♦ The battle over Project Runway rages on: Harvey Weinstein is now claiming that Bravo intentionally undermined the success of Season 5 by changing the show's airtime, running "mundane and unappealing" ads, and "revealing spoilers about future episodes." [THR]
♦ Barack Obama will appear on The Daily Show tomorrow night. [AP]
♦ The New York Times is not running out of money, say execs at the paper. [NYO]
♦ MSNBC moved into second place in the primetime cable news race, beating CNN for the month of October. [THR]

Hey, how about some more terrible news? The LA Times is laying off 75 people from editorial. "This is about 10% of our total staff and these cuts are comparable in scale to those made on the business side of The Times last week." Sigh. So soon after their redesign launch! Yes well innovation director Lee Abrams will probably have something innovative to say about all this, soon. This is not even the extent of the bad news. See, over the weekend the FAS-FAX circulation numbers came out and basically everyone lost. Circ was down more than 5% for the LAT. Meanwhile, on our coast, the Newark Star-Ledger is slashing 40% of its newsroom staff. They are trying to sell the paper but no one wants it. It is basically a bad time to enjoy getting a paycheck. Sadly, the Newspaper Industry is not too big to fail.

Are you aware that the LA Times revealed its redesign this week? Let's hope you are, because this is what's gonna save the paper! What people both inside the Tribune Co. and out really want to know is not, "How does the redesign look?" It's, "What does Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer and Vice Admiral of the Martian Army Lee Abrams have to say about it, in his own unmistakable way?" Well: "As we've seen with all the other Tribune newspapers, the 'plunge' is the first step. Nothing more...nothing less." Ha. And?:

The LA Times is considering a redesign. One of their most prominent proposed changes: changing bylines from "Times Staff Writer" To "By (Person), Reporting From (location)," as shown. The sad, likely reason for this change: the fact that Lee Abrams, Tribune's "Innovation" officer and maker of comical pronouncements about newspapers, came into his job not even understanding what bylines and datelines mean: From an Atlantic interview with Abrams via LAObserved:

It's just so perfect. Tribune Co. already boasts gnomish asshole CEO Sam Zell, who cusses out his own employees in public, and "Chief Innovation Officer" (ha) Lee Abrams, the dumbest guy in the newspaper industry. And now Eddy Hartenstein (pictured), who Tribune hired as the new publisher of the doomed LA Times last month, is telling LAT reporters that leaking memos to blogs is "treason":

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

Gnomish Tribune CEO Sam Zell has finally deigned to respond to the fact that his own current and former employees at the LA Times filed a lawsuit against him two days ago for, essentially, making Tribune suck. We imagine Zell spent a full day throwing things around his office and carving "F.U!" in his desk with a pen knife before he calmed down enough to make a statement. Though he couldn't help but include the fact that he's outraged, absolutely outraged, at the (motherfuckers) who filed this suit. Read Zell's seething statement after the jump:

♦ NBC's Ben Silverman says he hasn't managed the "unrelenting press attention" as well as he could have, and he's doing better than most people assme, a sentiment echoed by his close pal, Donny Deutsch. [TVDecoder]
♦ Harbinger's Phil Falcone says he has no plans to dump his investment in the New York Times. [Reuters]
♦ MTV is pulling the plug on TRL. [WSJ]
♦ Mark your calendars: Jeanine Pirro's court show debuts next week. [HuffPo]
♦ Current and former staffers at the LA Times are planning to file suit against owner Sam Zell. [LA Observed]
♦ How writers in Hollywood are dealing with the "new comedic landscape." [NYO]
♦ Product placements have earned less airtime on network TV compared with the same period last year, according to Nielsen. [AdAge]
♦ How the financial meltdown will affect Hollywood. [THR]
♦ Jeff Zucker, Mel Karmazin and Steven Rattner weigh in on the state of the media biz. [Portfolio]

So Andres Martinez, the former LA Times editorial page editor who just sued his former flack girlfriend for her stunning betrayals of his confidence? Maybe totally crazy! As we mentioned this morning, Martinez's suit came after his ex, Kelly Mullens, filed a restraining order against him in DC for stalking her and generally being a psycho. According to her filing, Martinez (who now works for the Washington Post and the New America Foundation) spent months emailing her, her family, and her professional contacts, calling her mom a "whore," inventing a separate false identity, and threatening to kill himself. Yea. Here are some of the most salient allegations, which purportedly quote from Martinez's own emails: The two broke up. Then Martinez allegedly emailed Mullens over and over and over, moaning about his lost love and his bad mental state, and promising to stop contacting her (which she told him to do). But it just kept on, and got worse:

"Then he suddenly stood up and said, 'Lemme go find out something, hold on' and, inexplicably, went to lunch." [LA Times]

One positive thing to come out of the widespread layoffs that have resulted from decimation of the newspaper industry is the fact that laid off reporters feel free to speak up publicly, sharing ideas about the industry that could actually do some good in the long run. That's cold comfort to unemployed journalists, of course, but it's pretty fascinating to read what these people have to say when they're unencumbered of their corporate shackles. William Lobdell, a longtime LA Times journalist who's now quit and "gone digital," has come forth with a damning list of dozens of things wrong with his old paper. And he's as clear as you could possibly ask:

Tony Pierce is in charge of all the L.A. Times blogs (there are like 30 of them or something? Crazy.) He is a good blogger and a keen editor (signing up Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to blog was weird and awesome). So he's probably regretting sending this email, which Times arch-enemy Kaus picked up as an example of MAINSTREAM MEDIA MISSING THE POINT in re: the John Edwards Love-Child and Mistress Scandal.

Oh hey, beloved humorist Joel Stein wrote a fantastic column for the Los Angeles Times newspaper called "How to Make Fun of Barack Obama." Wait, sorry, that's the wrong link. That link goes to a post we wrote on Wednesday. We meant to link to Joel Stein's hilarious and original column, "How to make fun of Obama." Do you need reassurance that all is right with the world? Here it is: his advice directly contradicts ours, repeatedly. Did you know that Barack Obama is really gay?

Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb is making good use of his leave from the magazine! Well, besides writing John McCain's official blog. [Update: This is a different Michael Goldfarb. Who knew?] He also wrote a letter to Romenesko, as all concerned journos must at some point, with a suggestion about saving the very institution of journalism. It involves capitalism!

Nonpartisan journalist Bill O'Reilly is a man who calls em how he sees em, and that means that he's not afraid to give credit to the liberal lie-mongering site HuffPo when credit is due. When former Bush flack Tony Snow died last weekend, the AP ran an obit that was not 100% positive. Even worse, "The LA Times website allowed loons to post vile things about Tony Snow." O'Reilly condemns these examples of factual reporting and free speech, respectively; but he actually praises foreign-born socialist Arianna Huffington for scrubbing her site of all Snow smears. Truly a bipartisan lovefest! Watch the clip of what happens when you look up "Fairness" in the dictionary, below:

Ann Marie Lipinski, who went from summer intern to editor of the Chicago Tribune, is stepping down. Why? She won't really say! Except that "this position is not the fit it once was." Which is to say, not the position it was from 2001 until crazy billionaire Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company in 2007? Maybe? "Her resignation comes two months after George De Lama, the paper's managing editor for news, announced he was leaving the Tribune after 30 years." And little more than a month after Zell announced he was trimming 500 pages of news a week from his many flailing newspapers. Meanwhile-is publisher and David Hiller out at the L.A. Times? Basically every decision he's made since arriving at the paper from Chicago has enraged the already miserable LAT staff, so we figured he'd stick around for a while longer.

Remember Alex Kozinski, the 9th Circuit Court Judge who's been forced to recuse himself from an obscenity trial because of BESTIALITY PORN POSTED ON HIS WEBSITE? What a wacky story, right? Hah! That maroon! Yes well it turns out it's actually a depressing tale of outright journalistic malfeasance that could impact an important first amendment case, but whatever. The Judge, Alex Kozinski, has already declared a mistrial, and all that's left is for his wife to pen angry letters to blogs. It's all the L.A. Times' fault!

The LA Times' current news headlines: Everyone at home and abroad is dead. (Click to enlarge)

The future of newspapers? It's like a trippy mural on the side of a VW bus in a bad movie about the '60s. But with a couple more buzzwords and nonsensical statements of purpose! The LA Times, stiff suffering from every single problem a daily newspaper can suffer from, even under new, Sam Zell-approved management, took 25 editors on a staff retreat this weekend "to figure out how to stop the bleeding and regroup as a newsroom for the digital future." When they came back, they had an inspiring memo from editor Russ Stanton and the graphic you see above. Click to enlarge.

Seeing as the L.A. Times wouldn't rush any story it couldn't retract in disgrace a few weeks later, John Horn took his sweet time pounding out today's analysis of all the dramatic agency-hopping exploits over the last week-and-a-half. There's a little bit of a long view, here, however, and it's decidedly ugly; for starters, could industry volatility force CAA reps to endure the horrors of — gulp — business class? Or worse?