Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• Oprah got all teary today when she announced she'll end her talk show two years from now. Meanwhile her upstart cable network announced it'll launch in January 2011, eight months before her talk show goes off the air. [EW, THR]
• Oprah isn't the only one planning her goodbyes. Bill Moyers announced today that he's retiring and will wrap up his weekly PBS show in April 2010. [NYT]
• Former NY1 anchor Dominic Carter was found guilty of misdemeanor attempted assault today for roughing up his wife last year. [NYDN]
• Last night's season finale of Project Runway was the highest-rated episode of the season; meanwhile, winner Irina Shabayeva describes what's next for her.
• The new Twilight sequel, New Moon, isn't just causing excitable teens to pass out in droves. It's also on track to break a few box office records. [AFP, AP]
• More on the bloodshed at BusinessWeek the past few days. [FBNY]
• Tina Brown has herself a new right-hand man at The Daily Beast. [NYP]
• Yet another book by reality TV star Lauren Conrad is on the way. [NYDN]
• Phil Falcone's Harbinger has cut his stake in the Times once again. [Reuters]
• The scariest news ever: Lou Dobbs has left open the possibility that he'll make a run for the White House in 2012. And he wasn't kidding. [Reuters]

• Down-and-out former pageant queen Carrie Prejean must be getting really desperate: She's turning to Donald Trump for career advice. Trump suggested she "become a major porn star," make tons of cash and then "give it to worthy causes." Clearly, it's this type of forward thinking that has made Trump the business titan he is. [P6]
• Nic Cage's lawyer now says the countersuit by the actor's former business manager—Samuel Levin claims he warned Cage about his "compulsive, self-destructive spending" years ago—is "ridiculous." As for Cage himself, he's in Somalia right now facing down evil pirates since he's under the impression that his life is one big action movie, but says he'll sort everything out once he gets back to the States. [P6]
• Lou Dobbs is taking a vacation now that he's no longer with CNN. Mexico is not on his travel itinerary, in case you were wondering. [NYP]
• Larry King's 10-year-old son is the luckiest boy in all of Los Angeles today: He's been signed to host his own cable TV show. Ain't nepotism grand? [TMZ]
• Amy Winehouse's dad says his daughter's new breast implants are leaking, which is why she's been in the hospital recently. But presumably that's to be expected if you poke yourself with needles all day, no? [Sun]More

Dobbs Keeps the Door Open | Lou Dobbs appeared on his pal Bill O'Reilly's show last night in his first interview since leaving CNN $8 million richer last week. And O'Reilly asked him the question that's been on many minds in recent days: Is Dobbs thinking about running for a U.S. Senate seat? More

• Oprah's interview with Sarah Palin aired today, as you know by now. [AP]
• The deal between GE and Comcast to give the cable giant control of NBC Universal could be finalized in the next few days/weeks, although approval from Washington could take some time. [DF, THR, WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs didn't walk away from $9 million when he departed CNN. He reportedly got paid $8 million in severance to walk out the door. [NYP]
• The largest gay newspaper publisher in the U.S. has shuttered. [NYT]
• Budget Travel may be the magazine to die. [Daily Intel]
• The cost-cutting McKinsey consultants have landed at Dow Jones. [Forbes] 
• 2012 destroyed the box office this weekend, reeling in $65 million. [THR] More

• George Stephanopoulos will probably replace Diane Sawyer on GMA. [TDB]
• Now that Bloomberg LP is talking over BusinessWeek, columnists Maria Bartiromo and Jack Welch are both parting ways with the mag. [NYP]
• CNN is laying off four of its web anchors since it no longer plans to produce live video on CNN.com. The good news? With Lou Dobbs no longer on the payroll, it should save $9 million over the next few years. [NYT, [NYP]
• Euna Lee, one of the two CurrentTV reporters who was imprisoned in North Korea earlier this year, has scored herself a six-figure book deal. [NYT]
• Shares of Playboy jumped yesterday after it was reported the apparel conglomerate Iconix was in talks to acquire the (struggling) company. [NYP]
• Another senior Observer editor is bidding goodbye to the paper. [Politico]
• Fashion mags are expecting their fortunes to improve in 2010. [WWD]
• Is the Fox Business Channel a lost cause at this point? [VF]
• Television is more getting more and more obscene, supposedly. [NYT]

• John King will be replacing Lou Dobbs at 7pm on CNN. [WP, NYT]
• CNN execs had been looking to part ways with Dobbs for many months now, although CNN president Jon Klein is denying that all the anti-Dobbs fervor had anything to do with his leaving. Meanwhile, Dobbs' departure is expected to leave up to 30 people without jobs. [TDB, NYT, AP]
• Dobbs' first post-CNN interview will be with Bill O'Reilly. Naturally. [DF]
• Iconix, the apparel company that owns Candie's, Badgley Mischka, and Rocawear, among other brands, is in talks to buy Playboy Enterprises. [BN]
• Bloomberg LP is ducking out of paying severance to BW staffers. [AdAge]
• A dozen staffers were laid off at Newsweek today. [Gawker]
• Martin Scorsese will receive the DeMille award at the Golden Globes. [LAT]
• Katie Couric is assembling media power lists now, apparently. [Forbes]

• Lou Dobbs is leaving CNN! Tonight's his last show! Happy Wednesday! [NYT]
• Condé Nast magazines have lost a collective 8,359 pages of advertising in 2009, which represents a 31 percent decline from a year earlier. [NYT]
• One thing that Hearst has going for it: lots of cash in the bank. [NYP]
• Banker-turned-media investor Jimmy Finklestein is reportedly buying the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, and a few other Nielsen titles. [Wrap]
• Current TV is keeping current with the times and laying off 80 staffers. [LAT]
• TV: Joss Whedon's Dollhouse has been canceled by Fox; meanwhile, ABC has decided that Kelsey Grammer comedy series Hank will exist no longer.
• Détente? President Obama has agreed to give Fox News an interview. [HP]
• The New Yorker sure has lots of writers and editors! [NYO]
• Reality TV is slowly killing us. So says Vanity Fair's James Wolcott. [VF]

• Time Inc. is expected to announce plans to slash $100 million in costs next week; naturally, lots of layoffs will be involved in making that happen. [NYT]
• The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Also in Beantown: The Boston Globe's publisher has announced he's stepping down. [BW, NYT]
• The war between the White House and Fox News is over. For now. [DF]
• Esquire's latest bid for relevance: Its December issue will be tricked out with "an emerging technology called augmented reality." Sounds hot. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs says someone fired a shot at his New Jersey home/horse farm. He's yet to blame the population of Mexico. But just give it time. [CNN]More

• The New York Times Co. reported a $35.6 million loss for the third quarter as ad revenue plunged 30 percent. But it was better than what Wall Street analysts were predicting, so the stock shot up 22 percent today. [NYT]
• New York magazine's chief says there are no plans to sell the magazine following last week's death of owner Bruce Wasserstein. [AdAge]
• Newsday plans to charge $5 a week to access to its website. [NYT, [E&P]
• Fortune is cutting back on the number of issues it publishes. And Time Inc., Fortune's publisher, is planning another round of job cuts. [WSJ]
• On the same day Sarah Palin's memoir is published, the Nation will release Going Rouge, an identical-looking book that mocks the ex-governor. [Politico]
• As if losing billions of family money wasn't enough of a punishment, France says it plans to put Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. on trial for insider trading in connection with the 2000 merger of Vivendi and Seagram. [NYP] More

Happy Birthday | CNN's least likable anchor is celebrating his birthday today: bigot and birther enthusiast Lou Dobbs is turning 64. Former cable news personality (and now radio host) Alan Colmes is turning 59. Actress Nia Vardalos is 47. Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, turns 58. Actor Kevin Sorbo is 51. Jessica Lucas, a member of the cast of the new Melrose Place, is turning 24. Ross Matthews, the guy better known as "Ross the Intern" from the old Tonight Show, is 30. And the WWE's Stephanie McMahon, daughter of wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, celebrates her 33rd birthday today.

• As expected, ratings for Jay Leno's new show are falling fast. [THR]
• Bloomberg LP appears to now be in the lead to buy BusinessWeek. [NYP]
• Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sold 1 million copies its first day. [NYT]
• Don't try to talk to Vogue publisher Tom Florio about what changes are in store for the mag now that those McKinsey consultants have finished their review. (He's not talking about it.) Meantime, McKinsey's final report will be handed over to Condé Nast's management next week. [NYO, WWD]
• Fox News boss Roger Ailes collected $24 million in compensation last year, which is $2 million more than his boss, Rupert Murdoch, took home. [BW]
• Jay-Z has his 11th No. 1 album. That puts him ahead of Elvis Presley as the solo artist with the most chart-toppers. But he's still behind the Beatles. [LAT]More

• The next top editor to fall victim to budget cuts at Condé Nast, at least according to Keith Kelly: Architectural Digest editor Paige Rense. [NYP]
• The first guest on Jay Leno's new show on Sept. 14: Jerry Seinfeld. [THR]
• Jay, Conan, Jon, Jimmy, Jimmy, or Craig? Now more than ever, celeb (and their publicists) are being forced to choose between late-night hosts. [THR]
• At least a dozen advertisers have abandoned Glenn Beck's show now that he's established himself as the most vile human being on television. [NYT]
• A big group of media companies—including CBS, NBC, Disney, News Corp., and Viacom—have teamed up to give the Nielsen ratings a run for its money. [NYT]More

• All is not well at ABC. The hoped-for comeback of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? didn't happen and ratings have been so low, the network is now occasionally falling behind Univision. Yes, Univision. [NYT, B&C]
• The owners of Uptown magazine are in talks to acquire Vibe, which shut down in June. What they plan to do with it is anybody's guess. [AdAge]
• Tina Brown's Daily Beast is on the move: She's planning to launch a U.K. version of the Barry Diller-funded website within months. [Telegraph]
• Not every magazine in America is struggling, apparently! [Newsweek]
• Is MTV planning to leave Times Square? Quite possibly. [NYP] More

• News Corp. posted a hefty loss for the most recent quarter, reporting that profits were down by 30 percent, although things would have been worse if weren't for Roger Ailes's cash machine, Fox News. In related news, Rupert Murdoch seems to think he can get people to pay for content on the Internet and plans to give it a shot over the next year. [NYT, BN, NYT, Guardian]
• Not to be outdone by Keith Olbermann's anti-Fox News rant on Monday night, Bill O'Reilly took aim at NBC's parent company, GE, on his show last night. This truce thing sure is working out beautifully, isn't it? [Gawker]
• Time Inc. is shutting down Southern Accents, a luxury lifestyle title. [NYP]
• Twitter was crippled by a big denial-of-service attack today, which you know full well if you happened to try and log into Twitter today. [CNET]
• If you don't watch Charlie Rose's self-indulgent talk show on PBS, now you can not watch it on Bloomberg TV, too. How convenient. [NYT]
• The Post's Page Six may be hiring Emily Smith, formerly Britain's Sun and Life & Style, to replace the recently-departed Paula Froelich. [Gawker] 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