♦ Keith Olbermann has signed a new, four-year contract with MSNBC. He'll earn $7.5 million a year, which is 25 percent less than what his arch-nemesis Bill O'Reilly is collecting from Fox News. [TVDecoder]
♦ MSNBC's new slogan—"Experience the power of change"—has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama's victory, naturally. [NYT]
♦ The job cuts at Time Inc. are underway. People is looking for 18 people to take buyout packages. Time is looking for 20 volunteers. [WWD]
♦ Jared Kushner says revenues at the Observer are up 40 percent, although the paper is still losing $2 million a year. [Guardian]
♦ Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, from DreamWorks/Paramount, reeled in $63.5 million in its first weekend. [NYT]

Britain's Guardian profiled Jared Kushner, and while the Observer owner makes some positive noises about his company, the salient facts are as follows: After two years and a purported 40 percent revenue increase, the paper is still losing about $2 million per year. Kushner said he is " definitely scared about newspapers" and compared the industry to "a falling knife." And despite having Ivanka Trump on his arm, Kushner was recently turned away from fading nightclub Bungalow 8:

How's that going? They're grooming the Trump daughter to marry boy-mensch and 27-year-old New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. But first they've got to beat the Gentile out of her! Of course the YNet's Jewish World has something to say about it, declaring Kushner the "perfect match" and informing us that " following her husband-to-be's request, Ivanka has begun the conversion process at the Kehilath Jeshurun Synagogue in Manhattan's Upper East Side." Has she been turned away by a rabbi three times, as is the custom? Update: But Kushner & Trump are not engaged as this article suggests, says Robert Sommer, Observer Media Group President. Apparently, they're just really seriously going steady.[YNet]

Terrible news: if Obama wins, you have to love America! That's right, New Yorkers have given the game away—all the hipster Obama gear and unconcealed excitement at his candidacy means no longer can we hide behind our secret glee at the utter rejection of our values and lifestyle by "Real America." If it's a landslide, we're screwed. Do we really want our smirking appropriation of the gung-ho patriotic vernacular (America—fuck yeah!) to suddenly become... sincere? As Doree Shafrir writes in today's Observer, some New Yorkers are becoming dangerously proud of their country.

• More than 40 million people tuned in to Sarah Palin's RNC speech last night. [AP]

There's no news in Denver. At least, no news that couldn't be reported by watching it on C-Span from the comfort of home. So what to do? Report on what all your fellow journalists are doing! So far, the single greatest example of this is HuffPo's constant reportage from their own "HuffPost Oasis" in Denver. At left, an unretouched screengrab from their front page today. The Oasis is remarkably popular with journalists, considering that we have no idea what goes on there but we don't think it involves free booze. Wait, maybe we do know what's going on there! "'I feel relaxed!' said a particularly refreshed Eric Alterman as he stepped away from a complimentary facial for a minute. 'I'll tell you this—everyone should add facials to their lives.'" Oh, wow. That quote is from John Koblin's piece in today's Observer. It's got more gems: Adam Nagourney couldn't find a seat at his own paper's workspace, then bitched about having to cover the convention with so many other, lesser reporters. Fox's Greta Van Susteren, though, was more than happy to be there.

2,000 words on "Canadians who live in New York—sure, that's a trend" and yet the name "Sklar" does not appear once. You guys didn't do your homework. Still, we learned lots of other terrifying things about these foreigners and what they want from us: our jobs! Canadians, you see, are a mysterious and dangerous race of attractive young superbeings!

"New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, who had been among the potential buyers for Newsday, might be interested in buying the Star-Ledger if it were for sale, according to a person familiar with Mr. Kushner's thinking." [WSJ, Previously]

Adorable publishing tyke Jared Kushnergot got back together with girlfriend Ivanka Trump! Really, how could he not, they have so much in common: Both are attractive, both rich due to inherited real estate wealth and both have fathers who get extremely nasty while feuding with enemies. But Kushner is a Jew and Ivanka's a shiksa, and this has been a problem for Kushner's Orthodox family. In fact, the religious divide may very well have been behind the couple's mysterious breakup in April, around the time of their one-year anniversary. To get Kushner back, Ivanka has promised that, if things get more serious, she'll convert to Judaism. So sweet! And I'm sure the socialite feels a profound, authentic connection to the religion. Totes! Well, sort of. A friend tells Page Six the conversion is "a possibility, but that's way down the line." A brief recap of the Kushner-Trump romance, for those who have not been following along at home:

Actor Steve Guttenberg's insane interview in today's Observer kind of creeps up on you. In the beginning, you're thinking he's an amusing 1980s movie star with a bit of a chip on his shoulder about his faded fame. A once-deferential maitre'd is depicted shoving the actor aside to make way for Tom Cruise, "and I'm like, 'Holy fuck.'" A 120-year-old club for actor types sparks in Guttenberg's head the status-anxious thought, "Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, who cares? ...it's like time, the great equalizer." Guttenberg is shown haunted by the memory of his peers shunning John Travolta when it seemed he'd never live up to Saturday Night Fever again. The actor says, referring to his dating exploits, "the Goot is on the loose," and you figure he must have been making a joke. But then he starts sounding weirder and weirder, and maybe kind of like a jerk, and the next thing you know he's talking about his compulsive drinking, lying and womanizing.

As we reported yesterday, Candace Bushnell uses a character in her next novel to retaliate against the disrespectful new generation of journalists which has emerged since the Sex And The City creator gave up her relationship column in the New York Observer. The bogeyman of One Fifth Avenue is Thayer Core-"a blogger on one of those vicious new websites that had popped up in the last few years, displaying a hatred and vitriol that was unprecedented in civilized New York." But the thin-skinned author gives the gossip blogs far too much credit.

New York media is, of course, incestuous; its Russian subset even more so. Russia! magazine, edited by New York magazine contributing editor Michael Idov, is "a niche quarterly about Russian culture and design," as the Observer put it in a recent party report. The salmon-colored paper had a lot to say in a sniper-neg style that made us wonder if one of its authors had a bone to pick. Either that or they just really don't like the "inexplicable little magazine"? Oh:

Yesterday real estate scion Jared Kushner bragged in an interview with Portfolio's Lloyd Grove that his New York Observer has "the smartest readership probably in the world of any publication." That must explain why the paper published an editorial aimed squarely at its ultra-sophisticated audience—OTB regulars who weekly blow their social security checks on horse races. Let's hear it for filthy dens of misery frequented by the city's most disenfranchised!

This week's award for most amusing disclosure goes to former Village Voice music critic and section editor (and DEAN OF AMERICAN ROCK CRITICS) Robert Christgau, reviewing a novel by former Ed Park. "I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they'd implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got fired the same day young Ed did." Sadly, everything is very fictionalized. Doesn't Ed get the point of these books? Score-settling, not literature! [NYO]

Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Goldberg started his very first blog this week, with a charmingly naive post mostly about how he knows nothing about blogging but does sit near uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan. "This is almost certainly a mistake," he begins, and it turns out he's 100% right. When the New York Observer's media blogger Matt Haber (the forgotten Gawker Alum!) devoted a post yesterday to basically announcing the existence of Goldberg's blog and needling Goldberg for his initial boneheaded support of the Iraq War, Goldberg blew up with rage. Haber's post was a mugging, he says. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey. We'll show you what a mugging is.

Highbrow pink newspaper the New York Observer—home to Gawker employees past, and probably future—launched their fancy new book review section, "O.R.B." (guess what it stands for) with a review of Keith Gessen's book, a profile by Leon Neyfakh, and a Joshua David Stein review. Which means that nearly all the names on the front page of the section belong to people who have, at one time or another, dated former Gawker editor Emily Gould. There are only like ten people who write things in New York, you see. This is like a nightmare we used to have! Click to enlarge the section, with names helpfully circled by a stalky anonymous tipster.

Another day, another New York Observer trend piece, which like most journalism, has basically been reduced to a long diary entry. (Full disclosure: We used to work there!) This week Gawker alum Doree tackles Facebook's new "People You May Know" feature, in which the social networking site mines your friend list and then matches people up with other friends on your list. It's the cyber equivalent of being at a party and the host awkwardly pushing you over to someone and saying, "Have you met Donna?!"

Tasty former Gawker chief and current New York Observer scribe Choire Sicha did his best to squeeze something interesting out of Saved by the Bell person Elizabeth Berkley in a freelance interview for The Los Angeles Times, but his editors were having none of it. Choire says on his website that they cut this bit from the piece.

Did the Ivanka Trump/Jared Kushner breakup affect her performance in the Kushner-owned New York Observer "Socialite Slapdown"? Trump had been inexplicably placed in the "brains" bracket, not "birth," but while she fought her way to the Sweet Sixteen, she finally and suddenly lost out to #14 seed Peter Davis. The contests seem to perhaps be based on "internet voting" but there's plenty of room for mischief in that. Recount!

Hey nerds, guess what? Being smart is no longer an excuse for being fat. The "ripsters" thing Nick Sylvester made up comes to terrifying life in today's Observer, where Doree Shafrir investigates tall tales of New York boys who read contemporary fiction but secretly have defined abdominal muscles. These literary Lotharios are real, and they're totally embarrassed about how they look good shirtless: