Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• 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

• Another media company falls: Reader's Digest Association, the publisher of Reader's Digest (duh) and a handful of other titles (like Every Day with Rachael Ray), says it will file for bankruptcy protection shortly. [Reuters]
• As you may have heard, things haven't been too well for Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob. So what will happen if they don't turn the mini-studio around? "I'll be... making cheap hamburgers, or selling trailers, or refrigerators, or something," says (a refreshingly honest) Harvey. [NYT] 
• Fashion mags are looking a bit thin this fall, in case you haven't heard. [WSJ]
• Don't expect the feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann to dissipate: Ratings for both have been up since the war of words began anew. [LAT]
• Comedian Steve Harvey is joining Good Morning America. In related news, comedian Mo Rocca is hosting a web-based show for CBS News. [ABC, NYT]
• District 9 was No. 1 at the box office this past weekend. [ABC News] More

So much for the truce between MSNBC and Fox. Since news of a cease fire (or at least a ratcheting down of the rhetoric) appeared in the pages of the New York Times twelve days ago, whatever fragile peace the two networks negotiated has dissolved into the usual volley of insults. Bill O'Reilly is once again the worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann. And MSNBC's parent company, GE, is once again responsible for supporting terrorist regimes that are hell-bent on America's destruction, according to O'Reilly. Few at MSNBC and Fox News are happy the deal has unraveled—and both sides have said they're hoping to salvage it, an unlikely prospect at this point—although some of the most annoyed people around are the NBC staffers who are getting increasingly fed up with Olbermann's antics.More

• The New York Times Co. is now publicly shopping the Boston Globe. Meanwhile, the list of potential acquirers is getting longer: The firm that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune is now a possible buyer. [AP, NYT]
• Related: The Globe is going to start charging to access its Web site. [E&P]
• News Corp. and GE were hoping to "ratchet down the rhetoric" when they ironed out a peace pact between MSNBC and Fox News recently. Keith Olbermann didn't abide by it, of course. (And Bill O'Reilly returned the compliment.) But Olbermann is still pretending it never happened. [WP, HP]
• It seems one embarrassment this week wasn't quite enough for Olbermann. Because he's resorting to shameless (and familiar) excuses to try and explain away the Richard Wolffe conflict-of-interest fiasco. [Gawker]
• Profits at CBS dropped by 96 percent in the second quarter. [WSJ]
• Why did Twitter go down yesterday? Blame the Russians. [NYT]More

• Keith Olbermann took Times reporter Brian Stelter to task last night for reporting that News Corp. and GE had worked out a deal to tone down the rhetoric between MSNBC and Fox News. But he didn't disagree with everything Stelter reported. Conveniently, only the bad stuff about him was wrong. [NYM]
• More bad news for Olbermann: MSNBC now admits it made a mistake by not disclosing that Countdown fixture Richard Wolffe is a paid lobbyist. Naturally, Olbermann had absolutely no idea about any of this. [Politico, Salon]
• Condé Nast is shedding more staff. This time around it appears the media giant's receptionists will be paying the ultimate price. [Gawker, NYM]
• Reps for Bruce Wasserstein met with BusinessWeek execs yesterday to discuss a bid for the magazine. Joe Mansueto, the founder of Morningstar and owner of Fast Company, may be a potential bidder as well. [BW]More

• Funny People debuted at No. 1 at the box office this weekend, although it was still the worst opening for an Adam Sandler movie in five years. [Reuters]
• Mort Zuckerman is selling shares of his real estate company to pump $50 million into the Daily News to pay for new printing presses. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs has become a PR nightmare for CNN. Presumably the fact that Media Matters is airing an anti-Dobbs commercial won't help matters. [AP, HP]
• Is the peace pact between Olbermann and O'Reilly a sham? [TDB]
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors. [BN]More

• New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson "isn't happy with the media." She'd also like to make it clear that the company is not currently up for sale, so please put your dollar bills back in your wallet, thank you very much. [MW]
• Ten movies will compete for Best Picture at the Oscars now, not 5. [THR]
• Sad: Dick Cheney landed a $2 million deal to publish his memoir. [NYT]
• Also sad: MSNBC, the illustrious home of blowhard Keith Olbermann, seems to think its tired prison docs are more important than covering Iran. [LAT]
• Director David Fincher is in talks to make a movie about Facebook. [Reuters]
• The always classy In Touch spent $75,000 to purchase photos of Kate Gosselin spanking her kids in public for its cover last week. [WWD, NYP]More

Keith Olbermann already lives at the Trump Palace on East 69th Street: He paid $4.2 million for a 2,100-square foot, three-bedroom apartment on the building's 40th floor in 2007. But that's clearly not enough space for the MSNBC host: Two weeks ago, Olbermann paid $810,000 for a 7th floor apartment in the same building. Guest quarters for out-of-town visitors? An abode for his cleaning lady? More

• It's not just TLC that is happy about the Jon & Kate nonsense. Putting them on the cover of Us six times in a row has been a "windfall" for Janice Min. [NYP]
• Get ready to pay for People.com: Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes says the company may begin charging for access to online magazine content. [AP]
• With book sales plunging and attendance down at BookExpo America, the mood in the publishing industry is kinda gloomy at the moment. [NYT]
• Keith Olbermann is in hot water again. The waterboarding video on his show last week was staged, it turns out, and MSNBC was made aware of that fact before the show, but they went ahead with it anyway. [Gawker]More

Rachel Maddow's Secret Formula | We always figured it took something really special for Rachel Maddow to be able to put up with Keith Olbermann every evening. Now we have the answer, courtesy of author/Mac pitchman John Hodgman: A bit of La Fée absinthe mixed with Red Bull, apparently. [Twitpic via BYOT]

Suggested Reading | Keith Olbermann's Ego Trumps the Truth [Gawker]

What were the "many sad logistics" that Keith Olbermann had to attend to when he took three days off work last month? That remains unclear, although he did have time to head over to Citi Field and take in a ballgame with his girlfriend and Jason Bateman. We all cope in different ways, clearly. [MLBlogs] [Update: Gawker has spoken with a source of its own at MSNBC and is now backing our account. See here.]

Keith Olbermann has responded to our story about his three-day absence late last month:

That was my first opportunity to take even a long weekend to mourn my mother's death and deal with the many sad logistics subsequent to her sudden passing. The source of this story is a liar and those who spread it without seeking confirmation or reputation are beneath contempt.

Naturally, we were saddened to hear of Olbermann's loss, and his tribute to his mother on Countdown was both honorable and deeply moving. But if that was the reason Olbermann took time off two weeks later, we can't imagine why Olbermann wouldn't have simply said as much. Furthermore, we find it hard to believe that one of his colleagues at MSNBC—an Emmy Award-winning journalist, no less—would have deliberately misled the public and attributed his absence to the "flu/allergy season" if Olbermann had made the perfectly understandable decision to take a few days to mourn his mother's passing. [Update: Gawker has spoken with a source of its own at MSNBC and is backing our account. See here.]

If you regularly tune in to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you may remember that Olbermann was mysteriously absent from the show for three days at the end of April. But Olbermann didn't just "have the night off," as David Shuster, his fill-in, said on the air three evenings in a row. According to a source inside MSNBC, it was a bizarre temper tantrum on Olbermann's part that led him to storm off the set in protest. Even stranger: The drama was all Ben Affleck's fault.More

Keith Olbermann's Girlfriend Joins the Family | Katy Tur, the 25-year-old girlfriend of Keith Olbermann, has a new job! She's now "chasing tornadoes as part of The Weather Channel's Vortex2 team." (You can see a clip of her doing just that here.) When Tur landed her last TV reporting gig in 2008—her first in the industry despite precious little experience—it was rumored that the MSNBC host had helped her land the job. More