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UnBeige: “60 Minutes” scored an interview with Vogue editrix Anna Wintour last night, but the results were about as surprising as an Andy Rooney monologue.

BayNewser: As Valleywag editor Owen Thomas prepared to leave his post for a new spot at NBC, he wrote a heart-felt letter to his successor, Ryan Tate.

Folio: There’s been shakeup at Adweek Media, publishers of Adweek, Mediaweek and Brandweek.

New York Times: Newspaper employees no longer dominate fellowships.

Boston.com: 10 funny reasons why the Internet can’t replace newspapers.

So what’s in store for Yahoo? New CEO Carol Bartz will be announcing the company’s first quarter results tomorrow, and all signs point towards the numbers being less than spectacular. What’s a CEO to do? Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster appears to have some suggestions: Why not buy Gawker? How about the New York Times? Says Jaffray’s in ‘An Open Letter To Carol Bartz:’

Acquire a major print new company with global scale and stature in addition to a blog network experienced in creating short content to generate significant page views. In particular, he says that the New York Times and Gawker Media would fit this profile. “These content acquisitions would allow Yahoo to own and distribute a collection of the best content on the Web in addition to generating short-form content to maximize page views and stickiness.”

Crazy? We’ve actually speculated on a number of our podcasts whether it would be smarter for MSM companies to purchase established blogs rather than attempt to start their own from scratch (we’re not the first to do so, by the way). But a Yahoo-owned Gawker? We asked Gawker-head Nick Denton what he thought of the suggestion.

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Gawker Media is capping off 2008 by selling two of its blogs — Consumerist and the Hollywood gossip site Defamer. Yesterday, two weeks after FishbowlNY broke the story of talks between the two companies, The New York Times reported that Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, is buying the customer watchdog blog Consumerist from Gawker Media. In the article, the paper quotes Gawker publisher Nick Denton saying that he’s also “in talks” to sell the Hollywood gossip site Defamer. FishbowlNY has exclusively learned that, later in the afternoon, Denton sent out an email to his site leads revealing that Defamer has actually already been sold. Denton told his top editors that public announcement of the sale will come later today.

Denton put the Consumerist up for sale in mid-November at the same time that he folded his tech-industry gossip blog Valleywag into Gawker.com. Defamer was never put on sale, but in his email, Denton says the company was approached about the site a few months ago and has been in talks with the buyer ever since. Denton’s missive did not reveal who will be purchasing Defamer, but that news should come out when the sale is officially announced later today.

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Over at the L.A. Times ex-Gawker editor (and recent Radaronline scribe) Choire Sicha is speculating as to why Nick Denton decided last week to shut down Valleywag and fold it into the main Gawker site. The short version is that in the not too distant future things may actually be worse than Denton’s doomsday predictions of last week. Also? If Sicha had just waited a few more days he could have got Dan Abrams to pay him for this sort of thing! Some of Sicha’s thoughts:

It makes sense from a business perspective in conjunction with the selling of Consumerist, and after the cross-company staff layoffs, and after the selling-off of the other sites they’ve already done. Plus whatever they’re doing to what they now consider the outlier sites. Plus I don’t think this is the end of this stuff over there!

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Gawker had their own black Friday newsdump today. In a move that may soon become known as the Denton doctrine, Gawker head Nick Denton announced that he was preemptively laying off 19 members of the editorial staff, including recently hired Moe Tkacik, and suspending page view bonuses for the first quarter of next year due to the upcoming fiscal crisis. Earlier this year Denton cut loose three of Gawker’s sites including Wonkette with similar explanations. We spoke to Denton earlier and he confirmed that this was indeed a preemptive move since none of the sites had yet to see any cancellations.

Denton declined to give us a rundown of who was being laid off, though Valleywag confirmed they had already cut three; judging from the memo that was posted to the site, it looks like Valleywag, Consumerist, and Fleshbot will be the hardest hit. The memo also confirmed earlier reports that Denton will be replacing himself with former NYO-er Gabriel Snyder. Why Snyder?

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