• Why did Budget Living fold? The word "budget" in its name. On, and also too many subscribers, apparently. [Folio:]
• Victor Navasky's secret to indie-mag success: Get Paul Newman to give you money. [FBNY]
• Jon Friedman likes Fortune. That's nice. [MW]
• Hungry in the new Hearst Building? The cafeteria officially opens Monday, but there was a "trial run" today. When does Bruni arrive? [Jossip]
• Us Weekly covers the Rolling Stone 1,000th-issue party, shockingly. [WWD (second item)]

• "Katie Couric's deal to move to CBS News is completed in principle, and an announcement that she is leaving NBC might come as early as this week." Which would be a relief, so we could finally stop hearing speculation about it. [TV Week]
• Budget Living's failure shows that indie mags just don't work anymore. But shhhhh... Ron Burkle might hear. [NYT]
• Jim Cramer says the Times should ditch paper and move entirely online. He's crazy, of course, but in that case also probably right. [NYM]
• The NYT's new web redesign — and the Journal's of a few weeks ago — are about creating more ad inventory and adding news aggregators. [Ad Age]
• Is Hearst looking to replace Glenda Bailey at Bazaar when her contract is up later this year? Well, no, says the company, and her numbers look good, too. [WWD]
• ESPN to start broadcasting dominoes games (matches?). Remarkably, this does not seem to be an April Fools joke. [NYT]
• NYO TV columnist Rebecca Dana has a signed picture of Richard Dawson on her mantelpiece. We're a little jealous, to be honest. [Jossip]

We've long argued that if we were the ad exec running the Judaism account, our big selling point would be death. In the ground as quickly as possible, no open caskets, seven required days of having friends over for jokes and smoked fish — it's death done right. In that vein, then, at this time of frequent magland deaths, we must call attention to a recently deceased pub that has also done death right: Budget Living. Reports one vet, who sent along the above photo:

• It was an emotional week for all of us: Life & Style declared the death of TomKat. As we try to wrap our heads around the implications of such heartbreak, it's important to keep some historical perspective.
• Meanwhile, we were faced with Us Weekly's gut-wrenching claim that Jessica Simpson is a ho, having cheated on Nick Lachey with Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine. Star calls bullshit on the scoop, because it's only true if your magazine breaks it first.
• The evils of pop culture know no limit: Meet the sex tape from Kid Rock and Scott Stapp.
• Budget Living is going, going, and, sadly, gone.
• But, as there's no justice in this world, Shop, Etc. continues to thrive.
• We fall in love with faggy Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, only to have him break our hearts.
• Time Inc. finally ends the bloodshed, but we've yet to get the names of layoff victims.
• The people have spoken: the Funny Pages are not funny, nor have they ever been.
• First JT Leroy; now, possibly, Pete Doherty. Are all our antiheroes just a skeezy mirage?

There were lots of reasons, as blogger Kyle du Ford points out, why Budget Living shouldn't have had to close: The magazine, by his calculations, was grossing $17 million a year, which is enough to keep even Maer Roshan happily publishing for a while. Impressive, yes? Actually no. Budget Living really did shut down yesterday, as both WWD and Keith Kelly report. Severance packages are still be determined, but staffers seem likely, at best, to be paid for another two weeks, till the end of the month. After that, well, one hopes they've been reading their magazine carefully.

We reported an hour or so ago on a rumor that Budget Living was set to shut its discount-loving doors. A flurry of recent email suggests the rumor was right. In the order they arrived:

The last news out of Budget Living magazine — the young "spend smart, live rich" title that won a general-excellence Ellie two years ago — was that founder Don Welsh was looking for a buyer. "Now is the time to sell," Welsh told Keith Kelly for his Dec. 16 Post column. "It needs a giant magazine company to be its home." Welsh said he'd find a buyer within 60 days.

Last night's party celebrating the new issue of Heeb had all the ingredients of a potentially historic Gawker Team Party Crash: Jews, Media, Sex. It's the Holy Trinity of our existence — and so we decided to send Jewish, mediocre, and undersexed Gawker mascot Andrew Krucoff, along with gentile photog Nikola Tamindzic, to the LES shtetl to document this simcha.