The gays—why do they cover politics? Because it is like a big campy gay soap opera, with divas and backstabbing and drama, of course! That is just one of the things we learned in Gawker Alum Jesse Oxfeld's story about the gays who cover campaigns! "'I think that the theater of politics is of real interest to political reporters,' says one of them. 'And a lot of gay reporters are theater junkies as well.'" You don't say, hah. Here's the paragraph most important for those of you keeping score at home:

The latest we're-supposed-to-care chatter from the tipline: "It was just announced yesterday that Ziff-Davis Chief Technology Officer Robyn Peterson is leaving to go to NBC. Ouch!" Ouch? The real ouch is that Ziff-Davis Media, the considerably reduced tech-magazine publisher, was paying someone to be its CTO in the first place.

Culture + Travel, a four-times-a-year magazine "For Travelers Passionate About The Arts," is reportedly folding. Nobody has money for magazines any more, much less travel and art. [PDNPulse]

Out has a piece online about the gay men on the campaign trail who are covering this year's presidential election. Strangely absent: any discussion of the gay anchors back in the studio. [Out via Portfolio]

Presidential elections aren't just about the candidates; they're about all the random crazy people only tangentially related to the candidates and their campaigns, the ones who are hyped into momentary superstardom by political reporters desperate for storylines. Or by the candidates themselves, desperate to deflect attention. The question for these random people is, how to capitalize on this brief and undeserved moment of fame? Joe the Plumber is determined to become a country music star! And he's just one of multitudes. We're here to help, fame whores! After the jump, we tell the incidental stars of this godforsaken election cycle what they should do with their lives after November 4, so that they may not be forgotten:

Tina Brown just can't stop gushing about her new digital venture, the Daily Beast—especially now that she's escaped the overspending print world of Conde Nast. "I’d hate right now to be in the magazine world," Portfolio reported her saying at a conference with Hearst president Cathy Black. "It’s a really tough time to be a magazine editor," Brown added, rubbing salt into the wound. Meanwhile, Black floundered about, defining the future of media in Orwellian terms: we won't have "newspapers" but "news and content distribution." As far as making a profit, "it depends on how you define money," Fishbowl quoted her as saying. Given the harsh cutbacks at Conde today, it looks like making money is out for Fall and thereafter.

Looks like the stress of the economy is taking a toll on the financial news media. CNBC's Charlie Gasparino had a bit of a meltdown on the air earlier this afternoon, as you'll see in this video clip. It starts off playfully enough, but wait for the end to see Charlie's colleagues have that classic WTF moment as Gasparino starts to say something totally incoherent about "shooting the capitalist system." [YouTube via Dealbreaker]

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]

If you can find a bunch of loosely-connected references to a certain subject floating around the zeitgeist, you can write a trend piece! Today's "Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here" in the NYT's Styles is the pitch-perfect example. A truly bad, meaning typical, trend piece can be broken down into pure science. The first thing you need? A contrarian question or statement! ("Is ugly the new pretty?") Got that? Here's a step-by-step checklist to writing the rest:Now that you've got your contrarian question or statement, the Times editors are going to be on your ass about getting facts and "proof" of this trend existing. Not as highly anecdotal as the Observer, though—you'll have to call in all sorts of experts. Ask yourself:

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.

Everybody in the media fucks up once in a while. Sometimes the fallout is bad. Remember when Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs' obituary while he was still alive? Then shortly afterward they mistakenly ran an old headline about United's bankruptcy as if it was current, and temporarily destroyed the company's stock price? Both are very bad errors, but at least Bloomberg apologized for them. Which is more than you can say for Dow Jones, which handily fails to mention its own mistake that crushed GE's stock price yesterday: With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

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!]?

The presidential campaign has been going on for, what, 10 years now? The sad campaign reporters are all about to collapse. Take CNN's Candy Crowley, who writes the following on a Post-It to look at as soon as her three alarms go off and she wakes up, weary and confused: "What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it?" Crowley pleads with a New Republic writer (do follow that link, it's an awesome story) that she just wants. To go. To a simple. Grocery store. Please! And the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza described a harrowing scene on board Barack Obama's stinky airplane:

Sometimes the wheels of justice turn slowly, it's true. But it is surely unexpected that a Supreme Court justice, of all people, would have to wait so long for deliverance from reckless cruelty. Over and over and over again, year after year since 1980, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had to endure the sight of her name carelessly rendered "Ginsberg" or some similarly awful facsimile in the pages of the Times. Would the paper deign, even once, to run a correction? No, it would not. Any formal objections were presumably, well, overruled. Until now.

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]

When Robert Thomson's Wall Street Journal ran a story labeled "EMBARGOED!" in June, we held out hope the tag referred to the paper's in-house lingo for an exclusive to be kept off the Web until the last possible minute, not to the sort of embargoes where sources dictate when information may be published. But alas, it appears former managing editor Marcus Brauchli's noble defiance of public relations choreography is truly abandoned, as evidenced by the screenshot above and the factually identical stories in the Times and Journal this morning (about a Netflix-TiVo deal). Sometimes, even the Journal will submit to a flack's rules. And even add a slammer!

So not only did Barack Obama avoid making a terrible GAFFE on the Daily Show, he was actually much more engaged and funny than a written summary of his comments by elitist pool reporters would lead you to believe. The Democratic presidential nominee's 6-pointish lead didn't leave Obama cocky, but did relax him enough to joke about being a Kindergarten socialist, libtard propagandist and half-redneck Frankenbitter who won't be able to cast an Obama-Biden vote without imploding. His guest-editing stint on Wonkette starts Thanksgiving Eve, drunkenly. (Click the video icon for excerpts.)