Page Six Magazine, the glossy spinoff of the gossip column stuffed in your New York Post every weekend, is cutting back to just four issues a year. Because of money, yes.

Leveraging the gossip column franchise into something other than just a gossip column has long been a problem for the Post. The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper first tried to launch Pagesix.com two booms ago, and once again last year before throwing in the towel after just three months.

The weekly incarnation of Page Six Magazine was launched in the fall of 2007. The magazine did actually have some good stories from time to time—Josh Stein's autobiography! The complete Raffaello Follieri!—as well as plenty of crappy celebrity socialite fluff. But you can never have too much of that, really.

All told, it currently employs about a dozen editorial staff. We asked the Post how many (if any) are going to be kept on for the quarterly version, but they didn't respond immediately. But here's the statement with the bad news. Update: 23 people, both edit and business side, lost their jobs today.

STATEMENT FROM THE NEW YORK POST -

"As a result of the difficult economy and continuing advertising decline
across the industry, Page Six Magazine will now be published four times
a year," announced Jennifer Jehn, Senior Vice President. "We're proud
that it's a great magazine and, should the advertising market improve in
the future, we will revisit publishing it more frequently."

The last weekly edition of Page Six Magazine is expected to be in paper
on Sunday, February 15, 2009.