• Bill Keller says that New York Times readers have offered to donate money to keep the paper alive, which is both very sad and very sweet. [Politico, NYP]
• Hearst has asked all of its newspapers to reduce costs by 20 percent. [BN]
• The launch of Oprah's cable network has been pushed back to 2010. [NYP]
• Eliot Spitzer will hit the Today show on Monday, presumably to talk about the financial crisis, not about his personal life. [NYO]
• Tensions are reportedly running high at MSNBC after the network decided to give Ed Schultz a show and bump Norah O'Donnell and David Shuster. [P6]
• Breaking! The media appears to be rather fond of Michelle Obama. [WaPo]
• Last night's series finale of ER generated big ratings for NBC. [NYT]
• Is Google about to acquire Twitter? Not so much, says Kara Swisher. [ATD]

Marcy Simon, the former mistress of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has landed a PR gig at Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller. We hear her new job is stirring up antitrust trouble for Google at Microsoft's behest.

Real-time is the future of everything, someone wrote three seconds ago. And therefore, Google will pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Twitter! Welcome to the way acquisitions are done in Silicon Valley.

It's not just philandering husbands who fear Google Street View's roving cameras; the residents of a wealthy British village have taken to the streets as well. Literally.

Michael Krantz, a poet-reporter who chronicled the dotcom boom for Time, went native during the bubble years. After a stint at a psychic-hotline operator (don't ask), he joined Google in 2004. Today's his big day.

Google wants to be your Web browser, not just your search engine, which is why it unveiled Chrome last fall, a rival to Firefox. Now we hear Google's ready to hit Firefox in the pocketbook.

Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. Yeah, right! Take a look at who's behind Google's new $100 million venture-capital fund, and you'll see how things really work in the cradle of technology.

• The markets were down big yesterday—the Dow shed 254 points—but stocks should do better today as the first quarter of '09 comes to a close. [CNN, WSJ]
• ABC News reports that the FBI and federal prosecutors are "closing in" on AIG's most notorious exec, Joseph Cassano, who made as much as $300 million running the company's disastrous Financial Products Division. [ABC]
• Wondering what Andrew Cuomo has been up to? Here's your answer: He just forced JPMorgan to refund a group of customers $4.4 million. [DJ]
• Morgan Stanley is set to raise $6 billion for a new global property fund. [BN]
• France is now looking to limit executive compensation, too. [WSJ]
• The 15 largest global banks are expected to shrink their balance sheets by about $2 trillion in 2009. [Reuters]
• Google plans to commit $100 million to a new venture capital fund. [WSJ]
• One more victim of the recession: the sanctity of contracts. [NYT]
• Carl Icahn is taking a gamble: He's bidding on Atlantic City's Tropicana. [DB]

A woman, checking out a female friend's house on Google Maps, was surprised to see her husband's Range Rover parked out front, complete with blingy hubcaps, reports The Sun. A divorce is underway.

So much for Twitter being a source of real-time news! Nearly three weeks after Valleywag first reported the startup's poaching of top Google designer Doug Bowman, cofounder Biz Stone confirms the hire.

The New York Times has been demanding Google welfare, which would artificially promote the newspaper's stories in search results. Yet inept Times webmasters just killed hundreds of thousands of their own Google hits.

Continuing her unstoppable PR rampage, Google executive Marissa Mayer took to NBC's Press:Here, a Silicon Valley interview show. The cupcake princess of search defended her by-the-numbers approach to Google's design.

Make it official: Google's not immune from the bad economy and plummeting ad market. We've been hearing for weeks that Google would have layoffs. Google is cutting 200 employees today, the company now confirms.

The Googleplex is a place apart. But are the brainiacs of Mountain View, Calif. so cloistered that they haven't heard of AIG's woes? Apparently so, judging by new graphics VP Marissa Mayer unveiled Wednesday.

To build the new, Google must tear down the old. As must its billionaire cofounder Larry Page, whose neighbors believe he's illegally tearing down houses in Palo Alto to make room for a gargantuan eco-mansion.

How does Eric Schmidt do it? The computer nerd runs Google, has Obama's ear, parks his jet fleet in a NASA hangar, and has a rocking girlfriend. Is she the reason he flies so much?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the BBC that the U.S. should break up banks that get "too big to fail." What about Google? Is it too big — and should the government take action?

Is Marissa Mayer, Google's cupcake princess, driving away talent with her icy indifference and utter lack of management skills? One ex-Googler says yes. Here's Anne Halsall's tale of getting dissed by Mayer at a meeting:

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products, experiences the unfamiliar at a recent visit with First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. (Photo by AP)

• You can rest easier now: Now that he's no longer planning to run for Senate, Chris Matthews has signed a new four-year contract with MSNBC. [NYT]
• Howard Dean has signed on to be a CNBC contributor. [HP]
• Major media companies are now looking for a bailout. From Google. [AdAge]
• Jay Leno's chat with Obama was his fourth most-watched show ever. [LAT]
• Some perks may be curtailed at Condé Nast. Like the one that allowed Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman to fly to Davos first-class, possibly. [NYP]
• Advance Publications is instituting mandatory 10-day furloughs and a pension freeze at nearly all of its daily papers, says Steve Newhouse. [E&P]
• Time publisher Don Fries is headed out the door. [NYP]
• NBC is very good at spinning the Times, in case you haven't noticed. [CJR]
• Knowing starring Nic Cage was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [NYDN]