FINANCE
• Banking analyst Meredith Whitney says that Citigroup is so deep in a black hole that even physicist Stephen Hawking couldn't help the company. [NYP]
• Kenneth Griffin, the founder of the successful $20 billion Citadel Investment Group, says Wall Street arrived at its current economic situation by means of inexperience. "Walk across any of the trading floors — they are full of 29-year-old kids. The capital markets of America are controlled by a bunch of right-out-of-business-school young guys who haven't really seen that much." [NYT]
• Today in Bear Stearns: JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon finds 50 percent of Bear Stearns employees a job. Or, um, he fires 50 percent of them. Depends on how you look at it. [NYP]

MEDIA
• Playboy lost money last quarter, but the magazine company claims it's not because of the growth of online porn. [DealBook/NYT]
• Yahoo and Politico are hosting President Bush's first-ever online-only interview. [Yahoo]

FINANCE
• AIG posts $7.8 billion in losses this quarter, dwarfing the $5.8 billion they recorded last quarter (and you thought $5.8 billion was a number that couldn't be "dwarfed"). The insurance giant will be raising $12.5 billion in capital. [WSJ]
• Vikram Pandit is still engaged in spring cleaning at Citigroup. Sell, sell, sell! [NYT]
• "Shame on you! You lied!" says one Bear employee to his bosses. "And, of course, the loyal employees your glib lies hurt the most are those who earned the least, the Associates." [DealBreaker]

MEDIA
• The New York Times laid off a total of fifteen journalists in the end. It was the paper's first mass-reporter bloodbath in the broadsheet's 157-year history. [NYP]
• It's a media showdown! NBC's local affiliate is challenging NY1's foothold on 24-hour New York news. [NYP]
• Is Ryan Seacrest really going to take over Larry King's time slot? Do we get a say in this? [MSNBC]

REAL ESTATE
• Public-service announcement: Union Square has turned up positive for bedbugs. [NYS]
• It's back to the drawing board for the $1.6 billion hospital-expansion proposal within Greenwich Village's historic district. The original plan was rejected yesterday. [NYT]
• The McKibbin lofts in East Williamsburg are home to more than 300 postcollegiate struggling artists. The vibe is similar to Greenwich Village 60 years ago, Soho 30 years ago, or the East Village in the nineties. And a month's rent at McKibbin is approximately the cost of one meal at Per Se. [NYT]

REAL ESTATE
• The Rent Guidelines Board, which regulates the city's 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, recommended increases of 3.5 percent to 7 percent for one-year leases and 5.5 percent to 9.5 percent for two-year leases. [NYT]
• It sort of makes us feel better that even Kanye West can't get a discount on rent. [NYP]
• More than 100 artists are returning to their loft spaces in Brooklyn about three months after the Fire Department cited their landlord for code violations and forced the tenants out. [NYT]

MEDIA
• Rupert Murdoch says he won't bid any higher than $580 million for Newsday. That seems to be Murdoch's figure of choice: He also paid $580 million for MySpace back in 2006. [Yahoo]
• Marie Claire is expressing interest in partnering with Bravo's Project Runway once the network's contract with Elle is up. [WWD]
• Vanity Fair's Buzz Bissinger regrets his personal attack on Deadspin's blog editor Will Leitch. [NYO]

MEDIA
• National Geographic took home three National Magazine Awards last night, while Vanity Fair, also a front-runner, received two. [NYP]
• Oh, it's on! Lenny Dykstra, a former Mets outfielder who founded the new magazine Players Club, which is targeted at affluent athletes, is embroiled in a legal battle with the glossy's publisher, Doubledown Media. But is Dykstra going to buckle? "I don't buckle," he says. "I go to war." [NYP]
• Fox News appears to have warmed to the Democratic Party. [NYT]

FINANCE
• Is Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein the most underpaid executive on Wall Street? [Forbes]
• K.K.R. is trying to improve the greenness of its businesses. (Don't think dollars, think ecofriendliness). [DealBook/NYT]
• Bear Stearns employees have started getting pink slips. [NYT]

MEDIA
• The inevitable book about the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer will be published by Penguin. It will be written by Peter Elkind, the guy who wrote The Smartest Guys in the Room [NYP]
• All is well in the land of CBS today, despite the "Evening News" program's low ratings: The network posted a 14 percent profit rise, prompting Viacom boss Sumner Redstone to give chief Les Moonves a pat on the back.[NYP]
• Meanwhile, Time Warner is planning to float its cable unit, which raises the question: What's in store for AOL? [NYT]