The Conde Nast cuts are apparently ongoing. After a massacre at Brides yesterday, a tipster today tells us there are "Mass layoffs at Conde Nast in Chicago today (lots of advertising people). Chaos." If you have more details, email us.


Kiki Paris, a former employee of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is suing the company for "forcing her to return to work too soon after a debilitating injury and then firing her soon after." Due to our irrational and sensationalistic one-sided "feud" with Martha Stewart, this doesn't surprise us one bit.


Renee Ferguson, a black TV journalist, discusses how her television employers told her to stop wearing an afro, because it would intimidate white viewers. Yet Lou Dobbs' hair draws no complaints? Astounding.


What is Choire Sicha exercised about today? The FTC's new rules about bloggers being forced to disclose their freebies! It's a pointless and arbitrary rule, he says in an NYT op-ed, and furthermore "Stealth marketing, direct advertisement and product placement work only on the clueless, and our immersive, hippo-like wallowing in the marketplace serves only to make us resistant to these viral contagions." Always with the hippos.

Hunter at Fishbowl NY did some *actual reporting* on this story, and he seems to confirm the basics:

• Kiki Paris was the magazine's director of national accounts, responsible for bringing in major advertisers, and was widely credited as a star on the staff, with glowing performance reviews.
• She got hit by a car and broke her spine. She had surgery and "placed in a halo neckbrace for 12 weeks." The company started urging her to work from home. She did, after seven weeks, against her doctor's advice.
• Then company HR people came to her home and stone cold fired her! "Paris says when she asked why she was being laid off Bruce told her 'I can only say it's corporate restructuring.'"
• Now she is suing their asses.

Not only did she open her show with a discussion of this scandalous, gossipy office design blog post; she also linked to it on her own blog, and struck back:

I just want to say that this Gawker.com article is a misrepresentation of what actually was discussed within our offices. The list of pens is an assortment of what our company will provide our employees with at our expense. We never stated that other pens were not allowed to be used. In these tough economic times, harmony is essential within the working environment. I must also inform you that we use a great assortment of writing implements from the Martha Stewart crafts line available at Michael's Crafts and Walmart.

We would never doubt that you buy all your supplies at Wal-Mart, Martha! Does this mean we can say we're "Locked in a feud" with Martha Stewart now? Let's hope so! Thank you for the traffic, Martha, but really a few MC Escher posters on the walls would clear this right up. [Previously]

Kevin Sharkey and Martha have decided that their new design scheme will be marred by any of the following: ink colors other than red or black, desks that are not completely clear at the end of the day, except for one metal basket of approved office supplies, and anything that could be construed as being personal, such as photos or coffee mugs (I guess drinking fluids slows down the proletariat). Perhaps they are figuring the last part makes it that much easier to lay people off quickly, because they won't have to waste everyone's time by clearing out their desks.

Well you know Kevin Sharkey himself believes that "a truly beautiful room is one that hasn't been 'decorated' at all, but rather 'considered.'" So this would seem to fit. Consider this, employees: spill one drop of Diet Coke in here and you're fucking toast.

The company's stock price since 2004:

So yes, Lyne oversaw a decline of more than 75% from the stock's February, 2005 high point. Was that due to her incompetence? Keep in mind that that high point came in anticipation of the company's resurgence when Stewart got out of jail. And Wall Street didn't seem to react ecstatically to Lyne's departure; the stock fell another 3% in the wake of the news this morning.

Magazines are on a longer, slower decline than the newspaper industry is, but an inevitable decline all the same. Public publishing companies with a big stake in magazines are going to see their revenues decline, their stock prices fall, and their investors get angry. They can fire people left and right, doing their best to momentarily assign blame for what is, in reality, a tectonic shift in the media marketplace. But they won't start seeing a real turnaround until the Internet has been fully monetized by old-guard media interests. And that day is a long way off.

Maybe Lyne's successors with do a better job; maybe they won't. Either way, magazine company stocks are a dangerous bet—for investors and CEOs alike.

UPDATE: From an interview conducted two weeks ago with Susan Lyne: "Q: Assuming you finally get some time off, what would be your dream vacation? A: My dream would be going somewhere I've never been that's reasonably exotic." Now she can! Also: Slate's Daniel Gross used Lyne's career path from journalism to the executive suite as the prime example of why journalists shouldn't become CEOs. Back in 2004. The more you know!