg]
• What do editor's-letter photos really mean? An exegesis on why Janice Min shows leg, David Granger crops his head, and Graydon Carter is smirking. [Radar]
• Paul McLeary doesn't like cliches. [CJR Daily]

An article American Journalism Review indulges the world of OCD editors by surveying a group of writers for the strangest anal inanities they've encountered: