♦ Cuts have arrived at Hearst: Cathie Black (left) is "going floor by floor at the Hearst Tower to trim costs and staff positions." [WWD]
♦ Lloyd Grove talks to Tina Brown about her new site and the economic climate: "It's pretty scary. It's scary, scary, scary." [Portfolio]
♦ The New York Times Co. reported profits fell 51 percent for the quarter amid the drop in advertising sales. Traffic to the Times website, however, is up. [Bloomberg, AP, NYO]

Who says the magazine industry is in trouble, besides all informed analysts? Plain old pessimists, they are! For example, did you know that according to prominently quoted guy "Mr. Magazine," new magazine launches are actually up this year? We looked back at the dozens of hot new titles that launched just last month, and we've selected the twelve most promising. Hobbies for the poor, escapism through porn and pets, and information about your various afflictions are especially popular! Gaze upon the future of media:

Hey, here's a surprisingly bold and fresh move, in opposite-world: the New York Times—a serious newspaper—is planing to give regular space on its editorial page to Bono—an edgy rock star! Will this odd couple possibly be able to get along? Will Bono stumble into the office at 7 a.m. after a night of wild coked-up groupie sex and start trashing the place, disturbing the morning meditation of Times editorial page chief Andy Rosenthal? Are Times readers ready for some motherfuckin rock-n-roll? Ha, of course what you really have to look forward to is six to ten editorials from another wealthy cosmopolitan liberal. Rosenthal and Bono have more in common than two ring-tail lemurs from separate sides of Madagascar. Wake us up when you hire Young Jeezy. [Radar]

We mentioned Michael Wolff's distaste for Tina Brown last week, but today he goes on the offensive. "I think it's preposterous," he starts off when Leon Neyfakh asks him to comment on Brown's new site, The Daily Beast, which competes (to some degree) with Wolff's own Newser.com. "I don't even think it's a rehash of Talk—I think it's a rehash of [CNBC's] Topic A." It gets better! "She's just an old magazine hack... It's like she's been on ice for ten years and suddenly she's been thawed out again." Now we can all look forward to watching Tina strike back in a few books when the Beast reviews Wolff's new book on Rupert Murdoch. [NYO, previously]

Allow me to construct a sports metaphor (UPDATE: Which I see the NYT also used in its lead sentence, DAMMIT. Oh well, forge ahead) that would sound stale to serious sports fans, but which I believe will sound fresh and insightful here, where we have only seven (7) total sports fan readers: Fox News is the New York Yankees. MSNBC is the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees throw huge contracts at aging veteran superstars, trading away their young players for big-name talent that tends to quickly prove to be over-the-hill. Tampa Bay had a string of bad years but stuck to its strategy of focusing on affordable young talent, nurturing them, and building from within. Now, Tampa Bay is in the World Series. The Yankees are sitting at home. My, this metaphor just gets more and more awesome: Fox just signed Bill O'Reilly, the most predictable shouting head on television, to a new four-year, $40 million contract. They just "lured" Glenn Beck from CNN (if you consider him a man who needs "luring") with a multimillion-dollar contract. Other Fox News names like Shep Smith and Sean Hannity get paid huge salaries to stay on. Meanwhile, MSNBC's new star Rachel Maddow came out of nowhere, in cable news terms. She was with Air America not too long ago, for fuck's sake, which is definitely the minor leagues. MSNBC took a chance on her, got her on air, saw how well she did, and then took the leap to giving her her own show. Which has paid off. The best part? They are probably paying her—in cable news terms, again—peanuts. Where are Fox News' Maddows? Where is the young talent that they nurture and build into a star while still paying them the wages of a rookie? These things are important. The economy is shit, advertising revenue is dicey, and homegrown stars are the wave of the future. I'm taking bets on Tampa Bay. Get at me, O'Reilly.

Early Monday morning, Arkansas news anchor Anne Pressly—who had a bit part as Ann Coulter in the new movie W—was attacked and stabbed in her home. By Tuesday she was national news. By Wednesday, she was international news, and the less savory members of the media were scrambling point out that it had not been ruled out that she could have been attacked by a crazy political Hollywood stalker potential serial killer. Today, even the Post acknowledges that police think the attack was likely random. Which of course means that the conspiracy angle will be back tomorrow. Get well soon, Anne!

Imagine you have $800 million due to various banks in two months, and your chief holdings are a couple of billion dollars in rapidly-declining CBS and Viacom stock. You've opened some delicate negotiations with the bankers into how you'll, uh, pay them. What do you do? If you're Sumner Redstone, you immediately take the obvious option — sell some more shares! — off the table, and then proclaim you don't know how all this happened because you don't really run your company (National Amusements). Then in the future, presumably, you can tell your mouthy daughter you were "forced" to sell her movie theater chain because it was the only option left, ha ha. That'll teach her to try and be your successor! That's just how Sumner rolls, said the Wall Street Journal:

If it wasn't inevitable from the get-go that Rupert Murdoch would, via tentacles that touch every distribution channel and medium, obtain an advance copy of Michael Wolff's biography of him, it certainly became so when the book landed in the hands of the News Corporation chairman's son-in-law Matthew Freud. Freud got it from a London newspaper negotiating serialization rights, Murdoch got it from Freud, and Wolff soon heard from Murdoch, the Times reported this morning: "[The book] contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact," he emailed, thus playing into Wolff's hands, as he seems to have done from the beginning.

Internet publishers Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown may both be foreign transplants to the U.S., but there's little question which of the two fifty-somethings has more fully assimilated her site to the democratic rough-and-tumble of American Web culture. It was Huffington who offered blogs to five virtual strangers over the course of two days, as documented in the New Yorker earlier this month, including "the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j." and "a woman, dressed exclusively in green, who was trying to stop insecticide spraying." Brown, in contrast, has lent her Daily Beast a distinctly royalist feel, as one might expect from a Commander of the British Empire. And the former New Yorker editor played the snob angle for all it was worth in a lengthy interview with Portfolio's Lloyd Grove:

Official websites give celebrities a powerful way to fighti rumors or promote new projects, free of the pesky filter of the entertainment media. But it's becoming clear vanity sites can backfire. Beatles drummer Ringo Starr recently pissed off fans by admonishing them, via his website, to stop sending him mail. And now William Shatner has taped a long diatribe against his Star Trek co-star George Takei, who allegedly did not invite Shatner to his recent gay wedding. It can't be long before Shatner yanks his YouTube video on Takei's "sickness" and "psychosis" over who got more camera time forty years ago, particularly now that Takei has told AP that Shatner was, in fact, invited to the wedding. And if Shatner really meant to attack "Takei's decision to come out of the closet later in life," as AP has it, he'll probably be getting left off many more invite lists in the future. Click the video icon to watch the highlights.

You know, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein may have his problems, involving Project Runway, a fashion line, a video distributor, an internet company, his wife's fashion company — they're endless, really. But the brash executive will be damned if he's going to feel ashamed to be losing four executives in the span of about six weeks. Because what that turnover really means is that he's an excellent people person! The departing staff, you see, started at entry level and were "groom[ed]" into "great executives," according to a statement sent to us by a PR firm representing the Weinstein Company. And what do great executives do? Get as far as possible from Harvey Weinstein, obviously. Click the icon to read the full statement.

Robert Thomson is known to be fashioning a more global Wall Street Journal. Thus far, the most striking example of this was when the managing editor sent hustling distributors to hand out copies of the Journal throughout London at the outbreak of the banking meltdown last month. But no one thought the former Financial Times man's ambitions would end there, and they haven't. In a sign he'd love to reconquer his old hometown, Thomson just announced the promotion of up-and-comer Bruce Orwall to chief of the London bureau. Anonymous sources told blogger Nikki Finke the move was coming last night; we've got the freshly-emailed memo after the jump.

A high-profile New York magazine company handing control of its flagship print property to a Web executive would be a great story about the transformation of media. Normally, writers at Forbes would be all over it — if it weren't happening to them. Yesterday's rumor about Forbes Media merging the magazine and Forbes.com — two distinct operations, housed in separate offices, whose managers don't get along — and tapping Forbes.com chief Jim Spanfeller to run the combination has provoked a collective wave of head-scratching from current and former Forbesians. Could it happen? One writer tells us that Forbes management has denied the rumor so unconvincingly that workers there are all concluding it must be true. "I work at Forbes. I'll be the last to know," says one. He disputes the idea that Forbes and its website don't work well together, giving several examples of Web and print writers crossing the line — but the fact that those are notable, rather than routine, just highlights Forbes's lack of cooperation. His note:

A Vice Magazine story about an extremely prolific sperm donor was condensed, reworded, and run as a story in the New York Post today, with no source other than Vice. The Post is now officially a blog on paper, and Vice is officially the mainstream media. Tears all around.

Three years ahead of schedule, Columbia J-School has met its goal of raising $100 million, thanks in part to a $20 million donation from John Kluge, a rich man who values Ivy League schools over starving children in Africa. The school plans to increase scholarships, start an "academic center focused on the coverage of race and ethnicity," and also get started on the big "Center for Internet Journalism," which will finally teach young people how to write things online. A worthy use of $100 million if there ever was one. Nick Lemann can afford to buy enough paper for his long memos, with enough cash left over to Make it Rain on Them Hoes, if he so chooses. Meanwhile, less upscale schools are forced to do things like this to raise money: The alumni office at Framingham State University recently sent out a fundraising letter that attempted to be cool and appeal to "Generation X" by using the word "blah" 137 times.

Early-to-rise AM New York takes a look today at an issue that will only grow more pressing as the economy sours and humans scavenge the city ever more voraciously for food: people posing as journalists to get into events—events where there will be free food, and drink, and warmth. The story is fundamentally an excuse for AMNY to shout "We're onto you!" at "Robert Miller," some dude who goes around town trying to crash events by posing as an AMNY reporter. Dude, bad idea for so many different reasons. But the larger issue is valid: how can flacks be sure they only kowtow to real reporters? And how can ordinary jerks crash parties reserved for media jerks only? Both questions answered in full, below: Flacks: Is this person a real reporter? Ask yourself these questions: 1. Is he poorly dressed? If so, you're probably dealing with an authentic journalist. Also a good option: Google the name on your little Blackberry, for chrissake. Do you find links to articles the person has written on the website of the news publication where he claims to work? Bingo, you've cracked the case. For regular people trying to pose as journalists to score some of those sweet spring rolls, mini-cheeseburgers, and signature cocktails named for the event sponsor, just follow these simple rules: 1. Dress poorly. 2. Act haughty and self-important. 3. Walk right in, acting surprised that they don't know who you are. 4. Claim to work for a blog. They can't call your boss. 5. Claim to be a freelancer. They can't call your boss. 6. Gaze into the crowd; wave randomly towards the back and shout, "Harvey!" Chuckle. Turn back to flack and say, "Now what's the problem here?" 7. Threats, threats, threats. If all else fails, pose as a UPS deliveryman. Those guys get in everywhere. [AMNY via PRNewser]

To answer someone's question of "and who praytell is Peaches Geldof?" It's "she is the latest It Girl foisted upon us, and we hate to snowball her semi-fame into a larger fameball by covering her, but the newshole is only so big, and we gotta write something." And also: "daughter of washed-up Irish rocker Bob" and the late Paula Yates. As we said, she's 19 and a little cokey and just moved here from London with her new husband to write/model at downton fashion mag Nylon, which we are sure pays very well! She's written her first column! And it is poetic. It's about the sunset and the Williamsburg bridge and how it feels when you're taking a cab over the bridge at night. New York is a magical place—and teen British expats understand this perhaps more poignantly than us cynics.

Are you aware that the LA Times revealed its redesign this week? Let's hope you are, because this is what's gonna save the paper! What people both inside the Tribune Co. and out really want to know is not, "How does the redesign look?" It's, "What does Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer and Vice Admiral of the Martian Army Lee Abrams have to say about it, in his own unmistakable way?" Well: "As we've seen with all the other Tribune newspapers, the 'plunge' is the first step. Nothing more...nothing less." Ha. And?:

So Portfolio went with a Dov Charney cover in the midst of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Hey, what do you expect them to do—undo stuff that had already been planned? What are they, a daily? No, they're a monthly, and they refuse to get all worked up about anything. They must maintain their office's monk-like atmosphere at all costs. And their fellow business mags agree: with a little creative editing, you can make it look like you're covering this crisis without doing any extra work at all! Portfolio's response to the crisis: meetings.

♦ Bill O'Reilly has signed a new four-year contract with Fox News worth $10-12 million a year. There is good news, though: His radio show may be coming to an end. [NYDN]
♦ More bad news for Harvey Weinstein: A handful of senior execs at The Weinstein Co. have announced their departures. [THR]
♦ How are monthly business magazines keeping up with the financial crisis? They're not, really. [NYO]
♦ The offices of the New York Times received an envelope this morning containing a "white granular substance." [Radar]