On Wednesday morning, during Time Warner (TWX)'s third-quarter earnings conference call, chairman Jeff Bewkes said, "We'll continue to take a look at non-strategic and less profitable titles."

Apparently, one of those non-strategic titles is Fortune Small Business. A Time Inc. spokesman confirms to DailyFinance that the Fortune spin-off is suspending publication.

The news comes just as the publisher embarks on a fresh round of job cuts aimed at saving $100 million in costs. Between 400 and 500 jobs will be eliminated, according to The New York Times, only a year after the company shed 600 workers.

The guillotine has begun its descent at Time Inc. Sources at the publishing company (which is part of the same conglomerate as DailyFinance parent AOL) say executives have asked for an emergency meeting with representatives of the Newspaper Guild to discuss job eliminations. A Time Inc. spokeswoman declined to comment, but John Shostrom, chairman of the company's Guild unit, said the meeting will take place "soon." He said it was Time Inc. that called the meeting.

"They act, and we react," said Shostrom. "The Guild doesn't lay people off. We just fight back when they make proposals to lay people off."

Things are still pretty tough for The New York Times Co. (NYT), but they're getting better. The publisher reported a $35.6 million loss in the third quarter of 2009, considerably better than analysts had expected. And, on an earnings call to discuss the results, Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson suggested that the outlook is finally improving.

"We have seen encouraging signs of improvement in the overall economy and in discussions with our advertisers," Robinson said. She even predicted a "modest return" of classified ad spending, whose drop-off is widely seen as more secular than cyclical, "when the economic winds blow more in everyone's favor."

The New York Times Co. (NYT) assured its unionized employees in September that the voluntary 5 percent paycut they had agreed to this year would be temporary; their former salaries will be restored on January 1. Now we know where the money to do that will come from.

The Times announced Monday that it will eliminate 100 newsroom positions by the end of this year. Employees will receive buyout offers this week, and will have until early December to decide whether to apply for one. If the paper can't reach the magic number purely through buyouts, it will have to resort to layoffs, as it did in its last round of newsroom cuts in early 2008, which reduced the newsroom headcount from more than 1,330 to about 1,250.

For the past year, silver linings have been in short supply. Even as financial markets claw their way back up, the wealth lost has been neither forgotten nor completely recovered. In the private equity sector, the good news is that, frankly, the situation could have been worse. Though returns plunged, the asset class still outperformed the public equity markets.

A new analysis from alternative investment research firm Preqin puts the private equity industry's return at -30 percent for the 12 months ending March 31, 2009, a period that encompasses the bulk of the lows without the benefit of the upswing that followed. For the same year-long period, the S&P 500's return was -38.1 percent, with the MSCI Europe's at -49.9 percent and the MSCI Emerging Markets' return at -47.1 percent.

Tom Taulli notes on BloggingStocks that private equity firm KKR is in the late stages of planning an IPO for Dollar General, the country's largest chain of small discount retail centers. KKR, along with the private equity arms of Goldman Sachs (GS) and Citigroup (C), acquired the company in July 2007 for a total of $7.1 billion. The timing of a potential IPO speaks volumes about what is in demand on Wall Street -- namely the "frugality trade" -- and the cashing out of a smart seller should be a warning sign to individual investors.

In a difficult market, the valuations placed on an IPO are usually low enough that private equity owners will wait until investor enthusiasm returns. Although the markets have generally been terrible, there are still pockets of demand, and few people are more intimately acquainted with institutional sentiment than private equity firms. While the June 2007 peak of the private equity bubble saw 21 IPOs -- including that of Blackstone (BX) -- the first half of 2009 has seen only 14. But KKR apparently feels that this is the best possible time to sell Dollar General; looking at hot areas of the market and the company's turnaround over the last two years indicates why this might not be so surprising.