BusinessWeek : Wasserstein Out, Layoffs Coming

In your revenue-generating Tuesday media column: the BusinessWeek bidding draws to a close, Americans would pay only a pittance for newspaper websites, Peter Shankman’s getting rich somehow, and the WaPo is determined not to write about dwarves.

Sharpen your knives, BusinessWeek staffers: The NYT says that 20% layoffs at the mag are “being pitched to investors as something of a done deal”. Surprise! Look to your left. Look to your right. Then look at two more people. One of you will be laid off, on average. Statistics are fun. Also: Jon Fine reports that Bruce Wasserstein’s dropped out of the bidding, so Bloomberg is looking strong, in terms of “being the one to buy your magazine and then lay you off”.

$US4.64 per month. That’s how much, on average, survey respondents said they would pay for online access to their newspaper’s website. Although half the people said they wouldn’t pay anything! So the actual average price point would be about $US2.25. Good luck, Steven Brill.

Help A Reporter Out, the source-finding PR-journalist connection website founded by voluble flack Peter “Zzzzzt” Shankman, claims to be raking in more than a million bucks in ad revenue per year. Which seems crazy, but according to some quick math by informed people, is plausible! All this from, basically, an oversized, popular Facebook group. Lucky. This concludes our discussion of Peter Shankman, which only encourages him.

The publisher of the Washington Post thought that an upcoming magazine story was icky and gross, as well as depressing, so the mag spiked the story, which is a total coincidence and in no way a bid to please this lady, the one who signs everyone’s paychecks.

Weymouth has been telling editors that there have been too many stories similar to the one last November about a 13-year-old dwarf undergoing surgery to lengthen her legs.

That is weird. Isn’t that weird? It is.