♦ Roger Ailes (left) has renewed his contract with News Corp., which will keep him by Rupert Murdoch's side for at least five more years (and keep him running the show at Fox News for at least one more presidential election). [NYT]
♦ New York has fired longtime restaurant critic Gael Greene. [Feedbag]
♦ The Runway battle continues: Lifetime has sued NBC over claims it is blocking the cable channel from airing future episodes of the reality TV show. [NYP]

Everyone's getting laid-off these days, what with the economy and all, and now we want to know what you'll be doing for money while the dust settles. There aren't any media jobs left and desperate times call for desperate measures. Depressing stories have already been trickling in, like the two longtime Jersey Star-Ledger newsroom employees who, after refusing a buyout, were banished to the mailroom! Or the Longmont, CO, Times Call staff who were invited to be valet parking attendants for their (probably soon-to-be ex) boss's fancy Christmas party. And, perhaps worst, a Hachette memo to staff inviting them to participate in the saddest thing of all, a holiday crafts fair. You know, so they can practice a trade before they inevitably get canned! "You will have the opportunity to show or sell your craft such as jewelry, accessories, chocolates, knitting and crocheting," it says. Sigh. Send us your post-axing, new job tales (depressing or not!) and we'll publish some of our favorites in the coming dark days. In the meantime, read the full dismaying Hachette memo after the jump.

Credit where it's due, people: the Post's cover this morning (click to enlarge) is simply a work of tabloid art. Sure, it's easy to sell papers when there's big news. But on a slow day, can you pull off a cover that combines revulsion, a perverse obsession with strange diseases, and a mythical monster? That's the news business at its finest. It's a heartwarming narrative: freaky baby born with freaky condition, doctors stumped, he begs for salvation, and it's finally delivered! Something we can all get behind. The Post is actually far more subtle than its tabloid ancestors:

Cold-hearted bastards. The New York Times sent out a memo to employees this morning telling them that the 14th, 15th, and 16th floors are going to be closed over Thanksgiving weekend so that workers can finally put finishing on the wood floors—a vital job for which the paper has plenty of money. Do you know what this means? The cafeteria will be closed on Thanksgiving. Take your snack from the coffee cart and be happy, peons! Wait, that's closed too:

After two years as a reporter at the Portland Oregonian, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger III will return to New York to work at his family's Times, Portland alternative paper Williamette Week is reporting. Sulzberger wouldn't comment for the paper, but his return to New York appears at first glance unrelated to staff cuts at the Oregonian. So what's the 28-year-old son of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (pictured) up to? In all likelihood, trying to help to stabilize not only a faltering newspaper company but a ruptured family.

Two longtime reporters at Jersey's Star-Ledger have been reassigned to the mailroom—maybe because they had the audacity not to take a buyout. [Editor & Publisher via Romenesko]

Remember that column in the Murfreesboro (Tennessee) Post last week, in which the columnist rewrote the Jeffersons theme song for the Obama election? If you're a true music fan, you may recall the killer lyric, "Well we’re movin’ on up, To Washington, D.C. To a deee-luxe pimp pad, Painted whiiiite." Yes. Well that columnist is also, fittingly, a principal at one of the town's fine schools. And he's very sorry:

Hey, let's all be disappointed! Did you hear that President-elect Barack Obama is already a huge sell-out? He's not even going to cut Joe Lieberman's nuts off! (We think it's dumb to give Lieberman subpoena power over the incoming president but whatevs, it's Barry's call.) Now, he's apparently going to let Hillary Clinton be Secretary of State. That is, if you believe The Guardian. The lefty UK paper says the Clinton selection is a done deal, though no US paper has been quite so bold. Michael Wolff thinks this is brilliant media strategy on the part of either the Obamas or the Clintons, to punish the New York Times for some unspecified crime or simply to bypass them in order to teach them a lesson about who's in charge. We, uh, aren't so sure. Neither the Clintons or the Obamas seemed to show much favor to the foreign press during the campaigns, and no UK paper, let alone The Guardian, was handed a scoop of this magnitude over the domestic press. So why now? As Wolff points out, the Europeans love Bill Clinton much more than we do, here where he used to run things, because we had to see his shouty red face so much during the primaries. So maybe it's just wishful thinking? But now the speculation has lasted days, without denials from anyone, so, yeah, it seems like the SecState gig is Hillary's. The trial balloons been floating out there for a while now, and no one's yet come up with a great argument against the nomination that doesn't boil down to "the Clintons are a headache." We are probably happier with her than with, say, hilarious clown Bill Richardson or old man Richard Holbrooke, but we were kinda warming to the John Kerry idea. That guy's been in the Senate way longer, and is clearly way more sick of being there, right? He was investigating Iran-Contra when Hillary was in Arkansas doing whatever she was accused of doing in that Whitewater thing! (Remember that?) Both of them were dead wrong on Iraq, obv, but we're probably not going to sell anyone on Secretary of State Russ Feingold. At least she's smarter than Condi Rice. Still, Clinton's rehtoric on foreign policy has always seemed more resolutely, defensively hawkish, in that "Democrats can be war-mongering badasses too" way we deplore, than that of genuine old-timey liberal John Kerry. Of course, Obama's language has been similar, so we probably shouldn't expect the doves and peaceniks to run the foreign affairs department in an Obama administration. Which means it's disappointment season! Turns out the new politics of hope might involve some hopeless old politicians! Because, hey, the only Democrats hanging around Washington with any experience in the executive branch are old Clinton people (there might be some Carter guys, at Brookings or something, but no one talks to them). So the faces of triangulation did not melt, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, when Obama won the nomination. It is a great excuse for us Coastal Liberal Elites to Hate America Again, for the very first time. Just keep Mark Penn far away from 1600 Pennsylvania, Barry, for the sake of the country.

LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein used his blog yesterday for the entertaining purpose of viciously mocking Variety and its Hollywood fixture editor, Peter Bart. Mocking them for being poor! This column is awesome for the following reasons: because media outlets don't usually air their dirty laundry like this; because Peter Bart and Variety certainly deserve the mocking; and most of all because Patrick Goldstein seems totally unconcerned that his own paper does the same exact thing he criticizes Variety for, and that that very thing keeps him employed. Ha: Peter Bart wrote a column of his own (Headline: "Will fiscal funk trip kudo contenders?" WTF) bitching about the lack of Oscar-related ads from the studios in Variety. Patrick Goldstein appropriately tells him to shut it:

The New York Times folded Play magazine yesterday, which actually had good editorial content but bad business prospects, because many of its advertisers were auto companies, and they are all crumbling and taking the media along with them. On the plus side, the NYT business section actually hired somebody yesterday! (David Segal, from the Washington Post). The paper's special magic investment fund dedicated to Biz section hiring is obviously paying off. At least the good editorial=weak advertising equation has a flipside: the vapid T fashion mag lives!:

The New York Times is folding Play, its quarterly sports-focused magazine. FishbowlNY spoke to Play editor Mark Bryant, who said that although the mag broke even last year, "The company needs to make some pretty considerable cuts going forward," and his magazine was one of them. This is a bad sign. T, the Times' fashion magazine, turns enough of a profit to prop up a lot of money-sucking newsgathering operations; the NYT doubtless hoped that Play could do the same. Not in this ad market, apparently. Scratch that off the dwindling list of lifelines for the Times. [FBNY; anybody with more info can email us.]

Attention Americans, it's almost time to travel to your local movie theater to take in Nothing But the Truth, the ironically-titled Hollywood dramatization of the Judy Miller story! Miller, the former NYT correspondent (now with Fox!) who went to jail unnecessarily to protect Scooter Libby's right to plant fake stories with her concerning nonexistent Iraqi WMDs, is reportedly pleased with the film because it captures the "moral ambiguity" of her situation. It did so by casting Kate Beckinsale as (the much older) Miller, then "dramatizing" the story in order to make her a heroic, martyred "devoted mother of a seven-year-old" who "faces starker physical and personal consequences in jail." So, just how Judith Miller sees herself! Click through to watch two clips, exclusively featuring people who are far too attractive to be journalists:

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's useless media critic whose column is the actual physical manifestation of "conventional wisdom," is upset. About Obama! Specifically, about the fact that every newspaper and magazine and TV network has decided that Obama worship is the proper coverage strategy at the moment. The media is engaged in outrageous "mythmaking," Howie Kurtz observes, long after all the worthwhile media critics have analyzed this point to death. Howie's method is to list every example of a media outlet celebrating Obama's victory, then to wrap it all up with a conclusion that you may not have considered yet:

Amid all the hair-pulling over magazine and newspaper layoffs, Rupert Murdoch's speech broadcast in Australia Sunday sounds bracing: "Too many journalists — ...misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity... — seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," he said. "I believe that newspapers will reach new heights." But the News Corporation chairman's faith in the power of quality journalism and newspaper websites sounds an awful lot like McClatchy chief Gary Pruitt's iconoclastic (and now-ironic) defense of the industry back in 2006, in the Wall Street Journal:

How long can the dying print media ride the feel-good Obama victory wave? Forever and ever and ever! Or at least another month, maybe. The effect on newspapers was only one day long (and for as long as they can sell reprints of that issue—six months?), but magazines are just starting to take their share of the American Dream, which is to pimp out our hopeful new black president for every last dollar his likable young ass can generate. Ready to pay extra for a thin, hastily assembled package of glossy photos and sickeningly reverent journalistic pablum? Sure you are!:

♦ The Times has the skinny on "Martin Eisenstadt," the supposed McCain consultant who leaked info to the press. (He's an aspiring filmmaker, not surprisingly.) In the meantime, MSNBC's retracted its story. [NYT, AP]
♦ You might be enjoying CW's Stylista, but the ratings thus far haven't been especially encouraging. [NYO]
♦ Two new cast members, Michaela Watkins and Abby Elliott, will join Saturday Night Live beginning this weekend. [NYT]
♦ Showtime is developing an hour-long show by Stan Lee about a gay superhero. [Variety]

The commie pinkos behind today's liberal fantasy spoof of the New York Times have released a video communiqué! It's basically a rundown of the printing and distribution and fabulous wonderment of the stunned populace as they considered a world free of bloodshed. The best part comes half way through: Actual NYT employee: "I don't understand what statement they're trying to make. We've been all over the Bush administration since day one. We set the standard for coverage of the Iraq war!" The faceless response: "Like Judith Miller?" NYT Guy: (turns around and leaves). Ha, they're both right! The video is below:

Michael Cooke, the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and former editor of the NY Daily News, made almost $250,000 last month by flipping a condo in Donald Trump's new Chicago high rise. A far less lucrative investment: a job at the Chicago Sun-Times. [Chicago Business]

The actual stories in The Yes Men's fake issue of the New York Times today are a little too earnestly liberal to be funny, though they're still... nifty? (And look, we know earnest liberals are the easiest group to make fun of, even easier than religious psychos, but let's give them some props for pulling the whole thing off okay? Hope, etc.) But the fake ads they put throughout the issue are a little sharper. Dr. Z makes a cameo! After the jump, five of the best ad spoofs, that have corporate America tumbling down as we speak:

Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson is continuing to reshape the post-Murdoch version of the paper in his own image. In the wake of an early October reshuffling of editors, Thomson sent another top editor to lead the London bureau a few weeks ago, in a clear push to try to expand the paper's international prestige. And today Thomson told the staff that Gerard Baker is the new Deputy Editor-In-Chief of the WSJ and Dow Jones—and, like Thomson himself, Baker is veteran of the Times of London and the FT. Taste the international flavor. The full memo introducing Baker to the staff is below: