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.

OK, who's sending all the white powder to New York newsrooms—and can you snort it? Reuters evacuated their newsroom today due to a powder-filled envelope. Last week, the New York Times had to seal off some elevators and evacuate one floor after a similar incident—which, as we reported, was scary, but no reason to stop working. Nothing to see here, folks. (We hope.)

♦ Campbell Brown is reportedly pregnant. [TVNewser]
♦ Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown aren't in competition. They're best friends! [NYT]
♦ The Robb Report is on the market. The price? "Upwards of $100 million." [Folio]
♦ NBC has exiled the struggling Lipstick Jungle to Friday nights. [Variety]
♦ CNN's new (and appallingly unfunny) political humor show starring D.L. Hughley debuted this past weekend. [NYT]

Model/publishing heiress/socialite Lydia Hearst—who once proudly listed "journalist" among her occupations (presumably with a straight face)—just quit her column in Page Six Magazine. "The Hearst Chronicles" was full of zeitgeisty revelations like "I just ordered banana-scented scratch-and-sniff wallpaper for my kitchen," but the porcelain-skinned model did win points with us for slamming Hearst Publications for not canceling their Christmas party amid layoffs and a recession. But wait—Guest of a Guest reveals Lydia's resignation letter, in which she says she didn't even write the item criticizing Hearst:

If you were unfortunate enough to read all mainstream coverage of the marketing and advertising industries every day, you would—as I have—come to the conclusion that this financial crisis is the greatest thing to ever happen to the reporters on those beats. That's because all they had to do was write three stories: The ad industry outlook is bad. Nobody's buying bullshit ads that don't work any more. And, hey, everyone sure is advertising a lot of sales now! The marketing reporters at all the papers filed these stories weeks ago, and then took off on a leave of absence, probably to become hookers or drug dealers like the other smart people do during recessions. And now: ...their papers just reword those stories and run them day after day, until the Dow breaks 12,000 again. NYT today:

After Moody's threatened to downgrade the New York Times Company's debt to junk status Thursday, Standard & Poors went ahead and actually made such a move, bringing to reality a development foretold fully two months ago by Bloomberg. The Times Company is only now considering reducing its outsized dividend to shareholders, including most prominently to the Sulzberger family that controls the company. Having failed one test, involving credit, the Sulzbergers now face another, involving their hold on arguably the most important journalism franchise in the country.

Oh, this is really not what you want to hear if you are a fan of the newspapers, or journalism as a whole, or especially if you're an investor in the NYT Co.: In the wake of shitty third-quarter earnings, the ratings service Moody's is warning that it may downgrade the company's debt to junk status. It's currently at Baa3, the lowest rating before junk. A downgrade would make it even harder for the company to borrow money, which—without going into a lot of financial mumbo-jumbo—is not what they need right now (Pictured: their year-to-date stock price). Financial mumbo-jumbo quote from Moody's analysts below:

'Smokers Should Be Shot: Experts' [NYP]

Hey, here's a surprisingly bold and fresh move, in opposite-world: the New York Times—a serious newspaper—is planing to give regular space on its editorial page to Bono—an edgy rock star! Will this odd couple possibly be able to get along? Will Bono stumble into the office at 7 a.m. after a night of wild coked-up groupie sex and start trashing the place, disturbing the morning meditation of Times editorial page chief Andy Rosenthal? Are Times readers ready for some motherfuckin rock-n-roll? Ha, of course what you really have to look forward to is six to ten editorials from another wealthy cosmopolitan liberal. Rosenthal and Bono have more in common than two ring-tail lemurs from separate sides of Madagascar. Wake us up when you hire Young Jeezy. [Radar]

A Vice Magazine story about an extremely prolific sperm donor was condensed, reworded, and run as a story in the New York Post today, with no source other than Vice. The Post is now officially a blog on paper, and Vice is officially the mainstream media. Tears all around.

Are you aware that the LA Times revealed its redesign this week? Let's hope you are, because this is what's gonna save the paper! What people both inside the Tribune Co. and out really want to know is not, "How does the redesign look?" It's, "What does Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer and Vice Admiral of the Martian Army Lee Abrams have to say about it, in his own unmistakable way?" Well: "As we've seen with all the other Tribune newspapers, the 'plunge' is the first step. Nothing more...nothing less." Ha. And?:

Entrepreneur and longtime entertainment executive Neil McGinness bought the deadpan supermarket tabloid Weekly World News from American Media, according to the Times, 14 months after the last issue was printed amid anemic circulation. McGinness has "revived" the website, which AMI had promised to keep open (as publishers tend to do), and might even bring back the print edition. The idea is that online advertising, licensing and movie deals can succeed where the prior incarnation failed. Plus, it's something of a golden age of satire, what with the Onion and Daily Show and so forth. The new site already has old staples Bat Boy and Ed Anger, but the headlines aren't quite up to snuff yet. Perhaps the site's distinguished editors can take some inspiration from this list of headlines from the past (add your own in the comments!):

Good news, Barack Obama supporters: Your Democratic presidential nominee is winning the campaign for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, with 112 newspapers to rival John McCain's 39! By circulation it's 13 million to 4 million. Sadly, however, those endorsements are almost definitely useless.

Steve Barnes (pictured), the restaurant critic for the Albany Times-Union, was coming out of a restaurant with a friend last Friday night when, with no warning, two young men walked up nonchalantly and beat them up. "They said nothing, just punched us both repeatedly in the face." Barnes doesn't think he was targeted because he was gay, and he doesn't think he was targeted by the restaurant he just left—but he does think he was targeted:

My constant raving about The Examiner is has paid off: The Chronicle now magically appears on my doorstep, 13 floors up, every morning. My neighbor doesn't get it, just me. Influencer marketing, or is the Chron trying to pump up its subscription numbers in Pacific Heights? I hate to admit it, but I might actually open the paper if I knew Violet Blue was hiding in there.

♦ It's confirmed: Sarah Palin will appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow. [NYDN]
♦ Yet another tragic consequence of the economic meltdown: Suze Orman is making money off the crisis with big-money endorsement deals. [WSJ]
♦ Playboy is cutting costs. How? With energy-efficient lightbulbs, naturally. [WWD]
♦ The Grammy nominations—not the actual awards, mind you—will be a TV special. [NYT]
♦ A hiring freeze is now in place at Condé Nast. [NYP]

As recently as the mid-1980s, the newspapers that ostensibly own the Associated Press constituted 50 percent of its revenue. Over the past decade, with the explosion of syndicated news on wesbites and the proliferation of cable news channel, cashflows have come increasingly from new media customers, who tend to favor more soft news coverage on topics like entertainment and lifestyle. Smell like a recipe for disastrous internal strife? Funny, because that's exactly how it's turning out! It was one thing when the editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette likened AP's CEO to a Soviet apparatchik this past April. But now even the insane revolutionaries at Sam Zell's Tribune Company are staging a mutiny, moving to cancel the wire and saying AP is charging higher prices for less hard-news (think state and local) content:

♦ Last night's debate attracted more viewers than the first, but not as many as last week's debate. [MediaPost]
♦ Dan Rather will be covering the presidential elections for a French TV network. Does he speak French? [Variety]
♦ Fox's 24 will command the highest ad rates this season. [AdAge]
♦ PBS has decided not to air a documentary about Bush administration torture tactics until after the election. [NYT]
♦ Britney Spears is back in print to hype her latest fragrance line. [AdRants]
♦ Steve Carell will play a French soldier in Brigadier Gerard. [THR]

Tribune's Chief Innovation (LOL!) Officer and crazy, crazy clown Lee Abrams snuck into Manhattan yesterday to "speak" at a media conference, using his trademark nonsensical version of "words." Luckily Jeff Bercovici was there to chronicle his wisdom, lest it be lost in the huge cloud of purple haze smoke that, we like to imagine, follows Lee Abrams at all times. I wonder if he got a chance to compare the newspaper industry to rock-n-roll?

Although the business media can't sell any ads during an economic meltdown like the one we're having now, it sure is a great chance for reporters to make names for themselves. Business reporters absolutely live for the periodic destruction of the American economy. This is their Normandy! After the jump, we survey the media landscape and pick out the winners and losers—all your favorites, from Paul Krugman to Jim Cramer, ranked on a merciless 10-point scale! [Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.] WINNERS