Mediagazer: How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard (Claire Cain Miller/New York Times)

4:40 PM ET, March 8, 2010

Top News:

Megan McCarthy / Mediagazer News:

Introducing Mediagazer — Mediagazer presents the day's must read media news on a single page. — The media business is in tumult: from the production side to the distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry. What do news organizations need to do to survive? Will books become extinct?

Discussion: Techmeme News, WebNewser, ReadWriteWeb, Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog, Silicon Alley Insider, Gawker, Vator.tv, PaidContent, Silicon Valley Watcher, Matt Singley, Search Engine Land, The News About The News, ResourceShelf, broadstuff, The Next Web, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com, The Bivings Report and VentureBeat

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Yet Another Media Aggregation Site? Yup. And You'll Read It: Techmeme Unveils Mediagazer. — Does the Web need yet another outlet dedicated to media coverage? Nope. How about another aggregation site? Plenty of those to go around too. — So what if you combined the two? Exactly.

Discussion: All Shook Down, TechCrunch and New York Observer

Kerry Lauerman / Salon:

The story behind Oscar's “Kanye moment” — We talk to the two filmmakers whose personal fight became one of the ceremony's weirdest moments … People are already saying you “pulled a Kanye.” What happened? — BURKETT: What happened was the director and I had a bad difference …

Discussion: Hollywood Reporter, /Film, Mediaite, MTV Buzzworthy Blog, The Awl, MTV Movies Blog, PopEater, Speakeasy, Movieline, New York Magazine, ArtsBeat, Jezebel, Gawker, The Big Lead and The Washington Independent

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.

Discussion: Mobile Marketing Watch, Gawker and Romenesko

Greg Bensinger / Bloomberg:
Online Ad Spending to Surpass Print in U.S. This Year

Discussion: btobonline.com

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: Mediaweek, Variety, Faster Forward, DailyFinance, MediaFreak, Multichannel, Media Money …, Broadcasting & Cable, paidContent, BuzzMachine and NYConvergence

New York Times:
At the Last Minute, a Disney-Cablevision Truce

Discussion: USA Today, New York Times, Media Decoder, Company Town, VideoNuze, The Wire, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and NewTeeVee

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

Discussion: MediaMemo and John Battelle's Searchblog

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?

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk, Media Decoder and FishBowlNY

Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:

The New York Times is hiring 12 techies and a social media whiz — While pundits climb over each other to predict the death of The New York Times Company, the NYT is looking to hire at least a dozen full-time software engineers and Web designers, plus one social media marketing manager.

Martin Langeveld / News after Newspapers:

iPad strategies for publishers — This is a white paper based on and expanded from my earlier post on the same topic, prepared for the Digital Publishing Alliance meeting at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri on March 7-9, 2010

Discussion: Online

Steve Pond / The Wrap:

Analysis: How ‘Hurt Locker’ Became the $21M Movie That Could — It wasn't an Oscars for the unexpected. It was an Oscars for the unprecedented. — In the end, “The Hurt Locker” shrugged off the barrage of last-minute criticism and came out of awards season in exactly the same …

Discussion: Multichannel, Broadcasting & Cable, The New Yorker Blog, MediaFreak, The Wire and Moraes on TV

Howard Kurtz / Washington Post:

In lean times, TV reporters must be jacks of all trades — Scott Broom turns his tripod toward the wall of gray mailboxes, adjusts the camera, walks into the shot and delivers his spiel. — “Here's how bad it is for the U.S. Postal Service,” the WUSA reporter says as a handful of customers at the Garrett Park post office look on.

Discussion: TVNewser

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 …

Adalian / The Wrap:

Ratings: Oscars Most-Watched Since 2005 — Sunday's Oscar cast attracted 41.3 million viewers, the best since 2005 and a roughly 15 percent gain from 2009's show. — That's according to fast national, time zone-adjusted ratings from Nielsen. It's a two-year up-trend for the Oscars, which last year averaged 36.3 million viewers.

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, The Huffington Post, The Live Feed | THR and Movieline

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.

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Michael Cieply / Media Decoder:

Variety Lets Two of Its Top Critics Go — Neil Stiles, the president of Variety, said the entertainment industry trade paper is cutting from its staff two of its most prominent writers — film reviewer Todd McCarthy and theater critic David Rooney. — In a telephone interview …

Claire Cain Miller / New York Times:

How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard — OAKLAND, Calif. — Tim Westergren recently sat in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, a glass of red wine in one hand and a truffle-infused Kobe beef burger in the other, courtesy of the investment bankers who were throwing a party to court him.

Discussion: Bits, PSFK, the Econsultancy blog, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable!, Silicon Alley Insider and Gizmodo

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

“OMG It's Steve Jobs! I'm the Only One Yelling at Him!” — That's the most excellent caption for this photo (below), posted Sunday night by blogger Wayne Sutton. — Squint and you can see the Apple (AAPL) co-founder and CEO in the middle of shot, standing to the right of the woman in a white dress (click to enlarge).

Discussion: MediaFile, VentureBeat, MacRumors, The Social, GMSV, Gadget Lab and Engadget

Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:

At 10 Years, A Magazine Finds Time To Celebrate — The project was not real simple. — To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Time Inc. magazine Real Simple wanted to offer “the gift of time” to its harried readers. Inside the April issue, that means shortcut dinners and time-saving tips.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Barnes & Noble Gets a Time Inc. Vet to Run Its Newsstand — Barnes & Noble wants to catch up to Amazon (AMZN)-and suddenly, Apple (AAPL)-in the e-reader race. This means the company needs its own digital newsstand. — So the bookseller has nabbed a magazine guy to run it.

Discussion: MediaPost, paidContent, The Business Insider, Associated Press, FishBowlNY and Gizmodo

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: Talking Biz News, Living Through 1500, Silicon Alley Insider, The Public Editor's Journal, The Awl, Mediaite, Romenesko, FishBowlNY, Journalism.co.uk, Lisa Gold, The Other McCain, Media Law Prof Blog, Y-rd, Salon and New York Times

Lucia Moses / Mediaweek:

Foodie Site, Magazine Target Men — One doesn't have to be a die-hard fan of Iron Chef to know that men have their own way of cooking and that it often involves meat, tongs and a grill. — This demo has been largely underserved by traditional media, but now, two publishers are firing up products aimed squarely at the male chef.

Discussion: FishBowlNY

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Cable Channel to Offer Giant Octopi and Big Cats — Cable channels usually get their start in the United States, then branch out to the rest of the world. But this month, the News Corporation will import a foreign channel full of shows about a subject that knows no borders: natural history.

Discussion: Media Buyer Planner