Conde Nast's beautiful holiday gift this year: a $15 gift card to the Conde Nast cafeteria. Oh, you really shouldn't have!

In your tremendous Tuesday media column: Dan Abrams is trying to take us on, bloggers now just as glorious as grizzled war reporters, Conde needs a PR person, and the New York Times Co. continues downward, dog.

Today, four prestigious magazine publishers, and News Corp, officially announced their new "digital storefront" for magazines and stuff. Buy it and put it on your E-reader! Are you sick of E-readers yet? You will be! And you'll be using one.

• France's first lady, Carla Bruni, will star in Woody Allen's next movie. [AFP]
• Time Inc. is shutting down InStyle Weddings and laying off nine people in the process. The company also let 15 staffers go at Fortune today. [Gawker, NYP]
• Adam Lambert's racy performance at the AMAs has stirred up some drama, in case you haven't heard; ABC says it's been flooded with complaints. [NYT]
• In related news, Lambert will not be appearing on GMA due to the fallout, but he will be on the Early Show and the Late Show with David Letterman. [HL]
• The Washington Post is closing its NYC, LA, Chicago bureaus. [WaPo]
• Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst are setting up a company to "allow them to take the digital future into their own hands." Better late than never! [NYO]
• Sarah Palin's Going Rogue sold 700,000 copies in its first week, sadly. [AP]

• It's official: Oprah says she plans to call it quits in September 2011. [ABC]
• Layoffs: The BusinessWeek cuts continue (and include a handful of the mag's more notable names); meanwhile the AP body count now stands at 90.
• Sarah Palin sold 300,000 copies of her book the first day, alas. [TDB]
• Condé Nast and Adobe are teaming up to bring Wired to electronic reading devices. Digital versions of Vogue, VF, and the NYer will follow. [WSJ]
• Vogue's design director is exiting the magazine after a four-year run. [WWD]
• In other Anna news, her de facto stepdaughter, Alexis Bryan Morgan, is leaving the Condé Nast family to take Nina Garcia's old job at Elle. [NYM]
• Cable mogul John Malone isn't happy about the idea of Comcast and NBC teaming up. Meanwhile NBC chief Jeff Zucker is staying mum about the deal.
• Another rumored Playboy bidder is denying interest in an acquisition. [NYT]
• Does Bonnie Fuller's new website stand a chance? [NYP]

Condé Nast says it is already racing to repackage its magazines for Apple's forthcoming tablet, starting with Wired, even while toeing Apple's line that the device doesn't exist. Publishers are clearly betting Steve Jobs can save their business model.

Condé Nast has shut down six magazines and laid off hundreds of staffers in recent months. But the company's annual Christmas party will return once again this year. Okay, so it's at Aureole next door (a "corporate cafeteria with a soundtrack of smooth jazz in the George Benson style," per the Times), and not at the Four Seasons as in years past. But it's better settling for stir-fry at Condé's own cafeteria or, even worse, nothing at all, right? [NYO]

They're back, baby! After killing six magazines and banishing hundreds to the unemployment line, Condé Nast has decided to go through with its annual holiday fete.

Final tally: ad pages dropped 32% (or 8,359 pages) at Condé Nast in 2009.

• Lou Dobbs is leaving CNN! Tonight's his last show! Happy Wednesday! [NYT]
• Condé Nast magazines have lost a collective 8,359 pages of advertising in 2009, which represents a 31 percent decline from a year earlier. [NYT]
• One thing that Hearst has going for it: lots of cash in the bank. [NYP]
• Banker-turned-media investor Jimmy Finklestein is reportedly buying the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, and a few other Nielsen titles. [Wrap]
• Current TV is keeping current with the times and laying off 80 staffers. [LAT]
• TV: Joss Whedon's Dollhouse has been canceled by Fox; meanwhile, ABC has decided that Kelsey Grammer comedy series Hank will exist no longer.
• Détente? President Obama has agreed to give Fox News an interview. [HP]
• The New Yorker sure has lots of writers and editors! [NYO]
• Reality TV is slowly killing us. So says Vanity Fair's James Wolcott. [VF]

In your woebegone Wednesday media column: Hearst gets money, layoffs at Current TV, Conde Nast gets internet religion, and Sesame Street characters are the swing votes in Fox News' war for righteousness.

For the second time this decade, the New York Observer's cobbled together the TOP SECRET masthead of The New Yorker. It sure has a lot of people working for it! A numerical summary, below.

• Comcast and GE have reportedly agreed that Jeff Zucker will remain the CEO of NBC Universal as part of their proposed $30 billion joint venture. Well done, gentlemen. Good to see things get started on the right foot. [Reuters]
• In related news, Zucker's totally brilliant plan to move Jay Leno to 10pm is paying off beautifully. Leno sank to a brand new ratings low last night. [NYT]
• Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who started the administration's war with Fox News last month, is stepping down. [WP]
• Hey, it's not all bad news for Condé Nast. Self is doing pretty well. [WWD]
• The creators of Will & Grace are working on a Twitter-inspired show. [THR]
• The nominations for the 2010 People's Choice Awards were announced today, just in case you happen to be care about that sort of thing. [LAT]
• Aerosmith is looking for new lead singer, in case you're job-hunting. [LAT]
• George Lopez and Wanda Sykes' debuts this week scored solid ratings. [NYT]
• Simon Cowell made $75 million last year, earning him the top spot on Forbes' list of primetime's top-earning men. Ryan Seacrest exploded in tears when he heard he came in No. 3 with $38 million. Or so we'd like to think. [Forbes]

• Another magazine has gone under: Hachette announced today that it's closing Metropolitan Home to "focus its resources" on Elle Décor. [AdAge]
• New York's profile of star Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin reveals he's one of the paper's highest-paid staffers and is beloved by the titans of Wall Street, but is not quite as popular with some of his Times colleagues. [NYM]
• Circulation is down—and losses are up—at the New York Post. [NYT]
• GE and Comcast have agreed on a valuation for NBC, which brings the parties one step closer to handing over control of the network to Comcast. [Reuters]
• Condé Nast may be trimming expenses and cutting jobs here at home, but the mag giant is busy expanding its presence in China. [NYP]
• Curb Your Enthusiasm is coming to basic cable. TV Land and TV Guide have picked up reruns of the show and will begin airing them next year. [LAT]
• Google has acquired the mobile ad company AdMob for $750 million. [NYT]
• Last night's Mad Men scored AMC its highest-rated finale ever, although considering it's AMC we're talking about, that isn't saying much. [B&C]
• A Christmas Carol was No. 1 at the weekend box office, although its $31 million gross was weak given it cost $200 million to produce. Meanwhile, Precious' $1.8 million take on 18 screens set a limited-release record. [LAT]

In your meritocratic Monday media column: Reporters suffer injustices unseen since Pol Pot's darkest days, The Week guarantees goodness, Esquire has a gizmo thingamajig that will save magazines, and Conde Nast gives up on America, finally.

• Condé Nast is now swinging into damage control mode: It's retained Michael Sheehan, a "crisis manager and media coach" who's faced some steep PR challenges in the past having worked with President Clinton and AIG. [NYP]
• So is Oprah moving to cable? The discussions continue, reportedly. [AdAge]
• Kyle Pope doesn't seem to have been Jared Kushner's first choice to serve as editor-in-chief of the New York Observer. Times star business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin turned Kushner down twice over the past year. [NYM]
• More than 100 people were laid off at Lifetime and A&E today. [Variety]
• Philip Gourevitch is stepping down as editor of The Paris Review. [NYO]
• Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes discusses the future of the media biz. [TDB]
• MTV did not rebuild the Berlin Wall for U2, in case you were worried. [UPI]

Si Newhouse (pictured, above) canceled Conde Nast's famous Christmas lunch for the second year in a row, and then—uh oh—then he hired a crisis management flack. Did Details dump toxic waste in Peru?

• Is Oprah preparing to leave her syndicated show behind and take her act to OWN, her long-delayed cable network? That's the rumor anyway. [DH]
• The new editor of the Observer is Kyle Pope, formerly of Portfolio. [NYO]
• Cable meets kindergarten: Fox News will stop being mean to MSNBC only if MSNBC first stops being mean to Fox News, reports Rupert Murdoch. [NYT]
• Fortune and Time are expected to be hardest hit by layoffs at Time Inc. [NYP]
• Scripps has beat out News Corp. for control of the Travel Channel. [BN]
• Susan Plagemann has been named the new publisher of Vogue. Meanwhile, Tom Florio will now oversee Vogue, Bon Appétit and Traveler. [WWD]
• Bloomberg BusinessWeek (or BBW for short) has its new team in place. [NYT]

Conde Nast overseer Si Newhouse desperately put his Alberto Giacometti sculpture, "L'Homme Qui Chavire"—for which he'd paid $20 million— up for auction at Sotheby's yesterday. He was expected to lose $10 million on the sale. He got lucky.

It looked like Condé Nast boss Si Newhouse was going to lose big when he put a prized sculpture up for auction at Sotheby's last night. But he ended up doing fine! Or close to it, least. Instead of losing as much as $10 or $12 million on the sale, he only came up $2.8 million short in the end: