• The bloodletting at CBS is underway. [THR]
• Macmillan Publishing and FSG are both trimming staff. [AP, NYO]
• Ad spending for the first nine months of this year fell 1.7 percent. [WWD]
• Katie Couric, Campbell Brown, and Rachel Maddow will appear in the next issue of Vogue. [TVN]
• Sean Hannity's Alan Colmes-less show begins January 12th. [NYT]
• The Disney Channel is taking its act to Russia next year. [NYT]
• The most amusing corrections published this year. [Regret the Error]

Ooh, the National Book Awards finalist list is out. Congratulations to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who scored with three of the five nominees for fiction (the heavenly Lydia Davis, Mischa Berlinski, and the great Denis Johnson). Who says FSG is washed up and out of touch? We are shocked to report that Christopher Hitchens is in the running for nonfiction for his stunt book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." [National Book Foundation]

We so wanted to dislike debut novelist Katherine Taylor. Rules For Saying Goodbye was hyped as "invoking the spirit of Melissa Bank and Curtis Sittenfeld" in the announcement that it had sold to FSG, and it's rumored to be Starbucks' next pick. Oh, and: "It's hard, when you're blond and attractive and you live in Los Angeles and you've written a book about young women in New York, not to be called 'chick lit,'" she told the Observer's Spencer Morgan. Oooh, bitch! But wait... do we hate her? Maybe she's just being honest. Regardless, she does at least seem to understand the genre's conventions: "'Indecision [by Benjamin Kunkel] was ridiculously simple, I thought,' she said. 'And had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world. It would have been the pinkest of all-time pink covers.'" Did we say we hated her? We might just have to buy a few hundred copies.