Ecko, the hip hop clothing line that morphed over a decade from underground to JC Penney chic, is in danger of going bankrupt. Maybe that 280,000 square-foot fantasyland office was a bit much?

The Tribune Co. has found a hero to rescue it from impending oblivion: Dick Tracy! They just have to break him out of Warren Beatty's basement.

Is the New York Times going under? Company officials have scoffed at the suggestion. The moneymen who just gave it a much-needed cash infusion are betting on it.

Business blowhard Donald Trump has created an indelible meaning for his world-famous brand: failed real-estate ventures. The latest event to cement the Trump reputation: a failed condo project in Mexico which cost buyers $32 million.

Brian Tierney, the boss of the recently bankrupt Philadelphia newspapers, vowed last week he would "never close" the Philly Daily News. But he never said he wouldn't desperately rebrand it to save a nickel!

Brian Tierney was a bulldog Philadelphia PR man much hated by Philadelphia journalists before he led a group that bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News in 2006. Let's review how that's worked out:

In your chesty Monday media column: the Oxford American lives, the Journal Register goes broke, Geraldo is trespassing, and Madoff pics are hottttt:

It's not all bad news this morning. As expected, Donald Trump's casino company filed for bankruptcy protection for a third time today. Whether it forces Trump to turn the volume down on his bluster remains to be seen, of course, but it should make the next season of The Apprentice, which premieres in two weeks, delightfully ironic. [Reuters]

• Viacom reported a 69 percent drop in its fourth-quarter profit today. [NYT]
• Vibe is cutting back to 10 issues a year and merging its print and digital operations. It's also slashing pay and adopting a four-day workweek. [AdAge]
• Sirius XM is looking to sell the company to Liberty Media in order to fend off a takeover by satellite entrepreneur Charles Ergen. [WSJ, NYT]
• Paul Allen's Charter Communications may file Chapter 11 by April. [THR]
• Scene from Domino's death party last night. [Gawker]
• Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds will hit theaters this August. [RB]

Do you listen to satellite radio? Do you find Howard Stern's antics amusing? Do you have some spare change buried in your couch? Get to work. Unless Sirius XM finds a buyer in the next few days, the company will probably file for bankruptcy protection "within days." [NYT]

This cruel Grim Reaper of an economy has gone too far. It came for magazines. It came for books. It came for banks. But now, it has come for our Muzak.

National Enquirer and Star publisher American Media has, for all practical purposes, gone bust. Although they left enough wiggle room to declare a successful non-bankruptcy!

Hope Donald Trump is huddling with his accountants today and not filming his 7,236th appearance for Fox News or Larry King Live. His casino company has two weeks to sort out its debt issues before it faces a third trip to bankruptcy court. [AP]

• How do you keep your magazine afloat? Put ads on the cover! [NYT]
• NBC is renewing 30 Rock, The Office, and The Biggest Loser. [AP]
• Music sales fell by about 7 percent last year. [NYT]
• The head of Hearst Magazines International is retiring. [NYP]
• Clear Channel is cutting $400 million in costs. [NYP]
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. [AP]
• Donny Deutsch's ad agency is laying off staffers. [AgencySpy]

• Citigroup announced yesterday that it would sell a majority stake in Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley, but more change is on the way: The bank is expected to dump two consumer finance units as well as its "private-label" credit card business, which means now your Save the Whales Mastercard is in jeopardy, too. [WSJ, NYT]
• Deutsche Bank reported a loss of $6.3 billion in the fourth quarter. [BN]
• HSBC may need $30 billion to stay afloat. [DB]
• Nortel Networks has filed for bankruptcy protection. [BN]
• Just in case it wasn't eminently clear by all the bad news above, today is expected to be a pretty bad day in the markets. [WSJ]
• Marcus Schrenker was caught last night, but there's a new financial exec to add to the fugitive list: Ex-UBS exec Raoul Weil is now a wanted man. [NYT]
• Bernie Madoff will be in court in person later today when a judge considers an appear from prosecutors who want to imprison Madoff pending trial. [BN]
• Robert Jaffe, the Madoff middleman who failed to show up to meet with regulators yesterday, says he missed the meeting because he's sick. [WSJ]
• More on Tim Geithner's little tax problem. [NYT]

A couple of weeks ago, teen fashion designer (and Russian heiress) Kira Plastinina announced plans to close "most" of her US-based locations, including the hot-pink branch here in NYC. Today we learn it really is the end of the line: After burning through $80 million of the dairy mogul's cash, the company filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. But we're pretty sure it's the first time that Bloomberg News has reported on a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing with a quote from a MySpace page. [Bloomberg]

Should the New York Times Co. sell its stake in the Boston Red Sox? Some people say yes. But this clever Monopoly metaphor says NO:

Poor John Rogers. The former CEO of Pay By Touch can't pin the fall of his online-payments startup, which raised $340 million and employed 750 people before going bankrupt. This self-aggrandizing outlaw has no one but himself to blame.

Let us not, at this crucial moment, forget how much shit the Tribune Co. is in. Executives at the Tribune Co. are quite literally wading to work today through rivers of bad news—deep, deep rivers. Yesterday they freaking went bankrupt. Today they find themselves smack dab in the middle of Gov. ROD BLAGOJEVICH's outrageous corruption scandal—because gnomish asshole Tribune CEO Sam Zell allegedly agreed in principle to fire a troublesome editorial page editor in exchange for $100 million in state money. Obvious question: Did Blago's corrupt scheme help drive Tribune into bankruptcy? We examine THE FACTS for you below!

The employees of Tribune Co. have plenty of reasons to be infuriated today—they're the ones who own the company through their Employee Stock Ownership Plan, not Sam Zell, who put just $315 million of his own money into last year's $8 billion deal that gave him control of the company. But the bankruptcy filing contains one detail that stands out as the unkindest cut of all: Tribune still owes $11.2 million to the former CEO of Times-Mirror (which Tribune bought in 2000) Mark Willes—a man most famous for massive layoffs and an ethical scandal of historic proportions: