World of Warcraft: The Magazine is the official magazine of the dangerously-addictive online role-playing game of the same name. It bills itself as "a deluxe high-quality, collectible quarterly coffee-table publication." And it needs a new EIC. Laid-off media elite: Chug your Monster energy drink, power off your iPhone and tell Mom to save some dinner: Your quest for stable magazine employment has begun.

The job has been posted to Mediabistro (which is down now, likely due to everyone needing a job) and also to San Francisco Craigslist, where WOWTM's offices are based:

Do you know the difference between a Night Elf and a Blood Elf? Do you know your favorite class role and spell rotations? And, more importantly, can you show us superlative examples of your publishing experience in the games/entertainment markets? If so, this is your opportunity to turn your favorite passion into a full-time job! Future US is looking for an Editor-in-Chief for its newest launch, the Official World of Warcraft magazine. This is a new quarterly magazine that covers all aspects of the World's biggest MMO from its content to the players themselves.

Um, favorite class role: Creative underclass?

And check out the perks:

What We Offer:
* A casual, comfortable dress environment with musicians, gamers and journalists roaming the halls
* A culture that encourages a passion for life both inside and outside of the office
* Don't want to drive? No worries - Future US offers a free shuttle from BART/Caltrain to the office

Any unemployed media person can tell you this sounds better than about 99.99 percent of what's out there. And probably more stable too: As the official World of Warcraft mag, WOWTM has a huge potential—and very captive—audience in the game's more than 11 million subscribers.

To get you started, here are some ideas for some WOWTM listicles:

•Top ten reasons you don't want to go on a date, ever
•Seven things on which to blame your current station in life
•The three World of Warcraft expansion packs that will make you forget your unbearable loneliness
•Something about spells and shit
•The eight other magazine jobs you would have right now if it weren't for the economy

Editor-in-Chief Joshua Neuman denies that Heeb is in trouble—see the bottom of this post—but a number of tipsters beg to differ. You be the judge.

Tuesday morning update: Heeb's editorial director Yasha Wallin emails to say Heeb isn't "shutting down" pointing to parties and the web site, which seems to sidestep the question of the magazine. We asked her to clarify the future of the magazine and will update again if she gets back to us. Updated again: "We have the utmost confidence in assuring you that our Spring edition will be out no later than Rosh Hashanah." (For you goys, Rosh Hashanah starts on September 9 next year.)

We just put out our winter issue (The Future Issue) as well as our first Storytelling anthology, Sex, Drugs and Gefilte Fish. We're gearing up for Heebonism, our biggest party of the year, held in cities around the country on Christmas Eve, and we're working on a re-launch of our website for early 2010. So, no, we're definitely not shutting down.

According to one tipster who used to work at Heeb, rumors that the magazine is folding have been so commonplace among young Jews in the know that they're usually greeted with an eye-roll. But this time, "everybody in the Jewish world kind of knows" that Heeb is just about ferklempt. (Or whatever the word for "totally fucked" is in Yiddish.) The main sign, our tipster tells us, is that donors who have traditionally propped Heeb up are pulling out their money and are actively looking for new Jewish non-profits to give it to. Thanks, in part, to the recession. (and not, amazingly, the Roseanne-Barr-as-Hitler photo spread) Says our tipster:

[Heeb] was able to live high on the hog when there was a lot of money coming in, like around 2004 The fact that they were wasting money went kind of unnoticed by the Jewish organizations donating to them. But the recession hit them kind of hard. Now Lots of funders are asking very specifically for people to spell out where their money is going.

Heeb has indeed been wasting a lot of money if it is run as incompetently as our tipster suggests: For example, the magazine—supposedly quarterly—would regularly miss printing deadlines for no other reason than they couldn't get the issue out to the printer in time.

This one issue came out in September and the advertising guys sold a bunch of ads for Rosh Hashanah services at different places. But they missed the deadline so the issue didn't come out until after the holidays and they had to give all the advertisers their money back.

(Other tipsters have also mentioned how Heeb's irregular printing schedule has come to resemble last spasms of the near-dead.)

And it doesn't help that the Heeb offices are run extremely haphazardly by editor-in-chief Joshua Neuman, according to our tipster. "He ran off almost every good editor and writer who worked there. They were frustrated with him because he would pay some people for stories and not others based on whether he liked them."

A freelance photographer backed up this claim and offered further proof that the end of Heeb is near. After receiving a potential assignment via email from photo editor Mike Garten in August, she asked if there was a budget: Silence.

This was the second fake assignment (fake because it is presumably unpaid labor, including gas—they wanted me to drive to baltimore!?), so I presumed when I read this it was on its last legs.

The Heeb Magazine death watch starts now.

UPDATE The JTA's Fundermentalist blog has a statement from editor-in-chief Josh Neuman:

"I think they maybe they're reading a little too much into the cover of our Winter Issue. Like Tupac faking his own death or something. Whatever. The traffic will help us sell menorahs for Modern Tribe," he told The Fundermentalist late Monday night.

He added: "We've actually got some pretty giant initiatives in the near horizon. A new website on its way, our largest partnership, more and more video...Dude, we just started printing an Australian edition!!!!"

First quarter revenue for the title is off 60 percent, the Post's Keith Kelly writes, worse even than Wired (57 percent) and well above the group's overall decline of 30 percent. Condé "should have cut back 20 percent when they cut back five," a rival executive tells Kelly.

But they didn't — who's that we hear darkly chuckling at Gawker HQ? — so now there is talk of layoffs.

Portfolio has thus far escaped the fate of less costly magazines like Domino, Men's Vogue and DNR. Launch editor Joanne Lipman remains in place, despite bizarre coverage decisions and reports of diva-like spending habits. But like the companies her magazine covers, she will not be able to ignore economic reality forever. And a sixty percent sales decline is quite an iceberg to maneuver around.

Ad Age

• Selling advertising for display "at the gas pumps... at the malls." You can tell your friends you work in "out of home advertising" if you prefer, although then they'll probably assume you sell those ads above urinals in bars.
• Pharmaceutical advertising, aka "direct-to-consumer advertising." If you're lucky, this means helping with print or TV ads. If you're not, you may well be spamming ads for "V1agra," or designing/selling Web ads that are barely a step above.
  
• "Contract and consulting opportunities," miscellaneous.

Is any of that really worse than, say, fact-checking a back-of-the-book listice on must-have gadgets for Christmas? You may well find out!

(Image via BBC)

Some magazines struggle to keep up with the shifting expectations for print journal's but Harper's has done a decent job keeping their magazine interesting. Whereas other publications fear dipping their toes into darker waters, the Readings section's dark investigations into torture and greed always did remind us of the best possible blog.

Here the magazine reprints conversations between undercover officer Ed Newcomer of the Fish and Wildlife Service and people who keep "roller" pigeons. Such folks aim to protect their pigeon collection by eliminating natural predators like hawks and peregrine falcons, sometimes in sadistic fashion. In the following excerpt, Newcomer incriminates pigeon keeper Rayvon Hall by asking him how he kills the hawks.

Ed Newcomer: What do you use, pellet guns?
Rayvon Hall: Yeah.
Newcomer: You know what? The last one I caught with my pellet gun, I heard neighbors trying to look over the fence, so I just chucked the gun as quick as I could and walked away. But you were telling me there's another way to kill them.
Hall: The ones I killed, I just put some bleach and ammonia in a spray bottle, shook it up, sprayed 'me in the eyes and mouth. They went into convulsions.
Newcomer: How long did it take? Did they make a lot of noise? Flap around or anything? They didn't do that screaming they do when you shoot 'em? Because that's the other thing. I think my neighbor heard that too.
Hall: Yeah, somebody else told me that if you mix the bleach with the ammonia, it makes a gas. The fumes damn near knocked me out. I was spraying it, and I had it on that wide spray. That's some strong shit. You be hearing that bottle fizzing. I just started spraying his ass through the wire cage. He started blinking his eyes, and his mouth kept opening, and he was flapping — he was suffocating, you know. I did two or three like that.

Would this be the same if you read it on a blog? I guess we're finding that out now. Don't leave us, print!