Ben Silverman has joined the board of GE/NBC Uni's $250 million Peacock Equity Fund, which helps "identify media investment opportunities" between $3 million-$25 million. What might Peacock Equity enjoy? Well, its investments have included recommendations engine Loomia, educators' online resource Hotchalk, women's blogging network BlogHer and medical search engine Healthline; the fund also invested in and later sold ad platform Adify, which yielded a tenfold profit. True, it all lacks a certain showmanship, but that's sort of comforting in this day/age. Which begs the question: Then why Silverman?

Looks good, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's a well-designed and utterly phony spoof, one that was handed out in New York this morning at subway stations around the city. Writes Sewell Chan:

The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics.

The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition.

(A headline in the fake business section declares: “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.” Uh, sure.)

Later on Wednesday morning, the Yes Men issued a statement claiming credit for the prank. The statement said, in part:

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

The Yes Men were also the subject of a 2003 documentary directed by Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman. [NYT]

Standard & Poor's has slashed its rating of the New York Times Company to junk. And on that note, I'm going home. [Financial Times]

The good news: no one was surprised when NBC Universal parent General Electric reported a 22% drop in its third-quarter earnings, a decline blamed on its struggling financial arm, GE Capital. However, Stephen Singer writes, some analysts are saying GE should sell the entertainment companies "because it does not fit the company's industrial and commercial business mix." And Citigroup analyst Jeffrey Sprague told investors Friday that with GE's uneven operating performance and a risky finance portfolio, "We believe GE may have reached the point that its size and complexity have become a hindrance to effective management." So far, GE chairman-CEO Jeffrey Immelt won't hear of it; the unit made $645 million from last year, a 10% increase. "Cable and films had a solid quarter and the success of the Beijing Olympics showed the value of the network model," he said. [The Huffington Post]

Veteran marketing consultant Jack Myers says that even with the current economic calamity, media companies will end 2008 with ad spending up just a little bit, about 3%-4%. However, that number comes only if you include "emerging media" categories (mobile, videogames) and remove newspapers from the equation altogether. As for looking ahead, it's not for the squeamish: "Today and into the foreseeable future, there is downward pressure on media pricing," he notes. "And marketers have historically accepted the old John Wanamaker anecdote that 'only 50% of my advertising works but I don’t know which 50%.' Today, marketers sense that less than 30% of their advertising works, and they are increasingly intent on identifying and eliminating the wasteful 70%." [The Huffington Post]

The Los Angeles Times has had yet another horrible, rotten, no good, very bad day. Writes Kevin Roderick, "Newsroom staffers are being told today individually and in department meetings that as many as 75 editorial positions are being cut through voluntary departures and layoffs." Furthermore, HAL hears that Playboy today laid waste to 1/2 of its staff -- that's half, gone -- across LA, NY and Chicago. If that's not enough of a gut punch, try this: Roderick says some LA Times staffers have been "enticed" to volunteer with the promise/threat that, should the LAT go through this exercise again, employees won't receive this two weeks' severance pay for each year of service. This is all beginning to sound like a game show hosted by Samuel Beckett. [LA Observed, HAL]

AdAge has just released its annual list of the Top 100 Leading Media Companies and while looks a lot like last year's list, readers may appreciate the nifty digital addition of a Media Family Tree. Hardly surprising: Newspaper owners held half of the top 10 slots a decade ago; today it's down to News Corp. and Cox. However, as newspaper analyst and Kent State professor Lauren Rich Fine points out, "Their position in a listing is the least of their problems." Also noted: Media growth was at its lowest since 2001. [AdAge]