In your springy Friday media column: a maybe-savior for the Boston Globe, traumatized journalists are everywhere, Newsweek bites HuffPo, and more!

• The first quarter wasn't such a hot one for NBC Universal: Earnings dropped 45 percent as the ad market continued its downward spiral. [WSJ, TVWeek]
• The world's largest newsprint maker has gone bankrupt. [NYT]
• Rolling Stone is closing up shop in San Francisco. [Portfolio]
• Ads sales figures at The New York Times Co. are looking pretty ugly. [E&P]
• Some good news, at least for impoverished porn addicts: Time Warner no longer plans to charge customers based on bandwidth usage. [Wired]

Times are tough. Stupid corporate cost-cutting tricks are rampant. Even within the hallowed confines of media companies! And the situation is growing more dire—no more free gyms, babysitting, good coffee, food, or toilet paper:

Paul Krugman writes in his column today about "the magazine cover curse." Funny he should mention it!

In your gloomy Wednesday media column: More rumored Viacom layoffs today, Newsweek staffers are mad at the boss, Playboy might have to sell Playboy, and more!:

In your bracing Tuesday media column: rumors of Newsweek closing a bureau [UPDATE: or maybe more than one], Barbara Walters tells the truth, questions are wrestled with, and Flex sells:

Newsweek, which traditionally (dentist's office joke), has for the first time ever correctly identified an overarching trend in American society and formulated a reasonable response, unaccompanied by any special "The Historical Jesus" stories!

Getting rich by blogging is "another high-tech fairy tale," writes Dan Lyons in Newsweek. He should know — he tried and failed, with nothing to show for his blogging career but 20 extra pounds.

There's a reason why CNBC viewers get shortchanged on their tech coverage: Jim Goldman, the network's Silicon Valley bureau chief, is not very tall. It's the kind of thing polite people don't talk about here.

Dan Lyons, the Newsweek columnist who launched his career from obscurity by impersonating Apple's CEO on a viciously satirical blog, has revealed what he really thinks of the man. Put on your blast armor.

• Ben Silverman and NBC have come to terms on a new contract. [B&C]
• Jeff Bewkes is taking over as Time Warner's chairman. [Bloomberg]
• As expected, Newsweek is trimming both staff and circulation. [WSJ]
• Do his 8 Golden Globe nods mean Harvey Weinstein is on the rebound? [THR]
• CBS Interactive is restructuring and making major cuts. [PaidContent]
• Hugh Jackman will be hosting the Oscars next February. [THR]

• Newsweek is planning to cut staff as well as give the mag a makeover. [WSJ]
• NPR is cutting 7 percent of its staff and dropping two shows. [NYT]
• Ad spending fell 2 percent during the third quarter, although online advertising continued to grow. [Adage]
• Les Moonves isn't too worried about Jay Leno's move to primetime. [NYP]
• Rumor has it Entertainment Weekly may go web-only. [Gawker]
• Reed Elsevier, which has been trying to sell trade titles like Variety and Publishers Weekly, is pulling them off the market. [NYP]
• Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. [HFPA]

The rumors appear to be true: Newsweek will amputate up to one million copies from its 2.6 million circulation, according to Wall Street Journal sources, and no fewer than 500,000. There will be an unknown number of layoffs, announced Thursday, to be achieved through voluntary buyouts like the 111 from last spring. But the biggest change at the 73-year-old magazine: It's going to become a whole lot more like Washington Post Co. sibling Slate, with contrarian, gimmicky or otherwise grabby headlines that wouldn't be out of place on Digg.

Oh, it's a terrible time to own a magazine. Advertising is falling and expected to plummet further. Everyone's laying people off, going online only or outright shutting down. But every editor worth his salt knows how to put a contrarian, positive spin on a dire situation. Time Inc. may be in the process of laying off 600 people, but, hey, the magazine group's executive vice president told Peter Kafka the layoffs are "pretty much" done, and if you're still employed with the company you probably won't get laid off between now and New Year's. Why, that's positively delightful! And dig the way Newsweek tried to positively spin a purported 1 million-copy-cut in its rate base:

Newsweek has come up with the worst rationale yet for canceling the annual holiday party: The magazine said it is sacrificing the Christmastime shindig to have any even more awesome party in April. Because spring is totally the time you want to be partying late with coworkers, and the sun goes down three hours later (7:39ish vs. 4:30), so management doesn't have to worry about people punching out early. We suppose this sounds better than "we want to reduce the chances of having to fire you all amid the rapidly accelerating implosion of print media and Western capitalism, just like Condé Nast, Viacom, Hearst ABC News and News Corp. before us." The internal memo is after the jump.

My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to blog outside the magazine; then freaked out when Lyons continued to write honestly in his spare time. You maniacs! You blew it up!

In theory, pro journalists can climb to the top of their fields without sacrificing their built-in urge to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In practice, even the loosest cannons find themselves battened to the hatch, or whatever the right sailing metaphor is. One of my role models, former Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons, seems to have been forced by his new employer to undo his own writing. Here's what happened.Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog he launched in 2006. Writing from home at night, Dan vented his frustrations as a Forbes writer by inventing a fictional Steve Jobs character. Fake Steve said everything about the tech industry's titans that Dan wasn't allowed to print in Forbes. (Check out "I love to fuck with car salesmen" and "Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.") Today, it seems Dan has taken down a post, for the first time any of us can remember. From most reporters, I'd consider this typical pointy-haired management, what can ya do, etc. But seeing Dan Lyons self-censor his own honest work makes me wonder if I'll be able to stay true to my own after I leave Valleywag's free-fire zone next month. What's changed for Lyons? Simple: This past summer, Newsweek hired him away from Forbes. After a long series of talks with both old and new editors, Lyons shut down Fake Steve Jobs and started a new blog, Real Dan Lyons. Yesterday he blogged a potty-mouthed, Fake-Steve-style rant about Yahoo's PR people yanking his chain in his official Newsweek reporter role. Today that post is gone. Dan's not answering his cellphone or email today, so I have to presume it was his Newsweek editor who made him take it down. Certainly, I've never seen Lyons wake up in the morning and rush to undo his previous night's typing. Here's the timeline:

Dan Lyons is shocked, shocked that Yahoo's PR team lied to him about how long CEO Jerry Yang would stay in the job. PR people routinely lie; it's part of the job description. But the good ones don't get caught. Lyons, Newsweek's tech columnist, interviewed Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock less than a month before Monday's announcement that Yang would step down, and Bostock loudly declared Yang was here to stay. One would think no one would be more cynical about the world of tech PR than the man who savaged Apple's spinmeister when he impersonated CEO Steve Jobs in a satirical blog. Lyons is no longer writing as Fake Steve Jobs, but as the real Dan Lyons, he occasionally summons up the old savagery. Here's what he says about the flacks who deceived him about Yang's employment status, as well as a now-scotched advertising deal with Google:

Barack Obama's historic presidential victory aroused so much emotion: Tears on an Oprah level, ecstasy on a spontaneous street party level and anger at a loudly-interrupt-an-old-war-hero level. So Newsweek can't help but ask... did it turn you on? And did you then have hot, hope-filled change sex, or maybe change-filled hope sex, possibly ending in someone yelling "Yes We Can?" Because, seriously, that would be perfect. Read the magazine's written inquiry after the jump.

Today, Newsweek posted the final chapter of their Special Election Project, the annual How He Did It book they've published for each presidential campaign since 1984 (when the answer was much easier: he just ran against Walter Mondale). The reporters assigned to the special project are embargoed from those publishing in the regular magazine, so they get jucier anecdotes, more hilarious quotes, and revealing stories, all of which are then packaged and in such a way as to make the winning campaign look like a well-oiled machine and the losing campaign look like a parade of idiots. Did you read the whole thing? We did! We'll share with you the funniest bits, the important takeaway, and the already solidifying conventional wisdom. In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska. Let's begin with Hillary and co. Hillary The Clinton campaign was beset by the vicious infighting among assholes, basically. The biggest and dumbest asshole was chief pollster/strategist Mark Penn!