How did Annie Leibovitz end up $24 million in the hole? New York magazine's Andrew Goldman has cataloged her wildly ill-advised spending flourishes. Oh, and the money behind her glorified pawnshop loan came from none other than Goldman Sachs.

Conde Nast's most painful recent cost cut: No more Fiji Water. Now Mother Jones reports: Fiji Water is evil. If Conde had just waited one week, they could have gotten rid of it because it's evil. Not because they're poor.

Vogue's September issue has 36% fewer ad pages this year, almost exactly as predicted.

These are uncertain times for Condé Nast. McKinsey consultants are now scouring company budgets looking for fat to trim. And staffers are now getting acclimated to a world in which they're expected to subsist on room temperature Poland Spring, not chilled Fiji water or sparkling citrus beverages in round little bottles. It hasn't been a walk in the park for Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, of course. Over the past year, he's probably seen several billion dollars of his net worth evaporate. And his private foundation—a vehicle he's used over the years to shower hundreds of millions of dollars on art institutions, hospitals, libraries, and his alma mater, Syracuse University—hasn't been immune either.

The Anna Wintour Tries To Make People Like Her Tour 2009 continues with a stop on Late Night with David Letterman on Monday, August 24. Does she think he can get her contract renewed?

How bad have things gotten at Condé Nast? The bottles of Pellegrino and Orangina are gone, the Fiji water has been replaced with Poland Spring, and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has been spotted in the cafeteria, "eyeing reasonably priced stir fry." Oh, yes, it's that bad. [NYO]

While the dreaded McKinsey recommendations are still weeks away, Conde Nast is in full cost-cutting mode. Examples: Graydon Carter is now lunching in the cafeteria with commoners and the free Fiji water will soon be replaced by tap water. Yeah.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has an interest-free $5.3 million mortgage on his four-story greek revival townhouse in Greenwich Village, courtesy of his sweetheart deal with Condé Nast. What's he pay? Oh, $2,083 a month.

• The New York Times Co. is now publicly shopping the Boston Globe. Meanwhile, the list of potential acquirers is getting longer: The firm that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune is now a possible buyer. [AP, NYT]
• Related: The Globe is going to start charging to access its Web site. [E&P]
• News Corp. and GE were hoping to "ratchet down the rhetoric" when they ironed out a peace pact between MSNBC and Fox News recently. Keith Olbermann didn't abide by it, of course. (And Bill O'Reilly returned the compliment.) But Olbermann is still pretending it never happened. [WP, HP]
• It seems one embarrassment this week wasn't quite enough for Olbermann. Because he's resorting to shameless (and familiar) excuses to try and explain away the Richard Wolffe conflict-of-interest fiasco. [Gawker]
• Profits at CBS dropped by 96 percent in the second quarter. [WSJ]
• Why did Twitter go down yesterday? Blame the Russians. [NYT]

Daily Intel has unearthed a secret club of gays, at Conde Nast! They call themselves "The Majority" and are as interesting as, say, a company softball team. But hey, we have the original, uncensored photo of these mystery gays!

• NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote Jay Leno's new show. Don't believe it? Try this out for size: "In early September, NBC will even adopt a portion of Interstate 10 in California to reiterate Mr. Leno's time slot." [NYT]
• Notwithstanding the Leno blitz, NBC is still looking to cut its budget. [NYT]
• No one cares about CNBC these days, in case you haven't noticed. [Slate]
• More on troubles at Condé Nast (revenues may fall by as much as $350 million this year), and the recent round of receptionist-purging. [NYP, NYO]
• The lobbyist scandal goes on. A couple of days after it was revealed that MSNBC's Richard Wolffe is now working for a lobbying firm comes the news that CNN's Bill Schneider has signed up with a D.C. think tank. [HuffPo]
• Related: Wolffe has another Obama-related book in the works. [TNR]
• Experts say the prognosis for BusinessWeek is not good. [DailyFinance]
• As you might expect, the mood has been very upbeat at CurrentTV today now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee have returned from North Korea. [NYT]

Yesterday we told you that McKinsey-driven Conde Nast was firing all of its receptionists. A blow to the company's editorial glamor, yes. But the dragnet has also seized the New Yorker's whimsical, overqualified "jack of all trades!" [UPDATE: Maybe not!]

Annie Leibovitz dug herself so deeply into debt that she was forced to mortgage her photographs to a high-end pawn shop to pay off her creditors. Who did she owe money to? None other than Condé Nast, her biggest patron.

• Keith Olbermann took Times reporter Brian Stelter to task last night for reporting that News Corp. and GE had worked out a deal to tone down the rhetoric between MSNBC and Fox News. But he didn't disagree with everything Stelter reported. Conveniently, only the bad stuff about him was wrong. [NYM]
• More bad news for Olbermann: MSNBC now admits it made a mistake by not disclosing that Countdown fixture Richard Wolffe is a paid lobbyist. Naturally, Olbermann had absolutely no idea about any of this. [Politico, Salon]
• Condé Nast is shedding more staff. This time around it appears the media giant's receptionists will be paying the ultimate price. [Gawker, NYM]
• Reps for Bruce Wasserstein met with BusinessWeek execs yesterday to discuss a bid for the magazine. Joe Mansueto, the founder of Morningstar and owner of Fast Company, may be a potential bidder as well. [BW]

This could be the unkindest Conde Nast cut of all: A tipster tells us that "as of Monday, Glamour will no longer have a receptionist." And this may be only the beginning.

In your sweltering Friday media column: the summer doldrums bring lazy story-theft to the New York Times, Conde Nast quits buying newspapers, a new documentary about reporters , to watch, and Pat Kiernan's Twitter is America's most powerful media outlet.

• Time Warner sucked wind in the second quarter as profits fell 34%. Newly-independent Time Warner Cable, however, posted a profit. [AP, Reuters]
• McKinsey has set up shop at Condé Nast. What it is the consulting firm's actually doing (or recommending), however, remains a mystery. [NYO]
• Barry Diller's IAC posted a modest profit for the second quarter, but reported that revenues at the media conglomerate were down modestly, too. [AP]
• Michael Milken is backing some sort of new business website. Exciting! [NYT]
• Even more exciting: Sarah Palin is thinking about hosting a radio show. [HP]

McKinsey & Co.'s penny-pinching audit of Conde Nast is underway, and they're successfully striking fear into the hearts of employees at all levels. Apparently magazines are expected to "make money," now?

WWD has gotten to the bottom of that lawsuit filed by Condé Nast against the Turks and Caicos last Friday. It seems the archipelago paid for a bunch of ads in a handful of Condé titles in 2007 and 2008, but then never paid its $1 million tab. It also seems the ads played a role in a corruption scandal earlier this year:

We showed you the insider's guide surviving McKinsey & Co.'s culling of the Conde Nasties, but it turns out that reality television staple Survivor also hold plenty of (probably useless) advice to outwit, outplay, and outlast your coworkers.