In your pleasant Thursday media column: Jay Mariotti is an asshole, Teens can't read, checks are bouncing, and more:

• How do you keep your magazine afloat? Put ads on the cover! [NYT]
• NBC is renewing 30 Rock, The Office, and The Biggest Loser. [AP]
• Music sales fell by about 7 percent last year. [NYT]
• The head of Hearst Magazines International is retiring. [NYP]
• Clear Channel is cutting $400 million in costs. [NYP]
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. [AP]
• Donny Deutsch's ad agency is laying off staffers. [AgencySpy]

• NBC's Lauren Zalaznick is forming a "panel" to help marketers target women. Just a few who have joined the program: Maria Bartiromo, Meredith Vieira, Candace Bushnell, Shelly Lazarus, and Tori Spelling. [AdAge]
• Hearst's Cathie Black is expected to sign a new 3-year contract. [NYP]
• The FT has let 80 people go. [Guardian]
• The first Madoff-related book, Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World, will be out in March. [NYP]
• ABC is thinking about bringing back Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. [TVW]
• Magazines like O, Glamour, W, Marie Claire and Teen Vogue all posted sharp declines in sales during the last few months of 2008. [WWD]
• The networks that went home winners at the Golden Globes. [Variety, NYT]

Bedbugs aren't just for dirty hovels like Fox News and hipster Bushwick. The filthy bloodsuckers have allegedly infested the very flower of our national womanhood—the offices of Marie Claire:

The layoffs at Hearst this week have already hit Redbook and Good Housekeeping. So as not to be sexist, now they've come to Esquire. We hear the upscale men's mag laid off four editorial employees yesterday, including two editors, and decreed that another open assistant editor position won't be filled. "They gathered everyone together to tell them not to tell anyone the exact number cuz they don't want any media," says a tipster. That's somewhat embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as the spending habits of another layoff-happy mag, the recently decimated Conde Nast Portfolio: According to P6,

Oprah Winfrey may still be celebrating Barack Obama's triumph Tuesday, but hopefully her good mood won't be ruined by the bad news this morning: Hearst, Oprah's magazine partner, has announced that O at Home, the shelter-focused spinoff of O, The Oprah Magazine, is shutting down. Guess Michelle Obama will have to look elsewhere when she starts thinking about redecorating the White House. [Mixed Media]

We hear that there were four editorial layoffs at Good Housekeeping today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we mentioned yesterday. And FishbowlNY reports 20 layoffs at M. Shanken Communications, the publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Wine Spectator, and Food Arts. And Eric Schurenberg, the managing editor of Money, was laid off today as part of the Time Inc. layoffs.

♦ Michelle Obama may end up on the cover of Vogue in the next few months: "It's been a long-standing tradition to photograph the new first lady. So needless to say, we are very interested in working with Mrs. Obama." But Ebony may get there first. [WWD]
♦ Shares of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. plunged today following the company's announcement it's revising its 2009 forecast. [Bloomberg]
♦ New York television critic John Leonard has died. [Vulture]
♦ A round of layoffs have hit Hearst, although the exact numbers haven't been released. [Folio]

We hear that as many as eight editorial employees—ranging from senior editors to editorial assistants—got laid off from Redbook today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we told you about earlier. "The economy" was the stated reason. If you know more about layoffs at Hearst, email us.

A tipster tells us there have been "Major, across-the-board layoffs at Hearst. All magazine titles had cuts, even the healthy mags had cuts, in all departments. Management says it's because of the economy." Hearst has already canceled its holiday party, and its top competitor Conde Nast just had layoffs of its own. If you have any info, please email us ASAP.

The publishing landscape is so bloodied right now that it's hard to keep track of all the corpses. This month has seen the end of Radar, Men's Vogue, CosmoGirl, 02138, Culture + Travel plus cuts at Time Inc., Portfolio, Niche Media, and Doubleday. Wow. Two casualties have gone largely unnoticed. A tipster informs us that Town And Country Travel closed a few weeks ago to little fanfare. Meanwhile, the New York offices of London-based travel book series Rough Guides are said to have closed, presumably doomed by declining travel, a declining pound — and perhaps a Gotham too depressing to visit. (Publishers, we know things are rough, but do allow us to give all your titles proper burials.)

Heiress/self-proclaimed journalist Lydia Hearst is stepping down as a columnist for Page Six magazine. Why? She claims the column published in yesterday's issue—the one in which she criticizes her family's publishing company for throwing parties amid a recession—wasn't actually written by her. A more likely explanation: Someone explained to Lydia that it's probably not a great idea to bite the hand that feeds you (especially when it doesn't take much to be disinherited!), and suggested she backpedal as quickly as possible. [GoaG, previously]

♦ The New York Times has endorsed Barack Obama, not surprisingly. [NYT]
♦ If Bravo loses Project Runway, there's always the copycat show Fashion House to fill the void. [NYP]
♦ Maer Roshan's Radar magazine has folded. [Gawker]
♦ OK! has a brand new editor, publisher and executive creative director. [NYP]

♦ Cuts have arrived at Hearst: Cathie Black (left) is "going floor by floor at the Hearst Tower to trim costs and staff positions." [WWD]
♦ Lloyd Grove talks to Tina Brown about her new site and the economic climate: "It's pretty scary. It's scary, scary, scary." [Portfolio]
♦ The New York Times Co. reported profits fell 51 percent for the quarter amid the drop in advertising sales. Traffic to the Times website, however, is up. [Bloomberg, AP, NYO]

Oh no! Bad things are happening to the already trod-upon desolate dead-eyed employees of the mighty Hearst Company! The magazine business sucks, and the economy's cratering, and CosmoGirl closed, so Hearst has decided that this year there will be no Hearst Christmas Party. Ye gods! Last year the party already moved from Tavern on the Green to their office (it's a big fancy brand-new office, but still), who knew there was yet more indignity to be suffered. This is a bad sign, for America. Now we are officially in another depression. Surely William Randolph Hearst threw opulent Christmas parties during the Great Depression, right? (Well, the Depression saw Hearst lose control of his company and sell off many of his vast and glorious treasures. But he still threw parties dammit.) This Depression must be even Greater! It's official! The only chance Hearst has of making it through the coming dark times is to gin up support for a foreign war, probably. Can we get Marie Claire to work on the Spanish threat, people? The fate Christmas itself hangs in the balance!

♦ Sumner Redstone is being forced to sell about one-fifth of his stake in CBS and Viacom to meet the terms of various loan agreements. Also: Shares in Viacom plunged after the company announced third-quarter earnings fell short of estimates. [Bloomberg]
♦ It's official: Hearst's Cathie Black announced CosmoGirl will fold. [Portfolio]
♦ A little perspective: Time Warner is now less than one-quarter of what AOL alone was worth before the merger. [SAI]
♦ After much drama (and a few leaked emails), Scott Rudin has decided to talk away from The Reader. [THR]

Jeff Bercovici is reporting that CosmoGirl, Hearst's teen-targeted girlie mag, is folding. It was just confirmed by the company, which says it's consolidating the mag with Seventeen. At least it lasted slightly longer than Teen People and ElleGirl! But this could just be the first of many titles to succumb to the horrible new economic environment for mid-tier media outlets, in particular. So what other magazines are going to fold next? We have a couple of guesses. Do you?: Men's Vogue? It's been getting thinner and thinner lately, and could be on its last legs, judging by outward appearances. Details? The men's mag recently came out of the closet—which is nice, but no guarantee of success. It's in a challenging place, and it's not that strong. (Though we hear it's on slightly firmer footing these days than it has been at times in the past). Your thoughts about who could be next in the comments, please. This may be the beginning of something bad.

There's blind item is causing a mild shitstorm on Fashionista today about a "publishing house" that has been "quietly paying interns - but only if they're of a 'minority.'" Commenters immediately called out Hearst, which, what do you know, we called them up and it turns out that like myriad other media organizations recruits local minority interns* through a separate internship program with special terms and specifications, one of them happens to be a salary of $12 an hour. Now there is something to get enraged about. Not. Who planted this fucking item? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. This is for you.Dear Disgruntled White Journalism Industry Intern Who Works For Free, What inspired you to get into journalism, kid? I'll tell you what got me into it: journalism. It is a shitty, vicious cycle I'm always meaning to break out the minute I quit abusing alcohol. But anyway: I was writing really bad music reviews for my college paper when it dawned on me that the dorks who listened to the police scanners and checked the logbooks for the "crime" beat were the ones with the actually glamorous jobs. Because there was all this crime on our campus! See, my school was an oasis of obscene mostly-white binge-drinking privilege smack in the middle of an impoverished swath of one of those dirt poor second cities that got abandoned by its economy sometime during the seventies and embarked on a ruinous adventure trying to smoke it all out through a crackpipe in the eighties. (Back then they used to solve problems by bombing them.) In any case, at some point - maybe like the very first weekend of freshman year - it occurred to me that there was no way "here" from "there." The nicest sweetest hardest-working most well-meaning person could be born ten blocks west of my campus and it was just never going to happen for her; worse, she wouldn't even think to aspire to it, though she might think to aspire to some of its shoe collections. I thought this was totally fucked up, and I am one of those people who when I think something is totally fucked up copes by writing about how fucked up it is - yeah, if I were one of those people who enjoyed actually helping I would not have this drinking problem - and anyway, that is what I chose to do, and the more I wrote about it the more I learned and the more I learned the more totally fucked up it became. Just like yourself I had to make some "sacrifices" to keep on this awesome career path. I didn't have money so I worked at Starbucks and took odd jobs the whole time I was working for free till eventually got a job that actually paid me to keep writing about it. It'll happen to you too, if you're masochistic enough! Money was not easy to come by because there were too many people who wanted to write for a living than there were readers to support them; and I'll tell ya, the past ten years haven't made things any easier on this side of that ratio! But hey, I was a white middle-class kid born in America; I actually did have a modicum of free will, and over and over again that will was to remind other people with free will of all the persistent little factors fucking up that sort of freedom for others, and guess what? Slavery is a still a big one. Racism is totally up there. Poverty = totally huge! Look I don't tell you this to be a scold; I am also here for the jokes and the glamorous lifestyle and because I'm a total hater and I don't pretend to think these heavy subjects are hitting you over the head if your internship consists of calling in resort wear for spreads in Harper's Bazaar. But think creatively for a second: why the fuck can't Harper's Bazaar pay you? It's really the same reason they have to give fashion editors "wardrobe allowances" instead of just paying them more money; we're all employed perpetuating the same myth about how life is lived, just in varying degrees of outlandish. If there were enough rich people buying the fancy shit they read about in magazines you'd be rich too; that would be how you found out about those magazines in the first place. But no, I'm guessing you're not. I mean, you are rich enough to accept an unpaid magazine internship in one of the world's most expensive cities, so you actually are pretty rich, but whatever, it's not enough for all the things you'd like to buy. Why is everything so expensive? How come bankers start at six figures and you'd be lucky to start at sixteen grand? Why do you even bother promoting $800 belts to readers who are like, nurses in the Midwest or whatever? Look, I don't know, I would never personally do that, but maybe you like fashion and glamour and "aspirationalism", because maybe you liked playing dress-up as a child or whatever. Maybe you're a dreamer. Don't abandon those dreams after one little glimpse inside the dream sausage factory! Because I have another inspiring affirmative action publishing story for you. Once upon a time a writer landed a job at Entertainment Weekly only to be informed by a co-worker that the editor who'd hired her got a $10,000 bonus because she was a minority. And Entertainment Weekly is not exactly Goldman Sachs! She was distraught when it happened, but she stayed in the business, and went on to become one of the most dedicated, hardest-working media members I have ever met. Because the thing is that as you grow up in the media the dysfunctional relationship between the fantasy world that made you want to go into the business and the ugly realities lurking beneath the surface of everything is pretty much the only thing that keeps you going. And if you really think a bunch of minorities getting a poverty level paycheck when the white kids work for free qualifies as an "ugly reality" you should quit right the fuck now. Because the thing is, no, affirmative action isn't fair, but I'd almost advocate keeping it around in its current flawed race-based state solely on the basis that "neither is fucking anything."

I get the sense Joanna Coles is one of those people whose unbridled enthusiasm for everything lends her a dorky quality that make her gargantuan ambitions somehow endearing. Since she took the editor-in-chief spot at Marie Claire two years ago, the magazine's newsstand sales have plunged nearly 30%, but you get the feeling she doesn't let it get her down! And anyway, people are paying attention to Joanna this Fashion Week because she just hired Project Runway judge Nina Garcia away from Elle. Fashion people sometimes say bitchy things about Joanna, mostly "that Joanna Coles is a nerdy poser who has to pay Nina to sit next to her at fashion shows," because fashion people are ridiculous and so is Joanna, a little bit. Just today Fashion Week Daily ran a huge long interview with her along with a little gossip item that seemed harmless but was actually sort of cruel! Read that and our Coles FAQ — and just for kicks, see a pic of Nina Garcia in a realllly short skirt — after the jump.

Well if it isn't a blessing from the Gawker Media Gods who brought us that pretty fundamentalist rape victim hating Alaska Governess! The Style Network plans to double your viewing rations of Project Runway judge Nina Garcia! This was known already, actually, but now there are details: the show is called Running in Heels and revolves around the staff of Marie Claire magazine, Elle having fired Garcia after deciding to make a reality show featuring Garcia rival Anne Slowey. Nina vs. Anne! Elle vs. Marie Claire! It is like Road Rules vs. The Real World, only…something we'll actually set our DVRs for! But can the show be anywhere near as awesome as the reality-TV-esque circumstances that enabled it to be?Nina told me1 last month she'd had plenty of offers to do other shows before, but didn't want to do a makeover show. She hasn't: According to Marie Claire, Running In Heels intends to "offer unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Marie Claire and the stylish, smart women who put the magazine together each month," including "private video confessionals," in which "viewers will learn how the interns cope with their jobs, their superiors and each other." That sounds so good!!! Except, of course, for two things: 1. Seriously, it's Marie Claire.2 How bad could the bullshit be at Marie Claire? The show runs the risk of being as boring as Vogue's stupid three million dollar "documentary" web show no one except Tatiana watches. At least Elle's Stylista has the virtue of being watchable, at minimum, as a trainwreck. 2. It's going to be on the Style Network. Which is owned by Comcast, unlike new Project Runway host Lifetime, which is half-owned by Marie Claire publisher Hearst. What kind of entertainment conglomerate snatches up Nina Garcia only to not air her new foray into "docu"-reality TV? Something is off there. My guess is that Nina, who is pretty controlling of her image, did not want to make a campy gossipy addictive voyeuristic Devil Wears Prada-type reality show when she is already, you know, famous.