In your should-be-a-vacation-day Monday media column: Sam Donaldson's retiring, the Obama administration's hiring (reporters!), Bloomberg is tiring (financially!), and Conde Nast is still Wired-ing!

Old plaster-haired Sam Donaldson is retiring from ABC next week! He'd been pigeonholed into some dead-end online show recently, and decided it was time to go, after 41 years. Oh Sam, we'll miss your strange, shouty Vulcan ways.


As even the least perceptive monkey would have guessed, financial news services Bloomberg and Reuters are going to take some losses this year, because of the collapse of Wall Street, which is their customer base. Current estimates are that they'll lose $500 million, combined.


On the other hand, Conde Nast (UK) is unreasonably optimistic! "The upmarket magazine group, home to Vanity Fair and GQ, will launch two new titles in the coming months; Love, a painfully trendy biannual fashion title edited by Pop founder Katie Grand, and a UK edition of its technology monthly Wired." Conde's been doing better in the UK than in the US, but still—we're only buying ten Wired subscriptions, guys. Take it easy.


Chicago Tribune Washington correspondent Jill Zuckman is leaving the paper to be a communications person in Obama's Dept. of Transportation. Looking back, you can see two clues that she was in the tank: she's from Chicago, and she's a reporter.