Just because Time Incorporated has to cut 6% of their workforce (roughly 600 employees) this Christmas season, and every trade daily is plastered with the heralding of the company's cuts as a synecdoche for the demise of the entire paper industry, doesn't mean that there isn't some silver lining to be found in the grey cloudy skies.

For example: Time magazine is now the number one rated magazine among college students, bumping Cosmo down to second place. No wonder Ann Moore is being recognized with national accolades for firing chunks of staff, while George Hearst is languishing in obscurity somewhere under his pile of billions as CosmoGIRL! fell by the wayside.

Or maybe the answer for the recent boom of college students subscribing to high-minded periodicals can be found elsewhere than just brand favoritism:

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Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is being celebrated with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Magazine Publishers of America, because if anyone deserves an industry pat on the back, it's the woman who's currently cutting 600 jobs at her company right now. What, was Joanne Lipman too busy scrambling to save the shards of her career to accept an award?

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Time Inc. continues on it's path of machete-ing out 6% of their workforce by letting go half of the employees of Time Europe. That's another fifty employees, so what, only 300 to go?

Meanwhile over at the broadcasting side of things, dark lord Roger Ailes just got a contract re-up to stay head of Fox News. Somehow, the universal justice scales do not topple over.

Time Inc. Nixes Cottage Living — At this point, I'm using a thesaurus just to find new words for "shutters." 38 employees are going to be cut from the roster, meaning that Time has approximately 369 more staffers to go before meeting their quota of dismantling 600 employees, or 6% of their workforce.

Remember how TV Guide was sold by Macrovision to OpenGate earlier this year for one whole dollar? Well, that deal included a cause which said a) Macrovision would lend Opengate $9.5 million, b) Macrovision would retain the rights to TVGuide.com, and c) Opengate could do whatever they wanted with the mag's title…including making cuts as soon as they owned the rights.

Which is exactly what's going on.

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So Nylon may be surviving to see another day, but those 20 or so staffers at Entertainment Weekly are still out of a job. People is also expected to offer buyouts for some, straight up firings for other.

And don't get us started on Time Inc.! Just because they're "reorganized" their entire marketing team with a loss of 200 employees, doesn't mean the editorial department for Time is safe just yet. Another 400 staffers can still plan on getting the cut, and their Christmas Party, along with the Hearst's and Conde Nast's, has already been canceled.

Well, at least it must feel good for those Nylon staffers, right about now.

Celebrity gossip is not immune to the economy's collapse. While some insiders speculate Bauer might merge its two tabloids, Time Inc.'s People — the literal cash machine at Time Warner's publishing empire — is hoping to weather the storm by slashing its editorial staff by 18. For now, according to an internal memo, they're looking for voluntary buyouts in the form of of six reporter-researchers, four West Coast and four East Coast correspondents/editors, three copy editors, and one research librarian. But what happens if editor Larry Hackett can't deliver to group chief Martha Nelson the 18 volunteers?

In fact, according to one knowledgeable People insider, it's likely he won't be able to, since the Dec. 1 deadline is quickly approaching and staffers are being offered only two weeks severance pay for every year they've worked there. (Our tipster describes this as "pretty sucky" compared to other publishers' buyout offers.) So what happens after Dec. 1? Involuntary layoffs. According to union rules, People must dismiss staffers in order of reverse seniority, which means the last person hired is the first person fired. But from all accounts, that's not the way Time Inc. plans on going about this. You can imagine how filled to the brim with joy that's making everyone.

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Going down to the bottom — Time Inc. begins its "overhaul" of 600 employees with some actual overhaul of their marketing department. Meanwhile over in Sam Zell's world, the Tribune Co. posted a loss of $128 million for the third quarter, as opposed to a year ago when it had a net income of $152 million.

Layaways beget layaways — Taking a cue from Kmart and Walmart, some discount chains like Burlington Coat Factory and TJ Maxx are starting to employ layaway plans to help struggling families afford presents for the holidays.

Which should be great for all those Time Inc. employees taking their buyout packages today.

After slashing 600 jobs, Time Inc. chief Ann Moore is busy notifying staffers of the upcoming changes. This affects things like the newly formed Style and Entertainment Group (People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle) and Southern Progress, where CEO Tom Angelillo is "suddenly" announcing his retirement! Read Ms. Moore's corporate speak below:

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JOSSIP IN-DEPTH — We pay a lot of lip service here to the idea that magazines and newspapers are a dying breed these days. But how can you not? It's no longer just a conceptual exercise, like "Oh, when the Internet really takes off and everyone buys a Kindle there will be no more need for paper journalism."

Since the stock markets have tanked, and as the automotive industry began stalling thanks to rising fuel prices and less discretionary income, meaning fewer big ad deals from GM and Chrysler, which means fewer ads in mags, yada yada yada, it's become increasingly apparent the push toward the future of magazines and papers wasn't going to be a technological development, but a financial one.

And no, it's not been great so far. Ad sales are down, overall readership is down, layoffs are up, and in some cases, publications are straight up folding. So goodbye, New York Sun, Radar, CosmoGIRL!, and 02138! Meanwhile, online news aggregators are popping up (Daily Beast!) and flourishing (Huffington Post!).

Nowadays, you'll have better luck starting a blog about the magazine industry's implosion than you would have trying to start up a title in today's climate.

So what are the glossies that are currently in danger? Here's our own suicide watch, and what drove these mags to the brink of extinction (besides the obvious lack of tasty ad dollars):

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It's okay for homosexual Aaron Hicklin to run Out, because Out is a homosexual magazine. It's okay for homosexual Jim Nelson to run GQ, because GQ's fashion, style, and culture sensibility are something homosexuals know all about. But is homosexual Ariel Foxman right to run Time Inc.'s In Style, the magazine for fashionable women? Too bad — you don't get to decide, because Foxman (the former editor of men's shopping failure Cargo) was just named editor of the thing, with current editor Charla Lawhon moving upstairs to an umbrella position. It could be argued that Foxman is not right for the job, because men just simply don't understand the lady style leanings of a book like In Style. But it could be argued Foxman is perfect for the job, because he is a homosexual, and homosexuals know what women want. Also, he likes shopping, or at least magazines that encourage it. Either way, this is good news for Joe Zee, the homosexual and creative director at Elle, a magazine he might one day use Foxman's In Style editorship as leverage to take over. You know, when Robbie Myers is done with the thing.

Time Inc.'s magazine subscription Maghound launched (quietly!) this week, and new customers are welcome to begin signing up for a $9.95 monthly membership that entitles them to seven titles a month that will smarten up any coffee table or knapsack. Interestingly, Maghound doesn't offer any titles from Hearst, nor do they seem to have signed on titles like The Atlantic, Conde Nast's Wired, the much-envied The Economist, or school-appropriate porn rag National Geographic. The service is inevitably compared to DVD-rental service Netflix, which is famous for what it doesn't charge: late fees. Except Maghound works slightly different: You don't have to return the magazines, which means each one sent to you counts as a single-copy sale, while movie studios don't get to count Netflix rentals as individual sales of their DVDs. This also saves you the hassle of having to tape back in the pages you tore out when every album Blender reviewed reminds of your asshole ex-boyfriend, and that garbage should not be in print! Also:

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With print revenues in steep decline, Time Inc. should be commended for trying anything to buoy the industry. Its latest stab at keeping Fortune subscriptions up is Maghound, the Netflix-esque service that lets users subscribe to a fixed number of magazine each month, but swap out those subscriptions for other titles at their convenience. The service has its critics, who say the model for this sort of thing — media on demand, like iTunes, TiVo, and even Netflix — are banking on digital products, not print, which is how they're succeeding. But publishers are likely to still sign on, since it's one more chance to generate subscriptions, or, at the very least, paid circulation, since each copy they move through Maghound will count as a single-copy sale, or the equivalent of of a newsstand sale. (Even though the prices will be deeply discounted.) So we should all be singing the praises, then, of Time Inc. for so selflessly coming to the rescue? Ehhh, not equite.

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The first public photos of Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt have already been taken! And, despite our suggestion to nobody in particular that Brad and Angelina split their newborn twins into two separate photo shoots to really maximize profit potential, the babies were photographed together.

But the babies will be split up in one sense: People magazine has secured North American rights to the photos, while British tabloid Hello!, which sports numerous international editions, will have other worldwide rights.

Sound familiar? That's because People and Hello! teamed up in 2006 to publish Brangelina's other baby, Shiloh.

In the end, the price is pegged somewhere between $11 and $15 million, though that could be off by as much as a multiple of two. And while the price is certainly one for the record books (for now), keep in mind that the price includes two babies; so really, we're talking bargain.

Not that it's any consolation to OK! publisher Richard Desmond.

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Fourteen of the 17 staffers at Fortune Small Business (essentially a tool of American Express) are being let go. The remaining three will be shuffled to some obscure division of Time Inc., where they'll be asked to churn out advertiser-friendly copy. Read: Whatever AmEx wants. Update: Maybe those 14 staffers have hope after all? And maybe AmEx doesn't control what appears in the magazine? Scandal!

Time Inc.'s Ann Moore and exiting Martha Stewart Living chief Susan Lyne are having lunch next week. It's either to meet about Lyne taking over Moore's job, or the most excellent prank on media's chattering classes.

"Most big magazine publishers saw total ad pages decline in the first four months of 2008 compared to the same period last year [...] While some losses can be attributed to the closing of various titles since last year, the broad nature of the declines, cutting across a number of categories, looks ominous for the magazine industry."

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OBLIGATORY TITLES Former Time Inc. chief and current Carlyle Group hand Norm Pearlstine is heading to Bloomberg LP, where he will assume the role of chief content officer. [Dealbook] Which begs the question: WTF is with these "chief content officers"? Netflix has one; so does PBS; so did the Cartoon Network. Is management not already stuffed with CEOs, COOs, CTOs, CFOs, and CPOs (that one is "chief privacy officer") that we need to reassign the responsibilities normally spread among top execs to a new high-earning title grabber?

"In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear. 'You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,' Mr. Carter said. 'That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.' 'Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!' said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc." [NYO]

Um, you mean like the $399 Kindle, which already exists? Which is very expensive now but will eventually cost less? That there are small buttons you can push where the words and photos from magazines appear? Where you can already purchase, download, and read Time Inc. titles like Time and Fortune?

Five years is SO far away!