• The curse of Gisele: Both Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar put supermodel Gisele Bundchen on the covers of their mags this year, and both have turned out to be their worst-selling issues thus far in 2009. [NYO]
• Can Forbes survive the downturn? The Forbes family thinks so. [NYT]
• Jared Kushner's New York Observer has acquired Very Short List, the struggling email newsletter owned by Barry Diller's IAC. [Gawker, NYP]
• The Huffington Post has a new CEO, ex-Ziff-Davis CEO Eric Hippeau. [PC]
• BusinessWeek is the latest mag to test a paid online subscriptions. [MW]
• Barack Obama's half-brother landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. [AP]
• The Hangover and Up were the top-grossing films this past weekend. [LAT]
• The Boston Globe is up for sale—and a handful of people appear to be interested—although just how much they'll pay is anybody's guess. [NYT]
• ABC's Lost is the most watched TV show on the Internet. [Variety]

• The newspaper industry may look to take a cue from the music business in its elusive hunt for new sources of revenue. Because, clearly, if there's one industry to gleam some wisdom from, that's the one. [MP, WSJ]
• The Justice Department is looking into whether tech giants like Yahoo! and Google violated antitrust laws in their recruiting efforts. [WaPo]
• NBC's two-part White House special scored big ratings. Conveniently, it also squeezed in plugs for every other show on the network. [HP, Newsday]
• Laura Ling and Euna Lee went on trial in North Korea today. [WaPo]
• Silvio Berlusconi is feuding with Rupert Murdoch. And so now Michael Wolff says he really likes Berlusconi. Business as usual, clearly. [Gawker, Reuters]
• Here's something really depressing to chew on: Glenn Beck is No. 81 on Forbes's "Celebrity 100" list and made $23 million last year. [Forbes]

In your warming Wednesday media column: Steve Forbes is in your pocket, insulting your bosses in your competitor's paper may damage your career, somebody fucking finally does not write an Obama book, and much more!:

• The New York Times is now thinking of charging consumers for access to its web site, although doing so would be "tricky," says Bill Keller. Indeed. [NYT]
• There are some signs of further trouble at Forbes. [NYP]
• Martha Stewart is going to see if she can charge for online videos. [WWD]
• Advertisers are looking to channel recession-related outrage. [NYT]
• NBC has renewed Last Call with Carson Daly. Unfortunately. [THR]
• Did David Geffen really consider taking a stake in the Times? [NYP]
• Jay Leno's last guest on The Tonight Show: Conan O'Brien. [NYDN]
• Suze Orman is having her "moment," in case you weren't aware. [NYT]
• Is the Jon & Kate drama good news or bad news for TLC? [TDB]
• Brian Williams is still a Jersey boy, or so it would seem. [The Awl]

Forbes has a cover story on how Steve Jobs got himself in hot water with the SEC over stock options. The magazine is part-owned by former Apple CFO Fred Anderson. Do the math.

Looks like we have some competition for tracking the media elite's bleat-replete tweets! Our competitive edge: We bring you the very worst of the Twitterati. Today's targets:

We heard about a sadly not fake memo Steve Forbes sent out this afternoon to everyone at Forbes who hasn't been laid off announcing unpaid furloughs and pay-cuts. [Updated: More details after the jump.]

Yes, we saw the Guardian piece, YouTube's upside-down layout and Google's blogging robot Panda. Sorta funny. Funnier are the memos being forwarded around media orgs, such as "Forbes to Sell Brother." Send us others!

• All those layoffs at Forbes yesterday? They continue today, sadly. [NYP]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller has a few words for Marc Bowden, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece about Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Also? He thinks VF should really beef up its factchecking department. [Romenesko]
• The biggest media company in America? That would be Disney. [BN]
• Nine of the top 10 cable news programs belong to Fox News. [HP]
• The winners of the 2008 Peabody Awards were announced today. [AP]
• Wanda Sykes is getting her own talk show. [B&C]
• Video from Bill O'Reilly's chat with David Letterman last night. [MM]
• Guiding Light is done. The final episode airs Sept. 18. [THR]

Forbes has busy been laying off staff today. But the magazine is facing other problems, too. Billionaire Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev now says he plans to sue the mag for reducing his net worth on its recent list of the world's richest people. "Forbes magazine claimed that I lost $2.5 billion in the global financial crisis," he told the Russian news agency, Interfax. "That's absurd. I will demand compensation of material and moral damage caused by this defamation." [Guardian]

Multiple sources tell us Forbes, the troubled, Bono-backed right-wing business magazine, is set to lay of 50 or 60 employees tomorrow. And Carl Lavin, a power-hungry editor, is behind the bloodbath.

The fighting following the merger of Forbes and Forbes.com continues. The latest casualty is print veteran Stewart Pinkerton, who's "retiring," but a tipster says he was "pushed out in a coup after knocking heads with Carl Lavin, his power-mad counterpart from Forbes.com."

Forbes's somewhat suspicious list of the world's billionaires is now online. You can look through the complete list here, but as you can probably imagine, it wasn't a very good year for members of the ten-figure club. The 2009 list includes 793 people—it's down 30 percent from last year—and a handful of notable New Yorkers (like Sandy Weill and Hank Greenberg) saw their names vanish. NYC's richest man, according to the mag? That would be Michael Bloomberg, who saw his net worth jump 39 percent from $11.5 billion to $16 billion. So did the mayor have such a fantastic year? No, Forbes had just been underestimating his stake in Bloomberg LP in years past, although they didn't bother to mention that. [Forbes, NYP]

Were you under the assumption that the recession would finally put an end to those annoying shows narrated by men with English accents who spend an hour listing off the ridiculous items that celebrities have purchased (or, oftentimes, received for free in exchange for the publicity)? Those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous imitations don't seem to be disappearing, at least judging by Forbes' ad campaign for its upcoming "Most Expensive" special on E! (We're guessing "Most Expensive Crap No One Can Afford Anymore" didn't have much appeal with E!'s advertisers.) But at least the designer responsible for adding that "bling" text effect still has a job!

Oh, good, Forbes has listed all the important liberals, in order of importance. God bless this new Obama era of paying attention to Times columnists again!

• It looks like Ashley Dupre's 15 minutes of fame isn't entirely over jet yet: She was spotted at HarperCollins' offices and is now reportedly trying to sell a memoir. [P6]
• Hijinks at the Golden Globes: Leonardo DiCaprio asked CAA to construct a ladder so he could sneak into the agency's dinner last Friday and avoid the press. Adrian Grenier and Paris Hilton were denied entry to another event. And Harvey Weinstein appears to be smoking again: He was spotted taking cigarettes out of Hilary Swank's purse. [P6]
• It's not easy being a Forbes: The family is taking its Highlander yacht out of commission until summer and has fired the ship's crew in the meantime. [P6]
• Eddy Curry is being sued by his former chauffeur for sexual harassment, after the Knicks center allegedly tried to "solicit gay sex" from the driver and forced him to "perform humiliating tasks." [NYP]

• Not surprisingly, nearly every major network is planning "longer and more exhaustive" coverage of the inauguration compared to years past. [NYT]
• Ugly day at Time Warner: The company is reporting its annual first loss in six years and is writing down $25 billion in the fourth quarter. [BN]
• Is Dick Parsons in line to become Commerce Secretary? [B&C]
• Forbes laid off 19 people yesterday. [ATD]
• People's Jess Cagle is taking over as managing editor of EW. [NYP]
• Michael Hirschorn thinks it's possible the New York Times will go bust in the next year; the Observer says Times boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the "media mensch of the year." Go figure! [Atlantic, NYO]
• Lloyd Grove's 4,100-word article on Sumner Redstone is online. [Portfolio]
• If a cable news doctor can be Surgeon General, we probably shouldn't be surprised to see that Joe the Plumber is now a war correspondent. [NYP]

We hear Forbes, the fussily conservative business magazine, is laying off Web and print staff today, and merging the surviving editors and writers into a single newsroom. It only took them a decade.

Forbes has "absolutely" denied last night's rumor that they were going to be bought by a Russian oligarch's private equity firm. They add that Forbes Russia isn't for sale to the firm, either. [Alley Insider]

♦ Alan Colmes, the "liberal" who supposedly serves as co-host of Hannity & Colmes with Sean Hannity, is leaving the Fox News program at the end of the year. [HuffPo]
♦ A daily news program hosted by Christiane Amanpour is in the works at CNN. [NYT]
♦ Despite screwing up nearly everything he touches, NBC golden boy Ben Silverman may see his contract renewed in the next few weeks. [NYM]
♦ USA Today has announced plans to cut staff. [E&P]
♦ Twilight was No. 1 at the box office this weekend, raking in $70.5 mil. [LAT]
♦ Forbes is not being sold to a shady Russian billionaire. [SAI]