Times editor Bill Keller's hand was suspected in the May departure of Michael Oreskes from the Times-owned International Herald Tribune. "Fiercely ambitious" Oreskes once vied for editorship of the Times itself, the Post's Keith Kelly reported at the time, and may have been made to pay for a "long history of animosity" with Keller. Now another IHT hand, Serge Schemann is being nudged out the door after accusations of disloyalty to Keller, an email tipster claims. His supposed crime: A meeting with former IHT publisher Michael Golden, the rival and cousin to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, just hours after a "make or break" November IHT meeting in Manhattan, a meeting that presumably involved Sulzberger underling Keller.

Computer maker SGI has yet to file its annual report with the SEC. Its excuse: The company is "continuing to work with its independent auditors, KPMG, to help them complete their audit procedures." That's a bit like telling your 3rd-grade teacher that your homework is late because you're still working on it. The company recently laid off 7 percent of its workforce, and SGI CEO Bo Ewald also got a $150,000 bonus that, under the terms of the company's bonus plan, was undeserved.

It's always fun to see a journalist fall on his sword. It has that righteous feel of a principled but stubborn man putting on his dinner jacket to sit calmly on the deck of the sinking Titanic. Except in the case of the newspaper industry, that man would eventually float to the surface and go into PR. Anyhow, the editor of a Southern California business paper called The Business Press got himself stone cold fired for blasting out an adorably serious email about how design changes are eroding the paper's credibility. He was promptly ejected from the building! Fey big city media elites who mock traditional newspaper values can learn something from the memos below. (How to get fired):

Time Warner CFO John Martin told investors yesterday that while online subsidiary AOL's ad network Platform-A "had been growing like a weed,'' the company now doubts it will hit its revenue targets. "We have seen some cancellations," Martin told conferencegoers. "It gives us pause in terms of our confidence to ramp advertising in the back half of the year.'' AOL also laid of 5 to 10 employees from its "Shared Services" group yesterday, SAI reports — the only surprise there being the small size of the cut. AOL's recent efforts to combat waning advertiser and consumer interest in its brand include creating a new huge banner ad format and also allowing AOL.com visitors to access email from other providers.

Carat president Scott Sorokin found himself explaining to AdAge his version of a major company restructuring for the struggling ad firm, which focuses on Internet and interactive TV advertising. Carat clients have included Adidas, Hyundai, Microsoft and Ofoto. Yes, the downsizing will affect Carat's San Francisco office on Brannan near 4th. How do we know? Because someone accidentally sent PowerPoint and Word attachments meant for upper management to the entire company.

Oh dear, it seems that the corporate leadership of a media agency has royally fucked up. Carat decided it had to lay off some workers. So the honchos carefully prepared secret internal talking points and strategy memos laying out exactly how they would break the news to the staff and clients, and deal with the media fallout. Then they accidentally emailed all that shit to their entire agency. Ha. Ha. Ha. The highlights are just so delicious: Lesson 1: Layoffs provide innovation, somehow. Message to clients:

A tipster writes: "Big cuts at CMP/Techweb this week also... Light Reading lost a couple, InfoWeak... death of print!" TechWeb, an infotech trade publisher formerly known as CMP, is best known — if you can call it that — for its flagship print title, InformationWeek, and also runs a collection of websites and events.

Lehman Brothers is laying off as many as 1,500 people. [Dealbreaker]

A tipster writes: "PC World continued its slide into the trashcan of history yesterday; 6 more employees were laid off yesterday; a couple in art, a couple in editorial and a couple of support staff." The IDG-owned print monthly has held up better than its main rival, PC Magazine, but beloved editor Harry McCracken left in May to launch his startup, Technologizer. Anyone know more?

"Sure, I know some people at Yahoo," says an industry executive. "They're scared. The company's in Titanic mode." The latest exec to scurry off the ship: Ten-year veteran Steve Boom, the No. 2 at Yahoo Mobile, says TechCrunch, which broke the story. What prompted his departure? Not sure yet, but we've heard Boom's division talked about as the target of layoffs.

"The Mort Zuckerman-owned paper is looking for 25 volunteers in the newsroom to take buyouts as the paper copes with a decline in ad revenue." [Post]

Back in the '90s, Wayne Cox earned $150,000 a year leading Palo Alto-based Varian Medical Systems's engineering department, at one point overseeing development of a profitable tumor-eradicating machine called the Multileaf Collimator. He lived in a $700,000 home with his wife and two kids. Then in 1996, Varian laid off Cox as a part of a company reorganization. 12 years later, Cox is divorced, homeless and in jail, arrested for running into and killing a pair of septuagenarians out for a Sunday stroll. A witness to the accident told the San Jose Mercury News that after the collision, Cox "reached out the window to push one of the dying victims off his hood, then drove away." Varian board member Dick Levy told the paper: "He must have gone through hell in his personal life to have dropped such a long way."

Yahoo sources told BoomTown's Kara Swisher that there's a price to be paid for management's lofty promises to shareholders. Top executives are considering "cutting costs" in Yahoo's mobile operations and the Santa Monica-based Yahoo Media Group. A Yahoo executive tells us that he doesn't buy the layoff rumors, and he's "not overly worried." So who are Swisher's sources and why are they spreading so much doom and gloom? That's just life at Yahoo, our source said:

What's a clever way AOL can avoid datacenter layoffs? Today's featured commenter, Tnuc, has the plan:

Gannett-the largest newspaper company in America and owner of USA Today-said today it plans to cut 1,000 jobs from its smaller local papers. That amounts to about 3% of the total workforce. Six hundred of those cuts will likely be in the form of layoffs. It's a rough message, coming on the same day that rival McClatchy announced a wage freeze, Cox announced its desperate newspaper fire sale, and Sam Zell's Tribune Company lost its daily $20 million. Nobody seems able to find a competitive advantage in their rivals' misfortune. A month ago, a rash of cuts at print publications made us declare Print's Black Wednesday; today, Black Thursday, has been even worse. Soon the newspaper industry won't have any days left.

On August 20, big layoffs are expected in AOL's technology operations. AOL CEO Randy Falco's vision for the Time Warner-owned Internet company: Get rid of all that messy Internet stuff. Madison Avenue, let's do lunch! Stripping AOL down to an ad-sales operation (and a collection of Web properties on which to place ads) requires shedding some of the things AOL was best known for — like hosting large-scale websites. After AOL bought Weblogs Inc., gadget blog Engadget handled Macworld-keynote traffic like a champ. Alas, the server farms are soon to be put out to pasture, if a tipster is correct. Commenter aoltech1 writes:

Nick Grouf once told me he started his online-advertising agency, Spot Runner, in Los Angeles, not Silicon Valley, for one reason: The video-production talent he needed to customize television ads en masse was down south. Now, a laid-off employee tells us Spot Runner has axed 100 employees, and is abandoning its original business of helping small businesses buy locally targeted TV ads. (Update: Rosabel Tao, a Spot Runner spokeswoman, says the actual number is 50, about 10 percent of the company's employees.) The startup, which recently made a high-profile hire in Joanne Bradford, a Microsoft media executive, is now focusing on reselling online ads to small businesses, and competing with established agencies to manage TV buys for large brands. Despite the layoffs, the company is hiring — but mostly for search-engine marketing jobs. That leaves Grouf competing in two crowded fields, from the wrong city, with little to distinguish his company. Save, that is, for the inflated expectations of his investors, who have piled $111 million into a vision which has proven wrong. (When asked to explain why he raised $51 million in May, Grouf specifically denied that his company was running short on cash.) Here's the layoff tip:

Yahoo's Aikido and Judo projects, briefly mentioned in a New York Times story, "are, in fact, yet another round of navel-gazing strategy overview efforts," Kara Swisher reports. Translation: more layoffs to come. [BoomTown]

"Morale, which took a tumble when CEO Susan Lyne left last month, has slumped even further, according to one insider." [Post]

BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we've learned that, at the last minute, the jobs of two sales engineers, an HR manager, and an office manager were spared. Another tipster — "you can guess as to whether I'm an insider or not" — says that the BitTorrent layoffs aren't the fault of new CEO Doug Walker, who came to the those-crazy-kids file-sharing startup to add some enterprise-software gravitas. Instead, the elimination of BitTorrent's sales and marketing departments amounts to a coup by cofounders Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, pictured here to Walker's right and left, who are giving up on the notion of marketing BitTorrent's file-sharing technology to businesses and hardware makers, and instead pinning their hopes on becoming an "Internet peace corps."That's the second time I've heard that phrase from BitTorrent tipsters, so I'm guessing it's already widely used, if poorly understood, within the company. Anyone care to explain what an "Internet peace corps" is — and how this plan will pay back BitTorrent's investors, who have invested at least $24 million in the company? Our tipster also says Walker's trying to raise a third round of financing amidst this uproar. Here's his detailed recounting of BitTorrent's woes: