Media Mob has learned that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer will write a new column for Slate beginning tomorrow. The column will appear every other week and it'll be about government, regulation and finance.

"He's going to be doing a regular thing," said Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group. "It'll be heavily about the financial crisis and fixing financial markets and the economy generally."

The column will be titled: The Best Policy.

Mr. Weisberg said that he was lobbying him to do it for months. Cliff Sloan, the former publisher of Slate, knew Mr. Spitzer back during their Harvard Law days, and Mr.  read more »

TiVo has taken a step toward building Living Room 2.0 by partnering with Blip.tv, the New York-based online videoblogging and production company. TiVo will distribute shows including Golf Girl TV, a biweekly golf news and gossip segment, Political Lunch, which includes "cold cuts" from the world of politics online, and DadLabs, a funny tips and stories show for fathers.

Advertising Age reports that "4.2 million subscribers, and test whether the genre has legs off the PC."

Here's more from the article:

But do TV-scale audiences await? And will advertisers respond? Andrea Kerr Redniss, managing director at Optimedia, sees the shows as opportunities to do product integrations on the cheap.

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There will be no layoffs enacted at Random House today. According to Random House spokeswoman Carol Schneider, but the individual publishers at the top of the newly realligned groups will soon size up all the people now under their jurisdiction and "may have to make some difficult choices."

"If the layoffs are nececessary, those decisions are going to be made as objectively as possible and as quickly as possible, but I would venture to guess not in the next week or so," Ms. Schneider said. "This is a big reorganization."

Ms. Schneider, who is ordinarily the publicity director for Random House's flagship division rather than the whole house, said she is handling all press calls on today's news, while corporate spokesman Stuart Applebaum, who might normally be expected to be the point person on it, is excising himself because the dissolution of the Bantam Dell division involves the departure of his brother and longtime colleague Irwyn.

What are people saying about David Gregory, NBC News' heir presumptive for Tim Russert's job on Meet the Press? Felix Gillette talks to some who say things like, “He’s got great instincts when it comes to what area of stories to probe...I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve when it comes to politics. He knows that world as well as anyone. He gets great stuff out of people" and "He can be an aggressive questioner—as he showed in the White House Press Room. He was a dramatic and good and persistent questioner. And he’s not afraid to be disliked.”

Is Tina Brown "like Schindler, in a skirt-suit"? That's what John Koblin calls her when it comes to bringing laid off writers into her Daily Beast. But what can they hope to be paid? Plus: January Groans: Mags' Lean Month Gets Downright Gaunt.

Can a 26-year-old consultant who took Columbia's Publishing Course and worked for a time at Little, Brown save publishing? Leon Neyfakh meets Eric Wolff, who says, "Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business... Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

Plus: Missbehave's new editor... Superstar avatars... Murdoch the Magnificent.

On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 30, David Gregory, NBC News’ ubiquitous robo-anchor, popped up in front of the cameras at Rockefeller Plaza where over the course of several drizzly hours, he held forth on such topics as the dismal weather, Barry Manilow and the world’s largest floating Christmas Tree, which turns out to be in located in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Gregory—NBC’s chief White House correspondent, host of MSNBC’s 6 p.m. show 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the world’s most indomitable substitute anchor—was filling in on Sunday for Lester Holt as co-anchor of Weekend Today.

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On the day the perennially troubled Radar magazine folded, its editor Maer Roshan got an email from an old friend, Tina Brown, with whom he’d worked at her own sunken ship, Talk.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

These days, Ms.  read more »

Over the next week or two, the January issues of monthly magazines will start hitting newsstands—or perhaps “lightly floating onto newstands like little snowflakes” would be a better way of putting it.

“A lot of people are really, really down in the dumps about what January looks like,” said Jay Lauf, the publisher of the recently revamped Atlantic.

Layoffs, hiring freezes and canceled Christmas parties have cast a general chill over the magazine world. But with budget season finally wrapped up, it looked like the industry could finally take a much-needed breather right before the New Year.

Then suddenly more bad news emerged from the business side: bleaker-than-usual ad-page numbers for January.  read more »

Like so many of us, Lesley Arfin has a Facebook problem. Ms. Arfin, the recently installed editor in chief of Missbehave, a lifestyle magazine for young women whose cultural touchstones (not to mention love lives) slant more towards Freaks and Geeks than Sex and the City, is a bit overwhelmed by her own popularity on the online networking site.

“Should I accept everybody? Or should I only accept people who are my friends?” Ms. Arfin wondered recently in the conference room of her magazine’s parent company, Colossal Media, which occupies a buzzing, bilevel space just off Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. “I deleted my MySpace,” she continued.  read more »

"There’s no truth to it," said Si Newhouse in a statement sent through a spokeswoman to wsj.com today, regarding the rumors that Anna Wintour is on the verge of being replaced by Carine Roitfeld as editor of Vogue. "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard."

Gawker wrote in an item earlier today—filed under the header "Rumormonger"—that Mr. Newhouse left for France early to seal a deal with Ms. Roitfeld.

So what does it mean that Mr. Newhouse released this statement? It means it's probably not going to happen all that soon! Mr. Newhouse very rarely delivers statements, even through his spokeswoman Maurie Perl, so the fact that he felt compelled (from Europe!) to take care of this is a rather strong vote of confidence for Ms. Wintour.

At least for the time being.

Could There Ever Be Another Britney Spears?, asks MTV.com's Jennifer Vineyard.

It's a question whose time has come. Just as The Boston Daily Globe asked WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER GREAT WAR in April 1893, people have been wondering similar things for as far back as Google searches will allow writers to search after 6 p.m. on a Tuesday.

- Will There Be Another WPA?, The Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 1942.

- Will There Be Another Christmas Is Thought of All in Pacific Area, The Hartford Courant, December 25, 1943.

- Could There Be Another Holocaust?, The New York Times, March 6, 1977.  read more »