Owner Radio One announced Giant is folding in print, although it will continue in some form online. No word on layoffs yet. They paid a mere $270K for Giant in 2007, so the financial loss is not as terrible as it could have been, in a cold, corporate sense.

The lesson is: Rumors are always true.

Not really! But usually they are.

He means in a business sense, obviously. Page Six report that Fox has been talking with Cerberus Management, the private equity firm that owns most of the magazine, since August, but they keep stalling. Fox feels very strongly about Maxim apparently, and this upsets him.

My vision is to make Maxim the must-have again, using event production, Web site development, e-commerce and digital marketing and online programming. I am trying to take a strong brand and give it legs for the future. I would take the magazine and all its digital properties and make it into a $300 million business again.

Revolutionary. He would not comment on whether he plans to kill the print version and go fully online. Which means he probably plans to kill the print version and go fully online. If Cerberus' new interim CEO Paul Miller does not meet him, says Fox, he predicts the magazine will be dead by March.

As you can imagine it most resembled a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations. There was sophisticated analysis, witty repartee and displays of incisive intelligence. Issues such as domestic oil production, the environment and macro-economics were dissected with the kind of verve and... oh fuck it, too much sarcasm. Just watch:

The Wall Street Journal reports that in-flight magazines are still profitable. A British company, Ink Publishing, now runs 40 airline mags in 17 countries, made $4m last year doing it and are on target to make a similar amount this year while everyone else tanks. The reasons are pretty straightforward:

You have very few places with such a captive audience," says Tony Cervone, chief communications officer at United Airlines. Even with seat-back entertainment and wireless Internet service becoming standard, he says, passengers must unplug during take-off and landing.

Advertisers like that and pay lots of money because they feel strongly that if people see Keira Knightley or Mikhail Gorbachev wielding their products in a nice magazine picture we'll all go and buy stuff.

POLITICO EXPOZAY: Our archnemesis Martha Stewart('s magazine, Martha Stewart Living, along with several other home decorating magazines) is involved in a scheme to "decorate" various rooms in the US State Department building. In bed with the warmongers, eh Martha? Why don't you just go over to Afghanistan and start kicking over mud huts one by one, yourself? Eh? We dare you to respond. Dare you!


Hey, that breakthrough new "iTunes for magazines" online magazine store thing that the world has been waiting for is close to happening, and Conde Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc. will all put their magazines in there, so you can buy them, on the internet. I am "going rogue" and saying that not too many people outside the magazine industry will care about this, at all.


Keith Kelly has this short week's layoff tallies, so far: 25 at Time Inc., some of whom we mentioned yesterday, and the prospect of up to 100 layoffs coming to Playboy following their deal to outsource non-editorial duties to AMI. Also, nearly 80 edit layoffs at the Toronto Star. This holiday season is shaping up to be just as merry as last year's, for the media!


The Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are reportedly considering joining the Search Engine Media Wars and pulling their content off of Google. This would have an even more minimal impact than if News Corp. does it, so no biggie.

The mag's closure will come with about nine layoffs. Its final issue hits newsstands on Dec. 25, and will be there through March. InStyle will continue to publish other similar types of spinoffs (i.e. InStyle Hair), but no mas for the weddings.

Conde Nast folded Elegant Bride and Modern Bride last month, and its flagship Brides is having problems of its own.

Condolences to the layoff victims.

In addition to (some of) Playboy, AMI has the National Enquirer, Star, and zombie RadarOnline. And then a bunch of muscle magazines! Perfectly capturing America's true, vapid obsessions with unattainable celebrity, unattainable sex, and unattainable bodies, all under one roof. As for Playboy, they say that the money they'll save with this deal will let them bring a touch of class back to the ol' cover page:

Though Mr. Jellinek said buzz-generating covers need not be costly, citing a recent cover with "Simpsons" cartoon star Marge, Mr. Flanders said freeing up cash for celebrity pictorials is a chief aim of the deal. Actress Tara Reid will pose nude for the first time in the combined January/February issue.

A bargain at any price.

And whereas Laura Ling's book proposal sounds like, excuse us, some craptastic "Sisters are so wonderful" Barnes & Noble checkout line gift special pegged to the fact that her sister works for Oprah, Euna Lee's book will actually focus on her insane (but heartwarming) North Korean imprisonment. Which was big news, you may recall!

Keith Kelly says Lee got "a six-figure deal to write her memoir of the imprisonment, tentatively entitled, 'The World Is Bigger Now: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Freedom,'" while the Lings are still "shopping" theirs. Burn notice! The lesson here is, if you ever find yourself caught up in a dramatic case of international crime/ kidnapping, write your book about that rather than trying to use it as a peg for your thoughts on The Meaning of Love, because you are not as interesting as your circumstances, no matter what Oprah says.
[Pic: Getty]

But that is probably not all of it, as that financial disclosure only covers the period before she suddenly resigned as governor of the Alaska.

Still: a lot of money!

What is weirder, though, in her financial disclosure: last April Sarah Palin created a company called "Pie Spy." No one knows what this company does. Just that it is called "Pie Spy," and it is a "marketing" company. And:

It is listed with a North American Industry Classification System code corresponding to companies that provide services to the elderly or to people with disabilities.

But no one will say anything about this "Pie Spy" company that markets secret pies to crippled old people! What does it mean?

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]

In John Koblin's weekly Conde Nast feature, company execs reveal a curious mindset (assuming it's not just spin): McKinsey's job was not to reshape the monolithic company with an eye towards a radically different digital-centric future; instead, its only assignment was to tidy up the balance sheet for 2010. After which, Conde presumes, everything will get back to normal.

"We have what we believe is a short-term problem with advertising revenue," [Conde Nast editorial director Tom Wallace said]. "That problem seems to be improving. How long will there be print magazines? I don't know. But for as long as there will be, Condé Nast is well positioned."

Really! And what if they turn out to be well positioned only if time begins running backwards?

"The advertising revenue until proven otherwise is cyclical," said Mr. Wallace. "And if it is proven otherwise, we've already adjusted for it."

So: The world's most famous magazine company is betting that the current print magazine ad downturn is cyclical, meaning temporary. And if it's not cyclical—meaning (as is likely!) it stays this bad, well, the cuts they've already made mean they'll be just fine.

And what if magazine advertising continues getting worse? Then they're fucked. Good luck, Nasties.
[Pic: Rafael Chamorro]

HOLY GRAIL ALERT: Computer nerds at Northwestern University have created a computer program that, all you do is plug in the stats from a baseball game and it will write an entire news story about that baseball game, and the news story is not even bad. The computer program's name: Jay Mariotti.


A tipster tells us that in addition to the previously reported layoffs at Vanity Fair last Friday, W Magazine also laid off 8-10 employees that day. ALSO: Another tipster tells us there were at least four layoffs at Lucky today, including a few editors.
If you know more about the endless magazine layoffs, email us.


Who says the media business is grim? A TV station in Saginaw, Michigan "is generating revenue by running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region's four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week." This works especially well in Saginaw, Michigan, where everyone would rather be dead.


HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman has figured out how to save the book publishing industry: Hire cheap, out-of-work editors to repackage old classics into E-books. Uh, hooray?

The NYT reports that ASME is "adding 12 new categories [to the Magazine Awards] covering online media." But! Rather than present these awards at the already-interminable fancy magazine awards ceremony in May, they "will be handed out at a lunch during a March online magazine conference." At lunch!

In fact, that real magazine awards used to be a modest affair like that, before they started taking that "The Oscars of the Magazine Industry" thing too seriously and inviting random wack people like Jimmy Fallon to present awards (suck it, Jimmy Fallon). Now, the Ellies get to siphon the nerdy, unglamorous online media reporters such as ourselves off into a preliminary affair, saving the real awards ceremony for the Beautiful People. It's genius, really. But what do these categories even mean?

"The Huffington Post, if it defines itself as a magazine, we would accept the entry. If it defines itself as a newspaper, then of course it should enter the Pulitzers," he said.

Haha! But what if it defines itself as the most specialest Magazinemediainternet Thingamajig in the whole wide world? Will there be a special category for that? And what are we supposed to enter? I assume there will be several categories dedicated to fameball coverage? And make sure there's something for Julia Allison!

We're not really winning any awards. But we are going and eating a free lunch, so SCORE. The internet continues to suck the magazine industry dry, one way or another.

Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles was a quickie satire of the GOP vice presidential candidate released in October. It was cheekily credited to the "the Editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette," but Grove's sources say one of the co-authors is Adam Bellow, the son of Saul and a reported editor of Sarah Palin's memoir at HarperCollins.

Terminatrix doesn't sound very funny, but apparently it treats Palin as "every blue-blooded Manhattanite's flyover nightmare":

[One] doctored photo-with the caption "Sarah Palin won the Miss Wasilla Pageant in 1984, while in college"-has her head grafted onto a dog's body, with a blue ribbon hanging from her neck. In yet another, she's wearing a white butcher's coat and standing in front of animal carcasses hanging from hooks in a meat locker. "This is our walk-in fridge at home. It isn't easy killing enough game to feed a family of seven. Half of these critters are protected species!"

We were prepared to write something along the lines of—well, gosh, if Bellow doesn't like Palin, then what possible motive could he have to participate in her book, which is currently ranked No. 3 on Amazon based on pre-orders alone? Could it be that publishing is really all about the money? Then we saw this piece Bellow wrote for New York back in 2005, explaining that he is a Bush-loving neocon who published The Bell Curve and The Real Anita Hill. So no, Adam Bellow doesn't secretly hate Sarah Palin. He loves her! He was just willing to co-author a book mocking her as an idiot last year because that seemed like a pretty good way to make some money, which is what the publishing business is, indeed, all about.

You may recall that last month Yale University Press refused to publish images of the controversial cartoons *in a book about the cartoon controversy*. Because they were scared of offending the type of religious fanatic that would find this book, hop a plane to New Haven, and burn down the Yale University Press headquarters. Even repeating that story is giving us palpitations of rage.

Anyhow, now the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, is coming to make appearances at Yale and Princeton in the name of Free Speech. Good for him! You know what else? The cartoon did kind of suck! Were you offended by it? Go tell him that, at his appearance! Go tell him his cartoon sucked and was not funny and that you were offended by it! Call him an asshole if you must! Just don't kill anyone. That's what free speech is all about.

Fuck you, Yale University Press. See?

Byron Pitts, who could soon become only the second full-time black correspondent on 60 Minutes, reveals that he was "functionally illiterate" until he was 12, and that as a kid he "was labeled 'slow' or even 'stupid'" because he had trouble reading. But whereas most TV news personalities are required to be functionally illiterate and stupid well into adulthood, Byron managed to get hired anyhow. Congrats to him on his unusual success in the TV world as a literate human.


Listen to this comically macho statement from an editor at the dying San Francisco Chronicle, of all places, to her staff: "You are going to smash whomever is naive enough to poke their noses in our market. Bring it on!" The reality is that San Francisco Chronicle editors are now paid in kidney beans.


Johnson Publishing is not confirming or denying a report that Ebony magazine is for sale, which means that yes, it is for sale. The question is, who will buy it? A white-person-controlled media conglomerate? Because that's the only option.


The Daily Beast is launching its very own book publishing imprint. It will be fast, mainly! "At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition." It's a slow blog.

Of course the creative underclass loves to hate on the creative overclass—embodied by Conde Nast—in public. But in private, everyone wants to get to Conde Nast. Or at least a Conde Nast expense account. Well, give up the dream, kids. The old folks got all that money already, and with 25% cuts coming down the pike, there's none left for you. Matthew Flamm says "The cuts could begin to take effect as early as mid- to late October and will continue into next year." Meaning if you haven't tasted the Conde bounty yet, you probably never will. At least not the way it should be. At least they're going out on an appropriately profligate note, sez the NYT:

For example, on Oct. 13, the men's magazine GQ will host a party in Washington to promote its list of powerful capital players, to appear in its November issue. The party is upscale: it will be held at the 701 Restaurant, known for its caviar and live piano music.

That is not the only expense involved. Several editorial employees will travel from New York for the evening. And they received an e-mail message recently reminding them to limit their expenses for the night - to $1,000 a person.

Once that would have been sad for an entirely different reason. Now it's sad like how revolutionaries probably get a tiny bit sad when they rush into a dictator's big golden palace built on the blood of the people and tear it down, because hey, even they have to admit that it was a nice palace.

Coming over the next year, it's safe to assume: Lower kill fees, no free lunches, fewer freelancers, cheaper consultants, fewer towncars for the mastheads, more ads sold below rate card, layoffs, and a drastic reduction in that good old fashioned Conde Nast luxurious wastefulness.
And they won't be hiring you. Or us.

[Except maybe at the unscathed New Yorker? No, they won't either. Pic: Getty.]

With all those rumors, you knew it had to be accurate. More or less. John Koblin talks to insiders who have seen McKinsey's proposals, and comes up with the following summary. Which is bad, but not as bad as it could be for the Nasties:

• Budget reductions of around 25% at Details, Traveler, Glamour, Gourmet, and Teen Vogue.
• Unknown budget cuts at the rest of the Conde mags—except the New Yorker, which is escaping unscathed, according to the NYO.
• The various mag editors get to determine how to achieve their budget cuts.
• No immediate magazine closures are predicted, but some of the weaker titles may reduce their frequency.
• Layoffs are coming.

Keith Kelly reports today that Teen Vogue, Allure, and Details—three of the company's shakiest titles—will not be killed. At least not right away!

A report from management consultants McKinsey & Co., now in the preparation stage, is expected to provide a blueprint for keeping all the magazine brands intact, although there will be some major ratcheting down of expenses, as has been widely reported.

Still. If those three mags and both Gourmet and Bon Appetit are all around a year from now, I will eat my shoe (which is made of pizza).

We'll try not to use too much insider publishing industry "lingo" as we break this down for you: Dan Brown is with Random House, and he sells more books than Jesus, and he was taking forever with his new book so Random House was totally sweating, particularly with this recession and all, but finally his book dropped this week and sold a million freaking copies in the first day, so now Random House has cake and champagne. Although look at this celebration pic at Galleycat, what did they do, just press an audiobook directly into the top of the cake? Bootleg.

Every book publisher should get Dan Brown!
[Pic: Getty]