Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone and Us, laid off half a dozen people this week, mostly on the marketing side. But we hear editorial layoffs at Wenner are coming down on Friday. Anyone with more info can email us.

Time Inc. is cutting six percent of its work force, or 600 people. [NYT]

Granted, the headline number is a shocker: 600 people losing their jobs starting two weeks from now at Time Inc. The cuts, reported this evening by the Times, will further hurt morale among magazine workers who once had the nearest thing to lifetime employment in American journalism. But put in proper perspective, the cuts look less draconian than one might have speculated after rumors started circulating earlier this month. For an organization with 10,200 staff, the layoffs amount to six percent of the workforce — a shave rather than an amputation, by the standards of endemic newspaper layoffs and the Great Magazine Die-Off. And they should come as no shock: Time Inc. has been contracting for years now.

Mark Zuckerberg's college-spawned startup is supposed to hire its 1,000th employee sometime this year. I don't think that's going to happen. If Zuckerberg isn't talking about layoffs behind closed doors, one of his executives must be brave enough to bring it up. I don't think the company is going to issue pink slips. But I do think its headlong growth in employees will come crashing to a halt before the end of the year.Here's some back of the envelope math on Facebook's burn rate. Figure the company's operating expenses are divided roughly half in labor, half in operations like running its servers. Count $100,000 in salary per employee, and double that in benefits and other overhead; double that again to account for the company's non-labor costs. You end up with an annual cost structure of $400 million. Facebook's revenues for this year are projected to be $300 million to $350 million; if the company isn't already operating in the red, it's headed there fast. Microsoft's $240 million investment? Most of that is already gone towards buying servers — and it's not like Facebook can stop buying servers as usage of its site continues to boom. Publicly, Zuckerberg has talked about the company making growth its priority. But a $400 million a year ship can sink fast, especially if the advertising market faces a hard contraction and media buyers cut back on their more experimental ad buys. And none of Facebook's new ad formats have proven to be a breakout hit, as Google's AdWords was earlier this decade. That's why I think Facebook's braintrust is talking about whether they can afford to keep hiring — and whether they need to cull their existing ranks. Here's where Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the law-and-order type Zuckerberg hired from Google, comes in. She's already made hiring considerably more bureaucratic, instituting new requirements straight out of the Googleplex, like a 3.5 GPA from a top school. Getting strict on recruiting is just the start. Facebookers should expect to see more rules, rules, rules. And even the slightest violation will prove cause for firing — especially for employees who are within weeks of vesting their first batch of stock options, which only come after a year on the job. Sandberg's very savvy about keeping up appearances. Google thrived in part because, in the darkest days of the dotcom crash, from 2001 through 2003, it was the only company hiring. Until it bought DoubleClick, Google had never done a layoff. That's part of Google's image, and I'm sure Sandberg wants it to be part of Facebook's image, too. So we won't hear about a Facebook hiring freeze. We certainly won't hear about layoffs. Whatever happens will be quiet: Candidates won't get called back about jobs they applied for. Managers will find their hiring requests tied up in bureaucracy. And employees will quietly box up their things and go. The sad thing is that those Facebookers will think they screwed up. They won't even have the saving grace of a layoff — the corporate kiss-off that says, "Hey, kid, chin up — it's not you, it's me." A layoff would be the honest thing. But it's the one cost-cutting move Facebook can't afford.

Listen up, younguns: Here's how this recession is going to go. You're going to get laid off. You're going to find a new job right away, and convince yourself things aren't that bad. Then you're going to get laid off from that job, too. And all your friends are going to get laid off, too, and move out of California. It's time to revisit Odd Todd, the 2001-era dotcom layoff victim who chronicled his unemployment online. The downside: "You can't buy any ice cream, because you have no money, and you can't go shopping, because you have no money." The upside: "It beats frickin' working." Go watch it, and laugh now, before it stops being funny.

Everybody knows what happened to the third iteration of "pop and politics and pop culture and scandal and pop" Radar last Friday: they fired everyone, locked them out of their offices, folded the magazine, and sold off the website to AMI (home of Star and other quality publications.) The website is now a reanimated carcass of its old self, picked clean by corporate carrion. The new ed is David Perel of the National Enquirer, and he already let it be known that the website is "hiring now." So what are these anonymous blogbots churning out for Zombie Radar?For now, some of the new items are bylined as the mysterious "FI staff." Posts since the takeover include heroin king Frank Lucas's lawsuit, the alleged non-promotion of new Sean Penn movie about Harvey Milk, the delay in the Harry Potter movie, something about a James Bond movie, the gossip about married rock star Bono hanging out with a girl, and the death of the hairdresser for seminal porn movie Deep Throat. We're noticing a theme: is it movies, along with the run-of-the-mill celeb gossip that can be found anywhere else on the web? Writing style: one-sentence paras with lots of exclamation points! Kind of like Perez Hilton! Or Page Six, if it was written by monkeys! Maybe we're wrong though. Maybe Zombie Radar is actually meant to be a parody of a gossip site. Or a comment on the state of gossip-blogging today. If so, it's the most sophisticated take we've seen. Best headline yet: "Somebody's Lion about Siegfried and Roy!" Anyway, we're sure they're very busy! As AMI chairman David Pecker said, "If it's on your radar, it's on Radar Online, and if it's not on your radar, we'll put it there." We're not so sure we want him to put it there. It's like watching an old friend get mauled to death by vampirezombies, and all you can do is watch.

Credit Suisse is laying off another 500 people, adding to the 1,565 people who were canned earlier this year. [Bloomberg]

♦ The battle over Project Runway rages on: Harvey Weinstein is now claiming that Bravo intentionally undermined the success of Season 5 by changing the show's airtime, running "mundane and unappealing" ads, and "revealing spoilers about future episodes." [THR]
♦ Barack Obama will appear on The Daily Show tomorrow night. [AP]
♦ The New York Times is not running out of money, say execs at the paper. [NYO]
♦ MSNBC moved into second place in the primetime cable news race, beating CNN for the month of October. [THR]

Despite the economic meltdown, and despite having its debt downgraded to junk status, the New York Times Company does not plan any more layoffs, Times editor Bill Keller told staff. There had been rumors of a 20 percent headcount reduction, but according to Keller's prepared remarks, as presented by the Observer, the paper thinks it can get by with some extreme belt-tightening. "There will be no luxuries and little comfort," Keller said rather darkly in the midst of a sugary pep-talk. That still doesn't explain how the Times Company will pay the half-a-billion dollars it has coming due over the next couple of years.

The old way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss comes up to you, claps you on the shoulder, and acts all chummy. The new way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss leaves a glowing recommendation for you. Revision3's Damon Berger got one from CEO Jim Louderback five days before he was laid off from the online-video startup. Damon, you should have gotten a clue when Louderback wrote that you could be "a great front-person for any organization."

As a startup, you are now, officially, on your own. You can't count on your VCs saving you or some magical offer from Yahoo or Google showing up to bail you out. Taurus has laid off Fondue. You need to rewrite — no, not your business model. Your business plan. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, in his latest private email, offers this advice:

Don't blame the Radar staff for those horrible celebrity gossip items going up on the site today. The entire staff has been locked out of the office since Friday afternoon. After the news the magazine would be folding was announced on Friday during an interminable meeting, an HR official came in to tell the staff at 1p.m. that they would need to empty their desks by 3p.m.Staffers were, of course, a bit disgruntled that they had just two hours to clear out their things, but the HR official made a little speech about how he had just lost his mother and learned in the process that stuff didn't matter nearly as much as the memories. Of course, employees looking to copy their email address books and collect their things may have disagreed. Said one unnamed ex-Radar staffer: "I'm not even sure he had a mother." But with the number of pink slips flying these days, we're sure there are worse layoff horror stories out there. Please send yours to tips@gawker.com.

A wave of layoffs is sweeping startupland. But why? "Today is my last day at Revision3," writes Damon Berger, one of the victims, in a mass email. "Due to budgetary cutbacks that are a direct result of the economic meltdown, I will no longer be employed at the company." Revision3, an online-video startup, has slashed five Web-video shows from its lineup, and with it some unknown number of employees. But are we to believe that collateralized debt obligations killed "Internet Superstar"? Of course not.Yes, online advertising is headed for a slowdown — but signs of problems were present in the market well before Wall Street went into crisis. An explosion of usage had created a supply of space for ads that far outpaced marketers' demand. A recession will further temper demand. Berger, and countless like him at ad-supported enterprises, would have ended up on the street regardless. (Which is a pity, since I've met Berger, and he strikes me as personable, clever, and eminently employable elsewhere.) Revision3, best known as the home of Digg founder Kevin Rose's beer-chugging Diggnation podcast, has always been the kind of lovably goofy startup one hopes does well despite itself. Anyone who suffered through "Internet Superstar" knew the show was going down. It failed on the merits, not because of distant economic forces beyond anyone's control. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way. And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes. Revision3 should always have concentrated on its main shows, and found cheap ways to experiment with new shows, as it's doing now. Helium.com should have figured out that there's not much money in user-generated content before laying off a third of its 110 employees. And Seesmic? Well, Seesmic should never have launched at all, good economy or bad. I'm declaring the layoff window shut. Big companies lay people off because of economic conditions; startups lay people off because their managers have fundamentally misjudged some aspect of their business. Any startup CEO who lays people off, from here on out, should be held accountable for his own mistakes. Blaming the economy for your cuts? So mid-October 2008.

Hey, how about some more terrible news? The LA Times is laying off 75 people from editorial. "This is about 10% of our total staff and these cuts are comparable in scale to those made on the business side of The Times last week." Sigh. So soon after their redesign launch! Yes well innovation director Lee Abrams will probably have something innovative to say about all this, soon. This is not even the extent of the bad news. See, over the weekend the FAS-FAX circulation numbers came out and basically everyone lost. Circ was down more than 5% for the LAT. Meanwhile, on our coast, the Newark Star-Ledger is slashing 40% of its newsroom staff. They are trying to sell the paper but no one wants it. It is basically a bad time to enjoy getting a paycheck. Sadly, the Newspaper Industry is not too big to fail.

"At Seesmic, a video blogging service, the day of reckoning — when it runs out of the $6 million it raised in May — will come in three years. To make the money last, Loïc Le Meur, the chief executive, recently laid off seven employees, or one-third of his staff, and cut all projects not directly related to the video service." Great messaging, Loic. Now for the bad news: No video blogging service will get its picture in the NYT until Web 3.0.

“The theme will still be ‘Vampires and Victims,’ but with an oh-so-appropriate ‘funeral’ spin." [WWD]

This weekend featured massive layoffs at the New Jersey paper The Star-Ledger - try 50 percent of their newsroom staff. Fortunately a few new gigs are popping up. Liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall has no doubt requested one of the more annoying resume deluges in recent memory by announcing today that his Talking Points Memo site will look to add two full-time Washington reporters (with health care). Since most sites have cut back on political reporting because of the anticipated post-election downturn, this is inspiring news for everyone who doesn't have to read the cover letters in Marshall's inbox. [TPM]

Terminated Radar employee David Cho posted a glimpse of what direction RadarOnline.com would have gone if it wasn't about to be taken over by former National Enquirer editor David Perel. Hopefully this will get Mitch Albom started on his next book project, The Five Blog Layouts You Meet In Heaven, although we can't help feeling the full version looks sort of familiar...

We called it the Great Magazine Die-Off, but it is the work of an angry Media God. We should take this time to reflect what we have done to irritate him so, for He is smiting us, laying off people in great multitudes, and killing magazines. He's about to pair us up two-by-two and load us all onto a big boat (the seas of the Internet?), so that he can flood the media and destroy it in order to save it. Radar was the sacrificial lamb, and we hope that He accepted that sacrifice—but let's be honest, CosmoGirl and 02138 deserved to die. (Was it advertorials? Is He mad about advertorials?) We can only hope that the great flood that is now upon us will wash away the media-sin, and desperately try to cling to the ark. After 150 days, we'll wait for a dove to return with an olive branch in its beak. We're hoping the bird won't have the face of Arianna Huffington—or the mark of the Daily Beast.

The new editor of RadarOnline.com—presumably replacing Alex Balk—will be David Perel. He's the current editor of the National Enquirer! So what does he do on the same day that AMI buys the website and everyone there gets laid off? He tells CoverAwards, “I have already been contacted today by some top entertainment and news journalists who want to be part of this new venture. I am looking forward to putting together a new team that is the best of the best. We are hiring now!” Uh, is it just me or is that an enormous prick move?