In your finally Friday media column: CEO tells reporters to give his kid some gigs, Jon Klein got shot, the third media exec of the day falls, and Joe Halderman will skip the Emmys.

Jeff Zucker and Jon Klein: gone. Who's next? David Westin, re-resigning in sympathy? You guess!

This morning, Scott Jones, the TV blogger who broke the news of Jay Leno's return to the Tonight Show, reported that CNN president Jon Klein will "be fired" today. Well—he just forwarded us Klein's farewell memo. It's below. [UPDATED]

• Did Hugh Hefner abandon a deal to sell Playboy because he insisted he be allowed to live at the Playboy Mansion until he dies? That's the rumor. [PC]
• CNN will finish 2009 behind MSNBC, which is a first. How is it that CNN chief Jon Klein still has a job? Ask Jeff Bewkes if you bump into him, please. [NYT]
• Daily Intel has a list of the latest layoffs at the New York Times. [NYM]
• Roy Disney, nephew of Walt and former top Disney exec, is dead at 79. [NYT]
• The war between the Times and Wall Street Journal continues apace. [NYO]
• The Journal is boosting circulation of its glossy quarterly, WSJ. [WWD]
• Pressure's on! Jim Cameron's $300 mil. Avatar debuts this weekend. [THR]
• Two of Hollywood's big PR firms, BNC and PMK, have joined forces. [AdAge]
• Teen Vogue editor Amy Astley is making a cameo on Gossip Girl. [WWD]
• Painful truths: Your boyfriend secretly loves soft-rock, Celine Dion. [NYT]
• Time's 2009 "Person of the Year" is Fed chair Ben Bernanke. Yawn. [Time]

• John King will be replacing Lou Dobbs at 7pm on CNN. [WP, NYT]
• CNN execs had been looking to part ways with Dobbs for many months now, although CNN president Jon Klein is denying that all the anti-Dobbs fervor had anything to do with his leaving. Meanwhile, Dobbs' departure is expected to leave up to 30 people without jobs. [TDB, NYT, AP]
• Dobbs' first post-CNN interview will be with Bill O'Reilly. Naturally. [DF]
• Iconix, the apparel company that owns Candie's, Badgley Mischka, and Rocawear, among other brands, is in talks to buy Playboy Enterprises. [BN]
• Bloomberg LP is ducking out of paying severance to BW staffers. [AdAge]
• A dozen staffers were laid off at Newsweek today. [Gawker]
• Martin Scorsese will receive the DeMille award at the Golden Globes. [LAT]
• Katie Couric is assembling media power lists now, apparently. [Forbes]

In your motivational Tuesday media column: CNN sensibly bans Lou Dobbs types, Tina Brown spans the Atlantic, America's stupidest magazines flourish, and Times Square is getting .03% less irritating.

• How's the New York Times Co. planning to lift itself out of the financial mess it's been in? Times Co. chief Janet Robinson says more cuts are on the way and the company is planning to sell off more assets. Also, there's some sort of paid membership model in the works, apparently. [WSJ, Gawker]
• Related: The paper says it will sell its stake in the Red Sox by January. [BG]
• What you missed at Walter Cronkite's funeral yesterday. [NYT, WaPo]
• Best-selling author E. Lynn Harris has died. He was 54. [NYT]
• More magazine is teaming up with Candace Bushnell on a new Web series starring 90210's Jennie Garth and Talia Balsam from Mad Men. [MW]
• After a ten-year run, today is Paula Froelich's last day at Page Six. [NYM]

• The Times is folding in several sections of the paper (City, Escapes); scrapping the weekly fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine, and cutting the budget for freelance writers. Grim times, indeed. [NYT, Gawker]
• NBC CEO Jeff Zucker is reportedly concerned that CNBC has become too conservative and is becoming "the anti-Obama network." [P6]
• The new Ben Silverman? That would be ABC's Stephen McPherson. [NYP]
• Bill O'Reilly tends to ambush liberals more often than he does conservatives. Could that mean he, like, has an agenda or something? How surprising! [NYT]
• Twitter on fire: Traffic is up 131 percent from February. [AdAge]
• Gannett Co. reported a 60 percent decline in first-quarter profit today. [AP]

Law & Order: SVU's Chris Meloni turns 48 today. CNN president Jonathan Klein is 51. Cardinal Edward Egan is turning 77. Femininst author Camille Paglia turns 62. Book editor Jonathan Karp is 45. Maroon 5's Jesse Carmichael turns 30. Emmylou Harris is turning 62. And Rodney King, victim of the LAPD and a member of the cast of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, is 44 today.

• Further evidence CNN's Jon Klein should start polishing his resume: The network continues to trail Fox News, MSNBC, and Headline News. [Portfolio]
• Obama's performance on The Tonight Show will keep people talking for awhile (and not in a good way, clearly), but the ratings were huge. [Time, THR]
• The April issue of Portfolio is the slimmest in Condé Nast's history. [NYP]
• Charla Lawhon is stepping down as managing editor of In Style. [WWD]
• Your prayers have been answered: VH1 is reviving Behind the Music. [NYP]
• Bob Pittman says the ad industry should get a bailout, too. [Fortune]
• Fox News's Greta Van Susteren is denying her husband is a paid adviser to Sarah Palin, but she admits that he gives her advice and "helps" her. [HP]
• SpiralFrog, the glitzy music site that launched in 2006, has gone bust. [PC]
• Broadway dimmed the lights last night in honor of Natasha Richardson. [THR]

It's been a rough few weeks for CNN. Ratings have falling fast, especially for primetime programs hosted by Anderson Cooper and Campbell Brown, news that came to light the same day Brown rather bizarrely confessed her apartment had been invaded by "toxic mold" in recent months. To make matters worse, this past weekend the Daily News revealed that Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's very-much-married legal analyst, has been having an affair with the daughter of former colleague Jeff Greenfield, and may have even gotten her pregnant, too. So how is CNN CEO Jon Klein responding to the bad news?

• 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]

"CNN President Jon Klein [said he] declined to hire Maddow because he found her 'predictable.'" [Washington Post]

Guess CNN feels like they've milked the Virginia Tech killer video dry. The following memo just came down:

• Dean Baquet wins the coveted Observer Media Mensch of the Year award. This follows hot on the heels of a bunch of other bullshit made-up media awards by organizations you've barely heard of, and comes a day in advance of our naming Chris Mohney's right testicle Gawker's Blog Ball of the Year. [NYO]