Yesterday we told you that Anne Pressly, an Arkansas morning news anchorwoman who played an Ann Coulter-like pundit in the new Oliver Stone flick W, was attacked and stabbed in her home early Monday morning (she's now expected to recover). The crime has predictably attracted a lot of international attention: it involves a pretty woman, a journalist, Hollywood, and politics. So what new facts have we learned about the case today? None at all, really. Unless you ask the media, in which case, CONSPIRACY?!?!?: In a neat trick, various news outlets are now able to go with totally opposite angles on this story—based on no new facts, and also sometimes based upon the same exact sources! New York Post:

A new round of layoffs is coming to Time Inc. "in the very near future," sources tell the Post's Keith Kelly. But please don't worry about the top brass, departing magazine staff, because they're doing just fine. They've still got their Caribbean retreats, you'll recall, and millions of dollars with which to buy celebrity baby pictures. And it looks like a surprise contract extension is in store for Ann Moore, the Harvard MBA who saw online revenue grow 76 percent this year, even amid cost cutting. That's probably why she's got enough swagger to gab to the Times of London about the "two-year plan" she keeps right next the contract with 18 months left on it. According to Kelly, she's probably right to feel to secure enough to assume she'll get a renewed mandate:

In its review of Elle-focused reality show Stylista, the Times finds plenty to like, surprisingly. It seems hippie editor Anne Slowey does a surprisingly convincing impersonation of Meryl Streep imitating Miranda Priestly standing in for mean old Anna Wintour of Vogue. (So much for those embarrassing preview clips from a few months ago.) The catfighting is inspired and "novel." And yet that's not what will hook you on the show. You'll watch because you are aching to pretend, for an hour each Wednesday, that the brutal hierarchy of yesteryear lent work an elegant simplicity. Writes the Times' Gina Bellafante:

Entrepreneur and longtime entertainment executive Neil McGinness bought the deadpan supermarket tabloid Weekly World News from American Media, according to the Times, 14 months after the last issue was printed amid anemic circulation. McGinness has "revived" the website, which AMI had promised to keep open (as publishers tend to do), and might even bring back the print edition. The idea is that online advertising, licensing and movie deals can succeed where the prior incarnation failed. Plus, it's something of a golden age of satire, what with the Onion and Daily Show and so forth. The new site already has old staples Bat Boy and Ed Anger, but the headlines aren't quite up to snuff yet. Perhaps the site's distinguished editors can take some inspiration from this list of headlines from the past (add your own in the comments!):

Sure, it was kind of a McCarthyite move by freshman Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, calling Barack Obama "anti-American" on MSNBC's Hardball. But you know what else it was? A chance for editors across the country to gleefully brandish their pattern-matching skills and knowledge of Canadian classic rock. Hence all of the references to Bachman-Turner Overdrive (hits: "Takin' Care of Business," "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") in the screenshots above, all courtesy Eric Spiegelman. As usual, the Daily Show adds that extra dash of awesome.

Remember how magazines targeting the rich were going to be "largely immune to the problems" besetting the economy in general and publishing in particular? Well, that was way back in March, and if the ensuing seven months have taught us anything, it's that every last one of us will end up a hobo or die in the ensuing revolution. What this means in the meantime is that there is no such thing as a safe publishing niche. To wit, shelter magazine Cottages & Gardens, serving the rich from the Hamptons to Connecticut to Palm Beach, is poised to let "a lot of people go," a tipster informs us. Staff this week were reportedly told that money on hand will fund their salaries for just two more weeks, unless a bigger company swoops and acquires the magazine. This should sound very familiar:

What business does Sarah Palin have spending $75,000+ at Neiman Marcus and $50,000 at Saks if she's not planning to be part of the "Washington elite" or "seek their good opinion," as she told the Republican National Convention in September? She probably wants to look snazzy on TV, because the poors get the same channels as the elites, and appearances matter more than they should. John Edwards knew that, so he spent $400 on hair cuts until he was accused of being a slick poverty pimp by various conservatives. Now that Politico has caught the Republicans' designated working-class icon being far more profligate — Edwards could get 10 haircuts just on the Palin/McCain ticket's monthly hair and makeup bill — reps for the "small town... hockey mom" aren't even bothering to deny their hypocrisy:

It's official: Sumner Redstone's second marriage is finished, confirming our exclusive from Friday. Court papers were filed at the end of last week, according to the Los Angeles Times, and now the Viacom chief has issued a statement saying the split is "amicable" and that "we remain close and supportive friends." In other words, wife Paula Fortunato has finally, 14 months after divorce rumors surfaced, agreed to leave, perhaps because she got something beyond her "iron-clad prenup," once thought to be worth a flat $1 million, or because she's actually now earned $5 million, with the prenup now pegged at $1 million per year of marriage. Or maybe the former public school teacher is just tired of living with the mean mogul, 40 years her elder, and of hearing rumors he's been calling some famous comedian's wife. Whatever happened, Redstone is reaching into his pocket at a time when he can least afford it. Writes the LA Times:

Most magazines keep their Web and print staffs apart, a legacy of petty rivalries, bureaucratic turf wars, and a fear of change. But Forbes Media has elevated balkanization into an art form. The two sides of the company barely speak to each other. The Forbes family tolerated this, but Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity fund which counts Bono as a partner and now owns 40 percent of Forbes is not so patient. A tipster tells us that a "big shakeup" is coming, with the editorial staffs of both magazine and website getting "smashed together."Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes. What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

For years, one man controlled all the news: Matt Drudge, nutty conservative weather-obsessed Miami queen blogger. He "broke" the Monica Lewinsky thing, sort of, and then for nearly ten years his website drove news narratives and pushed stories to the forefront. Even as recently as the primary season, some years past his peak influence, Drudge helped destroy the Clinton campaign with relentless Obama-boosting. Then, of course, he had to switch back to being a straight-up GOP hack. We'd say he just boosted Obama because he felt McCain would beat the Illinois Senator, but the fact is, his visceral hatred for the Clintons probably drove him just as much as anything else. Since the conventions, though, he's been an embarrassment. He highlights completely misleading bullshit and can't get anyone but the dumbest of bloggers to pick up on his pet stories. As Eric Bohlert notes in Media Matters today, Drudge has become so divorced from reality that even the serious press people who've religiously trusted his instincts since the Clinton days can't square his headlines with reality. His cherry-picked poll results are plainly ridiculous, last week's Drudge-touted "McCain Comeback" never even pretended to materialize, and he's completely, completely missed, by design, the major narratives of the last month of the campaign: Palin's national meltdown, the increasingly crazed McCain rallies, and Obama's fundraising and ground advantages. Instead we get... Biden on Botox, a little ACORN, and feeble attempts at finding crazy liberals attacking McCain supporters. They all work like a charm on the Conservative Blogosphere, but back in the good old days, that was just the first step toward mainstream discussion. Now, no one gives a shit. Maybe after the election Drudge will buckle down, like Fox, and provide the voice of the embattled opposition. But a conservative crack-up and the apparent disillusion of the tacit MSM/right-wing noise machine cooperative venture is not great news for Matt. And it's a long time until the next hurricane season.

Look, yet another good fact has emerged about Rachel Maddow, already the favorite news anchor of elitist coastal liberals simply by virtue of being a normal person (funny how that works!). Whereas most television news personalities are only "engaged" in the internet in the sense that they occasionally glance over their ghost-written blog posts before an underling posts them, Maddow actually made the following statement: "I care about Nielsen ratings, but I also care about Technorati searches.” Is she the future of news media people? Yes she is, and we'll tell you why. Could it be that part of the reason that the online world has so much love for Maddow is that she loves the online world back? It's crazy, but it just might be true! For example, she Tweets. Presumably with her own hands! And you have to figure that her 6,000 Twitter followers include at least several thousand bloggers, some of whom run blogs that are actually influential. Since internet memes often grow out of groupthink, her mere twitterings may have had an outrageously large impact on her positive reputation in the blogosphere, which is now equally influential, in ideas at least, to the mainstream media. Crazy! Further:

The Obama campaign, not content with the eleventy billion dollars it raised last month, is going to squeeze countless thousands of dollars out of news outlets who want the "privilege" of covering election night in Chicago. That'll be $935 for access to the filing center, please. Or for those publications on a budget (all of them), $880 will buy you a nice spot on a riser! The public must know what the view is like from the sixth step on the riser there, fellas! The campaign says it's just covering costs, which would indicate risers made of white gold. Full rate card after the jump; reporters across the country are, right now, literally begging for their bosses to purchase them access to the heated section. Sad:

The layoffs we heard about earlier today at Adweek have been confirmed by the company—sort of. An Adweek story and a statement to PRNewser confirm Nielsen Business Media's, ahem, "Reorganization," which will consolidate the staffs of Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek, while leaving them all as separate brands. Layoffs are taking place, though the company doesn't go into details (we heard around 20, and UPDATE: Folio says 19 total—11 in the Adweek group and 8 from other publications). It's a sign that trade mags are no safer than their consumer-oriented peers in this awful economic climate. And it offers some truly classic examples of fact-free corporate jargon:

The "voting" bit of the endless 2008 election has not yet happened, but honestly the winner of that particular contest is of little concern to anyone but plumbers and unemployed auto workers and ladies who want their precious "abortions." No, from here, two weeks out from Election Day, with Obama suspending his campaign and John McCain abandoning swing states, we can already plainly see who's really come out on top over these last couple months. Media whores! And, you know, media people who we actually like and wouldn't therefore call "whores." After the jump, the five real winners of the 2008 elections.

♦ The Rachel Maddow publicity machine rolls on (not that we mind, of course): According to today's Times, she's a "fresh face," MSNBC execs adore her, and her show's ratings have defied all expectations. [NYT]
♦ For reasons we will never understand, Fox & Friends is now more popular than CNN's American Morning and MSNBC's Morning Joe combined. [LAT]
♦ Sarah Palin will sit down with Brian Williams tomorrow. [TVNewser]

We hear that around 20 people are getting laid off from the "consolidation" of the trade mags Brandweek and Adweek. It's not clear if the layoffs will affect other Nielsen Business Media titles (the company owns E&P and several other trades). Anyone with further info can email us.

Anne Pressly, the anchorwoman of a 5 a.m. TV newscast in Little Rock, Arkansas, was attacked in her home, beaten, and stabbed some time early Monday morning. She's now in critical condition. Her other claim to fame: she played (a younger, more attractive) Ann Coulter in the new Oliver Stone flick W. And like the restaurant critic yesterday who was attacked in Albany, there seems to be some suspicion Pressly may have been specifically targeted:

In the same way people thought television and movies and the invention of thumb-twiddling would kill the radio industry, people were convinced the iPod would be the thing that pulled listeners away from commercial radio forever. But they failed to anticipate how utterly lazy and uncultured Americans are! Radio gained millions of listeners last year; young people's time listening to radio rose 11%, while their time listening to iPods dropped 13%. The whelps love Bubba the Love Sponge, or whoever is on "the dial" these days! So then why can't radio make any money?

The Tivo users among us have decided that they no longer need to watch television commercials, but rest assured that their unpatriotic fast-forwarding will not go unpunished. The entire advertising industry in now engaged in nothing except figuring out how to make TV viewers watch ads whether they want to or not. The most popular method is to try to turn commercials into "shows" themselves, or mix up advertising and actual content so much that you have to watch both. But CBS is raising the question: what if the advertising and the content are equally annoying?

If you're still mourning the passing of the New York Sun, here's your chance to indulge in a bit of nostalgia: a (very tragic) denim Sun jacket is up for auction on Ebay for $9.99. [Ebay]