Mediagazer: Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, and Screwing Customers (Fred/A VC)

8:15 AM ET, March 8, 2010

Top News:

At the Last Minute, a Disney-Cablevision Truce — The Oscar statuette became a pawn in a public brawl between the Walt Disney Company and Cablevision on Sunday, a dispute that prevented more than three million viewers from watching the beginning of the Academy Awards show until …

Discussion: NewTeeVee, Media Decoder and paidContent

Joe Flint / Company Town:

Disney's deal with Cablevision is good news for broadcasters [Updated] — And the Oscar for biggest gamble goes to ... Walt Disney Co.'s ABC. — Risking political backlash and hits to its ratings, advertising revenue and public goodwill, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger drew a line in the sand …

Discussion: Variety, paidContent, BuzzMachine, Broadcasting & Cable and Mashable!

Fred / A VC:

Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, and Screwing Customers — There's been a battle going on between the “broadcast” TV networks and the cable networks over something called “retransmission fees.” Cable networks have traditionally paid for “cable network programming” but not “over the air programming.”

Discussion: MediaMemo

Lucia Moses / Mediaweek:

Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Bullish — Taking sharp aim at its rivals, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is prepping for a relaunch April 23 that it boasts will “reinvent” the category, with shorter stories, 20 percent more editorial pages and three more issues for a total of 50. — The moves come as others are retrenching.

Dirk Smillie / Forbes:

Digital Lift-Off — Web ads to get a 10% boost in 2010. For the first time advertisers will spend more on digital than print. — We've been waiting for this: A study by Outsell, to be released Monday, reveals that U.S. advertisers are spending more this year on digital media than on print.

Felix Salmon:

Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ — Clark Hoyt, the NYT's public editor, has a good post-mortem on l'affaire Zachary Kouwe, and asks whether “the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked” was partly to blame for his plagiarism.

Discussion: The Public Editor's Journal

Clark Hoyt / New York Times:
Journalistic Shoplifting — ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter …

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk, Lisa Gold, Y-rd, The Other McCain and Silicon Alley Insider

David Carr / New York Times:

Breaking the Story That Isn't — Reporters have always kept an eye on other reporters. For a journalist, the only thing more interesting than what you are working on is what your competitor is working on. — But what if watching your competitor becomes your whole story?

Chris / cdixon.org:

News is a lousy business for Google too — There is a widespread myth that search engines have taken profits away from news websites. A few months ago, Rupert Murdoch said: “Google has devised a brilliant business model that avoids paying for news gathering yet profits off the search ads sold around that content.”

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Ad rules to take in Twitter and Facebook — Proposal would extend Advertising Standards Agency role to include marketing activity on social media and microsites — Tighter controls on the how Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles are used in company promotions are set to be introduced under …

Discussion: Faster Future

Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:

The National Enquirer Earns Some Respect — The call came into The National Enquirer's Los Angeles tip line — the kind advertised in the supermarket tabloid with the promise “We'll Pay Big for Your Celebrity Gossip” — in late September 2007. The caller's message was that a woman named Rielle Hunter …

Discussion: Fitz & Jen

Jay Rosen / PressThink:

News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest — These are my notes. You can help me make my presentation great by reading them over and commenting or asking questions. We have a week. — Suppose your laptop continually received updates …