• Charlie Gibson signed off as anchor of World News for the last time tonight. He's bidding goodbye to ABC News after a 34-year run. [ABC News, AP]
• More advertisers are fleeing from Tiger Woods; Tag Heuer is the latest. [NYP]
• The New York Times says its newsroom layoffs are done with. [Gawker, NYO]
• Twitter was hacked by last night; it's still unclear who was behind it. [LAT]
• Google is reportedly in talks to buy Yelp for as much as $500 million. [NYT]
• How much will Avatar rake in this weekend? That's the big question. [NYM]
• Time Warner Cable and Fox are embroiled in a big feud right now. [NYDN]
• Want to watch 3D movies in your living room? That's coming next. [WSJ]
• Is Dr. Drew Pinsky a real doctor, or does he just play one on TV? [TDB]

• Nic Cage has been having some money troubles as of late and he recently sued his business manager for allegedly mishandling his finances. Now the manager is striking back. He's filed a countersuit against Cage and claims the actor is an out-of-control spender who, in just the last few years, has picked 15 different homes around the world, 22 cars (including 9 Rolls-Royces), four yachts, a jet, and a Caribbean island. Oh, and Cage also blew a fortune by constantly hosting "Gatsby-style parties at his residences." [WSJ]
• Paris Hilton's plan to remake her image and position herself as more "mature" isn't off to a very good start. The cops had to be called to her house in LA last night after she and boyfriend Doug Reinhardt had a nasty fight. [TMZ]
• Wannabe reality TV star Tinsley Mortimer and "wannabe socialite" Devorah Rose got into "a fight" the other night. Fortunately, two cameras were rolling the entire time, so you'll get to see it yourself in about 6 months. [P6]
• The co-owner of Table 8 at the Cooper Square Hotel is under suspicion for secretly giving his girlfriend a drug to force her to have an abortion and may soon be charged with killing the couple's unborn child. Grim. [NYDN]
• Charlie Gibson claims he has "tremendous respect" for his ABC colleague Diane Sawyer, but he supposedly "badmouths her openly and often" behind the scenes. An ABC spokeswoman called the claims "bullsh*t," while a less excitable Gibson said it was all "just silly." [P6]

• Confirming the rumors from a few weeks back, Fox Business says it will begin simulcasting Don Imus' radio show beginning next month. [LAT]
• The total number of advertisers that have decided to yank their ads from Glenn Beck's Fox News show, according to ColorofChange: 57. [NYDN]
• More on the transition at ABC News: Charles Gibson's decision to retire took ABC execs by surprise; an effort to get him to change his mind didn't work; and it's still unclear who will replace Diane Sawyer at GMA. [NYT]
• Is YouTube going to be the new Netflix? The site is reportedly in talks with Hollywood studios about renting new release movies online. [WSJ]
• Two new women have been added to the cast of SNL. [AP]
• Erin Andrews returns to ESPN tonight for the first time since that whole hote room videotaping incident went down a few weeks back. [NYDN]
• OK!'s circulation is dropping. Naturally, things will get much better just as soon as Kim Kardashian takes up her new post at the magazine. [AdAge]

Charles Gibson unexpectedly retired yesterday as the anchor of ABC's World News Tonight and then someone started talking trash about him at a party last night, leading to a "commotion" between Gibson defenders and detractors? Let's hope it wasn't Chris Cuomo who needed the ice! [Twitter]

• Charlie Gibson is retiring as anchor of ABC's World News Tonight at the end of the year; he'll be replaced by Diane Sawyer, who is stepping down as anchor of Good Morning America to take the job. And now Brian Williams will soon be the only man anchoring a nightly network newscast. [NYP]
• The 66th installment of the Venice Film Festival kicked off today. [THR]
• Thanks to the success of Royal Pains and Burn Notice, USA has scored the highest summer ratings in the history of cable television. [B&C]
• Current TV's Laura Ling and Euna Lee have broken their silence and are now describing some of what happened when they were captured in North Korea. Not all it, though. You'll have to buy their book to read the rest. [LAT]
• Is Jared Kushner looking to unload the Observer? That's the rumor. [Gawker]

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox News host and wife of furniture heir Eric Villency, turns 40 today. ABC News anchor Charles Gibson is 66. Former congressman Vito Fossella is turning 44. Actress Brittany Snow is turning 23. Linda Fiorentino is 51. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue is 46. Neal Shapiro, the former president of NBC News and current president of WNET, is turning 51. Former HBO chief Michael J. Fuchs is 63. Artist Eric Fischl is 61. Bow Wow is turning 22. Chingy is 29. And former child actor Emmanuel Lewis turns 38 today.

For American presidential campaigns, the run-up to any televised debate is nothing so much as an exercise in managing expectations. Your opponent is fearsome and will probably crush you. Your own candidate will be lucky to form a single coherent sentence. Then, after the debate, you can spin a weak performance as a come-from-behind victory. In this little game of flackery, Sarah Palin could not be better positioned for tonight's face-off against Joe Biden. The Republican vice presidential nominee is up against a respected lion of the senate. Severe economic anxiety has put her ticket nine points behind in a new poll. The debate moderator has a big crush on Barack Obama. And, most importantly, a series of disastrous interviews with Charles Gibson and especially Katie Couric has made Palin look like an uninformed, inarticulate embarrassment. You can watch the complete lowlights in the attached video, including Palin's failure last night to name a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe vs. Wade. But keep in mind that the worse Palin looks now, the better she'll likely appear, to some key voters, tomorrow morning.

• The premiere of Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and Michael Phelps as guest host generated the show's best season debut since 2001. [THR]

• Charles Gibson reeled in big ratings for ABC with his interview with Sarah Palin. [THR]

Apologies are in order to Charles Gibson, widely presumed to be too soft to credibly interview Sarah Palin. If anything, the ABC News anchor's first exchange with Palin, aired last night, is all the more embarrassing to Palin precisely because Gibson was hand-picked by her handlers. The Republican vice presidential nominee's awful performance is apparent enough from the transcript, which contains her horribly stilted answer to a question about Iran, invoking "nucular weapons... given to those hands of Ahmadinejad" and already compared to Miss South Carolina's famous thoughts on "the Iraq" at a teen beauty pageant. But things are even worse on video, as seen after the jump.

• Gordon Ramsay says he's partnering with Victoria Beckham to open a restaurant in LA. Yes, a restaurant. Whether she'll actually taste any of the food served there is anybody's guess. [P6]

After his comparatively disastrous speech at the Republican National Convention, it wouldn't seem John McCain could teach Sarah Palin much about public relations. But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have imparted an important lesson in one-on-one media manipulation: Sometimes the best response to a skeptical reporter is to draw him in as closely as possible. Politico said Palin will meet with ABC News' Charlie Gibson not only on Sunday, as originally reported, but in multiple interviews Thursday and Friday, as well, including at the prospective vice president's home in Wasilla, Alaska. Much as McCain used to score points with campaign reporters with seemingly chummy off-the-record chats, Palin no doubt hopes to soften Gibson up with a tour of her home state. Gibson, meanwhile, is supposedly racing to become the sort of interviewer who needs softening up:

"ABC News' Charles Gibson has snagged the sought-after first interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin since she was named the Republican vice presidential pick nearly two weeks ago." [THR]

Well, the press can stop wondering when and where Sarah Palin's first post-nomination television interview will take place. A campaign adviser says they offered ABC nightly news anchor Charles Gibson the job days ago. That's the same Charles Gibson who was last seen being "greasily avuncular and patronizing" when he and his ABC cohort George Stephanopoulos were ruining the Democratic primary debate back in April. You know, the ABC-sponsored event about which a New Yorker scribe wrote, "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time... If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come."

When Barack Hussein Obama summers in his ancestral home of Iraq in a few weeks, along with some other foreign places, the trip will, of course, turn into an elite party for his showbiz friends, all of whom are clamoring for seats on his campaign plane. Katie Couric of the CBS Evening News is arranging an on-trip interview, as is Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News and Charles Gibson of ABC World News. Meet The Press wants to talk to Obama. "Star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines" are also coming, the Times reports for Thursday's paper. So, why all the enthusiasm? John McCain's last big tour in the war zone was relegated to the evening news remainders bin. And the network newscasts have already given Obama 114 minutes of coverage since June, to McCain's 48, according to some study. The official reason: This is Obama's first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. The real reason? Let's ask some starfucking magazine editors!

"Among those who encouraged the networks to put aside their competitive instincts, albeit temporarily, was Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News, who will appear on the fund-raiser alongside her principal rivals, Brian Williams of NBC and Charles Gibson of ABC." [Times]

A 30-year ABC News veteran, Gibson was the anchor of the network's nightly newscast from 2006 to 2009, when he retired and handed over the show to Diane Sawyer.

Network news: it's the story that just keeps giving. Today the Times takes a long look at the increased level of network news competition in anticipation of Katie Couric's splashy-yet-deliberately-unsplashy debut as the anchor of the CBS evening news. NBC is hanging gargantuan banners of Brian Williams outside of the CBS studio (a technique taken straight from the New York Post) while Williams blathers on about the "anchor-viewer relationship"; ABC's Charlie Gibson is being marketed as "Your Trusted Source," which hearkens back to the late Peter Jennings, whose slogan was "Trust is Earned." Blah trust blah blah trust blah.