When Tina Brown's Talk magazine launched in 1999, its party was one of the biggest events of the year, an overblown, garish party that sprawled over Liberty Island. Today it's a sad memory of where magazines once stood in the New York social strata. Bob and Harvey Weinstein, then the dominating heads of Miramax Films, had lured away Brown from The New Yorker and Ron Galotti, the real-life inspiration for Sex and the City's Mr. Big, from Vogue. The Daily Beast, which launched last month and is bankrolled with a supposed $18 million of IAC's Barry Diller money, splurged for a party last night at tiny Pop Burger in the Meatpacking District. People were treated to mini hamburgers and hotdogs.For the 1999 bash, guests had to take a boat from Lower Manhattan, and the party was full of celebrities (De Niro, Madonna, Demi, Paul Newman...) and literal fireworks. It resulted in the union of Salman Rushdie and his now-ex wife Padma Lakshmi, who met there. "Weinstein Brothers Revel in Vulgarity, Glory of Manhattan," was the headline in the New York Observer. "[Publisher Ron] Galotti continued his Bullworth -esque excursion into black culture by swaggering through a rap he had written for the occasion." At Pop Burger, there was an open bar. It was hard to get a drink! The event was hardly star-studded—a round up of the usual suspects you see at every media event, add a dash of Christopher Buckley and his post-National Review fame. When fact the mini-burgers ran out after 8:15, making some people sad. Yet, free prosecco still felt decadent for our lowered standards. "I'm surprised we were even able to have this!" said one guest while quaffing champagne. And the small talk? About the layoffs and the recently laid-off, as well as "I'm not even allowed to bitch about work anymore, because at least I still have a job."

Although it seems like Time Inc. has laid off upwards of 37,000 staffers in the last few weeks, the fact is that that company is still marching slowly towards its goal of 600 newly unemployed people. Today could be the worst day yet; Keith Kelly predicts as many as 250 Time Inc. layoffs by the end of the day. Cottage Living folded late yesterday, and other titles in the company's lifestyle group could be up for cuts today. Please send any layoff details and memos to us just before you walk out the door with the office stapler, never to return. [NYP]

You'd think that in these hard times more people would be scaling down to cottages, but no. Time Inc. just announced to its staff that Cottage Living—which had a rate base of 1 million(!)—is folding. The website will also die. According to an internal memo, "the economy inhibited its ability to grow and therefore, sadly, we had to make the decision to close it." Sad for cottage-livers. More sad for the apartment-living employees.

Lucky, Conde Nast's magazine about, um, shopping, has laid off three editors. [Portfolio]

LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein used his blog yesterday for the entertaining purpose of viciously mocking Variety and its Hollywood fixture editor, Peter Bart. Mocking them for being poor! This column is awesome for the following reasons: because media outlets don't usually air their dirty laundry like this; because Peter Bart and Variety certainly deserve the mocking; and most of all because Patrick Goldstein seems totally unconcerned that his own paper does the same exact thing he criticizes Variety for, and that that very thing keeps him employed. Ha: Peter Bart wrote a column of his own (Headline: "Will fiscal funk trip kudo contenders?" WTF) bitching about the lack of Oscar-related ads from the studios in Variety. Patrick Goldstein appropriately tells him to shut it:

Before Devil Wears Prada was filmed, before Project Runway made its reality television debut, before fashion grew beyond even the prominent role she had envisioned for it, Anna Wintour was compared in the Times to George W. Bush. It was one of Maureen Dowd's absurdly tortured analogies, but one of the rare ones that today sounds less ridiculous: If Page Six's source is to be believed, the Vogue editor is, like Bush, about to step away from the monster she's created, leaving to a more glamorous successor the job of revival. There is plenty to be done:

Walk by a newsstand today and it's nothing but Barack Obama and his family. As we said, treacly Obama worship will save magazines (this quarter)! But whatever Barack Obama said earlier about keeping his daughters out of the limelight seems to have given way to the American public's (and therefore magazine editors') interest in the most adorable family without a baby named Shiloh. In July, explaining why he regretted letting Access Hollywood do a brief interview with the girls, Daddy Obama said, "Generally what makes them so charming is the fact that they're not spending a lot of time worrying about TV cameras or politics."And since then, Obama has begged the press to back off while trick-or-treating and declined an invitation from Miley Cyrus for the daughters to appear on Hannah Montana. But unless the Obamas are trying to play it both ways (a well-worn gambit when it comes to politicians and their kids) then they might want to keep Sasha and Malia off magazine covers, too.

Not surprisingly at all, there are serious media layoffs today. TV Guide is laying off "up to 33 people," or 3% of its total staff. Also, Forbes—which cut chunks of its online staff last week—is laying off dozens of staffers as it merges its print and online operations into one. Read the full memo at Valleywag.

Last week, we told you about the Newsweek reporter searching for sources to answer this question: Did you make love in the name of Obama? Election-night sex resulting in conceiving an actual baby must have been too hot a trend piece to pass up. Even worse, some earnest libs actually did fornicate in the name of Obama. The resulting article is out now, and we'll admit it has a great lede—Obama himself was born "almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected."No hard stats here, other than the fact that people under thirty voted for Obama "by a margin of 2 to 1." However!

The New York Times is folding Play, its quarterly sports-focused magazine. FishbowlNY spoke to Play editor Mark Bryant, who said that although the mag broke even last year, "The company needs to make some pretty considerable cuts going forward," and his magazine was one of them. This is a bad sign. T, the Times' fashion magazine, turns enough of a profit to prop up a lot of money-sucking newsgathering operations; the NYT doubtless hoped that Play could do the same. Not in this ad market, apparently. Scratch that off the dwindling list of lifelines for the Times. [FBNY; anybody with more info can email us.]

Slate has been planning their new ladyblog—sorry, "online magazine"—as a sort-of-but-not-really competitor to our sister site Jezebel. Gals all over town want to get in on the action—some the few media jobs left! Now we know the ladies who will lead it, according to Fishbowl NY. It will be a "triumvirate" of editors (that means three): Emily Bazelon, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin. Three eds? Bad idea. Their cycles are gonna sync up after spending that much time together, which means fighting and crying might derail the publishing process once a month. But seriously, a little more on the new editors' credentials:Hanna Rosin is a journalist who started out at the New Republic and has written for heavies such as the Atlantic and the Washington Post—and is coincidentally married to Slate's managing editor. She published a book last year called God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America—about students at a new evangelical college—and often writes about the intersection of religion and politics. Emily Bazelon is a senior Slate editor. She has a law background (Yale, actually) and often covers jurisprudence. Fun fact: she's The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan's cousin. She's also written for The New Republic and Washington Post, as well as the New York Times. Meghan O'Rourke is also a Slate editor (culture), but a poet as well—she published a poetry book that garnered a full page New York Times Book Review and edits the poetry section of the Paris Review. She's married to New Yorker staffer James Surowiecki. O'Rourke is also a former New Yorker staffer, a job she got at 24, which is what partly led to our 2007 "Field Guide" called Why People Hate Meghan O'Rourke.

Vanity Fair editor and Spy founder Graydon Carter reviewed a biography of Paris Review editor George Plimpton in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday. ("I could have been a contender [to be a Great Male Author]," Plimpton once said, "If I hadn't done the Paris Review...) Carter revealed both his admiration for "George," as well as the fact that that when casting agents are scouting around for a "patrician type to play an editor ," Plimpton also had him beat—the secretly Canadian Carter was only the third choice for such a character:

♦ Barack Obama's first post-election interview with 60 Minutes (an excerpt is on your left) earned the show its biggest audience in nine years. [THR]
♦ Dan Rather has spent $2 million battling CBS thus far, but it looks like his time and money may finally be paying off. [NYT]
♦ MTV's TRL came to an end yesterday, in case you haven't heard the terribly tragic news. [NYT]
♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post appears to have warmed to Barack Obama. "So has Mr. Murdoch gone soft on liberals—or perhaps just reacted pragmatically to Mr. Obama's sizable victory?" [NYT]
♦ The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The flick generated $70.4 in its first three days. [Reuters]

Ad Age ran the numbers and found magazines eliminated 3,200 jobs between June and the end of September. And that was before the Great Magazine Die-Off! Here's what to do before your severance checks run out, former magazine people: Don't put off looking for a job; call up those contacts you thoughtfully cultivated before you were laid off and be an insane, annoying optimist. Do so and you just might be among the lucky few to snag one of the jobs on the following list, which depressingly represents the sum total of what Ad Age found to be still available, sometimes:

While we were writing that post about how there are too many layoffs to keep track of, we found out the creative director at BlackBook has been laid off, not to be replaced. Meh. [FWD]

Finally, some good news after months of Black Fridays for magazine foldings: downtown fashion mag Nylon will survive! Despite the rumors that they were closing, they assure us that they are soldiering on, says Mariana Lee in communications: "The speculation that has been posted on the internet is completely false. NYLON Magazine is not folding, and is actually doing very well." Even though we've teased them relentlessly—and wondered why Nylon Guys even exists—we'd be sad to see them go. (Where would we find the newest luxury denim and silly It Girl Peaches Geldof news?) Here's the rest of the statement:The rumors were sparked by WWD's incredibly grim picture of fashion advertising. But! Says Nylon: "Total print revenue in 2008 is up 10% from last year, and our online revenue is up 469%. Nylon Guys is doing exceptionally well, and is expanding from a quarterly and will be published 6x a year starting 2009." More here.

Does super deluxe magazine publisher Conde Nast have trouble "getting" the internet? In a macro sense we'd say they have trouble "getting" the entire magazine business at the moment, since they're in the midst of hacking 5% of their staff off every title, including dozens of online staff at CondeNet. So in that sense their troubles are equally distributed! But as Big Money points out today, Conde has been particularly slow to embrace the web, especially considering the company's level of prestige. Could the problem be.... ego? Big Money says, correctly, that even the magazines with good websites have a relatively weak online presence considering their role in the media power structure. Conde, which was late to take the internet seriously, is even worse, although it owns some of the best magazines in the country.

♦ Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch's right-hand at News Corp., may be planning to depart the company in the near future. [LAT]
♦ 60 Minutes has snagged the first interview with Barack Obama. [THR]
♦ WWD has a roundup of how magazines will fare overall in 2008. Most of the news is depressing, yes, but there are a couple of bright spots: Elle and Men's Journal reported 3 percent increases in ad pages. [WWD]
♦ You knew this one was coming: Political statistics star Nate Silver is reportedly shopping a pair of books to publishers. [NYO]

How long can the dying print media ride the feel-good Obama victory wave? Forever and ever and ever! Or at least another month, maybe. The effect on newspapers was only one day long (and for as long as they can sell reprints of that issue—six months?), but magazines are just starting to take their share of the American Dream, which is to pimp out our hopeful new black president for every last dollar his likable young ass can generate. Ready to pay extra for a thin, hastily assembled package of glossy photos and sickeningly reverent journalistic pablum? Sure you are!:

We asked earlier for tips about layoffs at Time Inc.'s Essence, and have since heard about 12 people were let go — around 10 from marketing and business and two from editorial. A shared services group on the same floor, which services several magazines, lost four more. It's been nearly a month now of watching Time Inc. layoffs unfurl, and we can't help but wonder if the magazine group might not have spared survivors some pain and the company some bad publicity by executing a little faster.