The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a five-year low today, closing down nearly 450 points. And the New York Times Co. had an even worse day. The company's stock dove almost 10%, lower than it's been in decades. And just after the close of the markets came the payoff: the company is cutting its dividend to six cents per share, down from 23 cents last quarter. How bad is it? Very bad. How long can the company last before calling bankruptcy if things keep going like this? We're putting the question to you. In one sense, it's wise for the company to cut the dividend, because it needs to conserve all the cash it can get. But it's pretty apocalyptic for its stock, because it just makes it that much more unattractive to investors. The company also released its October revenues just minutes ago. How are those? Horrible! Total revenues are down 9.4% from last year, and ad revenues are down more than 16%.

Canadian British Lord and newspaper magnate and stupid criminal Conrad Black is currently serving 78 months in federal prison for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. Black was an old friend of William F. Buckley and Henry Kissinger (before they stabbed him in his wrongfully convicted back) so obviously he's in with the right crowd. This is why he seems to think he's going to get a pardon! And he'd like his old newspaper company to maybe pay for it.

More on yesterday's gutting of Time's European bureau: threats are involved! We hear that Time Inc. stuffed suits told the Time London office "that if news and details of the layoffs were leaked, they might have their severance reduced." Whoever made that threat is an asshole, and one whose threat failed to accomplish its purpose. So there. We also hear the company is "axing the London art, imaging, and copy-editing departments," and firing two staffers in the photo department. And all of this is causing staffers to be pissed—predictably—at Time editor Richard Stengel [UPDATE: and more clarity on the layoffs below]: A tipster writes:

The recount in the Minnesota Senate race between asshole comedian Al Franken and regular asshole Norm Coleman is underway! And the campaigns have lawyers standing by to challenge every vote. So Drudge has had this image up all day, with the headline "DRAMA: Franken Is Challenging This Ballot." Yes, bullshit, obviously. The voter intent is clear. On the other hand, the Coleman campaign is challenging this ballot, this ballot, and this ballot. The whole recount system is obviously broken, the well-intentioned voter intent laws are being manipulated by the campaigns, and this nonsense will not be over with by the end of the year. Or, you know, Al Franken is stealing the election, whichever one you want to believe. [MPR via Wonkette]

We're hearing from a good source that Tom Curley, the head of the Associated Press, just held a town hall meeting to tell employees that the AP "will lose 10% of its staff next year." At a current headcount of over 4,000 employees, that would translate to at least 400 jobs lost, which could theoretically come through either layoffs or voluntary buyouts. Several cash-strapped newspapers—including the entire Tribune Co.—have recently announced plans to drop their AP subscriptions. Still, this would be a massive cut for what has always been one of the steadiest possible realms of journalism. AP employees with more details on this, email us. UPDATE: The AP has sent us a statement, which doesn't contain any numbers but acknowledges that cuts may be coming—though mostly through attrition, they hope:

Fox News mastermind, old Nixon image reformer, and all-around American democracy-damaging propagandist Roger Ailes leaked the news to Drudge that Roger Ailes is getting a contract extension at News Corp. Developing! Ailes, the president of Fox News, has been focused on launching and building the Fox Business Network for the last year, which he failed at, miserably, and meanwhile Fox News itself has begun a long-overdue tailspin into delusional irrelevance, with cranky Brit Hume retiring and Shep Smith the channel's sole voice of reason as Hannity and Greta Van Susteren run wild. So hey, Ailes will remain at the wheel through Obama's first term, probably. Maybe he can right the ship and transform it into a coherent (if still nutso) voice of opposition? Or maybe it will continue to be a madhouse of feverish conspiracy and paranoia. Either way, Roger, like his Fox Business Network, will not sweat the recession.

♦ Roger Ailes (left) has renewed his contract with News Corp., which will keep him by Rupert Murdoch's side for at least five more years (and keep him running the show at Fox News for at least one more presidential election). [NYT]
♦ New York has fired longtime restaurant critic Gael Greene. [Feedbag]
♦ The Runway battle continues: Lifetime has sued NBC over claims it is blocking the cable channel from airing future episodes of the reality TV show. [NYP]

Unreconstructed Liberals have their own reasons for disliking the Clintons, and movement conservatives obviously have even more, but what the hell explains the pathological antipathy the Washington Press Corps still feels for President Bill and Senator Hillary Clinton? The roots of it go back 16 years or so, but what's amazing is to see it still in such pristine condition, as if we haven't had eight terrible years to get over it. Now, as the Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State job offer becomes yet another press-driven telenovela, with the Clintons as, I dunno, the country's presumed dead ex-lover who just turned up on the day of our wedding to Barack Obama, or something, it's instructive to see how the press corps still sees the former first family. Christopher Hitchens comes at the Clinton issue as an old-timey Leftist (leftists hate liberals!) and also a drunken contrarian, but his comments and criticisms have been accepted by the resolute centrists of the DC press corps as a, bizarrely, an argument against Clinton with a great deal of popular support. The opinion of Chris Hitchens represents the views of precisely one person on this planet. He is representative of no one on the left, right, or in the center. You wouldn't know that from listening to Joe Scarborough:

The latest rumor is that MTV is planning a round of layoffs for early December. Now a tipster tells us that fellow Viacom property VH1 is holding a big HR meeting for department heads tomorrow. To sharpen the hatchet? Email us details. UPDATE: MTV layoffs are tentatively set for December 3 or 4, according to another tipster.

Credit where it's due, people: the Post's cover this morning (click to enlarge) is simply a work of tabloid art. Sure, it's easy to sell papers when there's big news. But on a slow day, can you pull off a cover that combines revulsion, a perverse obsession with strange diseases, and a mythical monster? That's the news business at its finest. It's a heartwarming narrative: freaky baby born with freaky condition, doctors stumped, he begs for salvation, and it's finally delivered! Something we can all get behind. The Post is actually far more subtle than its tabloid ancestors:

[Update: We heard from Slate and they say there's no dude site in the works, though Slude is still an awesome name.] From a tipster: "Rumor is that Slate is spinning of another site, this one a counterpart to [new female-oriented spinoff] Double X, but for dudes. It is so far unnamed, but its codename around the office is Slude, and apparently they want Bryan Curtis to come back and run it." Bryan Curtis was always writing for now-dead Play, so he should have time! is now keeping busy as a senior editor for Tina Brown's Daily Beast. Know more? Email us.

Former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams seems to have noticed that his plan to start a PR firm made up of actively employed members of the media who will sell their consulting services to corporate clients is causing some uproar among people who believe that it would be a blatant conflict of interest for any journalist to be part of it. Which should include you, and anyone else who doesn't think members of the media should take outside pay for PR work. Abrams and his cohort in the project, former HuffPo media critic Rachel Sklar, offered long defenses of the idea to Daily Intel. Let's do some critical analysis, shall we?

Just because we're in the midst of a Great Magazine Die-Off, you may be under the impression that all magazines die equally. Not true! We Leading magazine scientists have identified four distinct varieties of magazine death. Each has its own special flavor of despair for all those connected with the deceased publication. Here they are, from most common to least:

Pirates are now the most important news in the world! Fox Business News is calling pirates "The New Face of Terrorism." The scary new face! But are they really new? The New York Times has written six dozen stories about Somalian pirates in the past ten years, and they're just picking up steam. We know the Somali pirate crew currently menacing African waters has a good PR man. Maybe he's to thank? We took a look back at a decade of pirate coverage and found that the raggedy scalawags have a long media history: [A mere sampling of the highlights]: New York Times: 2/3/99: "Murderous Pirate Attacks Are on the Rise" 9/12/01 (OMINOUS DATE!): "Pirate Militias From Somalia Spill Into the Gulf of Aden" 7/1/05: "Somalia: Pirates Seize Tsunami Aid Ship" 11/6/05: "Pirates Attack Liner Off Coast of Somalia" 12/4/05: "After Attack, Cruise Ships Rethink Security" 7/3/06: "Waters That Prompt Fear From the Toughest of Sailors" (The waters of Somalia, that is) 1/10/08: "Pirate Attacks Increased in 2007, Maritime Group Says" 9/27/08: "Somalia Pirates Capture Tanks And Unwanted Global Notice" That's the one that started this most recent wave of coverage. Everyone has been getting worried about these pirates for years! The Washington Post was late to the game, but they jumped on the story in 2005 when a cruise ship was attacked and have been covering it regularly ever since. Others saw it much earlier: USA TODAY: 2/2/01: "Pirates loot the fruits of 21st century trade 'There is no law' in certain waters of Southeast Asia" The Brits were on the case even earlier! The Guardian UK: 9/18/99: "Bizarre tale of Briton killed by pirates; Family's doubts about attack on yacht in lawless seas off Somalia" And later: 11/7/05: "Seamen call for UN piracy taskforce" HEH. So you see, it's not all fear and terror. Pirates inspire us! Many people would secretly love to be pirates. We only get serious about them if any other response seems inappropriate. The best evidence of that: New York Post: 11/6/05: "YO-HO-WHOA! PIRATES HIT CRUISE SHIP" (Funny) 4/12/08: "FRENCH NAB PIRATES & BOOTY" (Still funny) 10/1/08: "EXTERMINATE THAT PLAGUE OF PIRATES" (Now it's serious!)

♦ Time Inc. is slashing another 250 jobs. [NYP]
♦ CNN is spending a fortune on fancy-shmancy technology and new talent, but it's making a mint, too: The network is recording double-digit profit growth for the fifth straight year. [NYO]
♦ Dan Abrams is starting some sort of research firm/expert network/PR agency now that he's been replaced by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. His first client is Ron Perelman. [NYT]
♦ 60 Minutes has been the most-watched program in the nation for the last two weeks, believe it or not. [NYT]

Two longtime reporters at Jersey's Star-Ledger have been reassigned to the mailroom—maybe because they had the audacity not to take a buyout. [Editor & Publisher via Romenesko]

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."

Let's do the math here: Ashley Alexandra Dupre, America's most famous hooker, hits the news in March when her fortuitous association with Eliot Spitzer becomes public. Except for some vague second-hand insinuations that she wants a record contract, she doesn't make any real career moves until now, when she decides to do her first interviews with the press. We're pretty sure that she's been getting advice—but are her advisers looking out for her interests as much as we, the gossip bloggers, are? Doubtful. We've put together a complete guide to career options for Ashley—or any woman who finds herself famous after a sex scandal—after the jump. Simply select one and go, Ashley:

So, former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams is starting a "consulting" firm full of random media people to give advice to rich corporate clients about how to handle media-related issues. Do you know what that's called? It's called a PR firm. But this PR firm would never call itself that, because that would make the media people it employs sound corrupt. The thing is, this firm's business plan is so annoying that the rest of the media (us) is going to cover its clients even harder to make up for it. For example! Abrams' first client is billionaire Ron Perelman. Now why would Ron Perelman need to worry about his reputation?

Everybody wants a piece of Internet fame these days, even prisoners who don't have access to the Internet. Wade Kirkwood is a serial arsonist—it's basically an addiction for him and all the wildfire coverage on cable news is his porn. CNN interviewed him recently to get insight on whoever it is setting fires in California, and now he's written them from prison asking if they could maybe "put his name out on the Internet" because he's "very interested in helping people that suffer from the same problems I deal with". Oh, no, he wants to be a fameball! Trust us, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. That said: here ya go, Wade Kirkwood: you're on the Internet. Congratulations! Click through for an excerpt of his prison letter to CNN.