Mediagazer: Witherow: Paywall needed for Times 100m ed costs (Oliver Luft/Press Gazette)

10:25 AM ET, May 19, 2010

Top News:

Oliver Luft / Press Gazette:

Witherow: Paywall needed for Times 100m ed costs — John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, last night admitted the move to restrict access to his newspaper's online content was “a big gamble” but necessary to help meet Times Newspapers' £100m editorial costs.

Discussion: paidContent, Guardian, Beehive City, Editors Weblog and Journalism.co.uk

Media Week:

Guardian editor forecasts ‘vault of darkness’ for The Times — LONDON - Alan Rusbridger and John Witherow sparred over their respective free and paid-for online journalism models last night, but were united in saying their current printing presses will be their last. — Alan Rusbridger: paywalls ‘a vault of darkness’

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Lost Remote, bbc.co.uk and Jon Slattery

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million — Deal Will Shore Up Portal's Content Offerings, Help Produce Low-Cost Media — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Yahoo has acquired startup Associated Content for slightly more than $100 million in a deal the at gives the portal new technology and a new strategy for producing low-cost media.

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:

Yahoo's Buy of Associated Content Makes It a Publisher, Syndicator, Wire, Ad Rep...and More — So what indeed is Yahoo? CEO Carol Bartz has been trying to paint the new picture of it not being in Google's space, but being different. Not a search company, to be sure, a media company of some sort …

Discussion: paidContent, Romenesko, Kirk LaPointe's … and Silicon Alley Insider

Yodel Anecdotal:
Welcoming Associated Content to the Yahoo! Family

Discussion: BoomTown, WebNewser, Trends in the Living Networks, Gawker, Epicenter, DealBook and Beet.TV

Steve Krakauer / Mediaite:

Campbell Brown Leaving CNN After Network Grants Release From Contract (UPDATE) — Mediaite has learned CNN has granted anchor Campbell Brown's request to be let out early from her contract. — She has agreed to stay on and anchor the 8pmET hour until a replacement is found. Updated with statements.

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Cable Bombast and Ratings Lead CNN Anchor to Quit — Once again, a star anchor is leaving CNN. This time it is Campbell Brown, and she is leaving with an extraordinary amount of candor. — In a heartfelt statement on Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Brown said she was leaving on her own accord …

Discussion: Mediaite, Wonkette, Media Decoder and PopEater

New York Observer:

Si It Isn't So! Condé Considers Move Downtown — Si Newhouse is intent on finding Condé Nast a new home. — Only 11 years after Condé Nast moved into 4 Times Square, Mr. Newhouse has stepped up a three-year-long real estate search and is setting his sights on, of all places, lower Manhattan.

Discussion: Romenesko

Felix Gillette / New York Observer:

Three Birds, a Billionaire and the Hyper-Local Future of News — On the morning of Monday, May 17, a Web site called DNAinfo.com published a story about a rooster named Napoleon Bonaparte and two hens, named Lucy and Apple. The story was a classic nugget of neighborhood reporting …

Discussion: Romenesko and Collective Talent

David Carr / Media Decoder:

48 HR Magazine Experiment Big Hit, Except for That Part About the Lawyers — It's the kind of story that would warm the cockles of any old MSM hack: Young, talented journalists in San Francisco decide to use all manner of digital technology and the networked wisdom of the crowd powered by social media to produce ... a magazine.

Discussion: Make Work Meaningful, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com and Romenesko

Reuters:

Twitter expects hundreds of advertisers — (Reuters) - Twitter, the rapidly expanding microblogging service, plans to have hundreds of advertisers using its new ad system in the fourth quarter as the company ramps up plans to become a self-sustaining, profitable business.

Jemima Kiss / Guardian:

Google: Publishers should maximise readership to maximise profit — Google's plans to help prop up the flagging newspaper publishing industry include building paywall and subscription management tools, co-founder Larry Page has explained. — Speaking at Zeitgeist Europe …

John Gapper / John Gapper's Business Blog:
Google is agnostic about charging for news

Discussion: Marketing News and Financial Times

Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:

Zuckerman considers making Newsweek bid — With the first-round deadline less than two weeks away, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, owner of the Daily News and US News & World Report, is now said to be considering a bid for Newsweek. — While Zuckerman has converted US News to a monthly from a weekly …

Discussion: The Wire

Matthew Belloni / Hollywood Reporter:

NIKKI FINKE IN TALKS FOR HBO PAYDAY — EXCLUSIVE: HBO is trying to make a deal with litigious showbiz blogger Nikki Finke. The network is negotiating an arrangement with Finke to bless “Tilda,” its planned comedy about a Hollywood blogger very much like Finke.

Discussion: Romenesko, Gawker, LA Observed and New York Magazine

Tim Elfrink / miaminewtimes.com:

Posner Plagiarizes Again — Disgraced Miami Beach author Gerald Posner is desperate. He apparently whitewashed an account of his serial plagiarism on his Wikipedia page, then threatened Miami New Times with a lawsuit for writing about it. And now he's retained an 83-year-old lawyer infamous …

Discussion: Gawker

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Rupert Murdoch Still Needs Allies For His Digital News Crusade — Within the next two weeks or so, we're supposed to hear about Rupert Murdoch's digital news subscription service — the one he's been trying to put together for many months, — One problem: That service is supposed …

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Blumenthal scandal lifts veil on how political campaigns shop opposition research to the press — The New York Times' big scoop on Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal's misrepresented record of service during the Vietnam War wasn't even an hour old when one of Blumenthal's rivals …

Discussion: The Plum Line, The Atlantic Online and PostPartisan

Jon Ward / The Daily Caller:
McMahon campaign says they ‘fed’ Blumenthal story to New York Times

Discussion: New York Times, PostPartisan, NPR, The Plum Line, The Politico, the nytpicker, Vanity Fair, Romenesko, The Awl and Politics Daily

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: Runnin' Scared

BBC:

300 years of papers go online — The British Library has announced a 10-year project to make 40m pages from its newspaper archive available online. — The record of more than 300 years of journalism, including coverage of the Crimean and Boer Wars, will be put on the web by the publisher BrightSolid.

Discussion: Press Gazette, Guardian, Associated Press and ResourceShelf

Richard Siklos / New York Observer:

Hollyworld: High-Low Split for Media Pay — Lately, media pay has become something of an extreme sport. — Last we checked, this was an industry in the midst of a recession and a scary transition. And yet Bloomberg BusinessWeek recently ranked the 10 most overpaid CEOs in America last year …

Michael Malone / Broadcasting & Cable:

NBC, Affiliates Work Toward Long-Term Commitment — Body discusses 10-year deals with network — Some 182 NBC affiliates met with the network in New York Monday (May 17) following NBC's upfront presentation at the Hilton. The meeting covered the long-term viability of the network-affiliate relationship …

Discussion: MediaPost

Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:

Blip.TV Raises Another $10 Million For TV Network Of The Future — Web video startup Blip.TV just closed a $10.1 million financing round to build out a sort-of “TV network of the future.” — Canaan Partners, which sold Associated Content to Yahoo yesterday for roughly $100 million, led the round.

Discussion: MediaMemo, paidContent, TechCrunch and PE Hub Blog

Yinka Adegoke / Reuters:

Google to fight government if AdMob deal blocked — (Reuters) - Google Inc Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday his company is prepared to fight the U.S. government “very hard” if regulators block the search leader's acquisition of mobile advertising firm AdMob.

Discussion: paidContent

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