The 5% across-the-board cuts at Conde Nast are already manifesting themselves. Men's Vogue has been officially scaled back to a twice-a-year publication—meaning that it's folding, in the sense of being a regular (almost) monthly magazine. Tipsters tell us that the MV staff is getting laid off, although Conde's own statement uses the vague phrasing, "Men's Vogue will be absorbed into Vogue," leaving open the possibility of some staff retention (MV editor Jay Fielden is staying on). And All Things D reports that the entire staff of Conde's troubled business title Portfolio has been summoned into a meeting that's going on right now. Ominous. Anyone with specific info on layoffs, email us. [UPDATE: Portfolio has indeed suffered a serious cutback, along with layoffs]: The bad news at the meeting: Portfolio is going to be published ten times per year, rather than 12. The December and January issues will be combined, as well as the June and July issues. Alley Insider says that Porfolio's web staff is being cut from twenty employees to five. More layoffs may be coming. The magazine has a lot of high-profile, highly-paid journalists on its staff—and now, one-sixth less space to publish their stories.

♦ Teen Vogue is opening a retail outlet at the mall in Short Hills, New Jersey. It'll be called "Teen Vogue Haute Spot" and, no, this is not a joke. [NYT]
♦ More than 20 percent of American households watched Barack Obama's infomercial on Wednesday night. [NYT]
♦ Joe the Plumber is pursuing a country music deal and could have an album out by Inauguration Day, although we're going to assume this won't be Barack's musical choice for the big day. [Politico]

As predicted, a "bloodbath" at Condé Nast Portfolio is unfolding at 4 Times Square this afternoon. Silicon Alley Insider has the ugly news that editor Joanne Lipman shared with the mag's staff here. [SAI]

Magazines for teen girls are dying and magazines in general are dying and it's all very scary but Teen Vogue is NOT going to allow that to happen to them, do you hear me? They are NOT. Too many young women depend on them for fashion tips. And if Teen Vogue has to open up a shop in a mall in New motherfucking Jersey and brainwash young impressionable Jersey girls into becoming vapid monsters of conspicuous consumption in order to stay relevant, well, that's just what Teen Vogue is going to do. Bitch.

Assuming Barack Obama pulls this thing off next week, we imagine we're due for a deluge of media gushing over our First Black President. No, seriously, it'll make the last two years look like a dress rehearsal. And it will all lead to a glorious crescendo of treacly nonsense by January, when Obama, secret socialist muslim god willing, is sworn in. So. That really makes it all the more ridiculous that Time editor Richard Stengel has taken to the YouTubes to ask "you" who should be named the Time Person of the Year. Every sitting President has received the dubious honor, with Bush II, Reagan, Carter, Clinton, and others all getting it the years of their elections. And they were all old white guys. So go ahead and email "NOBAMA" to Stengel and see how far it gets you if Barack wins Colorado and Nevada next week. A scant two years after naming YOU Person of the Year, Time is now just jerking YOUR chain.

Quelle horreur: Conde Nast is cutting the budget of all their high-class rags by 5% across the board! Five percent of payroll and 5% of every title's expense budget. And that goes for the editorial and the business sides. The Observer calculates that it will be impossible to accomplish the cuts without layoffs. One less assistant for Vogue's Anna Wintour! A slightly less long tail for Wired's Chris Anderson! And, worst of all: could this be the end of the long road to oblivion for that emasculating Wintour plaything, Men's Vogue [UPDATE: Sort of!]?

Condé Nast publishers and editors have been instructed by the powers-that-be to cut both their staffs and budgets by five percent immediately. Also, to the 29 faithful subscribers to Men's Vogue, please be advised the magazine may be closed down in the near future. [NYO]

Yesterday we took a look at the celebrity glossies' websites, to get a sense of how this weeks issues would cover the Jennifer Hudson story. People and Us Weekly seemed like they planned to devote the most space reporting on the murders of the singer/actress's mother, brother, and nephew. And, sure enough, they were the only two to run the story as the main image on their covers. But what's inside? Us spoke with people who described the inciting incident, a fight between Hudson's brother and the man suspected of doing the killings. That story isn't really featured in any of the other five magazines we looked at, so I guess Us gets the points for that. People's is typically heavy on the personal interest, though surprisingly they didn't set aside a space for other celebrities to weigh in on the tragedy, as three others, Life & Style (they got fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama!), Us, and InTouch, did. They pretty much all have the same photos, especially the terribly cute and just, well, terribly sad photos of Hudson's seven-year-old nephew. So, who wins? Us Weekly, we guess. Though, it also kind of feels like nobody won.

Being a regular girl is work enough—God knows what being a Cosmogirl entails. A tolerance for fruitinis? The ability to exist on salad alone? The shamelessness required to "[come] to bed in a soaking wet white tee shirt"? We've been gleefully following Cosmopolitan blogger Leo (Smith '07)—her blog's narrative is "one socially awkward girl's attempts to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." At first, we pointed and laughed like bullies—but it was only because deep down, we all feel awkward. We teased her about her use of the word "[doing] the grown-up" as a euphemism for sex, and how she wondered aloud if playing the field was "immoral". We also said that "increasingly, watching her thirty-day evolution at the hands of people who professionally suggest 'how to be a total man-magnet' is like watching a gazelle getting torn apart by hyenas." That was bitchy. But we were rooting for her all along. Leo's written her goodbye post, and we were worried: did the Cosmo machine spit out a Cosmotini-swilling, Choo-wearing girl-droid in the shape of their brand?Writes young Leo:

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

What to do if you have a magazine assignment, but the mag folds days before you're scheduled to leave for freaking Alaska? If the trip's already paid for, you go anyway and hope to shop the resulting piece to another publication. That was the case with Jessica Pilot (of the infamous "Hipster Hooker" story) and Radar. "It was purchased on [editor] Maer [Roshan's] card, so I guess I'm good to go," she told us.First order of business in Wasilla: a good old-fashioned house party.

When the celebrity weeklies unveil their new covers tomorrow, we can bet they'll be dominated by coverage of the terrible Jennifer Hudson news story, in which the singer and actress's mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered on Friday. And we suppose they're right to, it being big news and all. Since the issues went to print yesterday, it's up to the websites to tease what each publication has in store (and to keep up with breaking developments). So what might each magazine be featuring? We took a look at five magazines' websites today to try to see if there were any hints of what their coverage will look like tomorrow. People, the longstanding classy version of the other tabloids, has a story (kinda far down the page, honestly) about Jennifer's bond with her mother, featuring recollections about Darnell Donerson from Jennifer's acting coach and from people in Donerson's Chicago neighborhood. It's the kind of sad human interest story that People has made their name doing. Expect sidebar reactions from American Idol judges (Hudson was a contestant on the show) and maybe one of the bigger gets, like Beyonce, Hudson's Dreamgirls costar. Us Weekly reports at a more breathless, staccato clip, giving us gory details about the number of times Hudson's young nephew was shot and quoting from Hudson's sister's MySpace, in which she mourns her lost loved ones and imagines them as her guardian angels now. In your face awfulness. InTouch, Life & Style, and OK! aren't giving the story as much prominence as Us (their older and more popular sibling). OK! does a small dissection of the dispute that lead to the whole tragedy InTouch covers Idol judge Randy Jackson's reaction to the sad news. And Life & Style has nothing about the incident on their sparsely updated site. So, once again, it looks as though Us Weekly leads the pack toward getting the scoop, though their hand at the necessary quiet, soft-touch pieces is not as nimble as People's. Us ought to get the early lead while People follows up in the coming weeks with a punch-in-the-gut Hudson interview. Or not. Maybe we'll get surprised with a big Exclusive. It could happen.

Never one to bow out of a party, just-folded Radar magazine simply re-tooled their planned Halloween event as a funeral-themed "Print Is Dead!" bash. Costumes are "strongly suggested," so attendees could simply wear their own clothes and go as recently laid-off writer-bloggers. Or just wear a bartender or temp worker's outfit.

Huffington Post reporter Jason Linkins and Ana Marie Cox on the closing of Radar last week: "It should have been Portfolio." Video after the jump.

In its story today on the rise of mall-based tattoo parlors like Tattoo Nation, the WSJ said that Tattoo Nation "has bought Inked magazine to be a larger part of the tattoo culture." Inked's Jason Buhrmester emails us to clarify: "We are actually published by Don Hellinger, the owner of Nylon and Nylon Guys. We want nothing to do with Tattoo Nation and begrudge it for wasting valuable space that could be filled with a tasty Orange Julius." The more you know.

Don't blame the Radar staff for those horrible celebrity gossip items going up on the site today. The entire staff has been locked out of the office since Friday afternoon. After the news the magazine would be folding was announced on Friday during an interminable meeting, an HR official came in to tell the staff at 1p.m. that they would need to empty their desks by 3p.m.Staffers were, of course, a bit disgruntled that they had just two hours to clear out their things, but the HR official made a little speech about how he had just lost his mother and learned in the process that stuff didn't matter nearly as much as the memories. Of course, employees looking to copy their email address books and collect their things may have disagreed. Said one unnamed ex-Radar staffer: "I'm not even sure he had a mother." But with the number of pink slips flying these days, we're sure there are worse layoff horror stories out there. Please send yours to tips@gawker.com.

And it continues: 02138, the glossy mag for Harvard alumni that was bought by Manhattan Media last May, is folding. The magazine was conceptually pretentious and we've made fun of it plenty in the past, but honestly, we don't really have the heart right now. At this point we support any publication with paying jobs. The Great Magazine Die-Off is going to be a bitch. The full statement on the magazine's death is below:

The death of Radar is just one more reminder of the incessant economic crisis that is destroying jobs for hardworking members of the media (and, you know, everyone else). But there may be an upside! Way back on September 16, when The Panic of '08 was just getting started, Curbed founder and real estate blog generalissimo Lockhart Steele made this prediction to Guest of a Guest: "You will know when we have hit the bottom of this financial crisis the very day when Radar Magazine goes out of business. And you can quote me on that!” So things should be looking up!:

It happens in threes, it seems: Radar magazine was shuttered earlier today. Then came the news that 02138, the glossy mag for Harvard grads, was closing down. Now Fashion Week Daily is reporting that Elle Accessories has folded, too.

You have to give it to Maer Roshan: he was persistent. The man was determined to will Radar magazine into existence, and he did it. Three times. And now, for the third time, the magazine is folding—and taking a pretty great website with it. (When RadarOnline.com returns under AMI next year, it will be unrecognizable). The fact is that Radar, despite having an above-average amount of good content, was just a doomed idea from the start: