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?

CONTINUED »

The opening chapter of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People involves the Vanity Fair writer trying to crash the uber-exclusive Oscar-after party of Graydon Carter's publication. His ticket ends up in the hands of another reporter, and Young is bumped from the guest-list.

And if you think that was brutal then, you should see what the security is going to be like this year, when VF holds its infamous post-Oscar bash at the even exclusive-r Sunset Towers.

“The party will be a much more intimate affair than in years past; we’re going to scale back the guest list considerably,” Carter says. “We’ll celebrate Hollywood’s big night the way we did when we first threw the party 15 years ago—it will be a cozier, more understated event. And one with familiar decor—given the current economy, and our dedication to the green movement, we will be recycling many of the elements of years past.

Which, on the heels of so many axed Christmas parties (even for Vanity Fair's parent company, Condé Nast) seems like the frugal thing to do, right?

Except, if the economy is so bad, why even bother having a party at all?

CONTINUED »

• Associated Press will cut 10% of their workforce, which they are hoping will happen through attrition now that they've enforced a hiring freeze. Because people just feel so gosh-darn-guilty about having jobs these days that they'll just quit. And if they don't, you can always kill them.

• Condé Nast employees are no longer being reimbursed for lunches eaten at the desk. Also, town car services are being limited. Neither of these things apply to Anna Wintour of course, or else she wouldn't have been so quick to say she wasn't leaving Vogue to work for Barack Obama anytime soon.

• DNR however, is getting junked out of Condé Nast's portfolio, and Women's Wear Daily will now be covering men's fashion as well. Too bad they can't afford a title change.

Not So Lucky Editors Layed Off — 3 of them, to be precise. All part of Conde Nast's slow rip of the bandaid as they consolidate their workforce just in time for the holidays.

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.

CONTINUED »

Someone out there has it in for Portfolio's editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman. Ever since that giant misstep with putting American Apparel founder Dov Charney on the cover of a business magazine at a time when the entire world's business was collapsing, it's all been downhill for the former editor of The Wall Street Journal.

And now, in trying to come up with some interesting ideas that could save the Conde Nast title from itself, the best Jon Friedman could come up with is a list that starts out "Fire Joanne Lipman" but then inexplicably ends with "Give Portfolio a break in the gossip columns."

Well, lets compromise. We'll stop writing about Portfolio's imminent demise as soon as it stops self-destructing, Lipman or no. At this point, it's hard to blame her entirely for an industry-wide crisis, but there is always as sacrificial cow when it comes to heads rolling, and unfortunately being an editor-in-chief puts you right in the firing line for releasing stupid soundbites to the press.

The highly anticipated editors-in-chief luncheon that happens for the Condé Nast staff at the Four Seasons every year has just been…*gasp*…canceled. Mon dieu!

Says a spokesperson, "We are going to forgo it this year. We think it is in keeping with the times." Um, right, but whatever happened to the magazine industry's "Let them eat cake?" Guess it wouldn't look right with the fall of Men's Vogue and the scale backs at Portfolio.

Poor Si! Poor Keith Kelly who is kept in business at the Post writing about high profile/closed door media events like this. And poor anyone who thought they would be able to tell where they stand with the Newhouse clan, which apparently determines the seating arrangements at the Christmas bash.

CONTINUED »

As we reported yesterday would happen, Conde Nast is shuttering Elegant Bride, one of its three bridal magazines and one of the titles listed on Media Life's death watch list. Word is coming from 4 Times Square that the magazine is officially closed, which comes on the Friday news dump heels of Hearst stuffing O At Home back into O proper. Is Domino next?

Those 5 percent budget cuts at Conde Nast aren't the only trimming going down inside The House That Newhouse Built. We're hearing CEO Chuck Townsend is already blabbing about the coming closing of Elegant Bride, one from the publisher's stable of bridal magazines (Bride and Modern Bride), and a title that was absorbed from the Fairchild integration. Also quite possibly on the chopping block? The home style and shopping book Domino, which we're told Townsend & Co. are "reevaluating." Notice, of course, that neither of the two magazines we just mentioned are Portfolio or Men's Vogue, each ridiculously expensive, each ridiculously unnecessary, and each a ridiculous part of Newhouse's ego.

The layoff list from Si Newhouse's company is finally being trickled down to the peons whose jobs are actually being lost. But! Just like at Condé Nast's other victim this week, Men's Vogue, even the higher ups are getting kicked to the curb. Including Ken Wells, Portfolio editor and Pulitzer finalist. Also penner of the recent The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, for which he was thrown a book party by his (now ex) employers earlier this week. Surprise!

No one is escaping the wrath over at Condé Nast's Men's Vogue, which, everyone learned yesterday, is going the way of the dodo. If the dodo was only getting published two times a year as a supplement to Vogue.

Even sadder though, is the fact that no one, not even the head honchos over at the Si Newhouse publication, saw this coming:

At Men's Vogue, most of the 60-person staff is out as of next Friday. That includes Publisher Marc Berger, who only a day ago was seen wining and dining a client at Bottega del Vino, clearly unaware of impending doom. Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden is being absorbed back into the mothership, Vogue, which is run by editrix Anna Wintour. The shutdown is said to be a big personal embarrassment to her and her bid to expand her empire.

Whoops, is that really good business etiquette Si, to ambush your top talent like that? A little warning would have been nice, so that Berger could have added a couple more cocktails to his expense account before having his ass handed back to him and having to wait on the unemployment line with the rest of his former employees.

Remember back in August, when the biggest problem was trying to figure out who the nominees were going to pick as their running mates? Before all the stocks tanked and the banks failed and the phrase "worst _____ in American history" started getting thrown around a lot?

Yeah, good times.

Well, just because September was a shitshow, and October's been nothing but the fallout from that (Newspapers! Gone! Magazines! Kaput! Carsclothesfood! Everything is not great!), we can now look forward into November, what with election coming up in four days and all. No more postings of 3rd quarter losses: Now they'll be fourth quarter projections!

CONTINUED »

Now this is truly bizarre: While it makes sense that publisher Condé Nast would cut down the frequency of Portfolio and take their necessary 5% of flesh out of the magazine, why is Portfolio.com being "severely scaled back" when common sense (and trend reports) would say it's the only part of the operation that still has a chance to become lucrative?

Sure, cuts are being made everywhere, but going from a staff of 12 to a staff of 3 (or so says the rumor mill) is not letting go five percent, it's trimming 75% of the online workforce.

CONTINUED »

Look, nobody here is claiming to be a math genius, but what sense does it make to take a magazine that publishes monthly, and then trim it down by only two issues a year? Which is what Condé Nast, in their recent upheaval today, has decided to do with Portfolio, their business mag that lately hasn't been keeping very good track of business. So now Portfolio will be published 10 months out of the year, so they can continue "readjusting for the economic times.” Gosh, by their October cover, you'd figure the economy was doing just fine.

So what happens to those two other issues? They've been given to Men's Vogue, which recently lost all of their other publishing dates.

Holy shit. In our analysis of what magazines are getting trimmed down to nothing in the upcoming weeks or months, we somehow overlooked entirely Men's Vogue. Because hell, it's Condé Nast, and nothing bad ever happens to those guys, right? Si Newhouse practically invented the upper echelon privileges of town car services, clothing budgets, and expensive dinners for the staff, billed to the company. So there is no way that say, Men's Vogue may be cut down entirely, and every single title under the Condé umbrella will be forced to do staff cuts, is there?

Sorry, everybody.

CONTINUED »

Playboy announced it would be firing 55 employees and not filling an extra 25 positions that are currently empty. Sad, because the non-Hefner owned Playgirl just shut down a couple months ago. Equal opportunity suckage.

Also, Hugh Hefner's lady-friend Holly just left him, so that got to be a double sting for the 82-year old boob tycoon. Wonder if this affects the hiring of Playboy models? Heaven forbid the centerfolds get cut in half.

But the lack of employment can be found outside the pages of skin sector:

CONTINUED »

In the fall 2001, Conde Nast shuttered the magazine Mademoiselle, the lady's lifestyle magazine helmed by Mandi Norwood. After a 66-year-history, the magazine fell to the wayside thanks to titles like Sassy and Jane (both shaped by Jane Pratt), which ushered in the notion of "transparency," where a magazine's editors talked with you, not at you.

Now, seven years later, the magazine gets the appropriate postmortem, with the book Thin Is the New Happy, from former mastheader Valerie Frankel.

We'd like to think that part of Frankel's book publicity machine makes it required to have the most scandalous tidbits fed in morsels to the press, like this weekend's Page Six item about how staffers competed with each other in the blood sport of starvation. But the book is called Thin Is the New Happy, and you can probably judge this one by its skeletal cover.

CONTINUED »

Hey guys, remember the success of Vogue India? The publication that got called out in the NYT for using "local" models, i.e. homeless people living at the poverty level, to promote haute couture for a nation where fifty percent of the population lives off less than two dollars a day? And then the editor for the magazine was all like "Lighten up?"

Yeah, totally not one of the magazine industry's finer moments, but hey, every PR crash-and-burn has a silver lining. In this case it was to alert the public that just because it's cheaper and more lucrative to produce words in India, doesn't mean you should necessarily just move your entire operation over there without taking the local culture into account.

But apparently the lesson that Condé Nast learned from all this was "stop featuring poor people," because the corporation is going ahead with the first issue of GQ India, featuring not legions of nameless poor but Bollywood megastars.

CONTINUED »

Overseas Vogue publications are getting more and more press recently, while Anna Wintour and her iconic American brand seem to be fading into the background. Of course, not all of this is positive press (*cough*Vogue India*cough*) but at least one name is making the rounds for a possible upset in the Conde Nast hiearchy:

CONTINUED »

NHL player Sean Avery is famous for a lot of things, mostly hockey-and-clothing-related. Equally well-known is the fact that the self-proclaimed "fashion jock" interned at Vogue this summer and then did a semi-naked photo shoot for the Condé Nast's brother publication. Haha, yes. He did. Because dodging plates being thrown at him by Anna Wintour is the best way to prepare for a lifelong career in sports and sports-related injuries. Of which he's suffered from before.

Always on the ball, New Line Cinema bought the rights to Avery's life story (or at least the parts that involve him acting as a professional bottom for the editrix), and production has begun on the film, which will be a romantic comedy — or "rom-com," in Katherine Heigl speak — of all things. So who should casting directors be looking toward to play both Avery and the love interest he finds in his mirror reflection?

CONTINUED »