The Conde Nast magazine empire has curtailed its employees' once-lavish expenses. Once fatter than many phone books, PC Magazine is going online only. Other periodicals (including Oprah Winfrey's O at Home) are closing up altogether. What other changes are in store as the magazine world adapts to new economic realities?

1. Esquire stops pretending, goes to lineup consisting entirely of near-naked starlets.

2. Online-only magazine halts Web publication, will exist only as stray thoughts in the heads of its editors.

3. Highlights for Kids fires Goofus, saying it is "confident Gallant can carry the space solo."

4. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report consolidate, re-emerge as a weekly 10-page fax.

5. Us Weekly, after yet another Brangelina cover, admits the magazine is really about "them," not "us."

6. Consumer Reports finally reports on consumers, slaps them with dreaded "not acceptable" label.

7. O cancels plan to not feature Oprah on upcoming cover, calling it "too risky."

8. After 136 years, Popular Science admits science is not and will never be popular.

[This article first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.]

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