♦ Michelle Obama may end up on the cover of Vogue in the next few months: "It's been a long-standing tradition to photograph the new first lady. So needless to say, we are very interested in working with Mrs. Obama." But Ebony may get there first. [WWD]
♦ Shares of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. plunged today following the company's announcement it's revising its 2009 forecast. [Bloomberg]
♦ New York television critic John Leonard has died. [Vulture]
♦ A round of layoffs have hit Hearst, although the exact numbers haven't been released. [Folio]

A boilerplate statement from Linden Lab confirms yesterday's rumor: "We've had to make some hard decisions about resources and as a result we eliminated four positions out of our headcount of nearly 300." That's not as bad as the "9 or 10" we'd been told were cut. In a statement sent to Silicon Alley Insider, Linden says they're still hiring. There are 45 job listings on the company's employment page. Are they all still open? Huh, maybe Second Life really is an alternate reality. What temperature does water boil at in SL?

We hear that as many as eight editorial employees—ranging from senior editors to editorial assistants—got laid off from Redbook today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we told you about earlier. "The economy" was the stated reason. If you know more about layoffs at Hearst, email us.

You would think an online print-on-demand bookstore would be able to print books on demand. But you'd be wrong! A reader reports that he wasn't able to finish checking out a book on Lulu, a print-on-demand startup. (Red Hat founder Bob Young, shown here, was inspired to start the company after he ended up with boxes of unsold copies of his Linux nonthriller, Under the Radar.) A customer-support rep said that the company had known about the ordering bug for a week, and might not fix it for another week. An online store which doesn't want its customers' money? Odd. The only possible conclusion: Lulu doesn't have enough actual customers to worry about letting them conduct business with the company. Here's the exchange with the support rep:

I won't give up until I land automoronic rumor site LayoffGossip a hit in a major American newspaper. It's a perfect story for a lazy reporter: Web 2.0 uses Web 2.0 to document failure of Web 2.0. Three's a trend! Right now, the site's Valleywag entry says, quote, "General feeling is fearful. to be careful. Average salaries will be available next week." LayoffGossip has forced me to confess an ugly truth: TechCrunch is actually pretty good.

New York City Mayor-for-life Michael Bloomberg is bringing his Midas touch to the ailing media industry! In the form of a year-long study sponsored by the city. It's not that Bloomberg, who got rich running his own quasi-media company, has a soft spot for newsprint; it's that there are 160,000 media jobs in NYC, according to the Observer, and it would be beneficial for the municipal tax base not to allow them to crumble away in the face of a changing economy. The question is, can the city actually do anything about it?

LinkedIn, the richly funded business-networking website, is indeed laying employees off today. (No numbers available yet; if you know more details, please send them in.) But we know of at least one person who's skipping sticking around for the cuts: Reid Hoffman, the company's chairman and cofounder. He's in Japan, speaking at a conference. A convenient absence. Hoffman is described by his underlings as generous and kind, but we hear he didn't oppose the layoffs. We also notice he wasn't kind-hearted enough to cancel his trip and console his employees in person. Update: We're now told Hoffman did cancel his trip to Japan for the conference, at the last minute.

A tipster reports high drama at LinkedIn, the business-networking site. The company is funded in part by Sequoia Capital, the Valley's new high priests of doom and gloom — and, our source claims, Sequoia has told all of its portfolio companies to cut costs by 10 percent. LinkedIn's big-hearted chairman, Reid Hoffman (shown here), reportedly doesn't want to lay people off, but he and CEO Dan Nye are said to be engaged in a power struggle over this and other issues. Layoffs could come today — possibly an exercise in cleaning house rather than a reaction to the economy, though we hear LinkedIn has been missing financial milestones. Here's the tip:

Uh, while we're on the topic of layoffs today, we hear Goldman Sachs is currently a "SHIT SHOW" because the fancy bank has started its layoffs of what could eventually be 10% of its total work force. We hear people have already been put out of the GS building, and are upset, naturally. Been laid off from Wall Street today and want to bitch? Email us!

Michael Bloomberg has revealed how he plans to slice $1.5 billion from the city's budget this year and next. Some 3,000 city employees are going to be losing their jobs, he's rescinding the 7 percent property tax cut, and he's also suspending those annual $400 property tax rebate checks. [NYT]

A tipster tells us there have been "Major, across-the-board layoffs at Hearst. All magazine titles had cuts, even the healthy mags had cuts, in all departments. Management says it's because of the economy." Hearst has already canceled its holiday party, and its top competitor Conde Nast just had layoffs of its own. If you have any info, please email us ASAP.

Call it Company (Red). Michael Dell is asking employees at his computer maker to take five unpaid days off and thus help the company trim costs instead of slashing jobs. Extorting your people by suggesting they take a small hit now as opposed to a larger hit later on isn't particularly original. “We’ve seen a slowdown in spending,” says a Dell spokesbot, “but the primary reason is to ... to better position Dell for long-term competitiveness.” That makes no sense: Skimping on five days of payroll may temporarily give the company's bank account a fillip, but it doesn't change its permanent cost structure. Then again, maybe Dell's strategy is to drive away employees who are capable of doing math.

Valleywag is name-checked in the New York Times today. (Page B1 if you're holding the dead-tree version.) The article talks about how companies must now pre-blog their own layoffs to beat the rumor mill. What it doesn't talk about is the problem of false positives: On the Internet, you can find layoff rumors about any company on Earth. For example, look at LayoffGossip.com this morning. Valleywag layoffs! They're coming! I can confirm that layoffs are scheduled for October 3, 2008. Credit the losers behind LayoffGossip for building every Clay Shirky talking point into their site. You can vote for the truth/lie factor of a rumor. Awesome. I clicked True on this one 76 times.

Word has it there's been a bloodbath at Goldman Sachs today: "No big names have been told to pack up their staplers yet, but they may actually be praying to be given the boot. We're told there will basically be no bonuses this year, especially at senior levels." [Dealbreaker]

The 600 layoffs at Time Inc. that the magazine publishing giant announced last week will reportedly cost Time Warner, its parent company, at least $100 million. That averages out to $167K per layoff. How high is the severance pay over there? Time Inc. salaries are high, but Jesus. Even assuming they toss in a few months of health care benefits and hire some outside consultants to help execute the cuts, it's still a lot of money for only 6% of the workforce to leave. (It would cost $1.67 billion just to fire everybody. Fun with math!). Anyone with more info on the layoffs or the severance packages, email us. [All Things D]

♦ Stock futures were down on Wednesday morning as investors focused on the challenges facing President-elect Obama. Yesterday's gain, however, was the largest Election Day rally in 24 years. [Reuters, NYT]
♦ The former chief risk officer at Bear Stearns is now a senior official at the Fed where he's part of the division that supervises U.S. banks. [DB]
♦ US companies cut 157,000 jobs in October. [Bloomberg]

A tipster reports that Linden Lab, the maker of virtual world Second Life, is laying off its business-development department, which had cultivated ties with software makers. The move affects "9 or 10" employees," he says. A wise move, if tardy: Don't you need to have a business worth developing before hiring someone in business development?

A week after landing a case study on the New York Times tech page, workplace monitoring toolmaker FaceTime has sent home an unspecified number of staff. Here's the standard Tough Times, Tough Decisions email from CEO Kailash Ambwani:

Rumors of pending layoffs at Viacom have been floating around for weeks now. The media conglomerate is in terrible debt, and just yesterday announced that it's canceling its holiday parties from coast to coast. Today, a tipster has sent us an internal memo from Bob Bakish, the head of MTV Networks, that grimly alludes to "unprecedented economic challenges" that have caused a hiring freeze, and will affect spending "dramatically" through the entire coming year. Will the company start off the new year with a round of layoffs? Eminently possible. Bakish's full internal email, after the jump:

I imagine most of you won't blink an eye if I tell you that Serena Software just laid off 10 percent of its 900-employee workforce. Layoffs have become a predictable, opportunistic excuse for poorly managed companies to conduct house-cleaning, a reflexive overreaction to turbulent markets which may well end up lengthening the recession. Serena Software is a software company whose software other software companies use to make software — right, exactly, the kind of boring company people do their best to ignore. Last year, CEO Jeremy Burton forced employees to spend an hour every Friday using Facebook. As late as June, the policy managed to garner press for the company from credulous hacks. But we think some of those employees now wish they'd ignored the Facebook diktat and spent Fridays working.