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Happy Birthday | Carla Bruni Sarkozy is celebrating today—France's First Lady is turning 41. CBS chief Les Moonves is 60. Conservative coumnist Bill Kristol is 56. Soap star Susan Lucci is 62. Badgley Mischka's James Mischka is turning 48. Author Donna Tartt is 45. Literary agent Elyse Cheney is 41. Retired Army General (and one-time presidential candidate) Wesley Clark is turning 64. Rock star Eddie Vedder turns 44. And The Girls Next Door's Holly Madison is 29 today.
• Newsweek is planning to cut staff as well as give the mag a makeover. [WSJ]
• NPR is cutting 7 percent of its staff and dropping two shows. [NYT]
• Ad spending fell 2 percent during the third quarter, although online advertising continued to grow. [Adage]
• Les Moonves isn't too worried about Jay Leno's move to primetime. [NYP]
• Rumor has it Entertainment Weekly may go web-only. [Gawker]
• Reed Elsevier, which has been trying to sell trade titles like Variety and Publishers Weekly, is pulling them off the market. [NYP]
• Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. [HFPA]
♦ David Pecker's AMI, the publisher of the Star and National Enquirer, has been near bankruptcy for months. Now it's one step closer. [NYP]
♦ The details of Judith Regan's settlement with News Corp. have been revealed: It cost the company $10.75 million to make her go away. [Bloomberg]
♦ Janet Robinson says there are no plans to sell the Times. [E&P]
♦ A brief explanation for why newspapers are so screwed right now. [NYT, AP]
♦ An increasingly desperate OK! has cut the price of the mag. [NYP]
♦ The reorganization of Random House will likely leave Sonny Mehta the big winner. [NYO]
♦ Les Moonves on the state of network TV: "The model ain't broke." [THR]
♦ Gus Van Sant's Milk was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as the best film of 2008. [THR]
Spottings | Anna Wintour, John Lithgow, and Les Moonves and Julie Chen (left) watching a match at the US Open ... Rachael Ray buying fruits and veggies at the Greenmarket ... The four American Idol judges on a red carpet at Chelsea Piers ... Supermodel Miranda Kerr taking a stroll downtown ... Don Cheadle waving outside the David Letterman show ... ... Carmen Electra blowing kisses from her SUV ... Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian acting like idiots at JFK ... Vanessa Minnillo shuttling between talk show appearances in Midtown ... Lindsay Price heading into an event at the Empire Hotel ... and Katie Holmes showing up to watch a performance of August: Osage County.
It won't be quite as cheery as usual at Herb Allen's annual media mogul retreat, which kicks off today in Sun Valley. This time last year, the credit crisis was but a blip on the radar. Oh, how things have changed over the past twelve months. Without the billions on hand to close big deals, the economic downturn has made life pretty depressing for the master-of-the-universe set. But gather they will— the tennis and hiking must go on, damnit—and aside from the handful of players who were dropped from the invite list on account of their declining influence, all the media big shots are expected. Among those who will be cruising in on their company-owned jets: Rupert Murdoch (along with son Lachlan), Warren Buffett, Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, Les Moonves, Howard Stringer, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Jeff Bewkes and Dick Parsons of Time Warner, NBC's Jeff Zucker, Universal's Ron Meyer, Paramount chief Brad Grey, and Disney's Bob Iger. More
