As Owen put it yesterday, why can't we get laid off by eBay? An insider gives us the rundown of exactly what's in his (or her) severance package, and who's rumored to be next.

eBay's layoffs of nearly 10 percent of its 15,000 workforce are continuing today, a tipster tells us. Losing one's job now, with the markets so fraught, is painful. But the auction giant is, to its credit, sweetening the way out. Employees are getting five months' severance and health-insurance coverage.

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

News reports confirm the rumors we heard over the weekend about eBay's layoffs. Details are scant, but our sources say some departments are losing as much as 22 percent of their staffing. Development managers have been told to expect to lose 1,700 "train seats" next year. That's programmer lingo for weeks of developers' time; one train seat is three weeks. Do the math: That means at least 100 programmers are losing their jobs in the cuts. Adding insult to injury: eBay is spending $1 billion in cash and stock to acquire three companies — payments firm Bill Me Later, and two Danish classifieds sites. What a stupid PR move, to combine the two announcements: Those getting laid off will wonder how eBay has money to spend on buying companies but not paying employees.

I've long wondered why a largely-automated site like eBay needs to employ 15,000 people. Soon it might not. In September, research firm Wedge Partners said eBay needed to cut 10 percent of its workforce. Now an employee tipster tells us such "big deep cuts" may come as early as Monday. Our unverified source reports that "marketing and product" and " all of the horizontal support is at risk." If the axe doesn't drop Monday, it "will be done by earnings call on the fifteenth." What's gone wrong? eBay sellers don't like auctions as much as they used to, and as just another fixed-price online store eBay hasn't been able to compete.

More layoffs at the Village Voice have been confirmed: staff writers Maria Luisa Tucker and Sean Gardiner (who was a fine police beat reporter and good guy). Budgetary reasons were reportedly the cause. Further, "The paper’s copy chief also resigned in protest after the deputy copy chief was laid off Wednesday." This after the layoffs late last week of sex columnist Tristan Taormino and photo editor Staci Schwartz. Dayum, what a crappy Friday this is. [via Pop and Politics]

Though he only joined Valleywag in March, Jackson West made a lasting impression with his sharp wit, good humor, and wicked visual imagination. As fluent in Photoshop as he is in Foucault, our token communard laced his posts with insights into the inner workings of the Web. Listed below are my favorite pieces by Jackson. Leave your own in the comments — and keep following him at jacksonwest.com.

We would never sugarcoat someone else's layoffs. Why ours? Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them. Paul Boutin and I will continue running the site. Denton's memo:

Here's a splash of ice water for your morning cup of coffe, Yahoos: Silicon Alley Insider hears 3,500 people will lose their jobs in Yahoo's next round of layoffs. "People familiar with the company's thinking" — read: flacks who want to be able to deny the comments later — call that number too high. Cold comfort, indeed. These people say layoffs very much remain an option and that "the online ad market was already pulling up prior to Wall Street's collapse over the last few weeks, so Q4 and beyond could be scary." A tipster tells us Yahoo has already laid off two-thirds of its recruiters. A sensible move, since it's not like Yahoo will be hiring that many people. But putting those recruiters out on the street will make it all the easier for rivals to snap them up, and use their knowledge of Yahoo's talent pool to lure away the company's best remaining brains.

Tristan Taormino, the "Pucker Up" sex columnist who has been with the Village Voice for nine years, was laid off on Friday, she confirmed to Gawker today. Voice editor Tony Ortega told her she was a victim of budget cuts. We also hear that the ailing alt-weekly's photo editor, Staci Schwartz, was recently laid off [UPDATE: more on Schwartz here]. Older, more expensive employees appear to be getting the axe (thought Taormino, at least, has a pornography career to fall back on). Anyone with further info on Voice layoffs, email us.

A tipster says Glam Media, the women-focused online-ad network, is going through "material layoffs" — 14 out of 200 employees, mostly in sales, Silicon Alley Insider now confirms. The cutbacks, coming just seven months after Glam raised $85 million, mark the popping of the ad-network bubble. The move is consistent with what I've heard from inside the company: Tales of wild spending, chaotic decisions, and mismanagement. Glam, cofounded by slick serial entrepreneur Samir Arora, has embraced a risky business. Arora pitched the company as the future of online advertising, a "distributed media" network, targeting the lucrative female market, overtaking established players like Time Inc., Hearst, and NBC and transforming the economics of the industry. In reality?Glam is a poorly run middleman operation which has been buying high and selling low, ad-industry players tell me. Glam has spent millions of dollars buying up sites' advertising inventory, to create the illusion of bulk, and hiring expensive salespeople, in the hopes of later reselling the ad banners at a profit. Arora could argue he's cutting back in the anticipation of trouble in the advertising market to come. Or the company could be using layoffs to weed out salespeople, many of them recruited from the traditional media world, who aren't making their numbers. Glam, we hear, has been buying traffic at a $6 CPM, or cost per thousand pageviews. That is a rich price for traffic which is mostly low-end social-network content for which advertisers balk at paying, and it would not be surprising if some Glam salespeople found that challenging. More worrisome, given the ongoing credit crunch: $20 million of Glam's last round was "revenue-based debt financing." The way Glam has been spending, if the revenue underpinning the debt is not materializing, Glam could face a hard time getting new financing.

When all else fails, bring in more management consultants. We just got a copy of a memo Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang emailed employees yesterday:

Jerry Yang, you're not helping the local economy. Silicon Valley unemployment reached 6.5 percent last month, up from 6.4 percent in July. It's the fourth month in a row that the number increased, reports Digital Daily. Hewlett-Packard recently announced it plans to cut 24,000 jobs, and an analyst said eBay needs to lose 1,500. But we're curious: Have any startups had layoffs? The snidely buoyant attitude of South of Market's bubble dwellers is unlikely to change until their friends start getting pink-slipped.

A tipster tells us: "Having drinks w/a couple acquaintances from Yahoo. Word is an internal memo is going out today from Jerry or Sue that essentially says, 'Get ready for some streamlining,' and not much more." Kara Swisher reports that executives at Yahoo are telling employees to brace themselves for "rightsizing," in anticipation of drops in the online-advertising market. Yahoo reports quarterly earnings on October 21, at which point investors will get their first look at the business results driving the rumored cutbacks. Got the memo? Send it in.

It's the nature of the media business to take profits from the suffering of others, and coverage of the recent financial meltdown is no exception, helping to drive online traffic and (no doubt) newsstand sales. But the Wall Street Journal should be more discreet about its gloating, particularly given the newspaper will soon eject 50 of its own staff into the economic wilderness now home to the likes of Lehman Brothers. At least one Journal staffer was none too pleased to see an internal news item today headlined "Market Turmoil Provides Hook to Sell U.S. Journal in London." (It's reprinted in full after the jump.)

Buy low, sell high, as they say on Wall Street. And right now, there's a flow tide of technical talent from shuttered financial firms flooding the New York Area available at rock-bottom prices. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures says why not take a pay cut and work longer hours at a Web startup? The "quant jocks" Wilson describes could also bank their savings and some unemployment checks and spend six months pitching a business plan — I bet they could convince Wilson to throw some money your way. The entrepreneurial route worked for former finance techie Jeff Bezos, an early adopter who worked at a hedge fund before hedge funds were cool. First Round Capital has a list of jobs in and around New York for those who would rather continue collecting a paycheck. Though the fund did sneak in email startup Xobni, which is on the left coast. "[H]ey, why not consider a move. The weather is better and winter is coming!!!" That said, so is Julia Allison. (Photo by AP/Mary Altaffer)

As a by-product of its recent merger with EDS, Hewlett-Packard announced a layoff of more than 24,000 jobs, or almost 8 percent of its workforce. The cuts are highest in support divisions — accounting, information technology, human relations, procurement and legal. But the main rationale of the layoffs is to refocus the combined company's computer-services division on high-end consulting, not low-end gruntwork. What’s worse is the timeframe: job cuts take place over three years. If you work at HP or EDS, your office has now become a professional hospice unit. Adding to the workplace angst: Some at HP, we hear, are getting bonuses even as their colleagues get pink slips. For those fretting about the potential loss of income in these troubling times, we offer the following suggestions on finding your next job or coping with survivor’s guilt.

Click to viewSeesmic, an online-video startup, is laying off some employees working to create original clips for the short-form video site. The official explanation, from newly unemployed video host Rachael Joy: "Seesmic's not a content site, never has been. It's a conversation tool." Joy was host of the startup's daily news and views "Seesmic du Jour." Talk of layoffs is not the conversation founder Loïc Le Meur wanted to start about Seesmic, which lets users pretend they're talking to each other through the medium of short, recorded webcam clips. Joy delivered the news with a wagging finger, in a spot-on parody of the bombastic Le Meur.Before flirting with the idea of Seesmic as an online-video studio, Le Meur had been aggressively pushing Seesmic as a platform for blog comments, even trying to convince Valleywag to deploy the company's product. The startup had been engaged in a major redesign, already delayed, that would have highlighted its video shows, according to a source. The layoffs suggest that plan is off. It's also attempting a complete rewrite of the site's backend code — an expensive endeavor. One has to wonder if this is a truly a strategy shift or just a ploy to slash the company's burn rate.

Hewlett-Packard just announced it will cut 24,600 jobs over the next three years, as it integrates tech consultancy EDS. Half the cuts will take place in the U.S. The company is taking a $1.7 billion charge in the fourth quarter to account for the costs of shedding jobs. Layoffs always suck, but we never were sure what all of those IT consultants did, anyway. [WSJ]

Auction giant eBay may have to cut ten percent of its 15,000-strong workforce if CEO John Donahoe wants to keep his job, research firm Wedge Partners reports. Considering that Donahoe will receive up up to five years pay if he gets canned, we wonder why he'll bother. The good news for the grunts is that cutting payroll probably won't happen until at least after the election, in order for Republican groupie Meg Whitman to save face. (Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)