• Condé Nast is now swinging into damage control mode: It's retained Michael Sheehan, a "crisis manager and media coach" who's faced some steep PR challenges in the past having worked with President Clinton and AIG. [NYP]
• So is Oprah moving to cable? The discussions continue, reportedly. [AdAge]
• Kyle Pope doesn't seem to have been Jared Kushner's first choice to serve as editor-in-chief of the New York Observer. Times star business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin turned Kushner down twice over the past year. [NYM]
• More than 100 people were laid off at Lifetime and A&E today. [Variety]
• Philip Gourevitch is stepping down as editor of The Paris Review. [NYO]
• Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes discusses the future of the media biz. [TDB]
• MTV did not rebuild the Berlin Wall for U2, in case you were worried. [UPI]

Congrats to LILBauHaus for correctly guessing today's Freeze Frame. Is that red stop light driving you crazy? Find out where it's from after the jump.

Taylor Jacobson's reign of terror ends. She leaves Rachel Zoe to style on her own.

Click to view Our beloved bottle blonds returned to us last night with skydiving, poverty, and plenty of bitch fighting. There is only one thing that can contain all the emotions we are still feeling: poetry!

PR Week, a trade journal for and about flacks, has come to the defense of the New York Times after we published a batch of emails showing how deferential some Times reporters were to flacks. Imagine that!

This should surprise no one but Obama's campaign organization, which has swallowed the DNC, failed to do any organizing for the Maine gay marriage vote, though it did email Maine volunteers asking them to make calls for Jon Corzine.

Former supermodel Stephanie Seymour and newsprint mogul Peter Brant are in the middle of a very messy divorce at the moment. Neither side has spoken out about their imploded marriage, since Seymour and Brant signed an agreement barring them from discussing the feud publicly. But presumably Brant and Seymour's lawyers didn't address the subject of sexy photos, which explains why the December issue of Vanity Fair features a collection of half-nude photos of the 41-year-old ex-model by Mario Testino. (Brant will get a spread of his own in the January issue, we imagine.)

The Yankees win 27 championships and all of the sudden these hot shots are too important to answer questions about how amazing they are. Derek Jeter, what a jerk.

If you're a Citigroup shareholder and you've watched your investment in the bank tumble into the abyss over the past year, take heart. John Reed, the man partly responsible for creating the dysfunctional financial supermarket that Citigroup turned into by merging Citicorp with Sandy Weill's Travelers Group in 1998, is really, really sorry. "We learn from our mistakes," says Reed. Feel better now? [Bloomberg]

That 16-year-old TechCrunch writer with 120,000 Twitter followers, who we wrote about yesterday, is part of a burgeoning child punditocracy. Children are operating in virtually every facet media — and doing so successfully. Fear for your job.

Observer owner Jared Kushner tried twice to recruit New York Times wunderkind Andrew Ross Sorkin to take over the newspaper, according to New York.

Apple has set a date for the opening of its new outlet on the Upper West Side. The doors of the massive, three-floor store will open to the public a week from tomorrow at 10am sharp. "Until then, forget about sneaking a peek behind the capacious crimson curtain hiding its innards. The Mac-istas have the front door here seriously secured." [Racked]

Today in the Gawker Book Club: starting now or so, Douglas Rogers is joining us to discuss The Last Resort, his new memoir about Zimbabwe. Asking him questions in comments is novelist, playright and screenwriter Damian Lanigan.

Thank goodness for over-eager parents. They're ready at any moment to capture hilarity on tape and spread it all over the internet for folks like us to see.

Project Runway is all about vision and delusion. The vision to be inspired by art. The delusion that art begets art. The vision that tears will save you. The delusion that the judges care about your emotions.

Did you hear that a handful of large Wall Street banks have been getting the swine flu vaccine to give to their "high-risk" employees, even though area hospitals have yet to receive it or are now running low on their supplies? A little public pressure seems to be paying off. Morgan Stanley says it will return its 1,000 doses to the city health department since some hospitals are still without the vaccine. But not every firm is following suit. Goldman Sachs is still "more important than you are," reports the Wall Street Journal. But you'd probably figured that out already. [WSJ]

Finally, we understand why Mika Brzezinski constantly looks crazed and upset: because Joe Scarborough gets his kicks from constantly humiliating and belittling his co-host.

The guys from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia have a new product: The Dick Towel. It's purpose? To be awesome and hilarious.

World Series MVP Hideki Matsui celebrated the Yankees win at today's tickertape parade. And while we have no idea if plans to keep the party going this evening, he probably should know that no less than 100 lovely ladies are going to be waiting for him on West 33rd Street tonight, including "Suki" (right) who happens to be fluent in Japanese. Oh, and Hideki's wife is invited, too, naturally.

With possibly 8 people shot and 2 dead (authorities confirm 1 dead and 5 shot), police have locked down downtown Orlando, Florida, looking for Jason Rodriguez, who shot up an office building earlier today. Update: Rodriguez has been apprehended.