Not that we're merchants of gloom, the latest figures for magazine advertising are dismal. Tallies of the number of pages carrying advertising in the first quarter, an early indicator of publishing woes, are down by double-digit percentages at news weeklies such as Time and business magazines such as Business Week. The only surprise is that Keith Kelly, who published the figures in today's Post, didn't tweak Mort Zuckerman, proprietor of a rival tabloid. Zuckerman's pet news magazine, US News & World Report, fell 37.5%. One perky spot: Martha Stewart's Everyday Food, now the last best hope of the magazine industry, as well as frustrated cookie-bakers.

The Atlantic is a magazine about news and culture and stuff. It has been continually published for thousands of years—its founding editor was Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Now, though, the internet, which has made Americans forget how to read, is killing it. They struck back recently by putting on their cover a woman who is famous for being mentally disturbed, and now they've gone so far as to bring on brand consultants. Folio reports that Atlantic Media hired "an integrated marketing agency to handle its rebranding." They're redesigning the magazine and relaunching the website! Next fall they will "roll out of a full-scale marketing campaign to communicate the brand message." This is "something the Atlantic has never done" because it is a thing that was invented by marketing agencies ten years ago. [The Atlantic]

Marc Jacobs: former addict turned narcissistic gym-goer. That's the takeaway from GQ's new profile of the ubiquitous fashion designer, and perhaps that's exactly what one should expect. He's really good friends with his personal trainer! He has a tattoo of SpongeBob! He had a bad childhood! But now he's fabulous and not on drugs and working out at the David Barton Gym for hours before peacocking around town! The real lesson here is that if you write about fashion designers like Marc Jacobs, you're working with a limited palette from the start. But we'll fill you in on the specifics—including his mom's bad taste, his own self-loathing, and his friendship with "Easy," after the jump.

The rich and famous old ladies of the website WowOWow were talking about privacy and stalkers, and the book The Devil Wears Prada came up as a cautionary tale: Beware your office servants! Devil, of course, was written by a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour and was believed to be a lightly fictionalized portrayal of Wintour. WowOWow's Judith Martin, aka Miss Maners, described the book as "a huge argument for separating your business life from your personal life. Your personal assistant - so-called personal - should not be doing things in your private life and therefore she wouldn't be privy, or he wouldn't be privy to it." Oh, excellent: This is exactly the sort of catty backbiting we had hoped for from WowOWow. A lengthier exchange:

Does anyone here read Missbehave magazine? It's a fun, loopy girlmag. Singer Kelis ("I'm Bossy!") has her own advice column, the fashion spreads are bright and colorful and out-there. Shmancy writers, like Cintra Wilson, occasionally contribute. There was an article on how to dress like a stripper a few issues ago, and a Heatherette spread starring Lydia Hearst. It's "downtown" without the overly-precious, gushy NYLON sensibility, and some of the writing is satisfyingly freewheeling. Folio reviews the mag so far, pointing out that the "mag's models are less kempt, more ordinary, and more overtly sexual than most." Oh noes! Oh yes. How could you not love something with a swimsuit spread starring furries?

A tipster sends us this purported "Goodbye" email from Penthouse Media publisher Diane Silberstein, who we heard was fired last week "because there were disputes over how 'hard' they wanted the girls to look/pose." This email contains no hardcore scenes, so it must be real. Click to enlarge.

In 1999, BusinessWeek production manager Nicholas White went outside to smoke a cigarette and, upon returning, got stuck in an elevator. For 41 hours. The story of his ordeal is woven through Nick Paumgarten's new New Yorker feature about elevators, and is, predictably, the most interesting part. It's amazing how much 41 hours in a small metal box altered White's life forever, for the worse. And—oh yes—there is (sped-up) security camera footage of him the entire time. It's mesmerizing, because you can imagine him slowly going insane, which is exactly what's happening. Below, the video, and the article's summary of White's life since he was rescued. Let this be a cautionary tale to all of you who may find yourself similarly ensared in this most primal of New York office drone nightmares!

Erica Jong says Matt Taibbi wants to fuck his mom! But he can't, so instead he channeled that desire into print by calling Hillary Clinton's arms "flabby." It's all part of the feminist author Jong's theory of "Misogyny, Momism, and Militarism," which she chronicled on the Huffington Post. "Momism is a kind of Oedipal obsession with the bad mother — to counter a boy's attraction to his good mother...You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her," she explains. Taibbi, the angry Rolling Stone writer who is the most entertaining political journo in America, surprisingly took offense to Jong's logical inference that his use of an accurate adjective in a magazine story pointed to his own desire for incest. So he replied: you're an old, ignorant hack, Erica Jong!

When eccentric billionaire and Maxim publisher Felix Dennis confessed to killing a man in an interview last week, he quickly realized, once the hangover wore off, that he'd need some expert public relations help with this mess. So he turned to the trusty Drew Kerr, the former Radar publicist who managed to hang on to his Maxim account even as his firm, Four Corners, dwindled to little more than Drew himself and a bag of baby carrots. (Drew was very proud of that baby carrots-sent-to-Gawker stunt). So how does Kerr help the menacing Dennis back out of his murder confession? With an ill-timed joke about how he's only a killer of magazines.

Cosmo, the sassy, sexy source of sex secrets he's too scared to tell you, is going to an incredible amount of effort to promote its August issue: the magazine is trying to break the Guinness World Record for "most people photographed on a beach in a bikini." The old record? 1,010 girls on a beach in Australia, set last year by... Cosmo! Good to see they have a hobby. They need 1,200 "chicks 18-34" to show up on Miami's South Beach next Friday, so start hitchhiking now! You'll get a free Old Navy bikini, "style to depend on available quantity and selection." Unfortunately swimsuit photos appeal primarily to straight men, who don't buy Cosmo anyways, so this is all a big waste of time. After the jump, photos of the last record, which is still perfectly good and pointless if you ask us:

Bill Cosby is back in the news! And as cranky as ever. The Atlantic has a loooooong think piece about Cosby by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who incidentally is one of the only tolerable writers about hip hop ever to work outside of the music press. Coates runs down Cosby's whole history, and his transformation from the friendly black face popular with black and white Americans alike to a latter-day Booker T. Washington whose gruff dismissal of things like, you know, racism, rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the key lesson of the story: whatever you do, don't ask Bill Cosby about Obama!

A tipster writes in to say that Diane Silberstein, president and publisher of Penthouse Media Group, just got "FIRED!!!!!!!!." She was formerly the publisher of Playboy. The explanation: "She was fired because there were disputes over how 'hard' they wanted the girls to look/pose." Well then, this raises several questions. Did Diane Silberstein really get fired? Can someone confirm for us? And more importantly, how "hard" do you think the girls of Penthouse should look/ pose? We'd say somewhere between steel bar hard and diamond-tipped drill hard, but we like it hardcore. Your thoughts on these vital issues in the comments, please. [pic via MB]

Nielsen Business Media—which publishes Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Editor & Publisher and the Hollywood Reporter—is laying off "between 40-50 staffers," including people from the editorial departments of all of those publications. :( We've known Adweek's in trouble. They've cut back to 36 issues a year, lost staffers they haven't bothered to replace, and suffered under the regime of cruel editress Alison Fahey. Any more info on who's been hit? Let us know. [Folio, Agency Spy]

Portfolio's Joanne Lipman must be chafing at the New York Observer's flattering profile of her managing editor, Jacob Lewis. For sure, John Koblin's piece is the first positive coverage of the business magazine in a while. But almost every passage, while praising the new managing editor's calming influence on the troubled Conde Nast title, is an implied criticism of Lipman's management style.

I once wrote a story about Consumer Reports that involved a field trip to the timeless, servicey magazine's headquarters and labs. They're an amazing sight, and certainly the most fun place to visit in Yonkers. They take their work very seriously. Testing washing machines, for example, involves counting individual strands of frayed string off test items that have been washed hundreds of times. Their audio testing lab is a free-floating, echo-proof room that looks like a Star Trek set. This is my anecdotal way of introducing the fact that Consumer Reports has posted a selection of its classic testing photos, and after the jump you can find the five most amusing—one for each decade from the 1930s to the 1970s. Back to the future!

A full list of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners follows. A few surprises in there: did we know that Bob Dylan got a Special Citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power"? And that the Editorial Writing award went to... no one?

The guy who runs tech security for Condé Nast has admitted lying to the FBI and lending his services to private detective Anthony Pellicano even though he knew Pellicano was tapping people's phones. He's also been accused, in the course of Pellicano's racketeering and wiretap trial, of leaking a pre-publication copy of Vanity Fair that Pellicano mysteriously obtained, and of bragging about bugging the office of his Condé Nast supervisor. So why does he still have a job?

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, a chimp-rights group, is assailing Sports Illustrated with a vicious letter-writing campaign! The group is upset that the magazine used a macaque (FANCY WORD FOR "MONKEY") and a bear in its photo shoot for this year's Swimsuit Issue [Folio]. S.I. is like, whoa! We take care of the animals, and besides, what mammal wouldn't be happy nestled up against the thighs of a swimsuit model? The two bear/ model-relations pictures, which have caused all the human outrage, after the jump. The bear does look kind of annoyed by that muzzle.

"Both men share what could be called 'Economist-envy.' In 2007, the Economist newsmagazine, published by U.K.-based The Economist Newspaper Ltd., saw an 8.5% increase in advertising pages compared with 2006, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. By contrast, Newsweek's advertising pages dropped 6.7% and Time's fell 6.9%." [WSJ]

The pregnant guy who appeared on Oprah today? Ex-woman Thomas Beatie? He was officially a hot chick, according to People, earning a finalist slot in Miss HawaiiTeen USA back in the day. Finalist or not, he looks kind of mannish to me. And apparently to himself as well: "I always felt masculine, even as a woman," the caption reads. Click through for a larger pic and two other shots from the People spread, via Guanabee.