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]

• Rupert Murdoch and John Malone are "interested" in a deal with NBC Universal, but have yet to pick up the phone and do anything about it. [THR]
• Condé Nast cut sales staff at W and Vanity Fair today and proved that no one is safe by dismissing the wife of a Newhouse family member. Some good news: magazines are reporting that automotive advertising is way up, so maybe the auto industry will end up saving print media! Crazier things have happened.
• The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger is running into trouble in DC. [WSJ]
• The Fox News-White House brouhaha continues, not surprisingly. [THR]
• Fox Reality, which is going off the air next year, will be replaced by a new channel called Nat Geo Wild. Think less Cesar Millan, more Jeff Corwin. [NYT]
• Were you dismayed that yesterday's little balloon incident generated so much cable news coverage? Wait till you see what's in store next week! [CJR]More

• Is Time Warner planning to shed its Time Inc. magazine division? [Crain's]
• Condé Nast is hunkering down for a big round of budget cuts, as you've probably heard. One Condé title that happens to be doing quite well: Vanity Fair's Italian edition, which having its best year ever, apparently.
• Saturday Night Live's Jenny Slate won't be punished for cursing on the air. But it's looking like Darrell Hammond may have been dropped from the show.
• Tina Brown's Daily Beast is planning to get into book publishing. [NYT]
• Former Times film critic (and Turner Classic Movies host) Elvis Mitchell is in financial trouble again: He reportedly owes $500,000 in back taxes. [P6]
• How much the cast of The Hills makes might make you nauseous. [TDB]
• Can Twitter ever earn enough in advertising revenue to justify its recent valuation of $1 billion? It's highly unlikely, say some observers. [AdAge]
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was No. 1 again this weekend. [LAT] 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

• The publisher of the Los Angeles Times is defending his decision to put an ad disguised as a news story on the front page of the paper yesterday. [LAT]
• A Fox Entertainment employee has reportedly been arrested for stealing the personal information of other Fox employees. [TVN]
• NBC is developing a sitcom based on George Gurley's Observer column. [P6]
• Angelina Jolie, Victoria Beckham and Lauren Conrad were among the "most salable cover faces" for fashion magazines in 2008. The least? Nicole Kidman, Carrie Underwood, and Rachel Weisz. [WWD]
• Dylan Ratigan talks about his departure from CNBC and move to ABC. [BI]
• Speaking of covers, are struggling celebrity tabloids paying for them? [NYP] 
• The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's website, will introduce ads shortly. [AdAge]
• Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and his wife, Elizabeth, have purchased another local newspaper in Putnam County. [Portfolio]
• NBC will air a "comedy showcase" featuring Jay Leno on May 19. [NYT]

Arianna Snags Carl | Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown are locked in a bitter battle to line up high-profile contributors for their respective websites/blog networks, but it looks like Arianna will emerge as this week's winner: She's convinced cranky billionaire Carl Icahn to not only blog on his own site, but also post the same pieces on the Huffington Post. Now you can not read Icahn's boring missives on two sites instead of one!

There's a First Time for Everything: Fabiola Beracasa Officially 'Smart' | The Daily Beast picks Fabiola Beracasa for its "Smart People Recommend" feature and then the "New York correspondent" proceeds to recommend reading BlackBook since "it always seems to be the first to tell readers what's next in nightlife, entertainment, fashion, and arts"? It's enough to make your head spin on a Friday afternoon! [TDB]

Diller Downsizes | Changes are afoot at IAC, the media giant operated by Barry Diller. AdAge reports that Diller plans to scale back the company's collection of online content properties and possibly sell off or shut down underperforming sites like 236.com. The man Diller tapped to head up online programming, Michael Jackson, is expected to stay at IAC. And the changes, you'll be happy to hear, should have no impact on Tina Brown's extravagant new site, The Daily Beast. [AdAge]

♦  Time Inc. is slashing another 250 jobs. [NYP]
♦  CNN is spending a fortune on fancy-shmancy technology and new talent, but it's making a mint, too: The network is recording double-digit profit growth for the fifth straight year. [NYO]
♦  Dan Abrams is starting some sort of research firm/expert network/PR agency now that he's been replaced by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. His first client is Ron Perelman. [NYT]
♦  60 Minutes has been the most-watched program in the nation for the last two weeks, believe it or not. [NYT]More

It's been a month since Tina Brown launched her Barry Diller-backed website, The Daily Beast. But it appears the massive budget for the new launch—reportedly $18 million over three years—didn't create room for a fact-checker on staff. The Smoking Gun reports that Brown's site was fooled by a Canadian college student who posed as Jay McCarroll, the winner of the first season of Project Runway, when he submitted a design for a burlap dress for Michelle Obama to wear to the Inaugural Ball.

♦  Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦  More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦  Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦  Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦  Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]
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♦  Cuts have arrived at Hearst: Cathie Black (left) is "going floor by floor at the Hearst Tower to trim costs and staff positions." [WWD]
♦  Lloyd Grove talks to Tina Brown about her new site and the economic climate: "It's pretty scary. It's scary, scary, scary." [Portfolio]
♦  The New York Times Co. reported profits fell 51 percent for the quarter amid the drop in advertising sales. Traffic to the Times website, however, is up. [Bloomberg, AP, NYO]More

We mentioned Michael Wolff's distaste for Tina Brown last week, but today he goes on the offensive. "I think it's preposterous," he starts off when Leon Neyfakh asks him to comment on Brown's new site, The Daily Beast, which competes (to some degree) with Wolff's own Newser.com. "I don't even think it's a rehash of Talk—I think it's a rehash of [CNBC's] Topic A." It gets better! "She's just an old magazine hack... It's like she's been on ice for ten years and suddenly she's been thawed out again." Now we can all look forward to watching Tina strike back in a few books when the Beast reviews Wolff's new book on Rupert Murdoch. [NYO, previously]

Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago. More

♦  Barack Obama locked up 17 newspaper endorsements over the weekend compared to just two for John McCain. [E&P]
♦  John McCain will make an appearance on Letterman on Thursday. [CNN]
♦  Don't mention the recession to Tina Brown: Her new site will burn through $18 mil. over the next three years and most staffers are making more than 100K. [AdAge]
♦  Is the tween magazine over? [AdFreak]
♦  Jon Stewart's Daily Show is heading to the Middle East. [THR]More