Have you ever imagined what it'd be like if a New Yorker staffer tried to talk dirty with you? Their online editors feel your pain.

• More cuts at Condé Nast could come when Si Newhouse returns from his European vacation next week. Among the possible victims: Domino, Details, and staffers in the company's web division. [NYP]
• Berkley Books has cancelled plans to publish Angel at the Fence, a Holocaust memoir that the author admitted contains fabrications. [NYT]
• NBC is producing more webisodes to make up for programming gaps. [NYT]
• Ad spending in '09 is expected to drop to its lowest point since '03. [AdAge]
• CNBC's Conversations with Michael Eisner is no more. [NYP]
• An interview with CNN prez Jon Klein, who scored big ratings this year with AC360 and Campbell Brown's new show, but will also go down as the genius responsible for giving D.L. Hughley his own cable news program. [HuffPo]

Ad sales at the New York Times dropped 21 percent in November. Condé Nast, the fancy magazine publisher, could see revenue drop 30 percent in the first quarter of 2009. The advertising drought is here.

• New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick has confirmed he's writing a book about "Barack Obama, race and politics in America." [Politico]
• David Shuster is the new host of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. [NYT]
• Vogue was the most profitable magazine at Condé Nast this year. [P6]
• Crain Communications (AdAge, Crain's New York) is laying off 60. [NYP]
• The list of layoff victims at CNN grows longer: Jamie McIntyre, Kelli Arena, Linda Stouffer and Rusty Dornin are all on the way out. [TVN]
• The Day the Earth Stood Still was No. 1 at the weekend box office. [NYT]

For weeks, the Anna Wintour rumors coming out of Condé Nast concerned the Vogue queen's failures and purportedly impending departure. Now someone is spreading word about the Dear Editor's glorious success. Hmm.

♦ What recession? Condé Nast is launching a new magazine in the UK. [WWD]
♦ More on the fallout from the Tribune Co. bankruptcy. [NYT]
♦ Yesterday the New York Times revealed plans to mortgage its office building; now it says it's in talks with lenders about upcoming debt payments. [AP]
♦ Jann Wenner has hired a new chief digital officer. [AdAge]
♦ Is the advertising world sexist? Maybe! [HuffPo]
♦ Jay Leno may earn $40-50 million a year for his new gig on NBC. [MP]
♦ NBC still has some Super Bowl ads available, if you're interested. [AdAge]

Popular gay socialist Barney Frank is trying to run these auto industry bailout hearings in Congress, but he has to spend time dealing with so much unimportant crap. Here he is trying to explain speaking time limits and travel arrangements for today's hearing. One of his snide-ass colleagues chimes in to tell the auto execs that he won't ask about their travel arrangements: "I'm a congressman, not a Conde Nast travel agent." Yea, you wish you were a Conde Nast travel agent, dork. Also, are you calling Barney Frank gay? Click to watch the outrage.

New York City was lucky enough today to play host to a fancy panel discussion featuring the world's three fanciest magazine editors: Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter, Vogue's Anna Wintour, and The New Yorker's David Remnick. And Joe Nocera of the Times uncouthly "lashed out at the editors and asked how each of the them could be so sanguine about the future." Pish posh! Graydon Carter is convinced his invincible publication will weather this economic storm as it always has:

Conde Nast boss Si Newhouse will have you know that that rumor going around about him going to Europe to work out the details of replacingVogue editor Anna Wintour with her French counterpart is utter hogwash! "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard," Condé Nast's Si Newhouse told us via flack (first quoted in the Wall Street Journal). "There is no truth to it." Si finally sent in his denial from Europe, where he is, ah, not talking to anybody about any magazine jobs. [Pic: NYO]

♦ Condé Nast is denying rumors that Si Newhouse plans to replace Anna Wintour at Vogue. "The silliest rumor I ever heard," says a rep. [NYO, WSJ, WWD]
♦ Julia Restoin Roitfeld's response to the suggestion her mom might be taking over for Anna: "She loves Paris too much—she'd never leave." [The Cut]
♦ Zac Posen is working on a new diffusion line. [FWD]
♦ Londoners will get their first taste of Posh Spice's new fashion line tomorrow. [Times UK]
♦ Love Saves the Day, the iconic store in the East Village, is closing. [Racked]
♦ Will fashion shows survive the recession? Some may not. [WSJ]
♦ Bridal designer Gabriella Risatti is making copies of Carrie's Vivienne Westwood wedding dress from the Sex and the City for $15,000. [NYP]

This blog has been making fun of and predicting death for Conde Nast social networking site Flip.com since early 2007, when Flip was only a few months old. Our skepticism was based on the observation that the idea of spending millions of dollars building a social networking site for teen girls based on flipbooks is dumb. And now it appears that our predecessors were prescient, because Fashionista is reporting that Flip is shutting down for good on Dec. 16th. Duh. If you have more information, email us. UPDATE: It's official. The death notice sent to Flip.com users is below:

The Waverly Inn was crawling with Condé Nast insiders earlier tonight, some of whom had been waiting as long as 20 years for the appetizer: The hot, delicious rumor that Si Newhouse was meeting in Paris with Carine Roitfeld to work out the final details of the French Vogue editor's move to New York, where she is expected to take over flagship Vogue from Anna Wintour immediately after New Year's. It did not go unnoticed when Condé Nast overlord Newhouse departed early for his annual three-week December vacation in Vienna; it turns out he needed time for his meeting with uptight Wintour's chic Parisian counterpart.

Prepare to die, entitled Conde Nasties! Conde has always had a well-deserved reputation as the most opulent and self-important of all magazine publishing companies. Those days are coming to an end. The (gender-neutral!) diva culture that spawned The Devil Wears Prada and a million young aspiring media people who thought that a magazine employee could live the lifestyle of an investment banker—it's all on the way out. We come to bury you, Conde Nast culture, not to mourn you. Contemplate this, special ones: you may soon be forced to travel in (and pay for) common taxi cabs, like the poors! And it gets worse:

Conde Nast is folding DNR, the men's fashion trade magazine. It's also shuttering its website, DNRNews.com. The feeble spin is that WWD will pick up the slack by launching "comprehensive, round-the-clock men’s fashion and retail coverage." [#2 of the ">four ways to kill a magazine, for those keeping track]. Points to the PR department for attempting to create an upside. But it's clear that this is evidence of weakness in the fashion category specifically, and more momentum for the scary Great Magazine Die-off in general. The company hasn't announced how many layoffs will go along with DNR's death, but departing staffers with more details can email us.

Does super deluxe magazine publisher Conde Nast have trouble "getting" the internet? In a macro sense we'd say they have trouble "getting" the entire magazine business at the moment, since they're in the midst of hacking 5% of their staff off every title, including dozens of online staff at CondeNet. So in that sense their troubles are equally distributed! But as Big Money points out today, Conde has been particularly slow to embrace the web, especially considering the company's level of prestige. Could the problem be.... ego? Big Money says, correctly, that even the magazines with good websites have a relatively weak online presence considering their role in the media power structure. Conde, which was late to take the internet seriously, is even worse, although it owns some of the best magazines in the country.

♦ Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch's right-hand at News Corp., may be planning to depart the company in the near future. [LAT]
♦ 60 Minutes has snagged the first interview with Barack Obama. [THR]
♦ WWD has a roundup of how magazines will fare overall in 2008. Most of the news is depressing, yes, but there are a couple of bright spots: Elle and Men's Journal reported 3 percent increases in ad pages. [WWD]
♦ You knew this one was coming: Political statistics star Nate Silver is reportedly shopping a pair of books to publishers. [NYO]

If you're the sort of magazine industry obsessive who looks forward to the first week of December when Condé Nast releases its holiday luncheon seating chart—wherein Condé overlord Si Newhouse either exalts or punishes his editors according to where he seats them at the Four Seasons, and with whom—you're going to have to wait until next year. The company's CEO, Chuck Townsend, informed staffers yesterday that the lunch has been canceled. Of course, you probably don't need a chart to surmise that if the lunch had taken place, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman could have expected to nibble on her Cobb salad in the coat room. [WWD]

What with the economy and all, Christmas is totally going to blow this year. Especially for those of you (us?) in the media industry. The precious holiday was already partially ruined when the Hearst Company cancelled their historically awesome annual Xmas bash, and now Condé Nast is following suit. A tipster tells us that their annual Holiday Luncheon has been shut the heck down. Probably because every company everywhere is hemorrhaging money. Why Condé itself axed dozens of employees just yesterday. The real shame in all of this, though, is now we won't get the valuable "who sat where" insight into the magazine giant's power structure. You see, whoever sits closest to head honcho S.I. Newhouse at the Luncheon is deemed to be the boy or girl du jour. No coal in their stockings! Because we would never be invited to such an event we've had to rely on the Post's Keith Kelly's annual kremlinology. Now how will we know where everyone stands?? (Though we can make a guess: everyone stands to get laid off). In lieu of the shindig, we imagine that Vogue editrix and Big Table mainstay Anna Wintour will quietly drink spiked eggnog in her office, thinking back on better days. When Christmas still meant something. Even to those on the brink of catastrophic financial collapse.

A quarter of the 50-something employees in Wired.com's San Francisco newsroom are gone, a source tells us — and with them, the bubbly delusion that Wired would not just report on the transformation of media by technology, but be a part of the revolution as well. The cuts hit Wired's tech team heavily, though some writers and editors also got pink slips. (CNET reports that 3 out of 28 editorial staffers are gone, but a Wired insider says that the actual number of edit jobs cut is at least six.)Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

Conde Nast has laid off dozens of people today from CondeNet, the company's internet division. We hear from one source that 60 people were let go this morning, most in tech, some in marketing. We also hear that an additional 20 staffers were fired from "Conde Connect," the company's internal intranet division. Conde itself hasn't released specific numbers, but these are part of the 5% across-the-board cuts the company ordered two weeks ago. If you have info, email us.