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.

AMI asked Radar boss Maer Roshan to stay on for their new celebtastic version of RadarOnline.com, and Maer's like, "I don't think so." Also he thinks Portfolio should have folded way before Radar. [NYO]

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:

Three years ago, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, the author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald. The Donald's biggest objection to O'Brien's 288-page exposé? That O'Brien had suggested he was "only" worth $150-250 million, not the $5 billion that Trump argued was a more accurate estimate of his fortune. Trump filed a $5 billion defamation suit against O'Brien and his publisher, Warner Books, and the case that has been winding its way through the courts for close to three years now. After a modest victory last month—a judge ruled that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. could be compelled to give a deposition in the case—Trump suffered a defeat today: A New Jersey appeals court judge has ruled that O'Brien does not have to turn over the confidential sources who helped him come up with his "low-ball" estimate. Trump's lawsuit will continue to move ahead. And there's always a chance that Trump will ask for even more in damages: He's now suggesting he's worth $10 billion.

As rumored, AMI has bought the website RadarOnline.com, just as the print version of Radar folds. That, incongruously, puts the site under the same corporate umbrella as the celebrity mags Star and the National Enquirer, which may now become off-limits for mockery. The site will be "relaunched" in 2009. Judging from the tone of the press release alone, the site may well be repositioned to be far more credulous in its celebrity coverage, and consequently less funny. The effect on the RadarOnline staff is not clear yet; we'll fill in details as they come. Full press release from AMI below: American Media Inc. and Integrity Multimedia Company form joint venture to launch a new and enhanced RadarOnline web site

BREAKING: We hear that Radar, the smart-shallow magazine and website, is laying off "EVERYONE." Repeat: "EVERYONE." Including some beloved former Gawker editors. This will be everyone's last day at the office, apparently. The New York Observer says that "there might a business arrangement to keep the web site afloat and that it will be sold to AMI," although we've heard no confirmation of that [UPDATE: It's true]. It appears that Radar chief Maer Roshan has, indeed, killed trees until all the money is gone.

If you were unfortunate enough to read all mainstream coverage of the marketing and advertising industries every day, you would—as I have—come to the conclusion that this financial crisis is the greatest thing to ever happen to the reporters on those beats. That's because all they had to do was write three stories: The ad industry outlook is bad. Nobody's buying bullshit ads that don't work any more. And, hey, everyone sure is advertising a lot of sales now! The marketing reporters at all the papers filed these stories weeks ago, and then took off on a leave of absence, probably to become hookers or drug dealers like the other smart people do during recessions. And now: ...their papers just reword those stories and run them day after day, until the Dow breaks 12,000 again. NYT today:

"Hearst Corporation... continues to host parties even as it folds magazines like CosmoGirl... It seems excessive." [Page Six]

When NBC Universal poached executive producers from TV fashion competition Project Runway in May, we wrote the move would "enable [NBC's] Bravo to create something very similar to Runway," which producer Harvey Weinstein was in the midst of moving to Lifetime. That seems to be precisely what has happened, per a Bravo casting call on Craigslist for "talented designers where the winner will win a large cash prize." The likes of Weinstein are none too happy that NBC is moving ahead with a copycat show while the Weinstein Company is enjoined by court order from doing anything with Runway. Poor Harvey is going to get clobbered! Says Page Six:

After Moody's threatened to downgrade the New York Times Company's debt to junk status Thursday, Standard & Poors went ahead and actually made such a move, bringing to reality a development foretold fully two months ago by Bloomberg. The Times Company is only now considering reducing its outsized dividend to shareholders, including most prominently to the Sulzberger family that controls the company. Having failed one test, involving credit, the Sulzbergers now face another, involving their hold on arguably the most important journalism franchise in the country.

Face it, Sarah Palin is now a fixture among the East Coast elite whether she wins or loses Nov. 4. The Republican vice presidential nominee has lodged herself like some kind of tumor in the media psyche. Saturday Night Live is quite lucratively obsessed with her, as are newspapers, magazines, websites, the list goes on basically forever. And now, says the Hollywood Reporter, "producers and agents across the entertainment world" want her to star in a daytime talk show, news program or reality TV series, at least in between her attempts to rule the free world.

Perhaps the recent rumors about editor-from-hell Bonnie Fuller helming celebrity weekly OK! were a clever way of ensuring a warm staff welcome for the real editor-in-chief and publisher, both set for announcement tomorrow. They are former Quick & Simple EIC Susan Toepfer and Niche Media senior VP Lori Burgess, respectively, the Post's Keith Kelly is reporting. Recently-installed general manager Kent Brownridge insisted his choice for editor "had never been Bonnie," but his passing on the pricey and profligate former Us Weekly chief is as good a sign as any that the economic meltdown will slam celebrity entertainment media as it has banking and real estate.

Oh, this is really not what you want to hear if you are a fan of the newspapers, or journalism as a whole, or especially if you're an investor in the NYT Co.: In the wake of shitty third-quarter earnings, the ratings service Moody's is warning that it may downgrade the company's debt to junk status. It's currently at Baa3, the lowest rating before junk. A downgrade would make it even harder for the company to borrow money, which—without going into a lot of financial mumbo-jumbo—is not what they need right now (Pictured: their year-to-date stock price). Financial mumbo-jumbo quote from Moody's analysts below:

Martha Stewart, a lady who made billions of dollars talking about stuff for your house and dinner parties and things like that and also went to jail once, is already feuding with her company's new co-CEO, Wendy Harris Millard. Recall that, just this past summer, Stewart's company pushed out Susan Lyne, the former CEO. Now even Millard (Lyne's replacement) herself acknowledges there's been "healthy debate," which means the shit must have been too bad to even try to deny. The "differences" are attributed to different "personalities." For example, Martha Stewart's personality is that of a tyrant. [NYP via Cityfile]

Yesterday the New York Times had an anthrax scare at its headquarters. White powder in an envelope! The lobby was closed. People were barred from the main elevators. Who knows how many grammatical errors were made by scared and distracted reporters? Turned out the white powder was "some kind of pebbles." You know what? All this irrational anthrax fear is going to have to stop. Think about it: A lone nut was able to effectively seal off the entire New York Times building—and get an entire floor evacuated—by filling up an envelope with some fish tank pebbles or something. The same thing happened to the Times a month after 9/11, and they evacuated the entire newsroom. Also, "since then, there have been several other cases of suspicious materials being sent to The Times. None turned out to be harmful." It doesn't take much extrapolation to figure out that you could cost the NYT millions of dollars over the course of a year with just a box of safety envelopes and two scoops of baking soda. (And the Times can't afford it!) And really, is anthrax still a thing? It takes an incredibly sophisticated scientist to produce weapons-grade anthrax, and we haven't had any real anthrax attacks since that one rash we had several years back. It's basically the skyscraper equivalent of being made to remove your shoes when you go on planes. One single dude ruined it for everyone. So our suggestion: If you receive some powder in the mail, calmly call the cops. Don't shut down the building. Don't evacuate everyone. A decent actuary will tell you that, hey, in the long run your odds are extremely good. And that's what the New York Times stands for: facts, statistics, and a life chained to a desk. Back to work! [We reserve the right to change our minds when we receive anthrax here.]

David Churbuck, the founder of Forbes.com (and sweaty prep-school wrestling partner of Fake Steve Jobs blogger turned boring Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons), has weighed in on the chaos enveloping his former employer, the investor-friendly, snarkier-than-thou business magazine. Churbuck, like many Forbes alumni, seems to know more of what's going on than its current employees. The publication, now backed by Silicon Valley investment house Elevation Partners, is colliding together its Web and print editorial teams, and the result could be nuclear, as editors and writers scramble for position in the new order. Churbuck observes that the split between print and online had its roots in a plan to spin off Forbes.com in an IPO during the go-go late '90s; even after plans for an IPO were scrapped, the division persisted. Now, Elevation is pushing to consolidate the staffs, Churbuck says. Separately, a tipster reports several personnel moves happening at Forbes. Are they coincidence, or a sign of people positioning their own careers for the coming upheaval? Hard to say.

Oh professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff, is there any power to which you will not speak the truth, or at least some tough-sounding simulacrum thereof? No, there is not. News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch preemptively slammed Vanity Fair writer Wolff's upcoming biography of him, in a tone of indeterminate sincerity. Now Wolff has responded, telling the Observer that Rupert's just "a little embarrassed" about what he let slip, and what he calls are errors are really just "an internal political thing." That's much nicer than what he had to say about former New Yorker editor Tina Brown's new Daily Beast:

Greg Gutfeld, host of Red Eye, the 3 a.m. Fox News show you have never seen, wore out his faux-meathead wingnut schtick around the same time he stopped regularly doing crunches. He purposely poses as a wiseass ignorant bastard (which is fine!), so we're not upset that his latest column explores how Obama is like "a really hot chick." We just chalk it up to homoeroticism. But we have to object to his opening line, "So yesterday, during an ideas meeting..."; Greg, you know don't have "ideas" meetings.

Elizabeth Spiers is doing a new thing! Spiers, the Gawker founding editor-turned-media mini-mogul and closely watched savant of the blog business, is already talking about her next project, which doesn't have financial backers yet. It's going to be an "online magazine" (translation: blog) aimed at women. Uh oh, does that mean she's taking on our sister Jezebel?