Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

Happy Birthday | Ethan Hawke turns 39 today. Mike Nichols, the film director and husband of Diane Sawyer, is turning 78. Gossip Girl's Kelly Rutherford is 41. The First Lady of California, Maria Shriver, is 54. Sally Field is turning 62. Writer Michael Cunningham is 57. Rebecca Romijn (formerly Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) turns 37 today. Thandie Newton is turning 37. Taryn Manning is 31. Actress Emma Stone is 21. TV host Catherine Crier is turning 55. Former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger is turning 69. Joe Wilson, the former diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame, is 60  And Lamar Odom, the NBA star and poor soul now married to Khloe Kardashian, is 30. A few weekend birthdays after the jump.
More

Si Newhouse Catches a Break | It looked like Condé Nast boss Si Newhouse was going to lose big when he put a prized sculpture up for auction at Sotheby's last night. But he ended up doing fine! Or close to it, least. Instead of losing as much as $10 or $12 million on the sale, he only came up $2.8 million short in the end: More

It's been a brutal few weeks at Condé Nast as the magazine giant has shut down four magazines and slashed hundreds of jobs. The pain, however, isn't limited to the rank and file. A prized piece of art from the collection of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse goes up for auction tomorrow at Sotheby's and despite the fact he stands to lose much as $10 million by selling now at the market abyss, Newhouse has opted to try and unload the piece anyway. Desperate times call for desperate measures, it seems.More

Mort Zuckerman's latest attempt to expand his media empire has failed, it seems. Reuters is reporting the real estate developer and owner of the Daily News and US News has decided to drop out of the race to acquire BusinessWeek, possibly because he sensed execs at the mag's parent company, McGraw-Hill, are more interesting in doing a deal with Bloomberg LP instead. More

• Don Hewitt, the man who invented 60 Minutes, is dead at 86. [CBS, NYT]
• Those McKinsey consultants at Condé Nast have commenced their work. The first order of business: a review of Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler. [NYO]
• Related: Anna Wintour is "said to have told" Condé boss Si Newhouse that "she would welcome McKinsey to her offices." So welcome, guys! [WWD]
• Nine companies are said to be eyeing BusinessWeek, the struggling title owned by McGraw-Hill. The front-runner, according to the Post's Keith Kelly: financier Bruce Wasserstein, who also owns New York magazine. [NYP]
• Is Fox News going to fire Glenn Beck given all his insane comments and all the advertisers who have since abandoned the show? Alas, no. [DailyFinance] More

These are uncertain times for Condé Nast. McKinsey consultants are now scouring company budgets looking for fat to trim. And staffers are now getting acclimated to a world in which they're expected to subsist on room temperature Poland Spring, not chilled Fiji water or sparkling citrus beverages in round little bottles. It hasn't been a walk in the park for Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, of course. Over the past year, he's probably seen several billion dollars of his net worth evaporate. And his private foundation—a vehicle he's used over the years to shower hundreds of millions of dollars on art institutions, hospitals, libraries, and his alma mater, Syracuse University—hasn't been immune either.  More

Earlier this week, Condé Nast announced that it had hired McKinsey & Co. to help it "rethink" how it does business and "develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business [and] growing revenues." Is it a coincidence that Condé's parent company filed a lawsuit against the British West Indies today? More

Hearty congratulations to S.I. Newhouse and the rest of the Newhouse family: Samuel I. Newhouse IV, the grandson of Condé Nast's mercurial chairman, got hitched this past weekend! You may remember the young heir from Jamie Johnson's 2003 film Born Rich, which featured an interview with the youthful Newhouse in his college dorm room. (See photo, left.) Much has changed since then, as you can probably tell from the before-and-after photos. More

These are difficult times for Condé Nast. AdAge reported yesterday the publishing giant is planning to slash the ad sales group managed by Richard Beckman; today, Keith Kelly of the Post reports some of the company's flagship titles have seen a 30 to 40 percent decline in revenues, and the company has "taken a dagger to its corporate pension plan" in order to reduce costs. Meanwhile, the Observer's John Koblin reports chairman Si Newhouse and CEO Chuck Townsend have asked editors to trim their discretionary budgets (which includes items like messengers, first-class airfare, and car services), and says a broader round of job cuts is inevitable. Of course, it's hard for any editor to trim his or her own staff—and it can be difficult for top execs to take a step back and see the absurd spending when they're so close to it.More

Things are not looking up at Condé Nast, the publishing conglomerate controlled by shadowy billionaire Si Newhouse. Yesterday, Chuck Townsend, the company's CEO, sent around a memo warning that "difficult decisions" would have to be made "to ensure our financial well-being," and insiders suggest a big budget cut is imminent. What to do? Well, here's one way to start: Si Newhouse and his nephew Steve should really have their assistants fill out the forms so they get the unclaimed funds in their names returned to them by the New York State Office of the Comptroller. Uncashed checks, stock dividends, credit balances: There could be a fortune there! Or, at the very least, enough to save the job of a lowly assistant or two. After the jump, a list of what Si and Steve are owed by American Express, Aetna Health, the State of Louisiana, Tiffany & Co., and a handful of banks. More

There's been no shortage of Anna Wintour rumors the past couple of months. Back in November, the word circulated that the Vogue editrix was thinking about retiring; two weeks later, there was gossip that Condé Nast chief Si Newhouse was planning to replace her with French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. More recently, there have been outlandish suggestions that Barack Obama is considering Anna as a possible ambassador to France or England. What gives? Who's been spreading the rumors? It turns out that the juicy bits about Anna are all connected: They're related to tense behind-the-scenes negotiations between Wintour and Newhouse over her new contract and were disseminated to the media by both sides as part of a devious whisper campaign.More

It's been a rough few weeks for Vogue editor Anna Wintour. There were the rumors that Condé Nast chief Si Newhouse was thinking of replacing her with Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue. Then there was more concrete evidence of Vogue's fading relevance: The number of ad pages in the magazine tumbled by nearly 10 percent in 2008, a decline more substantial than most of Vogue's competitors. Yesterday, the Times' Cathy Horyn, one of the few fashion writers daring enough to take on the industry's most powerful figure, laid out some of the magazine's problems with a piece entitled "What's Wrong with Vogue?"More

• More cuts at Condé Nast could come when Si Newhouse returns from his European vacation next week. Among the possible victims: Domino, Details, and staffers in the company's web division. [NYP]
• Berkley Books has cancelled plans to publish Angel at the Fence, a Holocaust memoir that the author admitted contains fabrications. [NYT]
• NBC is producing more webisodes to make up for programming gaps. [NYT]
• Ad spending in '09 is expected to drop to its lowest point since '03. [AdAge]
• CNBC's Conversations with Michael Eisner is no more. [NYP]
• An interview with CNN prez Jon Klein, who scored big ratings this year with AC360 and Campbell Brown's new show, but will also go down as the genius responsible for giving D.L. Hughley his own cable news program. [HuffPo]

♦  Although her life looks like it's finally back on track, a new documentary suggests Britney Spears thinks her new life is like prison and lacks "excitement" or "passion." Hopefully she'll be in a better mood in two weeks when she makes an appearance at the Rockefeller Center tree lighting ceremony. [The Sun, OK!]
♦  Could Anna Wintour be planning to retire? Page Six says the Vogue editor is thinking about leaving the mag once her contract is up, and she's even been recommending possible replacements to Si Newhouse. [P6]
♦  Kiefer Sutherland may be planning to move to NYC so he can be closer to his girlfriend, Allure style director Siobhan Bonnouvrier. [Daily Star]
♦  Madonna is reportedly making $10 million to appear in her new Louis Vuitton ad campaign. [P6]More

Condé Nast Cancels Lunch! | If you're the sort of magazine industry obsessive who looks forward to the first week of December when Condé Nast releases its holiday luncheon seating chart—wherein Condé overlord Si Newhouse either exalts or punishes his editors according to where he seats them at the Four Seasons, and with whom—you're going to have to wait until next year. The company's CEO, Chuck Townsend, informed staffers yesterday that the lunch has been canceled. Of course, you probably don't need a chart to surmise that if the lunch had taken place, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman could have expected to nibble on her Cobb salad in the coat room. [WWD]