Wow — whoda thunk. Once up on a time, Ron Burkle and Bill Clinton were thick as thieves, BFFs schmoozing up a lucrative storm for Burkle's Yucaipa and (allegedly) flying though the sky on Burkle's private jet with pretty young things. Now they are buds no more, relationship severed and reputations distanced and chummy lovefests replaced by snippy articles wherein the playboy billionaire disses his former best bud for being a waste of his precious time. (more...)

Bloomberg, which acquired Business Week last month, announced this week that they were looking to layoff 100 positions or 25% of its staff. Judging from Twitter it looks like the layoffs took place today (h/t FishbowlNY). (more...)

Over the weekend, the Washington Post became the largest name in news to issue an all-points memo about acceptable use of social networking platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook. And though the paper did not make their guidelines public, Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander made the announcement via an interpretation of the policy on his blog. Soon thereafter, paidContent ran the rules in their entirety, fueling an already raging firestorm against the policies on the web. Today, the Post's media critic Howard Kurtz responds, but seems hesitant, giving a surprising amount of space to critics of the policy and providing little convincing support for his bosses. (more...)

Jon Fine reports that financial information giant Bloomberg LLC has submitted a bid to acquire his own magazine, BusinessWeek, making Bloomberg the presumptive favorite in purchasing the troubled title. (more...)

POLL The media loves one-year anniversaries, hundred-day anniversaries — any excuse to zoom in on the thing they've been covering all along. This week's one-year anniversary of the financial crisis -- a gold mine for business magazines! Or a call for gold spray paint, if you're BusinessWeek. Mary Louise Parker -- the maintstream, not to mention sterile, face of rampant marijuana use, after her five-season success on Showtime's Weeds. With her help, and some magic leaf, this cover could actually grab a few non-Fortune-reading stoners. And "Wall Street: One Year Later" up top is a nifty hard-news peg. Mediaite Grade (B+): Hey, an issue of Fortune about pot -- that's pretty cool. Oh wait, Sage, the color, what are you doing here? You're not very cool. If this cover was trying to make marijuana seem staid (which it probably is), then it's a wild success. We wonder how their pot story stacks up to New York mag's.
Before we snub The Economist, we want to get one thing straight: We know the cover isn't what sells the magazine (it's the incisive content, dummy). That said, we have to ask if these Economist covers are a nose-in-the-air smirk at the rest of the magazine industry, or just the product of uninspired designers who hate sharing an office with neurotic econ-types? Mediaite Grade (D): We don't need to beat a dead horse, or a series of plastic horses revolving in a circle, but this cover is bush league. Tucking the dollar sign ornament at the top of the carousel into the deck? It's not cute. It's not imaginative. We worry that a bunch of professionals actually sat down together and brainstormed this cover, or spent any time thinking about it at all. We've seen you do your best work before, Economist design team, now keep it up. If for no other reason, to set a good example for Newsweek (their cover this week -- yikes).
Magazines are at their best when they jump on the next hot thing, rather than just distilling a week or month's worth of news. The latest edition of Forbes does both, highlighting the story of high-speed computer trading, which has been percolating all summer —  a smart and timely take on the one-year anniversary of the financial collapse. Mediaite Grade (A-): Visually, the cover's play with font and depth is sharp; the psuedo-pyramid of faces at the bottom, illuminated by the chilling glow of computer screens, is electric. Pick up Forbes for a smart, forward-looking take on the financial world, one year after the collapse.
It's a scary time for BusinessWeek. People are talking about buying the magazine for $1 . We wanted this cover to be a ray of light for the floundering title. Though cheap, spray-painting a gun gold and pasting it on the cover, wasn't exactly the sizzle or pop we were hoping for. Mediaite Grade (C+): We wonder, is there a BusinessWeek intern walking around somewhere with gold spray paint on his hands? We like the idea of putting a gun on the cover, but this one looks too fake, too gold. And the yellow at the top of the cover doesn't exactly complement the gold below (not even yellow could make the "America's Manufacturing Crisis" banner exciting). Add BusinessWeek's big, red, blocky masthead to the mix and watch the colors clash. Let's see some hustle, BusinessWeek. COVER WARS WINNER: Forbes nailed the one-year anniversary with a cover that subtly acknowledged the bench mark, but took the story in a new direction -- the future of finance. And they had fun with the cover -- not too conservative, not too boring, not too tacky. Take notes, BW, before you're liquidated. Which business mag cover is your favorite?(polls)

The deadline for final bids for BusinessWeek came and went yesterday, and the question on a lot of people's minds was whether or not Bloomberg LP would bid. It's been reported that the financial media giant expressed their interest in the troubled financial magazine very late into the process, so it's expected that the company will get an extra couple of days to perform due diligence and decide upon its bid. (more...)

While the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment has never been successfully challenged politically, it is now being challenged economically:  as a practical matter, the press is not so free.

In the hard new priorities of news management, dwindling resources struggle to keep coverage alive on essential routine beats, while the public-interest side of the business — investigative journalism,  the very heart and soul of journalism — is being unforgivably squeezed in the face of fiscal realities. (more...)