Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• It's official: Will Ferrell is the most overpaid man in show business. [THR]
• Layoffs: BusinessWeek's cuts kicked off today; layoffs now loom at Time Inc. as the company awaits word on how many volunteers will accept buyout packages; and there's a bit more detail on this week's cuts at the AP.
• MSNBC's Joe Scarborough isn't exactly on fire at the moment. [NYO]
• Palinitis: The ex-governor's sit-down with Oprah on Monday generated the talk show queen her highest ratings in two years; Fox News clowns Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are now at war over their respective Palin interviews; and people are still talking about that Palin Newsweek cover, for some reason.
• Vivendi has tossed a last-minute complication into the NBC deal. [NYT]
• Times reporter Jodi Kantor has landed a seven-figure book deal. [NYO]
• Breaking! The Emmys are moving from September to August. [THR]
• CNN's Candy Crowley is speaking out about her weight loss. At last! [LAT]

• CBS posted a first-quarter loss as the ad recession took its toll. [THR, NYT] 
• News Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in quarterly profits. [LAT, B&C]
• Profit dropped by 46 percent at Warner Music during the same period. [PC]
• Sirius XM posted a $236 million quarterly loss and also announced that its number of subscribers declined for the first time ever. [AP]
• Cablevision plans to "explore" a spinoff of Madison Square Garden. [NYT]
• News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch says he plans to charge readers to access the online content of his newspapers in the near future. [E&P]
• The new Bob Dylan album is No. 1 on the charts this week. [THR]
• Felix Dennis says The Week is for sale. For just $200 million. [Folio] More

• Mark Bowden's 11,000-word profile of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for the May issue of Vanity Fair is now online. And it ain't pretty. [VF]
• In other Times news, the paper is scrapping its "City" section and has shut down the International Herald Tribune website. [NYO, E&P]
• For the first time, CNN will finish March behind MSNBC and Fox News. [AP]
• He's only been on the air two months, but Glenn Beck's "conservative populist anger" has already put him right behind Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. [NYT]
• Adweek, MediaWeek and Brandweek may be folded together. [NYP]
• News Corp. is hiring ex-AOL CEO Jon Miller to lead its digital division. [WSJ]
• The Huffington Post is launching an investigative journalism site. [AP]
• MTV is bringing back music videos! Sort of. [NYT]

Happy Birthday | Nightlife vet Amy Sacco turns 41 today. Strangely, Today show co-anchors Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer happen to share the same birthday, too: Meredith is turning 55, while Matt is 51. Fox News' Sean Hannity is 47. Entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman (and the husband of Deborah and father of Lizzie) is 66. Tiger Woods is turning 33. Film director Bennett Miller is 42. Patti Smith is turning 62. WCBS political reporter Marcia Kramer is 60. Actress Eliza Dushku is 28. R&B singer Tyrese is 30. Comedian Tracey Ullman is 49. LeBron James is 24. Laila Ali is 31. Heidi Fleiss is turning 43. And New York County Clerk Norman Goodman—the man responsible for all those jury duty summonses—is 85.

• The bloodletting at CBS is underway. [THR]
• Macmillan Publishing and FSG are both trimming staff. [AP, NYO]
• Ad spending for the first nine months of this year fell 1.7 percent. [WWD]
• Katie Couric, Campbell Brown, and Rachel Maddow will appear in the next issue of Vogue. [TVN]
• Sean Hannity's Alan Colmes-less show begins January 12th. [NYT]
• The Disney Channel is taking its act to Russia next year. [NYT]
• The most amusing corrections published this year. [Regret the Error]

Alan Colmes' Goodbye | As if spending the last eight years as Sean Hannity's punching bag on Fox News wasn't humiliating enough, watch the crew of Hannity & Colmes break into laughs as Alan Colmes announces his plan to leave the program at the end of the year. Your colleagues will miss you dearly, Alan.

♦  Graydon Carter says Vanity Fair plans to go ahead with its annual Oscar party, but "the party will be a much more intimate affair than in years past; we're going to scale back the guest list considerably." [DH]
♦  No replacement is planned for Alan Colmes: Fox News plans to have Sean Hannity serve as solo host of the nightly show. [NYT]
♦  Ted Koppel is parting ways with the Discovery Channel. [NYT]
♦  Looks like OK! has been cutting back on copy editors. The cover of the new issue misspells Ashlee Simpson's name. [HuffPo]More

♦  Alan Colmes, the "liberal" who supposedly serves as co-host of Hannity & Colmes with Sean Hannity, is leaving the Fox News program at the end of the year. [HuffPo]
♦  A daily news program hosted by Christiane Amanpour is in the works at CNN. [NYT]
♦  Despite screwing up nearly everything he touches, NBC golden boy Ben Silverman may see his contract renewed in the next few weeks. [NYM]
♦  USA Today has announced plans to cut staff. [E&P]
♦  Twilight was No. 1 at the box office this weekend, raking in $70.5 mil. [LAT]
♦  Forbes is not being sold to a shady Russian billionaire. [SAI]More

♦  When Barack Obama mentioned on 60 Minutes that he was reading a book about FDR, what book was he referring to? At least one publisher wants to know. [NYT]
♦  National Geographic is getting into the videogame business. [THR]
♦  Pepsi has dumped its longtime ad agency, BBDO Worldwide, in favor of TBWA/Chiat/Day. [NYT]
♦  Rosie O'Donnell is planning to appear on three episodes of Rachael Ray's cooking show this month. [NYDN]
♦  ESPN has outbid Fox for the broadcast rights to college football's Bowl Championship Series, beginning in 2011. [WSJ]
♦  Maxim has named NBC's Amy Robach as "hottest news anchor." [TVNewser]
♦  Just in time for Christmas, Fox News' Sean Hannity is sponsoring a series of "Freedom Concerts."  [HuffPo]
♦  Here's video of a stilted Arianna Huffington filling in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, in case you missed it. [Gawker]

The list of election '08 losers is a long one: There's John McCain, of course, who will die angry and bitter, notwithstanding his rather gracious concession speech last night. Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, will probably have trouble finding a Little League team to advise, unless he manages to redeem himself somehow. From Republicans on the Hill to GOP strategists to snowmobile and hunting enthusiasts, plenty of people will feel the cold wind of electoral defeat for a long time to come. After the jump, a roundup of New York City's nine biggest losers. More

♦  Sean Hannity has signed a new "multi-year" deal with Fox News. [THR]
♦  Cutbacks at the Wall Street Journal: Reporters will only get one laptop now, not two. [Gawker]
♦  Ratings for Meet the Press have dropped since Tim Russert's passing. [NYP]
♦  The New York Times is shutting down the website for the International Herald Tribune. [E&P]
♦  People is rushing to market a 96-page, soft-cover book commemorating Paul Newman. [Folio]
♦  Dan Rather is seeking to expand his suit against CBS. And he's "only" making $1.5 million a year at HDNet, in case you were wondering. [Bloomberg]
♦  Dreamworks is downsizing. [Nikki Finke]
♦  The Natalee Holloway made-for-TV movie is on the way. To Lifetime, naturally. [NYP]
♦  Ryan Seacrest's radio show is coming to New York. And some people wonder why radio is dying. [NYP]

• Most amusing bits from the lengthy Times piece this past weekend on succession at Condé Nast: That overlord Si Newhouse still "personally hand-counts ad pages in his magazines and their competitors." And that he goes to work every day in "chinos and an old sweatshirt." [NYT]
• The Sarah Jessica Parker-produced show American Artist was picked up by Bravo. It's a "Project Runway-style competition series that takes on the art world. Aspiring artists compete to produce various styles of artwork (painting, sculpting, etc.), which is then judged by a panel of experts." [HR]
• Just in case Jimmy Fallon hosting Late Night wasn't bad enough, he'll be hosting an online version of the show beginning this fall. [NYT] 
• Jeff Zucker would like you to know that NBC has sold 90% of its Olympic ads [HR]
• Conservative blowhard Sean Hannity has signed a new distribution deal with both ABC Networks and Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks. [WSJ]
• A rivalry between CNBC's Erin Burnett and Maria Bartiromo? Perish the thought! "She is smart, beautiful and hard-working," says Bartiromo. Guess that settles that. [NYT]

Last week brought the appalling news that pill-popping professional idiot Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year, $400 million contract with Premiere Radio Networks. He'll now collect $38 million a year, which he'll probably direct to some of the passions detailed in a NYT Magazine profile of Limbaugh this past weekend, like La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel cigars, private jets (he just purchased a Gulfstream G550) and life-size oil paintings of himself. (The deal also provided him with a $100 million signing bonus.)  But what about the rest of the news media heavyweights—how much coin are they taking home annually? The salaries of America's most beloved anchors and blowhards of various political persuasions after the jump. More