"Russian private equity firm Onexim — founded by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov — is rumored to be buying Forbes." [Silicon Alley Insider]

A fresh batch of media layoffs were reported today, including cuts at Condé Nast's Lucky, Time Inc.'s Cottage Living, and Forbes. New York's Daily Intel has a rundown of the carnage. [NYM]

Not surprisingly at all, there are serious media layoffs today. TV Guide is laying off "up to 33 people," or 3% of its total staff. Also, Forbes—which cut chunks of its online staff last week—is laying off dozens of staffers as it merges its print and online operations into one. Read the full memo at Valleywag.

Ending a longstanding internal split that dates back to the days of the first dotcom boom, Forbes Media is merging the staff which puts out the conservative-leaning business magazine and its online component, which run separately and with a ludicrous amount of mutual suspicion and jealousy. (Valleywag had gotten wind of these plans last month.) An internal memo sent by CEO Steve Forbes to staff says that print and online sales and marketing will be immediately integrated, reporting up to an "office of the chairman" which includes Forbes.com publisher Jim Spanfeller, whom rumors had previously pegged as the head of the combined operation. Integration of the Web and print editorial staff won't happen until early 2009. Translation: No one in the newsroom will know what's happening to their job until next year. Here's the memo:

♦ Barack Obama's first post-election interview with 60 Minutes (an excerpt is on your left) earned the show its biggest audience in nine years. [THR]
♦ Dan Rather has spent $2 million battling CBS thus far, but it looks like his time and money may finally be paying off. [NYT]
♦ MTV's TRL came to an end yesterday, in case you haven't heard the terribly tragic news. [NYT]
♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post appears to have warmed to Barack Obama. "So has Mr. Murdoch gone soft on liberals—or perhaps just reacted pragmatically to Mr. Obama's sizable victory?" [NYT]
♦ The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The flick generated $70.4 in its first three days. [Reuters]

More layoffs today in the wonderful world of media: In addition to cuts at EW and Essence, 8-10 people were let go yesterday from InStyle. Blackbook canned its creative director. Jim Cramer's NYC-based finance site, TheStreet.com, closed its offices in San Francisco. Bauer Publishing laid off five editorial people from Life & Style. Forbes dismissed staffers assigned to ForbesAutos.com, scaled back ForbesTraveler.com, and closed its conference business. But despite rumors to the contrary, Nylon says it is not closing down, so it isn't all bad news today.

We hear that there are layoffs at Forbes.com today—according to one source, the "entire staffs" of the Forbes Auto and Forbes Traveler online divisions have been cut. If you have any more information, email us.

Name-dropping old man James Brady is just about the oldest old man in all the working media. He's turning 80 on Saturday, so he decided to dedicate his Forbes column to that most interesting of topics: his own career. This is a slight departure from his usual practice of reciting as many names as he can in 800 words and being shocked about this modern age. Brady's learned a mess of things in his long, long media career; but "modesty" was not one of them: He's a lover:

Forbes.com, the online arm of the right-wing business magazine, is offering to pay blogs to run a political ad supporting a ban on gay marriage. The price: $2.85 per thousand pageviews. The ad advocates the passage of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative. The blogs in question are part of Forbes's Business and Financial Blog Network, an online-ad network which places ads sold by Forbes salespeople on independent sites. The network itself is run by Adify, an ad-technology company now owned by Cox, the media-and-cable-TV conglomerate. The ad won't run automatically, according to an email from Sharon Gitelle, who's listed on Forbes.com as a "membership" contact; bloggers must specifically choose it. Politics aside, a $2.85 CPM, or cost per thousand pageviews, is nothing to sneeze at in these tough economic times. Reached on the phone, Gitelle said, "I'm not talking to Valleywag." So we know this much: She's no dummy! Here's the email she sent:

Something is stirring at Forbes Media, the publisher of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, two similarly named but otherwise uncooperative publications. Bill Baldwin, the paper tiger who runs print editorial, has issued a memo to his staff announcing two promotions. The Dickensianly named Stewart Pinkerton "will continue to spend a lot of his time overseeing the contributions of print writers to Forbes.com and vice versa." The other guy, Tom Post, will remain another faceless middle-management drone, but we're inclined to like the guy, since he went to the University of Chicago.

David Churbuck, the founder of Forbes.com (and sweaty prep-school wrestling partner of Fake Steve Jobs blogger turned boring Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons), has weighed in on the chaos enveloping his former employer, the investor-friendly, snarkier-than-thou business magazine. Churbuck, like many Forbes alumni, seems to know more of what's going on than its current employees. The publication, now backed by Silicon Valley investment house Elevation Partners, is colliding together its Web and print editorial teams, and the result could be nuclear, as editors and writers scramble for position in the new order. Churbuck observes that the split between print and online had its roots in a plan to spin off Forbes.com in an IPO during the go-go late '90s; even after plans for an IPO were scrapped, the division persisted. Now, Elevation is pushing to consolidate the staffs, Churbuck says. Separately, a tipster reports several personnel moves happening at Forbes. Are they coincidence, or a sign of people positioning their own careers for the coming upheaval? Hard to say.

A high-profile New York magazine company handing control of its flagship print property to a Web executive would be a great story about the transformation of media. Normally, writers at Forbes would be all over it — if it weren't happening to them. Yesterday's rumor about Forbes Media merging the magazine and Forbes.com — two distinct operations, housed in separate offices, whose managers don't get along — and tapping Forbes.com chief Jim Spanfeller to run the combination has provoked a collective wave of head-scratching from current and former Forbesians. Could it happen? One writer tells us that Forbes management has denied the rumor so unconvincingly that workers there are all concluding it must be true. "I work at Forbes. I'll be the last to know," says one. He disputes the idea that Forbes and its website don't work well together, giving several examples of Web and print writers crossing the line — but the fact that those are notable, rather than routine, just highlights Forbes's lack of cooperation. His note:

So Portfolio went with a Dov Charney cover in the midst of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Hey, what do you expect them to do—undo stuff that had already been planned? What are they, a daily? No, they're a monthly, and they refuse to get all worked up about anything. They must maintain their office's monk-like atmosphere at all costs. And their fellow business mags agree: with a little creative editing, you can make it look like you're covering this crisis without doing any extra work at all! Portfolio's response to the crisis: meetings.

Most magazines keep their Web and print staffs apart, a legacy of petty rivalries, bureaucratic turf wars, and a fear of change. But Forbes Media has elevated balkanization into an art form. The two sides of the company barely speak to each other. The Forbes family tolerated this, but Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity fund which counts Bono as a partner and now owns 40 percent of Forbes is not so patient. A tipster tells us that a "big shakeup" is coming, with the editorial staffs of both magazine and website getting "smashed together."Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes. What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

We hear that Forbes is making changes—something along the lines of a decree that "everyone must write for both online and print." Makes sense, if true! If you have with more details, email us.

Another day, another dubious Forbes list that you can only read if you click through a neverending slideshow. Up today: The mag's list of the best-paid music stars. The winners: The Police, who took home $115 million last year, followed by Beyonce, Toby Keith, Justin Timberlake, and Madonna. [Forbes]

Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans was published this week. Could the timing be any worse? More than a few people won't be seeing their names appear in the magazine this time next year thanks to the events of this week. But at least the notoriously inaccurate list has finally updated its estimate of Michael Bloomberg's net worth! He's now No. 8 on the list with $20 (Previously, Forbes misjudged his stake in Bloomberg LP, which the Wall Street Journal was more than happy to point out last year.) After the jump, the list of people in the New York area who made it on to the list, including some of the people who, in fact, live here despite Forbes's suggestion to the contrary. Stan Druckenmiller didn't pay eight figures for a Fifth Avenue penthouse and send his girls to Spence so he could stay behind in Pittsburgh!

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We... didn't expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch. "Smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses," Fortune wrote, calling a recent correction in Merrill stock "an overreaction." Investors who followed this advice are now down 93 61 percent. All the big financial magazines butter their bread with dubious prescriptions for how hobbyist investors can beat market professionals, so Fortune is hardly alone in being humiliated by the ongoing market meltdown. We'll spread the embarrassment around after the jump.

Ha ha ha just months ago the stupid business press were writing glowing cover stories of Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain like he was John McCain in 2000 and now look his company doesn't exist anymore! Yes we've received those tips. "Aside from its obvious troubles-afflicting all the largest financial institutions," Forbes wrote, "Merrill is in damn good shape." Interesting word choice, media! Distracted by a certain someone's athletic physique?Oh but wait, everyone still hearts John Thain. He was not a giant arrogant prick, managed to understand all those complex securities without being autistic, and he looks go good next to that other guy! By which I mean Lehman CEO Dick Fuld, but also Thain's his predecessor at Merrill, and his predecessor before that from the New York Stock Exchange, and pretty much any other asshole by whom you could be being laid off right now. From today's Journal:

Aways handy with a dubious listicle, Forbes magazine is presenting us with its ranking of America's "Best Cities For Singles." Could Atlanta really be No. 1? Maybe! Dallas at No. 3? Perhaps! But there is no way in hell New York City should come in 8th place. Why? For the same reason this list ranks NYC as number one in the "Cool" category.