Conde Nast could really use some good news. Instead, today's news is that the company is planning cuts in its media group, which handles its biggest advertisers and marketers. That's even worse than it sounds.

At Conde Nast, the Media Group is the inner sanctum—the people who bring in the vast majority (80%) of the money that keeps the company afloat. Ad Age says that cuts could come this week, although it gives no estimate of how many of the Media Group's 135 employees could go. [Know more? Email us.]

Of course, from a business perspective, this is hardly a surprise. Conde CEO Chuck Townsend told employees in a memo earlier this month that "additional difficult decisions to manage costs" were on the way. They folded Domino in January, and many of the company's biggest titles saw huge ad page declines last year.

One might say that the sun is setting on Conde Nast's fancy culture. One just might.

Fewer magazines and fewer ad pages would naturally mean fewer staffers in the group that handles big advertisers at any normal publishing company. But Conde's not run like a normal, numbers-wise publishing company; it's run as an entrenched bureaucracy. The fact that such a favored department is getting hacked is a dark sign for, oh, editorial staffers, who'll have a much harder time pointing to the bottom line to justify their own existences. Beware, Nasties. [Ad Age]