Among the victims: Klaus Kneale, nephew of CNBCer Dennis Kneale, and Lauren Sherman, girlfriend of Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer. We're told the layoffs are hitting both the magazine and print Web sides of the publication — and that they're not yet done. Still, we're told the growing list of names is long enough to soon meet expectations of 40-60 layoffs.

We first reported about a new round of layoffs at Forbes three weeks ago, and the rumors have only grown louder and more persistent since then. Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes finally confirmed them earlier this week, blaming "seismic shifts wrought by the Web." He had shot down layoff rumors just five months earlier — a period of time that, in the context of print journalism, used to seem like a brief flash, but which can now deliver brutal new realities.

UPDATE: We're told the Los Angeles bureau has been eliminated, along with LA-based staff writer Evan Hessel. We also hear Scott Woolley has been axed.

UPDATE: Other casualties we're hearing about: The London bureau; one correspondent each in Japan and roving Europe; Becky Buckman, lured from the Wall Street Journal to Forbes' Silicon Valley bureau; banking writer Bernard Condon; plus "a bunch of junior people." Killing so many — virtually all? — the bureaus is apparently part of a concerted effort to save on real estate costs.

UPDATE: Former Forbeser Peter Kafka tweets that he's seen a list of 27 editorial staff let go today alone. We've heard the layoffs will span multiple days.

Some Forbesers darkly note that, barring a summer recess, company layoffs have come near the end of this year's financial quarters, with 19 let go from the magazine and website in early January followed by a reported 50 or so at the very end of March. Another round now, just after the close of the Sept. 30 quarter, would fit the pattern. CEO Steve Forbes assured staff in May that layoffs were done for the moment and "Forbes continues to outperform its competitors." But in such a severe an ad recession that's not much reassurance.

We've put in an inquiry with Forbes PR and will update with what we hear back.

Ranked the 377th richest American last year, with a net worth of $1.3 billion, Thiel has dropped off this year's Forbes 400 list entirely. In the middle of last year, he could brag that his Clarium Capital had averaged an annual return of 30 percent, net of fees, over six years; these days Thiel is quoted in the Wall Street Journal blaming the irrational economy (when is not?) for his fund's outflows and double-digit declines. These things tend to come in threes, so we're waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Then Thiel can speedily move on to the inevitable next phase: Redemption and comeback. At 41, he's got many more acts still to come.

(Pic: Andrew Mager)

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

Without specifically addressing what he's said to other people, Kneale told us in an email his feelings are "particularly heartfelt:"

My "animus" toward vicious, anonymous bloggers and blind comments pre-dates my joining CNBC... Look at the scary and brilliant Forbes cover story on net anonymity, which I edited, in October 2007: it should make bloggers feel ashamed.

Kneale's campaign against shame is something of a transformation for the one-time Forbes editor whose antics became legendary after editor Bill Baldwin lured him from the Wall Street Journal in 1998. The most famous story — we've heard others, but this is the one that was widely told on the Forbes staff; i.e. the kind of gossip that pre-dates blogs — occurred at the company Christmas party shortly after he was hired. As relayed by people who worked for the magazine at the time, it goes like this:

After the party, Kneale shared a cab back to Park Slope, Brooklyn, with three other people: a female Forbes writer, a male Forbes staffer and the staffer's wife. Somehow, in the course of the ride, Kneale managed to grope both women. The next morning, the male staffer showed up at Kneale's house to avenge his wife's honor, and when the story reached the office Kneale had to beg several layers of the Forbes masthead to keep his job.

The incident was purportedly the foundation for this Feb. 12, 1999 Page Six blind item:

WHICH business-magazine editor, who keeps a jar of blue jellybeans on his desk labeled Viagra, was called on the carpet for feeling up an underling's wife? The co-workers and their spouses were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn after an office party. The underling later went to the groper's home to get an apology. The groper's boss told him that if it ever happened again, he'd be fired.

Kneale declined to comment on the story, writing, "As a rule I do not respond to blind comments... if Gawker will publish the names of the people behind these 11-year-old rumors, maybe I'd have more to say." We know the names of two of the people said to be in the cab with Kneale and emailed them for their version of events. We'll update if we hear back.

We don't begrudge Kneale some purported drunken mistakes in his past. We all have them. Though the number of tales that have crossed our transom in recent days suggests Kneale has more than his fair share. And so we have to wonder if his hype-seeking crusade against gossipy, anonymous bloggers is less about principle and more an exercise in self-defense.

At last, libertarian political ideals can finally be expressed, on the internet. The tweet:

Amid SEC charges that Apple management had shifted the dates of stock options to benefit executives, including Jobs, Anderson, and former general counsel Nancy Heinen, the company took an $84 million charge in 2006. Jobs and Apple settled a shareholder lawsuit for $14 million, but avoided trouble with the SEC. Anderson and Heinen paid $3.5 million and $2.2 million in fines respectively, without admitting guilt.

The episode caused a major rift between Anderson and Jobs. Anderson had left Apple in 2004, but stayed on the board until the scandal led to his resignation in 2006. In the meantime, Anderson had joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley. As the stock-options scandal grew, Anderson and Jobs pointed fingers at each other, at one point issuing dueling press releases shifting the blame. Anderson has long maintained that Jobs knew more about the options chicanery than he has let on.

Elevation, which also counts famed Valley investor Roger McNamee and U2 frontman Bono as partners, backed Palm, a rival to Apple in the smartphone business, and recruited a former top Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, as Palm's executive chairman. No one in Silicon Valley honestly believes this is a coincidence.

Forbes is another Elevation investment. The May 11 story, written by Bill Barrett and teased on the cover, centers on the 118-page transcript of a three-hour interview Jobs gave SEC examiners trying a case against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen, which the magazine obtained at some difficulty through a Freedom of Information Act. In the interview with SEC examiners, Jobs complained that the board was not looking out for him and he had to ask for a generous stock-options package, but maintained that he was largely unaware of the backdating and ignorant of the accounting consequences. (Backdating is not illegal by itself, but requires notice to shareholders and a charge to earnings, neither of which Apple undertook at the time it backdated options.)

Excellent journalistic work on Barrett's part. But here's the question: How did Forbes know precisely which document to ask for? It always helps to have well-connected sources. And it's hard to imagine who would be better placed to know the details of the case than Anderson.

Guardian writer Bobbie Johnson sought proof his employer deserved worship.

ABC newslunk Jake Tapper never thought he'd be on a copter.

Chicago Tribune twitter newbie Stacy St. Clair objected to the belittling of fictional furry creatures.

TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld tried to unload Brooklyn real estate.

Forbes writer Brian Caulfield delivered a veiled threat to his gadget collection.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Already, Stewart Pinkerton, an old magazine hand who had overseen the integration of the magazine's newsroom with the Web team, is "retiring," though our sources believe he was actually forced out by Lavin, an ambitious Forbes.com editor who previously worked at the New York Times. Lavin's next target, according to a tipster, is Tom Post, an editor high on the print magazine's masthead, who's been "shut out of the decisionmaking process."

What journalistic accomplishment is Lavin best known for among the Forbesians? Trying to censor his son's high-school newspaper. In 2001, when Austin Lavin was being impeached as student government president at Walt Whitman High School in a Maryland suburb, Carl, then an editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, sent a letter to a school superintendent demanding that copies of a school newspaper detailing the trial be removed and that a school television-news segment about it not air. (Lavin told the Student Press Law Center that he merely raised privacy issues about the airing of the story.)

Austin Lavin now runs a startup, Myfirstpaycheck.com, which he has been busily promoting on Forbes.com.

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:30:57 -0400
Subject: To all edit from Bill Baldwin

After nearly 20 years at Forbes, most recently as Managing Editor, Stewart Pinkerton has decided to retire next month after the completion of the edit staff merger, a process he's been deeply involved in for the past few months.

For a long time we have depended on Stew in many areas: getting the magazine out on time and under budget, recruiting new talent to the editorial staff and overseeing foreign licensee editions. In recent years he was also the bridge between magazine and online editorial staffs, smoothing the way for this year's integration.

Prior to Forbes, he spent 24 years at the Wall Street Journal, part of that as Deputy Managing Editor. There are a lot of great journalists who owe a first or an important stepping stone in their careers to a hiring decision by Stew. Among them: Mary Ellen Egan, Dan Hertzberg, Dennis Kneale, Laura Landro, Jane Mayer and Jim Stewart.

Stew has been an important colleague, and we are grateful that he'll continue his association with Forbes as a Contributing Editor. Please join me in thanking Stewart for his many contributions over the years. We wish him all the best in the years to come.

Bill Baldwin

Peter Kafka, a former Forbes.com editor, reports that 19 have been laid off from both the print and online sides. Other sources give a breakdown: 17 from print, chiefly those with the longest tenure and hence the highest salaries; and 2 from the Web, both recent hires.

Forbes and Forbes.com have been run separately since the late '90s, when the Forbes family hoped to make some quick cash by spinning out the dotcom in an IPO. The public offering never happened, but Forbes Media's split has persisted, exacerbated by turf wars and infighting. (Forbes.com did not want Dan Lyons, the magazine writer who turned into a superstar blogger as Fake Steve Jobs, to write for the website; he left for Newsweek last year.)

Plans to merge the two feuding operations first leaked in October. In November, the company, which is now part owned by the Forbes family and part owned by Elevation Partners, the private equity firm which counts U2 rock star Bono as a member, conceded in a memo to employees that a merger was afoot, and that decisions on cuts would be made in January.

It is a comedown for the magazine, especially. We have heard, but not yet confirmed, that the list-happy title has lost most of its junior reporters who served as factcheckers. And the print team, we're told, may move from its 60 Fifth Avenue headquarters to Forbes.com's dumpier newsroom at 90 Fifth Avenue, perhaps so Forbes Media can unload the more valuable real estate. (Not that it's a good time to sell Manhattan office space, which is likely why the move is still undecided.)

From: Steve Forbes
Sent: Mon 11/17/2008 2:20 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: News

We want to let you know of a series of structural changes that will enable us not only to better weather the current economic torm, but to move ahead quickly and profitably when the global economies begin recovering. These moves will make our company highly competitive in an extremely tough environment.

One of the benefits of Forbes is precisely the ability to move nimbly and swiftly to respond to our clients and marketers in the way they want to do business. For these reasons we have decided to change the organization of our sales and marketing groups in the company. In making these decisions, we got enormous and valuable input from our own people, as well as the marketplace to best position Forbes Media.

Over the next few weeks, the sales and marketing groups of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com will be combined into three specific units under the Forbes Media umbrella. The purpose is to enable us to more sharply and effectively focus our resources and priorities in response to our audiences and marketing partners.

The first newly organized sales and marketing group is the Brand Intelligence Group. It will focus on the senior-most levels of our marketing partners. We will create consultative engagements with these executives to better connect our highly valuable audiences with our advertisers' core communication goals. This vital enterprise will be led by Kevin Gentzel, as President and Group Publisher of Forbes Media. Bruce Rogers, Chief Brand Officer, will lead the marketing and research arms of this effort. The Integrated Solutions Group, another newly aligned sales and marketing unit, will work to create integrated and custom solutions to access our unique audiences. These original programs will be cross-platform, content-based, with broad marketability. The Integrated Solutions Group will be led by Mike Woods, as President.

As always, the core of our client outreach will be our geographically dispersed sales teams. Now, though, we will organize these teams in regional business centers, that combine the talents of the Forbes and Forbes.com sales staff in the newly created Forbes Media Sales and Service Group. This initiative will position the Forbes brand as a true multi-media vehicle. The marketplace increasingly recognizes the necessity to utilize —precisely and efficiently — several platforms to achieve their objectives. The group will be led by Avery Stirratt and Robert Pietsch, who will serve as Co-Presidents and Chief Advertising Officers. Debbie Himmelfarb will serve as Vice President, Marketing to support this group's marketing programs.

The leaders of the newly established groups will report to The Office of the Chairman, which will consist of Steve Forbes, Chairman and CEO of Forbes Media; Timothy Forbes, President and COO of Forbes Media; and Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com.

I want to thank the leadership of sales and marketing for their critical input in this valuable effort. We believe these bold moves will place us in a far stronger position to expand our historical lead in both print and on-line. In other areas of the company, the following changes will be implemented as well.

Conferences and events in the U.S. and Europe will now be part of sales and marketing programs.

Recently, the name of the overall brand of web properties and affiliated properties has changed to Forbes Digital. Included under the Forbes Digital umbrella are: Forbes.com; Investopedia.com; RealClearPolitics.com; RealClearMarkets.com; RealClearSports.com; the Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network; and ForbesTraveler.com. ForbesAutos.com will be discontinued.

We are also strengthening and expanding the editorial integration at both Forbes and Forbes.com. There has been a program to exchange talent between the web and the magazine in place for some time. These efforts have been successful, and we are in the midst of conversations to discuss ways to truly integrate the great talent in both organizations by sometime in early 2009.

Nice things about Ray Wert
1. You have nice hair.
2. The Burberry accessories do a great job of hiding your otherwise cheap wardrobe.
3. You're not the worst driver in the world, just the worst driver I've ever met.

Nice things about Nick Denton
1. I've never met you but I hear you smell like freshly minted silver dollars.
2. You publish Deadspin and this site, two places I spend a lot of my time.
3. You make wonderful charts.

Oh, and for the record, Ben badmouths both of you all the time.

[via Alley Insider]

In recognition of their considerable contributions to the magazine in the past year, I am elevating Stewart Pinkerton and Tom Post from Deputy Managing Editors to Managing Editors.

Before joining Forbes in 1990, Stewart spent 24 years at the Wall Street Journal, in a mix of reporting and editing positiions, including Deputy Managing Editor under Norm Pearlstine. He's a graduate of Princeton and has a J.D. from New York Law School.

Tom joined Forbes 11 years ago from ABC News. He has B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UC, Berekeley.

This masthead change won't result in any reassigments of writers. Stewart will continue to spend a lot of his time overseeing the contributions of print writers to Forbes.com and vice versa. That job is getting bigger; it is vital that magazine contributions to the Web go where they will deliver the most prestige and traffic. Tom will keep his stable of writers and have a large role in the development of cover stories. He has done much in the past two months to keep us on top of the news.

• Forbes.com superstar Lacey Rose will move to Los Angeles and will take the lead on the magazine's Celeb List.
• Scott Woolley, L.A. bureau chief, is moving back to New York to run a team there.
• Betsy Corcoran, who runs the Forbes.com team in the magazine's Silicon Valley bureau, is stepping back from editing to do more writing — but some in Forbesian circles think she might be interested in ousting Quentin Hardy, her replacement as the magazine's Valley bureau chief, as head of the combined print and Web operations in the Valley. Corcoran says, "No, no, no. Wrong."

Our tipster adds: "Please don't buy this bullshit about how nice things are between print and dotcom."

The ongoing intra-Forbesian unpleasantness aside, one big question looms over the coming reorganization: Who's going to run the whole show. Churbuck thinks Bill Baldwin, the magazine's editor, is brainy but clueless. Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment, insiders say, is just a "puppet" of the publisher, Jim Spanfeller, and Maidment's contract is up soon. We have a suggestion: Why not just make Bono, the rock star turned venture capitalist at Elevation Partners, editor-in-chief of the whole shebang?

How should I know? I work at Forbes. I'll be the last to know.

I'd heard rumors about .com getting a floor here, but rumors like that circulate all the time and never come true. If they did, we'd belong to Fox, the magazine and website would already have merged, we'd all be in one building Queens and Joe Nocera would be running the operation. I personally doubt Valleywag is well sourced here.

There are also rumors about Spanfeller making a power grab. But what else is knew? Those rumors have been around since he arrived. Sometimes they're true, sometimes not. Or perhaps sometimes he succeeds at getting more power and sometimes he doesn't.

I think the move might be true, and it might involve some shift in power, but the idea that there's a dramatic consolidation in the wind is almost certainly wrong. But that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.

I do think putting the two staffs in the same building would do a lot to get print writers writing for the web and web writers writing for the magazine. But this is already happening. Maureen Farrell and Andy Greenberg both write for print, and Brian Caulfield had a cover. Nathan Vardi (print) did a list of the world's most wanted fugitives for the web. Mike Maiello just went from the magazine to the website.

If they do take over a floor of 60, I hope they bring their free coffee with them.

Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes.

What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

Publishers are bad-mouthing ad networks, only to offer the smaller publishers who really need them their own networks instead. That's not cutting out the middleman to protect brands — that's steering away interlopers from outside the media business, while jealously guarding their relationships with Madison Avenue. Either way, smaller publishers which can't afford their own salespeople will get taken to the cleaners. It's just a question of who drives.

Jobs's scary-skinny appearance at an Apple event earlier this summer had everyone talking, including Lyons. While there turned out to be a reasonable explanation for Jobs's frail frame — aftereffects of surgery for pancreatic cancer — and people with Jobs's specific ailment have a high survival rate, Lyons concluded that posing as a guy recovering from cancer just couldn't be humorous for much longer.

Hence his attempts to write as Fake Jerry Yang and a Google insider. None of the alternate personae really took. Just as well. Some thought that after the New York Times unmasked him last year, Lyons's blog wouldn't be as good. Instead, he just got better. As Lyons proved on his book tour for Options, his first Fake Steve novella, he is riotously funny as himself. Goodbye, Fake Steve Jobs; hello, Real Dan Lyons. Where have you been hiding?