Annnnd, layoffs at the Columbia Journalism Review cap a remarkably awful layoff-filled week for New York print journalists. Stay safe out there, everyone.

In your Murdoch-free Tuesday media roundup: speculation on the LAT's future, Time magazine gets more paywall-y, everyone wants to work for CJR, Jay Rosen pontificates, and a labor journalism spat.

In your retro Thursday media column: Vice is having a Halloween party, laid-off journalists get an award, 'Netflix for magazines' is doomed to fail, and the Wall Street Journal is finally as prestigious as USA Today.

Ring the alarm: the paper of record is treating rappers separately and unequally! In a surprisingly fresh piece of analysis, the Columbia Journalism Review unearths the NYT's sneaky tendency to "birth-name" rappers more than other musicians. (They also coin the term "birth-name," which I like, although for the sake of hip hop consistency they should say "government-name"). That means, for example, that RZA gets second-referenced as "Robert Diggs," but Marilyn Manson gets to keep his stage name throughout Times stories. That is so foul! Government names are nerdy. Plus, culture editor Sam Sifton gives a nonsense nilla explanation for the discrepancy:

Financial news network CNBC is in a tiff with the financial magazine Barron's, according to a ponderous but awesome story by the Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman. Barron's decided to investigate CNBC meal ticket Jim Cramer, host of "Mad Money," and the network got pissed. The Barron's story began as a look into whether Cramer's stock picks might be leaking before broadcast somehow, which scared CNBC so much that it scurried around spending money on lawyers and sweating until that line of investigation was dropped. The final version of the piece didn't mention that, but it did say that Cramer's stock picks don't generally beat the overall market—not a stunning conclusion to financial types, but poison to Cramer's viewing audience, who watch him with hopes of getting rich. Now the TV network is so mad that it has mostly stopped inviting Barron's reporters onto shows. Starkman comes to the conclusion that both sides made some mistakes, but CNBC is almost totally wrong, while the Barron's story is mostly correct. So why the snippy move to ban the (innocent) reporters from the air? That's the most shine anybody at Barron's can hope for in their day-to-day life. End the embargo! [CJR] Remember: if you upset Jim Cramer, he goes PSYCHO like THIS:

• Dean Baquet wins the coveted Observer Media Mensch of the Year award. This follows hot on the heels of a bunch of other bullshit made-up media awards by organizations you've barely heard of, and comes a day in advance of our naming Chris Mohney's right testicle Gawker's Blog Ball of the Year. [NYO]
  

• Ailing humorist Art Buchwald stays alive long enough to make his 5 millionth Medicaid joke. [WP]
• No one at Time Warner has ever heard the phrase "throwing good money after bad." [WSJ]
• CJR finds a way to make even gossip boring. This essay will make you long for the sweet embrace of the grave. [CJR]

Several games worth talking about this week:

In tonight's big media softball faceoff, Coach Dellinger's well-oiled New Yorker machine will take on the scrappy watchdogs of Columbia Journalism Review, who we believe will actually be playing rather than just umpiring.

A confession: we can't keep up with the media congomerates, and are always forgetting who owns Us Weekly. Here are a set of links to useful data and charts. Still missing: a database which, when a magazine title or TV network is plugged in to the search box, produces the parent company in the result.
· Big Ten [a chart, from The Nation]
· Who Owns What [exhaustive listing, from the CJR]
· Media Ownership 2001 [a graphical indictment of media concentration, from mediachannel.org]
· 100 leading media companies [ranked by revenue, from Advertising Age]
· Media giants [a chart, from PBS]
· Resources [a list of other databases, tables and charts, from I Want Media]