Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

• Jon Stewart's smackdown of Jim Cramer last week generated some of the biggest ratings The Daily Show has ever seen, not surprisingly. [MediaPost]
• Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman has once again defied logic (and some of her Condé colleagues) by putting Sarah Palin on the cover of the new issue. [WWD]
• Condé Nast is expected to trim Richard Beckman's ad sales group. [AdAge]
• Liberal activists have launched a petition drive targeted at CNBC. [AP]
• ICM's Esther Newberg has sold a memoir by Paul Allen to Penguin. [Crains]
• More on Eric Siminoff's split from Lynn Nesbit and Mort Janklow. [NYO]
• Mel Karmazin sounds off on his fight to redeem Sirius and his rep. [Fortune]
• Ratings for Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice continue to slide. [AdAge]
• 60 Minutes is the "hottest show on TV." Who knew? [Newsweek]

• Jon Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer is getting mixed reviews, mainly because both deviated from their typical personas: the normally brash Cramer was a wimp and Stewart wasn't funny. It "felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing," writes Alessandra Stanley. [NYT, Salon, Atlantic, ABC]
• TMZ and Extra have extended their coverage to the financial services industry! Isn't it ironic that TMZ has exposed more corporate misbehavior over the past few months than CNBC has? Because it sort of has. [NYT]
• Google sales chief Tim Armstrong is the new chairman and CEO of AOL. [WSJ]
• Jim Kelly is stepping down as managing editor of Time Inc. [NYP]
• Fox has dumped Peter Liguori in favor of Fox Searchlight's Peter Rice. [THR]
• More changes are ahead at the Peter Brant-owned Interview. [WWD]
• Mel Karmazin says Sirius's poor performance last quarter was due to "doom and gloom" rumors suggesting the company would go bankrupt. [WSJ] 
• Jimmy Fallon finished his first week with solid ratings, beating out the numbers that Conan O'Brien typically generated. Depressing, huh? [Variety]

• Investors are finding "wisps of hope" in the current not-so-bad economic news, so the three-day winning streak on Wall Street may continue today. [DB]
• AIG reached out to Warren Buffett twice before ultimately collapsing. [BN]
• Citigroup is looking at adding four new people to the company's board. [WSJ]
• Ken Lewis seems to be sending signals he wants out of BofA. [Dealbreaker]
• H. Rodgin Cohen is out of the running to be deputy Treasury secretary. [DB]
• There's already chatter that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may get pushed aside in favor of—yes, you guessed it—Steve Rattner. [BI]
• How bad is it for hedge funds? John Paulson was up 38 percent last year and he still lost 16 percent of his assets during the last half of 2008. [Portfolio]
• Two things you never expected to see: A meek, frightened Jim Cramer on national television. And a comedian talking about CDOs. [The Daily Show]

• Jim Cramer hits The Daily Show tonight. And in what can only be interpreted as an effort to dial down the ass-kicking headed his way, Cramer is now claiming Jon Stewart is "his idol." Good luck with that there, Jim. [HP]
• Should CNBC's Erin Burnett really be making appearances on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice? Maybe not: "NBC keeps testing the limits between news and entertainment in pursuit of cross-promotional synergy." [NYT]
• "Sully" Sullenberger has scored a two-book deal worth $3 million. [TDB]
• Ann Coulter "has been especially noisy in her self-promotion lately," which may have something to do with the fact her book isn't selling. [Portfolio]
• More and more TV shows are working the recession into storylines. [ABC]
• These are dark days for the newspaper biz, as you've probably heard. [NYT]
• More on Ross Douthat, the conservative blogger who has been hired by The New York Times to take over Bill Kristol's Op-Ed column. [E&P]
• Post staffers reflect on the life and times of Braden Keil, the paper's real estate columnist who died on Tuesday and who will be very much missed. [NYO]

• Jon Stewart ripped Jim Cramer apart once again on his show last night. And now Cramer is planning to appear on The Daily Show on Thursday. [Gawker]
• William Morris and Endeavor are said to be in merger talks. [NYT]
• Time Inc. chief Ann Moore says the company is thinking about turning Time.com and People.com subscription-based sites. [Folio]
• For its part, Disney is launching a new "portal." It's 1999 all over again! [WSJ]
• Former NBC prez Katherine Pope is said to be in talks with News Corp. president Peter Chernin about joining his new production firm. [THR]
• Is liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz destined for a gig with MSNBC? [NYO]
• Needless to say, the Daily News is taking issue with the list suggesting the paper is likely to go out of business in the near future. [Crains]
• The plug has been pulled on David Alan Grier's Comedy Central series, Chocolate News. Let's all take a moment to mourn, okay? [NYT]

♦  ABC appears to generated the highest ratings as the election results rolled in last night. NBC came in second and CNN ranked third. [TV Decoder]
♦  Time is rushing to produce a commemorative issue of the mag by the end of the week. [HuffPo]
♦  Both People and Us Weekly will feature Obama on the covers of the next issue.  [NYP]
♦  Can The Daily Show survive an Obama presidency? and how will other media outlets deal with the post-election dropoff? [Politico, AdAge]
♦  An explanation of that holography thingie on CNN last night. [YouTube]More

♦  What does Bravo have in the works to replace Project Runway if it moves to Lifetime? There's a Runway ripoff called The Fashion Show. There's also Celebrity Sew-Off, in which "celebrities" will compete in a competition for their own clothing label, which should be totally awesome because we've always wanted to buy jeans designed by Jill Zarin. [THR]
♦  The sponsors for Bravo's fifth season of Top Chef? Campbell's Soup, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Quaker. [AdAge]
♦  Because you haven't heard enough about Bravo today, the NYT magazine profile of Bravo boss Lauren Zalaznick (left) is now online. [NYT]
♦  More details on the cuts and layoffs at Condé Nast. [NYP]
♦  Condé Nast's glitzy Fashion Rocks show is no more. [AdAge]More

• People's $14 million purchase of the Brangelina pics worked out nicely in the end. The issue sold 2.6 million copies, making it the mag's best-selling issue in seven years.  [WWD]
• The Wall Street Journal reported today that Barack Obama had picked Tim Kaine as his running mate, then quickly took it back. [Politico]
• CNN correspondents like Candy Crowley and John King will begin writing guest columns for Metro. [E&P]
• Former LA Times editorial page editor Andres Martinez has embroiled himself in a nasty scandal. [Gawker]
• "Why, exactly, did Michiko Kakutani write a profile of Jon Stewart in this past Sunday’s New York Times?" Good question. [CJR]
• Hearst is folding Town & Country Travel. [WWD]
  

When one pictures the New York Times' fearsome literary critic Michiko Kakutani at work, the scene is of a book-lined, slightly dusty apartment, with Kakutani frowning over the book in her lap, perhaps with pencil in hand, getting ready to eviscerate a new novel that disgraces itself in various ways. A TV is most definitely not flickering in the background. But it seems that this image of Casa Kakutani will have to be revised, as she apparently just watched TV for the first time! More