The custom battery design that cost hundreds of thousands in Chinese R&D. The refrigerated trucks used to haul the magazines from Mexico to Kentucky. The fallback to finding a sponsor to defray costs — in return for an animated ad. If the managers at Esquire publisher Hearst Magazines want to spend time and money on a project that Wired probably already rejected as not worth it, that's their business decision. But the mag's blinky 75th anniversary cover is a massive letdown. Instead of a new slogan for the ages, the million-dollar signage simply says, "The 21st Century starts now :)." Yes, they put a freaking smiley on it. Party like it's 1999. (Update: Reader Keymaster corrects us that the icon some of us mistook for a smiley emoticon is actually an arrow done in reverse foreground/background from the letters.)

Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Such a pain! "It takes a lot of time and energy and she's sick of it. She's given them six months to figure out what to do without her." [Post]

The San Francisco Chronicle, which has been losing over $1 million a week for Hearst for years, is set to offer 125 employees across the company buyouts. Rather than a strategic round of buyouts focused on one division, any employee can offer up his or her name, marking a desperation to reduce overhead at all cost. It remains to be seen how many of the cuts will come out of the newsroom, and if more than 125 buyout applications are received, the newspaper may accept even more. If not enough employees apply for the buyout, layoffs are threatened. Who's responsible?Publisher and CEO Frank Vega, originally brought on by parent company Hearst for his union-busting expertise and lovingly nicknamed "Darth Vega." Under his watch, operating losses at the company have actually mounted even as he's reduced the workforce. And while the 15-year, $155 million deal for a new press operations center in Fremont will serve to potentially gut the activist press workers' union, it also makes the paper especially unattractive as an acquisition. Meanwhile, executives are rumored to be spending anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million a month on management consultants. Cut them out, and the Chronicle's deficit will instantly shrink.

Targeting Yahoo again, Microsoft may be abandoning its "Project Granola" plan to grow its online presence organically, but that doesn't mean ignoring food altogether. Microsoft's MSN and Hearst magazines will partner to create Delish.com, a food and recipe site to be released this fall. Just like Conde Nast's Epicurious, but 13 years later! [AdWeek]

We hear that Hearst's Quick & Simple, the housekeeping tips magazine, has just folded. No word yet on what's happening to the current staff, but there's been heavy turnover there for months, particularly in advertising and marketing. Any further info? Email us. [UPDATE: Ad Age says it's true. Click through for the spelling-challenged intro to a perfunctory goodbye note from a Q&S editor.]

The people who run some of the (once) grandest institutions in print media are tumbling from their perches like so many fallen leaves, cast off in the face of a new season. It's not always their fault. Print is slowly wasting away, and as companies shrink, they cut off their own heads in a desperate bid to prove that they're doing something to address the problem. Not fair, but that's capitalism for you. After the jump, a list of recently deposed members of the old guard; mourn their passing, briefly.

"Several industry observers zeroed in on William Randolph Hearst III, a family trustee widely known as Will, as a potential source of conflict with Ganzi." [Post]

It's been a day since Victor Ganzi resigned as the CEO of Hearst. And still no one seems to be sure why he left exactly! The company released a vague statement which said the 18-year-vet departed because of his "irreconcilable policy differences with the Board of Trustees about the future direction of the company." But what really happened? Every media outlet seems to have a different account.

"The word had come from on high that they weren’t doing enough getting into digital, nothing big enough to fundamentally change the business model." [Times, Previously]

• Sean Avery's Vogue internship is over. (That was quick!) But he's hoping Anna Wintour will invite him back next summer. [People]

Not an ideal day to be the CEO of a major magazine publishing company. First Hachette Filipacchi, the parent of mags like Elle and Car & Driver, announced that Jack Kliger was stepping down as CEO and moving to the chairman position effective Sept. 1. (Alain Lemarchand of Hachette's Paris-based parent Lagardere will take over as CEO.) Hours later, Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi, an 18-year veteran of the company, announced he was stepping down after having "policy differences" with the company's board. (Ex-CEO Frank Bennack Jr. will step in as chief in the interim.) We're guessing Victor's mom won't be feeling too sorry for her son this afternoon. Ganzi has the rare distinction of having dragged his 84-year-old mom to court last year.

Magazine groups are changing their management with all the abandon of the fractious Meade family in Ugly Betty. The latest casualty: dorky Victor Ganzi, who's stepping down as chief exec of Hearst with no successor lined up. (That's always a bad sign.) Magazine bosses must be feeling particularly insecure today. The rumors about Cosmopolitan publisher Hearst in the Wall Street Journal come the day rival magazine group Hachette dropped its boss of nine years. That leaves S.I. Newhouse's Condé Nast an island of stability-as long as the forgiving 80-year-old publishing magnate remains in charge. (Have the backstory on the sudden Hearst reshuffle? Email!) Update: At least Hearst isn't pretending this was in any way planned. "The reason for his resignation was irreconcilable policy differences with the Board of Trustees about the future direction of the company." And Meredith-which publishes a range of tepid lifestyle magazines such as More-just dropped its editorial director.

Esquire's David Granger, you'll recall, secured a lone nomination in the National Magazine Awards this year thanks, reportedly, to lobbying by fellow Hearst editor Rosemary Ellis, of Good Housekeeping. No surprise, then, that Granger was all-too-happy to do a solid for another Hearst title, O, The Oprah Magazine, when editors there asked him to answer the question "Men! What Do You Like Most About Us [women]?" Granger's exuberant response (last item) is clearly intended to flatter O's middle-aged lady readers, which is fine, since that's half the point of these things. But the answers are so obviously terrible one almost wonders if it was written as parody. Did Granger hand this one off to a junior assistant or something? The four worst tips:

It has become conventional wisdom that print is struggling to renew its readership and that cost-effective reality programming is the future of television. But just how much has the balance of media power shifted? Here's one anecdote which says it all. Bravo's annual contest for aspiring fashion designers-Project Runway-has become so powerful that magazine titles such as Marie Claire and Bazaar are expected actually to pay for the privilege of attaching their names.

So, was Esquire's last-minute inclusion as a finalist in the National Magazine Awards a stroke of luck for the languishing Hearst magazine, or merely the result of a fix? As you might have read, David Granger's men's title, which used reliably to feature in several categories in the magazine industry's annual exercise in mutual flattery, only received a solo nomination for its work in the past year. Mixed Media's Jeff Bercovici explained that even that was a fluke: the nomination was to have been New York's, until the judges realized that the magazine, an awards hog, had naughtily entered material it had already submitted in another category. So, a lucky break. Or maybe not.

I'm going to venture a guess here: The demographic overlap between Valleywag and Seventeen is approximately zero. But it turns out teenage girls are just like us! "Weekends are usually a time for slowing down and relaxing," a Hearst PR flack informs us. They squabble over whether BlackBerrys are better than iPhones! They think the MacBook Air is really thin! They like Wi-Fi enabled bunnies! They have a crush on the Jonas Brothers Band. Okay, not exactly like us. Find more similarities in this feature, available in the April issue of Seventeen, on newsstands March 4.

Lydia, daughter of Patty Hearst and great-granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, is moving into her first Manhattan pad, yay! It's in the Sheffield 57 on West 57th, reports Page Six. It's "very San Simeon," the model/self-promoter said, back in November, referring to the Hearst Castle in California (and the inspiration for the vast, deserted Xanadu in Citizen Kane). OK, we get it already—you're a Hearst. "But on a much smaller scale," she added. For reals! You can't buy much of an apartment in Midtown for only $1.49 mil. [Page Six]

Gannett, Hearst, the New York Times Co. and Tribune, in the grand tradition of doomed online-newspaper joint ventures, is creating an ad network, QuadrantOne. The new partners said QuardrantOne will reach more than 50 million monthly visitors through more than 120 papers. But not the New York Times or USA Today, which already have national sales operations. Yahoo launched a similar newspaper consortium last year, to no visible effect. [WSJ]

Glam, the West Coast network of fashion blogs and other women's sites, is the fastest growing company on the face of the Earth, says its backer. Or else the startup, an increasingly worrying competitor of established media companies such as Hearst and NBC Universal's iVillage, is merely metastasizing, argues Valleywag's Owen Thomas.