The layoffs at Condé Nast Digital Wednesday included not only Wired.com but also Ars Technica, the website known for its in-depth, computer-related technical articles. We're told fully seven of roughly 17 staff were cut.

More detail on the layoffs at Conde Nast Digital today (which is not an April Fool's joke, okay): Wired.com was reportedly hit hard. Internal turf war?

In your troubling Wednesday media column: layoffs at Conde Nast and the Boston Globe, Bill Keller fights back, King's officially dead, North Korea's still mean to journalists, and more:

• All those layoffs at Forbes yesterday? They continue today, sadly. [NYP]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller has a few words for Marc Bowden, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece about Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Also? He thinks VF should really beef up its factchecking department. [Romenesko]
• The biggest media company in America? That would be Disney. [BN]
• Nine of the top 10 cable news programs belong to Fox News. [HP]
• The winners of the 2008 Peabody Awards were announced today. [AP]
• Wanda Sykes is getting her own talk show. [B&C]
• Video from Bill O'Reilly's chat with David Letterman last night. [MM]
• Guiding Light is done. The final episode airs Sept. 18. [THR]

Monday we heard that WNBC's Chuck Scarborough and KNBC's Paul Moyer, the Kent Brockman and Ron Burgundy of New York, were both potential buyout targets. And now loooooooongtime WNBC sports guy Len Berman—the guy who shows the bloopers!—is getting bought out:

Chuck Scarborough has yet to be given a pink slip by WNBC, as per the rumors making the rounds yesterday, but the same can't be said for sports anchor Len Berman. The 20-year veteran of Ch. 4 will stick around for the next 30 to 60 days before bidding goodbye to his $1-million-a-year salary. Whether his "Spanning the World" bit lives on without him is unclear, although on a positive note, he'll no longer have to commute home to Long Island at 11:30pm every night. [Newsday]

In your ideal Tuesday media column: Forbes layoffs, Havana goes dark, Brian Tierney's a greedy rat bastard, career suicide, and Tina Brown's a communist:

Forbes has busy been laying off staff today. But the magazine is facing other problems, too. Billionaire Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev now says he plans to sue the mag for reducing his net worth on its recent list of the world's richest people. "Forbes magazine claimed that I lost $2.5 billion in the global financial crisis," he told the Russian news agency, Interfax. "That's absurd. I will demand compensation of material and moral damage caused by this defamation." [Guardian]

Multiple sources tell us Forbes, the troubled, Bono-backed right-wing business magazine, is set to lay of 50 or 60 employees tomorrow. And Carl Lavin, a power-hungry editor, is behind the bloodbath.

• Washington is now playing hard ball: The Obama administration has forced out GM CEO Rick Wagoner and now says the company has 30 days to finalize its alliance with Fiat if it expects to get more bailout cash. [NYT, WSJ]
• UBS plans to lay off as many as 8,000 more employees worldwide. [Reuters]
• Working at Goldman Sachs has its perks: The bank spent tens of millions bailing out several senior execs facing a personal liquidity squeeze, including former COO Jon Winkelried and general counsel Gregory Palm. [NYT]
• Bank of America plans to increase some bankers' salaries by as much as 70 percent to offset reduced year-end bonuses. [BN]
• The Blackstone Group turned down a request from regulators to disclose the performance of its buyout and hedge funds; Fortress, however, caved. [BN]
• Timothy Geithner says some financial institutions will still need a lot more government aid in the future. You're stunned by that, we're sure. [BN]

In your rubble-strewn Friday media column: rumors of carnage at Budget Travel, threats at a medical journal, advertising havoc at ESPN mag, and editors destroy everything:

• NBC is chopping 6 shows, including, yes, the Chopping Block. [THR]
• It's rumored Budget Travel has, yes, cut its budget. [Gawker]
• Another stain on Jim Cramer, not that he needs it: In '07, he called Andrew Cuomo a "communist" for proposing mortgage industry regulation. [NYT]
• The Times's Bill Keller sheds some light on yesterday's cuts and layoffs. [E&P]
• Condé Nast's Chuck Townsend sheds light on his staff changes. [AdAge]
• Lionsgate slashed 8 percent of its staff today. [THR]
• Newspaper ad revenue dropped 17.7% in 2008. [E&P]
• Americans spend 8.5 hours a day consuming video content. [NYT]
• Facebook needs a (generous) friend: It's trying to raise $100 million. [PC]
• Cable company Charter Communications is officially bankrupt. [NYT]

Amazon.com just closed warehouses for the first time since 2006, including one open just 18 months. No wonder: Penny-pinching consumers don't mind waiting a few extra days for their stuff. And CEO Jeff Bezos would no doubt prefer those in a hurry buy high-margin Kindle downloads.

Further evidence that instead of taking a tour bus to visit the suburban homes of AIG execs, taxpayers would be better off channelling their rage by staging a noisy protest outside the Beresford: After the Times reported this morning that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit signed off on tens of millions in retention bonuses to nine top execs at the firm—Pandit, himself, received a stock grant worth $2.5 million—comes word from Daily Intel that Citi is now laying off 65 janitors. Janitors. (Presumably not the same ones, though, who will be expected to clean up after Pandit in the new $10 million office, which he's currently constructing.) Two other big advantages to a Pandit protest: Unlike AIG, you won't have to make the trek to Connecticut. And PETA protesters have been there for months now, so they can show you the ropes. [NYM]

New York City's jobless rate jumped to 8.1 percent last month, up from 6.9 percent in January. It marks the biggest single-month increase in more than 30 years, according to the state Department of Labor. [Crains]

Make it official: Google's not immune from the bad economy and plummeting ad market. We've been hearing for weeks that Google would have layoffs. Google is cutting 200 employees today, the company now confirms.

• It's been a dark day at the New York Times: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Janet Robinson announced a five percent salary reduction for all editors and said 100 employees on the business side would be laid off. [Gawker, NYO, NYT]
• Blender has been shuttered; April will be the mag's last issue. [AdAge]
• The Washington Post is offering buyouts again. And if enough people don't take 'em, the paper says a round of layoffs will follow. [Politico]
• Richard Beckman is out as Condé Nast's marketing chief; he'll be heading up the company's Fairchild Fashion Group instead. [WSJ, Crains]
• It's getting a little stormy over at the Weather Channel! [NYP]
• Rod Blagojevich may have some sort of reality show in the works. [CST]
• ABC News has settled a lawsuit filed against Diane Sawyer. [NYP]
• Barry Diller is the proud new owner of SportsPickle.com. [PaidContent]
• The most newspaper-friendly city in America? Rochester! [E&P]

Gov. David Paterson is so unpopular that he may have to fend off Andrew Cuomo in the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Maybe it's time to take a page from the Cuomo playbook and give the ol' iron fist a try? Paterson announced today that he plans to lay off 8,900 state employees now that unions have refused to make concessions on pay and benefits. [NYDN]

Getting crushed by Jon Stewart last week wasn't the end of the bad news for Jim Cramer. Last week, TheStreet.com, the financial news site that Cramer co-founded and continues to oversee as chairman, lost its longtime CEO, Thomas Clarke. Today the company laid off 18 staffers as part of a plan to slash $2.4 million in costs. We'd hate to second-guess Cramer given his rep as all-knowing financial guru, but if the company was really looking to reduce overhead in a hurry, wouldn't it have been easier to have started with Cramer's seven-figure salary? Just a thought! [PaidContent]

In your outrageously newsy Wednesday media column: a PR conspiracy theory for Us Weekly, updates on Conde Nast layoffs and Interview cheapskate-ness, Steve Bartelstein vanishes, and trade mags start wheezing: