Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• Reed Elsevier is planning to sell a bunch of publications, including Broadcasting & Cable, Publishers Weekly and Multichannel News. [THR]
• Rodale's president and CEO, Steve Murphy, has resigned. [Gawker]
• Disney reports third-quarter profit fell 26 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Sony posted a loss for the quarter, as well. [AP, Reuters]
• Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia reported a loss, but beat estimates. [NYP]
• TLC's been having a pretty good year, in case you haven't heard. [LAT]
• Amy Poehler is coming back to SNL. Just part-time, though. [Vulture]
• Maria Bartiromo has locked in a new five-year contract with CNBC. [VF]
• Dustin "Screech" Diamond's tell-all memoir will be published, after all! [NYO]

• How's the New York Times Co. planning to lift itself out of the financial mess it's been in? Times Co. chief Janet Robinson says more cuts are on the way and the company is planning to sell off more assets. Also, there's some sort of paid membership model in the works, apparently. [WSJ, Gawker]
• Related: The paper says it will sell its stake in the Red Sox by January. [BG]
• What you missed at Walter Cronkite's funeral yesterday. [NYT, WaPo]
• Best-selling author E. Lynn Harris has died. He was 54. [NYT]
• More magazine is teaming up with Candace Bushnell on a new Web series starring 90210's Jennie Garth and Talia Balsam from Mad Men. [MW]
• After a ten-year run, today is Paula Froelich's last day at Page Six. [NYM] More

• BusinessWeek's Jon Fine reports that New York owner Bruce Wasserstein may be in the running to break out a dollar bill and buy BusinessWeek. [BW]
• ESPN banned New York Post employees from appearing on the network yesterday after the paper ran (blurry) pics of a nude Erin Andrews. [AP]
• Will will happen with McKinsey consultants now infiltrating Condé Nast? How should you behave if you work there? Some answers and tips. [NYM, Gawker]
• Martha Stewart loves Twitter, doesn't particularly care for Facebook. [TDB]
• Kate Major, the Jon Gosselin-loving, publicity-seeking reporter for publicity-seeking Star magazine, has resigned from the junky tabloid. [Star]
• Ad revenue fell precipitously, but the New York Times Co. reported second-quarter profits of $39.1 million, up from $21.1 million a year ago. [NYT]
• Related: Is the Times Co. planning to hang on to the Boston Globe? [E&P]
• America's most trusted newscaster? That would be Jon Stewart. [Time] More

• The urban/music magazine Vibe is shutting down. [Daily Finance]
• Media coverage of Michael Jackson's death is now "receding." Not that there was any other place for it to go but down: A report finds that 93% of the coverage on cable late last week was Jackson-related. [AP, Journalism.org]
• Or maybe not. Katie Couric anchors a big Jacko special on CBS tonight. [NYO]
• Fired Fox News columnist Roger Friedman has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against Fox News, News Corp, 20th Century Fox and Rupert Murdoch. He'd like $5.2 million, please. [HuffPo] More

• The late night battle rages on: After losing ground to Letterman, Conan bounced back last night, and had a pretty solid first week overall. [THR, NYT]
• Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. confirms that it has been talks with the New York Times Co. to purchase the Boston Globe. [BH]
• Stephen Colbert's decision to broadcast from Iraq worked out nicely: Ratings for the Comedy Central show have been up 25 percent this week. [NYT]
• Joy Behar is launching a new talk show on HLN. The best part about it: She'll be bumping blowhard Lou Dobbs from his 9pm slot on the network. [NYT]
• TV, print and online ad spending fell 14 percent in the first quarter. [WSJ]
• Hope you're a Marley & Me fan. HarperCollins is cemented a deal to publish 13 children's books about the world's most famous Labrador. Yes, 13. [PW] More

As expected, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced this morning that it plans to spin off AOL, a move that puts the final nail in the coffin of one of the most disastrous mergers in history. But if the mechanics of the deal strike you a little too complicated, The Times Bits blog has outlined it in easy-to-understand celebrity tabloid terms:More

• Rumor has it Richard Branson may be interested in buying Playboy. [ChiTrib]
• Two Boston Globe unions have agreed to concessions with the NYT Co. [E&P]
• Why did the Times pick Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to invest in the paper instead of David Geffen? It seems publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was "worried about Geffen's ambition to take over the company." [AllThingsD]
• Mayor Bloomberg plans to introduce legislation in Albany to extend the city's popular—but broke—film/TV tax credit program. [THR]
• Tom McGeveran has been named interim editor of the New York Observer. He'll take over for Peter Kaplan, whose last day will be this Friday. [NYO]More

• Jon Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer is getting mixed reviews, mainly because both deviated from their typical personas: the normally brash Cramer was a wimp and Stewart wasn't funny. It "felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing," writes Alessandra Stanley. [NYT, Salon, Atlantic, ABC]
• TMZ and Extra have extended their coverage to the financial services industry! Isn't it ironic that TMZ has exposed more corporate misbehavior over the past few months than CNBC has? Because it sort of has. [NYT]
• Google sales chief Tim Armstrong is the new chairman and CEO of AOL. [WSJ]
• Jim Kelly is stepping down as managing editor of Time Inc. [NYP]
• Fox has dumped Peter Liguori in favor of Fox Searchlight's Peter Rice. [THR]
• More changes are ahead at the Peter Brant-owned Interview. [WWD]
• Mel Karmazin says Sirius's poor performance last quarter was due to "doom and gloom" rumors suggesting the company would go bankrupt. [WSJ] 
• Jimmy Fallon finished his first week with solid ratings, beating out the numbers that Conan O'Brien typically generated. Depressing, huh? [Variety]

• ABC is reportedly thinking about giving Jimmy Kimmel the Nightline slot, putting him in competition with Conan when he takes over for Leno. [NYT]
• ABC News is cutting 35; Disney-ABC TV is dismissing 300. [TVN, THR]
• Congressional Quarterly is for sale. [WSJ]
• The Washington Post is dropping Book World as a Sunday section. [WP]
• AOL is laying off around 700 employees, or 10% of its work force. [WSJ]
• Ex-MTV prez Christina Norman will run Oprah's new TV network. [THR]

Yahoo to Buy AOL? | A source tells Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo! is acquiring AOL from Time Warner and will announce the news as early as tomorrow. [SAR]

♦  Sumner Redstone is being forced to sell about one-fifth of his stake in CBS and Viacom to meet the terms of various loan agreements. Also: Shares in Viacom plunged after the company announced third-quarter earnings fell short of estimates. [Bloomberg]
♦  It's official: Hearst's Cathie Black announced CosmoGirl will fold. [Portfolio]
♦  A little perspective: Time Warner is now less than one-quarter of what AOL alone was worth before the merger. [SAI]
♦  After much drama (and a few leaked emails), Scott Rudin has decided to talk away from The Reader. [THR]More

• The bill for the auction-rate securities mess is now adding up by the hour. Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, UBS, and Morgan Stanley have all contributed to to the tally. [Dealbook]
• More losses at Fannie Mae. [WSJ]
• Cablevision investor Mario Gabelli is calling for Jim and Chuck Dolan to break up the company. And he's threatening a proxy fight. [NY Sun]
• Google has acknowledged its stake in AOL is now "impaired." [AP]
• Sprint is cancelling a $3 billion stock offering. [Dealbook]
• Tone Grant, the former president of Refco, will spend the next 10 years eating prison food. [Reuters]
• About 10 years after it started, Ron Perelman has settled one of the lawsuits related to his investment in Marvel comics by paying $80 million. [NYP]
  
• Not every institution is suffering: Harvard's endowment is up between 7 and 9 percent. [NY Sun]
• The anti-trust chief at the FTC is joining the law firm Linklaters LLP. [Reuters]

• Time Warner is getting ready to sell off its AOL dial-up business and may announce a deal this week. [WSJ]
• The Fed is likely to keep interest rates steady when it meets on Tuesday. [AP] 
• Fortune reports that former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne was near death from a prostate infection last September when the firm started to spiral downward. [Fortune]
• The bankrupt retailer Steve & Barrys may have a buyer. [NYP]
• HSBC has reported a 28 percent drop in profits during the first half of 2008. [Reuters]
• Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone Group is opening an office in Beijing. [Reuters]
• The Post issued its list of hedge fund winners and losers yesterday. But the big winner may not have done so well after all. [NYP, NYP] 
• July was a dismal month for IPOs. [WSJ]

• JPMorgan announced that profits fell 52% due to write-downs, slightly less than the Street expected. [Bloomberg]
• Merrill Lynch has scrapped the idea of relocating its headquarters to an office tower in the new World Trade Center. [NYT]
• Continental reported a second-quarter loss amid surging fuel costs. [WSJ]
• Microsoft and Yahoo aren't terribly eager to take AOL off Time Warner's hands. [NYT]
• Larry Fink-led BlackRock said its profits rose 23% over the same quarter last year and confirmed Merrill will retain its 49% stake in the company. [DealBook]
• Henry Kravis will be thrilled: Union protestors are expected outside the offices of KKR today. [Dealbreaker]

• Did Goldman Sachs have a hand in the downfall of Bear Stearns? London-based traders at the firm are now under investigation for spreading negative rumors [WSJ]
• Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes has stepped up talks with Yahoo and Microsoft over merging or selling AOL to one of the companies. [Reuters] 
  
• The SEC took dramatic steps to curb the short selling of major financial stocks. [Reuters]
• Lehman's former CFO, Erin Callan, is moving to Credit Suisse where she'll head up the global hedge fund business. [Forbes]
• Congressional opposition may complicate the government's plan to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. [NYT]
• Asking rents for Manhattan office space are climbing despite the tanking economy. [NYT]