Stewart Pinkerton, said to have been pushed out the door in a coup this past spring, was asked whether he's shopping a book about how his ex-boss Steve Forbes is feuding with Forbes' brothers over the direction of their family media empire. Pinkerton certainly didn't deny that, telling Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovici,

"I've been working on a book project for the last year, but I'm not at liberty to discuss what it's about."

In other words, Pinkerton can't comment on whether his big secret book project is about the big secret at his former employer, but he wants to make sure you know he is working on a big book, which is secret so... probably, right? Connect the dots. (Bercovici lists some other people who hypothetically could have written this tell-all book, but of course they didn't, since Pinkerton did.)

(Pic via Forbes)

The cuts at the magazine happened at the end of October and were 50 or so deep - the Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and London bureaus were axed entirely, and the layoffs spanned several days. Perhaps it's not surprising then that writers and editors with nothing to do but fume would turn to the tell-all. And that, per the tipster, they'll get all the help they need:

Recently ousted employees are said to be lining up to share anecdotes and sources with the authors of the proposed tell-all.

More as it comes in.

Among the victims: Klaus Kneale, nephew of CNBCer Dennis Kneale, and Lauren Sherman, girlfriend of Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer. We're told the layoffs are hitting both the magazine and print Web sides of the publication — and that they're not yet done. Still, we're told the growing list of names is long enough to soon meet expectations of 40-60 layoffs.

We first reported about a new round of layoffs at Forbes three weeks ago, and the rumors have only grown louder and more persistent since then. Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes finally confirmed them earlier this week, blaming "seismic shifts wrought by the Web." He had shot down layoff rumors just five months earlier — a period of time that, in the context of print journalism, used to seem like a brief flash, but which can now deliver brutal new realities.

UPDATE: We're told the Los Angeles bureau has been eliminated, along with LA-based staff writer Evan Hessel. We also hear Scott Woolley has been axed.

UPDATE: Other casualties we're hearing about: The London bureau; one correspondent each in Japan and roving Europe; Becky Buckman, lured from the Wall Street Journal to Forbes' Silicon Valley bureau; banking writer Bernard Condon; plus "a bunch of junior people." Killing so many — virtually all? — the bureaus is apparently part of a concerted effort to save on real estate costs.

UPDATE: Former Forbeser Peter Kafka tweets that he's seen a list of 27 editorial staff let go today alone. We've heard the layoffs will span multiple days.

Another Conde Nast mag lines up for its 25% budget cuts: A tipster tells us that Teen Vogue had about six layoffs today in the sales and marketing departments, including, they say, a pregnant woman. We also hear rumors of editorial layoffs at Details today, although we have no...details. Know more? Email us.


Elsewhere in magazine layoffs: The long-awaited Forbes layoffs are coming down this week. Keith Kelly says 30 to 40 layoffs there this week. And WWD says that Time Inc. is "expected to make staff reductions across the board next week." That follows the 600 layoffs there one year ago. Damn.


What horrible things are going on at the San Francisco Chronicle? The paper lost more than 25% of its circulation in the latest report. Which is great news, according to the publisher! "Frank Vega, publisher of The Chronicle, said the newspaper's loss in circulation was an expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue." Ah yes: Now that your model relies on readers for revenue, you'd expect readers to flee from your paper in record numbers. Naturally. Also: "Starting next month, the paper will become the first in the country to use glossy, magazine-style paper in its daily editions, although not for every page." Um, just what the public's been waiting for? Even Romenesko is totally making fun of you, SF Chronicle.


Looks like Wonkette will be resuming its boycott of Politico, after discovering Politico is still way dumb.


There's a little war of words going on between "xenophobic" xenophobe Lou Dobbs and "self-important ass" Fox Biz mustache-haver John Stossel. Hopefully this will end with both men tearing each other limb from limb.

The essence:

We — and the entire media world — have been hit hard by both the severe recession and the seismic shifts wrought by the Web. Given these dramatic events, further layoffs, unfortunately, are necessary across the entire organization...On the editorial side, we will maintain the essential strengths of Forbes while also deepening our relationships with our community. On the advertising side, we are making shifts to fully meet marketers' evolving needs.

More ad cuts than edit cuts? Hard to tell just yet. The real bloodshed will come tomorrow and/or Wednesday, we hear. If you know more, email us.

[Full Forbes Memo]

We're hearing from multiple sources that a major round of layoffs will be hitting Forbes next week. So if you work at Forbes...um, just be nervous, I guess. And if you know more details, email us.


Danyel Smith was the editor of Vibe. Then Vibe folded. Then she got a job as editor of TheRoot.com. Now, after just six weeks on the job, she's quitting "because of issues related to her commute." Huh. Well I was coming home late one dark afternoon/ A reporter stopped me for an interview/ She said she heard stories and she heard fables/ That I'm vicious on the mic, and the turntable/ This young reporter I did adore/ So I rocked a vicious rhyme like I never did before/ She said 'Damn fly guy I'm in love with you'/ And the Casanova legend must have been true/ I said: TELECOMMUTE.
Hip hop has a message.


Details from a tipster regarding this week's cutbacks at Conde Nast Traveler: "A majority of the full-time research staff was 'severed.' Although, purportedly, there will be an arrangement in the coming weeks for those let go to remain as freelancers—a mitigating demotion, ostensibly. But the axe also fell on some editorial and copy edit staff, and several other senior editors, while not fully terminated, will see their work weeks shortened to two or three days only." That's marginally better than being laid off!


An 80 year-old man who retired as Baltimore's AP bureau chief in 1991 killed himself last weekend after being charged with molesting two young boys.

Your usual host Hamilton Nolan is off for the rest of the day, so you're stuck with me. Rest assured, I'm as sorry about all this as you are.

A fellow calling himself Bob Anderson is going around pretending to be a writer for W magazine. He even registered an entire fakey domain name, fairchildgrp.com, to make his emails look more legit, according to an email exchange we've reviewed between him and a media event organizer. But the scammer was nevertheless excluded from a recent event after he was busted trying to pass off another writer's online column as his own. The writer is a lady of the female persuasion, and her byline is on the online column submitted by "Bob Anderson" as credentials. So, be on guard against this guy, if you are very very easily fooled.

Forbes' executive editor for technology, Betsy Corcoran, is leaving the magazine after ten years. The Silicon Valley journalism fixture is launching a startup to bring more technology into America's classrooms (Lucere.org, not yet live). She tells us her departure is "really and truly about my passion for education and technology" — and not the relentless rounds of layoffs at her magazine.

Eighteen years worth of National Lampoon covers, starting at the magazine's 1970 inception, have been posted online. (Via Robert Newman). A perfect way to burn through the rest of your last day of "work" this week, no? (For the youths: The Lampoon was like The Onion of the 1970s and 1980s, but with a little bit more actual news, and a lot more questionable taste.)

Why is conservative, gay-marriage-hating Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz pouring money into right-wing DC media sinkholes like the Examiner newspaper and the Weekly Standard magazine? Because he can, is about the best answer anyone can come up with, according to a profile in Politico. Just your basic propaganda play, but with dying media. That should end as well as Anschutz's dabbling in movies, probably (i.e. poorly).

Some Forbesers darkly note that, barring a summer recess, company layoffs have come near the end of this year's financial quarters, with 19 let go from the magazine and website in early January followed by a reported 50 or so at the very end of March. Another round now, just after the close of the Sept. 30 quarter, would fit the pattern. CEO Steve Forbes assured staff in May that layoffs were done for the moment and "Forbes continues to outperform its competitors." But in such a severe an ad recession that's not much reassurance.

We've put in an inquiry with Forbes PR and will update with what we hear back.

He always thought he was doing good. And sometimes he was. He oversaw one of the greatest expansions of industrial production and civil improvement Germany had ever experienced. His government sponsored architectural wonders, invested heavily in infrastructure and hosted the Olympic Games. Yet he emerged as probably the most evil man the world has ever seen.

See, a true leader doesn't just 'blindly follow down someone else's path" and massacre six million Jews; a true leader asks, "Does this massacre match my own objective sense of my principles?"

Leadership.
[Pic via]

Ranked the 377th richest American last year, with a net worth of $1.3 billion, Thiel has dropped off this year's Forbes 400 list entirely. In the middle of last year, he could brag that his Clarium Capital had averaged an annual return of 30 percent, net of fees, over six years; these days Thiel is quoted in the Wall Street Journal blaming the irrational economy (when is not?) for his fund's outflows and double-digit declines. These things tend to come in threes, so we're waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Then Thiel can speedily move on to the inevitable next phase: Redemption and comeback. At 41, he's got many more acts still to come.

(Pic: Andrew Mager)

Lists like these, which Forbes' crack researchers based on "visibility—by press mentions—and the size of the organization or country these women lead," are a priori useless linkbait. But this particular iteration, which separates the two female Supreme Court justices by six slots (why? Ruth Bader Ginsburg's longer tenure doesn't grant her more votes than Sonia Sotomayor), is particularly hilarious.

Here's how Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and the Queen of England stack up against Susan Chambers, the executive vice president in charge of Wal-Mart's "global people division":

Also, Bill Gates' wife Melinda is more powerful than both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

If you're going to just make up a list like this based on nothing, shouldn't it at least make intuitive sense? Here's the thinking that went into it:

Forbes' Power Women list isn't about celebrity or popularity; it's about influence. Queen Rania of Jordan (No. 75), for instance, is perhaps the most listened-to woman in the Middle East; her Twitter feed has 600,000 followers.

Kim Kardashian has 1.9 million Twitter followers. WHY WAS SHE DENIED? Does Angela Merkel even use Twitter!?!?

Forbes recently authored a book on the megalomaniacs who proceeded him historically, called Power, Ambition, Glory. The book aims to teach CEOs (or CEOs-in-training) lessons drawn from history: basically, it aspires to be The Art of War For Dummies. From the tipline, Forbes is so desperate to win wars on behalf of his own ego, he had employees buy his new book en masse in order to get it on the Amazon.com bestseller list:

It's very important to Steve that he be considered a successful author and a serious scholar. So he (or someone that works for him) instructed the Forbes sales staff to buy the book - every day, several times a day, in different stores, especially when they travel, so that it will help inflate the book's sales figures. They can expense these purchases and the company will presumably write off the cost. Using this technique, they successfully got the book into the top 100 on Amazon during the first week of release, but it's flatlined since then.

Ah, yes: maybe Steve can take a cue from his own book, and remember that time Napoleon Bonaparte failed when he tried to move in on Russia in the winter, and then later, when Hitler did the same thing. Both attempts miserably failed, because they didn't know what Russia in the winter was actually like. Hopefully Forbes - while trying to move in on bestseller lists with a shitty book - won't try too hard to make the same mistake. Seeing as how his company's hitting tough times, spending the last year laying off and consolidating staffs, Forbes shouldn't any his ammo fighting battles he can't win. As we all know, the Ruskie-esque menace that is James Patterson's The Angel Experiment pulls no punches.

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

Without specifically addressing what he's said to other people, Kneale told us in an email his feelings are "particularly heartfelt:"

My "animus" toward vicious, anonymous bloggers and blind comments pre-dates my joining CNBC... Look at the scary and brilliant Forbes cover story on net anonymity, which I edited, in October 2007: it should make bloggers feel ashamed.

Kneale's campaign against shame is something of a transformation for the one-time Forbes editor whose antics became legendary after editor Bill Baldwin lured him from the Wall Street Journal in 1998. The most famous story — we've heard others, but this is the one that was widely told on the Forbes staff; i.e. the kind of gossip that pre-dates blogs — occurred at the company Christmas party shortly after he was hired. As relayed by people who worked for the magazine at the time, it goes like this:

After the party, Kneale shared a cab back to Park Slope, Brooklyn, with three other people: a female Forbes writer, a male Forbes staffer and the staffer's wife. Somehow, in the course of the ride, Kneale managed to grope both women. The next morning, the male staffer showed up at Kneale's house to avenge his wife's honor, and when the story reached the office Kneale had to beg several layers of the Forbes masthead to keep his job.

The incident was purportedly the foundation for this Feb. 12, 1999 Page Six blind item:

WHICH business-magazine editor, who keeps a jar of blue jellybeans on his desk labeled Viagra, was called on the carpet for feeling up an underling's wife? The co-workers and their spouses were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn after an office party. The underling later went to the groper's home to get an apology. The groper's boss told him that if it ever happened again, he'd be fired.

Kneale declined to comment on the story, writing, "As a rule I do not respond to blind comments... if Gawker will publish the names of the people behind these 11-year-old rumors, maybe I'd have more to say." We know the names of two of the people said to be in the cab with Kneale and emailed them for their version of events. We'll update if we hear back.

We don't begrudge Kneale some purported drunken mistakes in his past. We all have them. Though the number of tales that have crossed our transom in recent days suggests Kneale has more than his fair share. And so we have to wonder if his hype-seeking crusade against gossipy, anonymous bloggers is less about principle and more an exercise in self-defense.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince grossed a magical $58.4 million. It pulled in $22.2 million in midnight shows. Can some one talk to J.K. Rowling about giving America an loan? [ Variety ]

Right now, with it being the End of Days and all, what would you do with $240 million dollars? Finance a James Cameron 3D movie about a band of humans pitted against a distant planet's indigenous population? OBVIOUSLY! [LAT]

Tyler Perry makes Forbes' list of 2008's highest-paid men in Hollywood. The children of Israel round out the list. So they control the movies and the banks! How do they do it?[/Film]

Fox's telecast All-Star Game delivered an average audience of 14.6 million viewers, making it the most-watched midsummer classic since 2002 — even without Jon Hamm's sexy hands gripping a bat. [THR]

Nick Hornby's An Education has gotten some pretty rave reviews. It looks to be poised as a real Oscar contender. The trailer, filled with British accents, does like pretty titillating. [Variety ]

At last, libertarian political ideals can finally be expressed, on the internet. The tweet:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Did you see the NYT magazine this weekend? It's slightly smaller! Also the paper has chosen a new font to help it squeeze more words on the page, in response. Every penny saved on newsprint these days helps, you know. Unfortunately the magazine also changed the layout of Deborah Solomon's weekly interviews, which was the best thing about them.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.What is happening at the upheaval-wracked Boston Globe today? Upheaval! Of a minor sort. The union is meeting with the NYT Co. to discuss that 23% pay cut. The union says it's still in "negotiations," but management says negotiations are over so I guess the meeting is just kind of a friendly consolation thing? David Carr goes out and gets estimates of what the Globe might sell for—the estimates range from $250 million to less than nothing. Maybe go ahead and sell to the guy who said $250 million?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Congressional Black Caucus thinks that the Sunday news shows should have more black guests and commentators. Which is possibly self serving and also true! "White people talking about Obama all the time" is not the same as "diversity," television people. Clarence Page can only be one place at a time!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Among the every-magazine-in-the-world doing poorly these days: Forbes. If only we had a flat tax, things would be different!

"Serious thinkers" talking about pop culture is sort of my favorite thing ever, almost as good as when opera singers cover Stevie Wonder or chefs "reimagine" Twinkies. In recent weeks, we've seen Wolf, Rhodes scholar, prominent third-waver and beauty myth-maker, ask "who won feminism?" - the humorless old hairy-leggers or those of us living the dangerous vida loca?! The answer, according to her Bazaar piece, is Angelina Jolie. See, that's why women love her - "she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation." Hey, you said it, we didn't.

Wolf breaks down Angie's mystical appeal thusly:

She's Hot.

Bosomy and wasp-waisted, with that curtain of hair and those crazy pillowy lips, she is an obvious male sex fantasy...Polls also show that if women — not just lesbian and bisexual women but straight women — had to choose a female lover, they would want to sleep with Angelina Jolie. In other words, women both identify with her and desire her.

She Has it All.

She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it. Against every Western convention, she has managed to draw together all of these kinds of female liberation and empowerment. And her gestures determinedly transgress social boundaries — boundaries of convention, race, class, and gender — giving many of us a vicarious thrill.

She's Done the Impossible Switcheroo from Whore to Madonna. Wolf points to Jolie's long, strange trip - from tiresomely brother-macking, blood-sportin' self-styled shit-show married to grizzled oldster with fear of antique furniture, to the (sexy!) paragon we all know and allegedly love.

She Flies a Plane.

Women are so used to being dependent on others (certainly on men) for where they go, metaphorically, and how they get there. Flying a private plane is the classic metaphor for choosing your own direction; usually, that is a guy thing to do, yet there was Jolie, with her aviator glasses on, taking flying lessons so she could blow the mind of her four-year-old son. That is the ultimate in single-mom chic: Even before she had reconstructed a nuclear (or postnuclear) family with a dad at the head of it, she was reframing single motherhood from a state of lack or insufficiency to a glamorous, unfettered lifestyle choice.

She's Takes Lovahs.

Equally ostentatiously in her role as lover, she took for her own pleasure the male seen as the most desired of the tribe, Brad Pitt, who is always ranked at the top of indexes of male beauty and virility. As for the constraints of social convention — ahem, he was still married? You can have a variety of feelings about this, but Jolie's evident disdain of that social constraint certainly, for better or worse, put her in the same self-entitled category as those men who have traditionally taken what they wanted and let the emotional chips fall where they may.

To those of us who find Brangelina impossibly dull (or, you know, fine in Girl, Interrupted and attagirl for UNICEF) her appeal is more like this: people like crappy movies, too. Movies full of abrupt transitions and overblown characters. (What this says about our feminist acumen I'm not sure, but then, Wolf doesn't think much of that.) I'm not sure if Wolf is paying Angie's fans the ultimate compliment or just being really patronizing. She's not wrong: clearly women are drawn to the dramatic highs and lows of the Angelina storyline, the family's beauty and diversity, the novelty of a movie star using her powers for good, the idea of a goddess who has it all. But is that a good thing? (If this is "having it all," "having it all" was a lot more literal than I ever knew.)

Brangelina are totally enigmatic; we don't know anything about them except the Harlequin-worthy synopsis. People like them because they can project whatever they want onto them. Maybe moms fantasize about Angie reading to her kids at night, then having hot sex with Brad. Those who want to turn their lives around probably are inspired by this scion of movie star and model who's fearlessly pursued a course of growing up. Doubtless somebody somewhere has taken up flying as a result. Hopefully a few have turned to good works. (Ideally no one, anywhere, will allow Angelina Jolie to have any impact on her decision to adopt or not.) Some woman involved with a married dude may stay with him that much longer because of her tabloid happy-ending. Some people will see The Last Kiss and think it's profound. And Naomi Wolf will look at Angelina Jolie and project her own fantasies: a feminist icon whom women love because they think the right way. And that right there pretty much justifies the Forbes pick.

The Power of Angelina [Harper's Bazaar]

Related: What's Angelina Jolie's Allure? [People]
The World's Most Powerful Celebrities [Forbes]
Who Won Feminism? [Washington Post]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Who says that financial media Iphone apps cannot be "fun"? "There's even something called 'the Daily Steve,' a feature Forbes developed with the 'shake function' that uses the iPhone's accelerometer to generate a random quote from Mr. Forbes himself." Put in a secret code to hear the racist ones!


Remember how much you love contextual advertising on the internet? Well now that sort of thing is coming to TV, also! Happy day.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.After Hearst threatened to close the money-incinerator that is the San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle staff writer Delfin Vigil took out an ad in a rival paper excoriating the corporate drones at Hearst as un-American assholes. Now Vigil has been laid off. Heroic and all, but dude, your paper's been losing a million bucks a week. That's un-American.


Good news: American consumers are now even less satisfied with newspapers than they are with airlines or the US Postal Service! Excuse me, that's bad news. Bad.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Matt Bai becomes the first campaign reporter to voluntarily not write a book about Obama. Cheers to you, sir. It would have been a thorough waste of time.

Amid SEC charges that Apple management had shifted the dates of stock options to benefit executives, including Jobs, Anderson, and former general counsel Nancy Heinen, the company took an $84 million charge in 2006. Jobs and Apple settled a shareholder lawsuit for $14 million, but avoided trouble with the SEC. Anderson and Heinen paid $3.5 million and $2.2 million in fines respectively, without admitting guilt.

The episode caused a major rift between Anderson and Jobs. Anderson had left Apple in 2004, but stayed on the board until the scandal led to his resignation in 2006. In the meantime, Anderson had joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley. As the stock-options scandal grew, Anderson and Jobs pointed fingers at each other, at one point issuing dueling press releases shifting the blame. Anderson has long maintained that Jobs knew more about the options chicanery than he has let on.

Elevation, which also counts famed Valley investor Roger McNamee and U2 frontman Bono as partners, backed Palm, a rival to Apple in the smartphone business, and recruited a former top Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, as Palm's executive chairman. No one in Silicon Valley honestly believes this is a coincidence.

Forbes is another Elevation investment. The May 11 story, written by Bill Barrett and teased on the cover, centers on the 118-page transcript of a three-hour interview Jobs gave SEC examiners trying a case against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen, which the magazine obtained at some difficulty through a Freedom of Information Act. In the interview with SEC examiners, Jobs complained that the board was not looking out for him and he had to ask for a generous stock-options package, but maintained that he was largely unaware of the backdating and ignorant of the accounting consequences. (Backdating is not illegal by itself, but requires notice to shareholders and a charge to earnings, neither of which Apple undertook at the time it backdated options.)

Excellent journalistic work on Barrett's part. But here's the question: How did Forbes know precisely which document to ask for? It always helps to have well-connected sources. And it's hard to imagine who would be better placed to know the details of the case than Anderson.