More sunny economic news for the newspaper industry: yesterday the financial ratings firm Fitch put out a report predicting that "several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010." Oh joy! You won't have to complain about your shitty local fish wrapper much longer, if you live in "some cities" (*NEWARK*, ahem). This would really be a serious change in American civic life, people. Crooked city councilmen and religious nut school board members are bound to run wild without any reporters telling people what they're up to. Well, buck up, doomed papers in "some cities"—every other newspaper will have a hellish year, too:

♦ Anna Wintour has responded to rumors she's leaving Condé Nast: "I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future." [NYO]
♦ Chris Matthews could be seriously considering quitting MSNBC to run for Senate. Or he could be using it as a negotiating tactic. [Politico]
♦ The Grammy noms were announced last night, in case you missed it. [AP]
♦ NBC has halted production of Knight Rider. [THR]
♦ More on the changes afoot at Random House. [NYO]
♦ ABC will air Homeland Security USA, a reality show produced in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, in January. Really. [NYT]

You may not know that Kanye West—the eclectic business mogul best known for his muppet shows, model wrangling, blogging, and MacBook stress-testing—is also a bit of a fashionista. He loves the clothes and whatnot! So much so that he wants to take time off from his other ventures and go intern in a fashion house. Celebrity fashion-related intern trend now officially official!

Recently, we re-introduced Gawker Pin-Ups, in which we scour the web (and your Facebook pages) for hottt photos of people in (or vaguely around) the media. And I was thinking: why fight the system when you can be the system, or at least make the system work for you? One of the jobs I never got fired from was art modeling, which is like one step above food preparation. It was more interesting than telemarketing, which I did get roundly dismissed from. Pop quiz: if I'm laid off by the end of this month, and I get paid by the pageview, then why not use it for my very own benefit? No way: I would never exploit my likeness for pageviews. Haha, yeah right. Click through, cookie. (Do not want? Do not care!)

This morning, it was announced that NBC Universal is cutting 30 people from its sales team. But that is just the beginning. TVNewser says that NBCU has started a round of planning 500 layoffs which could continue through today and into next week. We'll be updating this post as more NBCU layoff news comes in [More info on NBC News cuts now added]. Here's what we know so far:

Is haggard MSNBC host Chris Matthews actually running for Senate from Pennsylvania? Against five-term senior Republican Arlen Specter? Really? Politico says he's house-shopping in Philadelphia! He's asking insiders whether he should step down from MSNBC before his contract expires! Oh, and about that contract: it expires in June.

The long-feared Viacom pre-post holiday layoffs are here, and they're not pretty. We heard earlier that as many as 300 layoffs might be coming at MTV today, but the total, Viacom-wide numbers are even worse: 850 people are being cut, about 7% of the company's global staff. And top management is "suspending salary increases" next year, if it makes you peons feel any better. The full internal memo that went out this morning is after the jump; if you know more about the specific breakdown of the layoffs, email us. UPDATES: additional memos from MTV and Paramount added below:

Eliot Spitzer has a new job! John Koblin reports that starting tomorrow, the scandalized ex-guv is going to be writing a column for Slate called "The Best Policy." It will be about "the financial crisis and fixing financial markets and the economy generally," and will almost certainly be very informative (Spitzer was once a populist hero, remember!) and very boring. Because really, do you think Spitzer's going to run down his hooker stories (which is what everyone actually wants to hear) in Slate? He's saving that for the book. They should have gone after Ashley Dupre as a columnist instead. "THE SEX POLICY." It's a win-win. [NYO]

Although the business of journalism is currently in the process of imploding, the romance of journalism remains. So while journalists can't find jobs any more, they can at least take comfort in the fact that they are very attractive subjects for Hollywood! The Sundance Film Festival released its lineup today, and there are no less than three documentaries that are all about the drama of the A-list press. They could all conceivably be good, although Anna Wintour sounds like a far more compelling subject than Nick Kristof:

Glossy city magazine publisher Niche Media had layoffs at several titles in October. Now the company has folded Atlanta Peach. Neither Niche Media nor the South can have nice things. [AJC]

There are so many ad messages out there that in order to break through and stick in your mind, sometimes companies have to use a little old tactic that experts like to call "Reverse Psychology." It's an advanced technique, and you might not know it when you see it—but you'll be able to tell when you find that you've unwittingly played right into the marketer's hands! That's why you should be very careful to watch out for some sneakiness in this ad for a new religious TV network. There's Satan, urging you not to watch the new channel. Is he giving an accurate assessment, or is there some underlying message here that's not being said? See if you can pick up on the psychological subtleties of these clever, Jesus-based media masterminds:

Back in September, we reported rumors that deluxe listings magazine Time Out New York was having trouble paying its bills. There was speculation that the magazine "won't make it to the end of the year." TONY dismissed the rumors and assured its staff: "Happily, our New York investors, who understand the value of the brand you have all built and have been entirely supportive over the past 14 years, remain fully committed to us." Can you guess what happened today? Yes, those investors are putting the magazine up for sale:

Hey Michael Phelps, America is transfixed by your endorsement deals for some reason! The golden fishboy should, by all rights, have fallen out of the spotlight by now. It's been what, like, four months since he won any Olympic medals? Old news. But by god people just love this goofy ass-grasper, so we and the rest of the media will continue to tell you exactly what he is formally recommending for public consumption. Today, the story of how one tiny company swindled the unsophisticated manchild into ongoing indentured servitude:

Can Tina Brown and her newfangled "website" The Daily Beast singlehandedly provide refuge to all of New York's talented laid-off writers? Ha, no, of course not, not even a glimmer of a chance. She'll be lucky to get through the next two years without burning through tens of millions in start-up funds and flaming out like the Talk magazine of the internet. But there's no reason talented laid-off writers can't get a piece of that sweet monetary pie while it's here! The Observer notes that Tina's passing out freelance bylines to many deserving newly unemployed vets of dead publications like Radar and the New York Sun, like a blond Brit Santa with a media fetish. And the pay is not bad! Not by recession standards, at least:

Conde Nast boss Si Newhouse will have you know that that rumor going around about him going to Europe to work out the details of replacingVogue editor Anna Wintour with her French counterpart is utter hogwash! "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard," Condé Nast's Si Newhouse told us via flack (first quoted in the Wall Street Journal). "There is no truth to it." Si finally sent in his denial from Europe, where he is, ah, not talking to anybody about any magazine jobs. [Pic: NYO]

Cox Newspapers, publishers of papers including the Palm Beach Post, Austin American-Statesman, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (among 14 other local dailies) is closing its Washington Bureau. The bureau was founded in 1974 and has won Pulitzers and all that jazz. This also means the end of Cox's five foreign bureaus! Also they're selling three papers! Cox Enterprises co-owner Anne Cox Chambers is the fourth richest woman in America, with an estimated net worth of $13 billion. She shares the privately-owned company with the children of her late sister Barbara Cox Anthony, whose net worth was estimated at a paltry $12 billion upon her death last year. (Pictured: James M. Cox founds a newspaper that will no longer be profitable in 100 years.) [AP via Google]

When the Huffington Post reported last night that David Gregory would be the next host of Meet The Press, all the other online news sites treated it as a rumor. Then today Politico ran the same story, citing anonymous sources, and everyone accepted it as a confirmed fact. Why? It's just the new rules of online sourcing at work. The outsourcing of sourcing!

Tragedy of the elite: we hear that Sheryl WuDunn, the wife of Times columnist Nick Kristof, has been laid off from her job as a private wealth advisor at Goldman Sachs—a casualty of Goldman's plan to cut 10% of staff. She was a longtime journalist, and wrote for the Times, Reuters, and the WSJ before going into banking. She married Kristof in 1988 and won a Pulitzer in 1990 for her reporting in Beijing. Rather ironic that the journalist in the family is now the breadwinner over the banker, no? The lesson here: just when you thought you were getting out of the crappy journalism industry... it PULLS YOU BACK IN! And lays you off at your new job. Care to watch Nick and Sheryl appear together on Charlie Rose back in happier days? Then click through to do so!

This blog has been making fun of and predicting death for Conde Nast social networking site Flip.com since early 2007, when Flip was only a few months old. Our skepticism was based on the observation that the idea of spending millions of dollars building a social networking site for teen girls based on flipbooks is dumb. And now it appears that our predecessors were prescient, because Fashionista is reporting that Flip is shutting down for good on Dec. 16th. Duh. If you have more information, email us. UPDATE: It's official. The death notice sent to Flip.com users is below:

Extremely tall man David Gregory will be your next host of Meet the Press. He's still famous mostly for dancing and for arguing with Bush press secretaries, which proves that he's a serious journalist, and it also served the press well to look like it was totally standing up to Bush just as it served the administration well to look like innocent victims of the liberal media. That is how the world works. Who knows how he'll perform on that show, because frankly the format itself is outdated and useless. The late Tim Russert was no prize either, friends. But Gregory is just... kind of annoying.