Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• More on Condé Nast's decision to shut down four magazines, including Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride: An estimated 180 people will likely lose their jobs as part of the move, although CEO Chuck Townsend says the company has no plans to shutter any other titles. [NYO, AdAge]
• If Comcast goes ahead with a deal to take a controlling stake in NBC, Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal's CEO, may need to find a new job. [NYP]
• Don Imus' radio show debuted on Fox Business today. [WP]
• Rich Ross, the president of Disney Channels Worldwide, is taking over Walt Disney Studios; he's succeeding Dick Cook, who was ousted on Sept. 16. [NYT]
• Universal Pictures has fired chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde. [LAT]
• CBS has been busy ridding YouTube of David Letterman's mea culpa. [NYT]
• Zombieland was No. 1 at the box office this weekend with a $25 million take. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs dropped to second place. [Variety]
• It wasn't all bad news at Condé Nast today: The New Yorker landed its biggest ad buy since 2005 with a $1 million deal with HSBC. [Folio]More

• Who hasn't looked at buying BusinessWeek by now? Daily News and US News owner Mort Zuckerman appears to be the latest mogul to join the party. [BW]
• The wave of job cuts at Condé Nast could begin in a few weeks or in a few months, depending on who you ask. But either way, it's going to be ugly. [NYO]
• Fox News continues to trounce the competition: Both CNN and MSNBC experienced big declines in ratings during the third quarter. The situation appears to be especially bleak at CNBC, however. [B&C, HuffPo, ZH]
• Simon & Schuster is shaking things up at a couple of its imprints. [Crain's]
• The New York Times is planning to introduce a Chicago-centric edition of the paper. That's in addition to the San Fran edition launching this fall. [NYT]
• Related: Is the New York Times going to start charging readers to access its website? That's still unclear, but the answer should be coming soon. [NYO]
• "Print is undead," reports the undead print newspaper the Village Voice. [VV] More

• Rumor has it Condé Nast isn't going to shutter several of its money-losing magazines like Details and Teen Vogue, after all. But the budget review that's taken place in recent weeks seems to have "scared fiscal responsibility into some of the highest-rolling titles at the glitzy empire." This means Graydon Carter won't be making it to London or Milan Fashion Week, sadly. [NYP]
• Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, is dead at 89. [AP]
• Oprah has picked the next big best-seller. The latest pick for her book club is a set of short stories by Uwem Akpa called Say You're One of Them. [NYDN]
• After a 72-year run, Guiding Light's final episode aired today. [Reuters]
• CNBC has canceled Dennis Kneale's 8pm show on the network. [NYO]
• The Emmy Awards take place this Sunday. Who's going to win? If you watched last year's telecast, you may already have the answers. [WP]More

• NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote Jay Leno's new show. Don't believe it? Try this out for size: "In early September, NBC will even adopt a portion of Interstate 10 in California to reiterate Mr. Leno's time slot." [NYT]
• Notwithstanding the Leno blitz, NBC is still looking to cut its budget. [NYT]
• No one cares about CNBC these days, in case you haven't noticed. [Slate]
• More on troubles at Condé Nast (revenues may fall by as much as $350 million this year), and the recent round of receptionist-purging. [NYP, NYO]
• The lobbyist scandal goes on. A couple of days after it was revealed that MSNBC's Richard Wolffe is now working for a lobbying firm comes the news that CNN's Bill Schneider has signed up with a D.C. think tank. [HuffPo]
• Related: Wolffe has another Obama-related book in the works. [TNR]
• Experts say the prognosis for BusinessWeek is not good. [DailyFinance]
• As you might expect, the mood has been very upbeat at CurrentTV today now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee have returned from North Korea. [NYT]More

• 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]

• Bad news for NBC Universal: second-quarter profits dropped by 41%. [MW]
• Good news for NBC News: Susan Boyle's first in-depth TV interview will take place with Meredith Vieira on the Today show next Wednesday. [NYT]
• Alpha Media, the company that owns Maxim (and used to own Blender and Stuff)—and which was sold to Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in 2007—has changed hands again: Steve Feinberg's Cerberus now runs the show. [NYP]
• Rumor has it Pamela Fiori may be leaving Town & Country. [P6]
• Bonnie Fuller is taking over Hollywood Life, the website controlled by Jay Penske, who owns Movieline and recently bought out Nikki Finke. [NYT]
• More Finke: Days after the LA Times ran an article on Hollywood's most powerful blogger comes pretty much the same piece in the NY Times. [NYT]
• All that bad press for CNBC a few months ago must have refocused the network on the things that matter, right? Nope. [Gawker, Zero Hedge]More

• The New York Blade, one of the two big gay and lesbian newspapers in New York City, has suspended publication and laid off most of its staff. [NYT]
• How many books can you possibly read about Bernie Madoff? Who knows, but there at least four books about him scheduled to hit stores this fall. [Crains]
• David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was kidnapped in Afghanistan with his translator in November and released a couple of weeks ago, returned to the Times newsroom to a standing ovation yesterday. [NYT]
• James Frey's young adult novel has been sold to HarperCollins. [NYT]
• Wonkette editor Ken Layne has sold a book to HarperCollins, too. [NYO]
• The battle between CNBC's Dennis Kneale and bloggers goes on. [Dealbreaker]

• Cablevision is planning to launch an entire cable network devoted to nothing but wedding shows. So now you'll be able to watch Bridezillas 24/7. Yay. [B&C]
• It may not be over for Vibe. Quincy Jones, who founded the magazine in '93, says he's looking into buying it back and keeping it alive as a website. [Ebony]
• Spin reportedly laid off 20 percent of its staff yesterday. [Gawker]
• Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. by circulation, is reportedly cutting between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs at the company. [WSJ]
• More bad news for CNN: MSNBC is now in front on weeknights and Campbell Brown's nightly show continues to plunge in the ratings, too. [NYT, TVBTN]
• CNBC's Dennis Kneale doesn't like it when bloggers mock him. Will acting like a nut on TV fix that? No, but it sure makes for amusing TV. [Dealbreaker] More

• The Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe's largest union, narrowly rejected a package of pay concessions and benefit cuts last night. [NYT]
• David Letterman is close to signing a new, 3-year contract with CBS. [THR]
• Conan O'Brien has beat Letterman in the ratings every night since his show debuted last week. But that may very well change pretty soon. [Vulture]
• Rachael Ray's talk show has been renewed for two more seasons. Alas. [THR]
• Glenn O'Brien is out as Interview's editorial director. [Daily Intel, FWD] More

• Is Harvey and Bob Weinstein's film company headed for bankruptcy? That remains unclear, although the Weinstein Co's decision to hire Miller Buckfire to restructure its finances isn't a good sign, that's for sure. [NYT]
• Members of the Boston Newspaper Guild are voting today whether to accept the package of pay cuts proposed by the New York Times Co. [PC]
• Stephen Colbert is broadcasting from Iraq this week. In addition to an interview with the president, Colbert will get a military-style makeover. [NYT]
• Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor by a North Korean court late last night. The Obama administration has vowed to keep up its lobbying effort. And in the meantime, employees at Current TV—where both women work—continue to keep quiet about the matter, per instructions from network management. [NYT, AP, NYT]More

Another Mishap For Michael | Is there a plot to deny Michael Wolff airtime on CNBC? For the second time in the last month, a technical glitch ended up interrupting one of his appearances, although we can't imagine viewers minded the fact that his image disappeared behind a blue screen for a minute or so while he droned on about Jon & Kate Plus 8, a show he explains at the outset he's never even seen before. (That's his shoulder sticking out on the right side of the photo.) The video is here; skip ahead to the 2:45 mark to see Wolff's magical disappearing act in action. [CNBC, previously]

• Portfolio isn't over and done with, after all: An affiliate of Condé Nast—based in Charlotte, weirdly—plans to revive the magazine's website. [NYO]
• Josh Marshall has accepted Maureen Dowd's apology for swiping some of his copy; and Dowd's new column today is Marshall-free, thankfully. [TPM, NYT]
• Upfronts 2009: What the CW and CBS have in store for the fall. [THR, THR]
• Is Jann Wenner looking to poach Condé Nast honcho David Carey? [NYM]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller says Google is the paper's "frenemy." [NYO]
• CNBC's Jeff Macke had a meltdown on the air yesterday. [Gawker]  More

• Jim Dolan's Cablevision says that Newsday is not for sale, which is good since there isn't a company on the planet that wants to buy it. [E&P]
• David Geffen made an offer to acquire the stake in the New York Times Co. controlled by Phil Falcone's Harbinger fund; Harbinger passed. [Fortune]
• The mood isn't too upbeat at the Cannes Film Festival, unsurprisingly. [THR]
• 60 Minutes' segment on Anna Wintour should air this Sunday. [Gawker]
• As of the publishing biz didn't have enough to worry about, "web pirates" are now posting copies of books on the Internet. [NYT]
• Anderson Cooper's ratings have been on the decline all year. [LAT]
• OK! appears to be dissolving into chaos. [ASSME, Gawker] More

• The first quarter wasn't such a hot one for NBC Universal: Earnings dropped 45 percent as the ad market continued its downward spiral. [WSJ, TVWeek]
• The world's largest newsprint maker has gone bankrupt. [NYT]
• Rolling Stone is closing up shop in San Francisco. [Portfolio]
• Ads sales figures at The New York Times Co. are looking pretty ugly. [E&P]
• Some good news, at least for impoverished porn addicts: Time Warner no longer plans to charge customers based on bandwidth usage. [Wired]More

We're not sure why CNBC would have picked Michael Wolff, of all people, to come on to talk about how disgraced CEOs and celebrities can go about restoring their damaged reputations—and it's also a mystery why Wolff would have accepted such an ironic invite—but maybe he was just hoping to pick up a tip or two from the other guests on the panel? Unfortunately for Wolff, just as he got done explaining why a Lindsay Lohan reality show would be a huge rating success—you think?—some sort of technical glitch occurred and kind of ruined Michael's moment. Oh, well. We'll just have to look forward to next week when Wolff appears on camera to talk about what qualities to look for when you're hiring an intern.