Mediagazer: It's Open Season on Journalists Near Moscow (Clifford J. Levy/New York Times)

Clifford J. Levy / New York Times:

It's Open Season on Journalists Near Moscow — Journalists have been attacked in a region along the M-10 highway. More Photos » — “Last spring, I called for the resignation of the city's leadership,” Mr. Beketov said in one of his final editorials. “A few days later, my automobile was blown up.

Discussion: CJR, Journalism and the World and mediabistro.com

Lauren Indvik / Mashable!:

GQ's Men of the Year Issue on iPad: 365 Copies Sold — GQ, one of the first magazine titles to appear on the iPad, has sold 365 copies of its December 2009 Men of the Year issue, according to publisher Pete Hunsinger. — The issue was priced at $2.99 per download — $2 less than the newsstand price …

Discussion: MediaMemo, FishbowlNY, eMedia Vitals, BRANDING UNBOUND, Guardian, Journalism.co.uk and New York Magazine

Laura McGann / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Mediagazer: From zero to big traffic driver in just two short months — Last week we were perusing our Google Analytics report here at the Lab and one data point stood out: A site barely two months old had inched into our top 10 referring sites for the previous month.

Discussion: TNW Apps, Techmeme News, WebNewser and Mediagazer News

Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age — The Huffington Post is now five years old. — In those five years, the site has gone from a tiny blog featuring posts from famous friends of founders Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer to one of the largest independent news sites in the world.

Discussion: Romenesko

Peter Osnos / The Atlantic Online:

The Rise of Bloomberg News — By any standard, Michael Rubens Bloomberg is one of the most successful public figures of our age. As the third-term mayor of New York, a billionaire many times over, and in the top tier of global philanthropists, he has stature nonpareil among his mogul peers …

Discussion: Inside Cable News

Maureen Tkacik / CJR:

Look at Me! — A writer's search for journalism in the age of branding — When I was nineteen and chose to accept the creeping suspicion that I would turn out to be a writer and, by extension, chronically deficient of funds, I made the fiscally prudent decision to drop out of school.

Discussion: The Awl

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Waiting to Pay for Hulu? Wait a While Longer. — A public service announcement for those of you eager to start paying for Hulu: Be patient. You're going to have to keep waiting. — Last month, the Los Angeles Times said Hulu was set to roll out a subscription service “as soon as May 24.”

Discussion: Fast Company, Online Video News, CrunchGear, Lifehacker and Gizmodo

Kunur Patel / AdAge:

Will Growing Crop of TV Apps Engage Viewers, Advertisers? — ABC, MTV Already Are Making Mobile Part of Upfront Package, While Others Use It as Viewing Companion — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The Gleeks have an app. So do “Dancing with the Stars” addicts and “Beavis & Butthead” fans.

Discussion: MediaPost

Ben Smith / Ben Smith's Blog:

Rahm opened backchannel to Murdoch — Even as the White House waged war on Fox News last fall, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel kept a backchannel open to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, telling him the White House “welcomed his ideas,” Jonathan Alter reports in his new book on Obama's first year.

Discussion: National Review and New York Observer

Jon Ward / The Daily Caller:

McMahon campaign says they ‘fed’ Blumenthal story to New York Times — UPDATE - 12:26 p.m. - The McMahon campaign has pulled the Rennie blog post off their site, in an apparent attempt to backtrack from the claim that they gave the story to the Times. A McMahon spokesman has not yet responded …

Discussion: The Plum Line, The Politico, FiveThirtyEight, The Atlantic Online, The Fix, Yahoo! News, New York Times, the nytpicker, The Awl, Romenesko, Vanity Fair and Politics Daily

Nick Bilton / Bits:

With a Kindle Hiring Spree, Amazon Gears Up for Battle With Apple — Since Apple announced its plans for the iPad, Amazon has shared few details about how it would respond to the competition for its Kindle. But over the past few weeks, it has offered some more clues.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Fast Company, Kindle Review, Gizmodo and TechFlash

Mike Reynolds / Multichannel News:

800-Pound Peacocks and Gorillas — Walking up to the Hilton on Avenue of the Americas, NBC had an armada of painted taxi cabs circling the hotel. — In tune with the network's “more colorful” pitch, each proudly displayed one of the shades of the Peacock's tail feathers …

Amnesty International:

Amnesty ‘disappointed’ by FT's decision to pull ad targeting Shell — Financial Times' late call thwarts Amnesty's campaign — Amnesty International UK expressed its immense disappointment today at the Financial Times' decision to pull a new hard-hitting advertisement at the last possible moment.

Discussion: Guardian, Press Gazette and Jon Slattery

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

“It's a totally new universe”: Digital media expert Mario Tedeschini-Lalli on the way forward for Italian media — While attending the International Journalism Festival in April, I met Mario Tedeschini-Lalli, one of Italy's premier new media thinkers. Co-chair of the Online News Association's …

Discussion: George Brock

New York Times:

Cable Takes a Front-Row Seat at Upfront Week — FOR decades, the upfront week in mid-May — devoted to previewing the coming television season for advertisers — was reserved for the big broadcast networks. Recently, however, the cable channels, emboldened by gains in ratings and advertising revenue …

Discussion: Media Decoder and The Wire

Mohammed Al Shafey / aawsat.com:

A Talk with the New Yorker's David Remnick — London, Asharq Al-Awsat- Amidst the upheaval that journalism is experiencing in light of the rise of new digital and internet technologies and the global financial crisis, David Remnick, Editor of the New Yorker magazine agreed to speak …

Discussion: New York Observer

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Why Bill Simmons isn't the cash cow you might think — Our own Jason Fry wrote a post worth reading on web economics at Deadspin, the Gawker Media sports site. It's about Bill Simmons, the star columnist for ESPN.com and one of the bigger web-native journalism stars the Internet has produced.

Discussion: ESPN

Spencer Bailey / CJR:

Everyone's the Wine Expert — Wine critics and bloggers, professional and amateur, are mixed up in a social media web — In late 2003, just as wine blogging was starting up on the Internet, Eric Arnold, currently the editorial director of BottleNotes.com, had never written a word about wine.

Brooks Barnes / Media Decoder:

Judge Dismisses Suit Over Variety Review — The trade paper Variety has escaped from a legal tangle over a negative review for the independent film “Iron Cross.” — A Los Angeles Superior Court last week dismissed a lawsuit that charged Variety of illegally damaging the movie by luring …

Discussion: Runnin' Scared, Hollywood Reporter, Gawker and LA Observed