Mediagazer: Making Headlines In South Africa (Laura Martinez/Multichannel)

2:10 PM ET, May 20, 2010

Top News:

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Guardian Looking For Money In API, New Readers Club — It may be sceptical that readers would pay to read its news site - but Guardian News & Media is today taking the wraps off two alternative new commercial models... Readers Club — We've known for nine months that an equivalent …

Discussion: Guardian, Press Gazette, Journalism.co.uk, Brand Republic and Beet.TV

Jemima Kiss / Guardian:

Guardian announces commercial launch of Open Platform — The Guardian today introduced the second phase of its Open Platform initiative, expanding the content-sharing service to commercial partners. — A comprehensive set of developer tools and resources, the commercial launch …

Discussion: GigaOM, Media News and Editors Weblog

Salahuddin Choudhary / The Official Google Blog:

Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV. — If there's one entertainment device that people know and love, it's the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*.

Discussion: Digital Daily, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Engadget, Faster Forward and ResourceShelf

Nilay Patel / Engadget:

Google TV turns on at I/O: runs Android and Flash, partnered with Sony, Logitech, and Intel — As expected, Google just announced Google TV at I/O. There's four billion TV viewers worldwide, making it the biggest market in the world, and Google's after it in a big way — it's a $70 billion ad market in the US alone, after all.

Discussion: paidContent, TechCrunch, Bits, Download Squad, VentureBeat, Gizmodo and MediaPost Raw

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter Online:

Ben Franklin Project's ‘Digital First, Print Last’ Approach Produces First Products — In April, Journal Register CEO John Paton presented the newspapers in the company with a challenge: create a Web and print product in 30 days using only free tools, and seek help from the community to do it.

Discussion: The Ben Franklin Project and INMA

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Freelance Journalism Site True/Slant In M&A Talks — More M&A may be on the way in the freelance content space, although on a much more modest scale than yesterday's Yahoo-Associated Content deal. True/Slant, a freelance news startup that encourages “entrepreneurial journalism,” …

Discussion: Romenesko, The Wire, Media Thresher, Screenwerk and Silicon Valley Watcher

Jeff Bercovici / DailyFinance:

Will Mort Zuckerman Move the New York Daily News Downtown? — The employees of Conde Nast, the glossy magazine publisher, may not be relishing the prospect of a corporate move to downtown Manhattan, but at least they should have some company down there. Mort Zuckerman, the owner …

Discussion: Gawker, Romenesko, New York Magazine, Curbed NY, New York Observer and The Wire

Mark Milian / L.A. Times Tech Blog:

Web vets bet online video is ready for a TV takeover — Jason Calacanis is a betting man. — The poker enthusiast gambled that blogging would break out when he founded Weblogs Inc. in 2003. He was right on the money and cashed out in a sale to AOL for $25 million.

Mike Shields / Mediaweek:

MSNBC.com, BermanBraun in Talks for New Political Site — MSNBC.com and BermanBraun are in serious talks about the launch of a new content site—possibly this August—focused on politics that according to sources will borrow heavily from BermanBraun's current project with MSN, the celebrity photo-filled Wonderwall.

Discussion: paidContent

Laura Martinez / Multichannel:

Making Headlines In South Africa — Q&A With Univision President of News Alina Falcón — A television veteran — and 2009 Multichannel News Wonder Woman — Alina Falcon this year was named to the new post of president of news at Univision Communications.

Discussion: Guardian, rbr.com and For the Record

Jon Slattery:

Orwell Prize: Winners are Peter Hitchens of the MoS and social worker blogger Winston Smith — The Mail on Sunday's Peter Hitchens has won this year's Orwell Prize for journalism. — Given the contrast between his right-wing views and those of George Orwell, there was an audible collective intake …

Discussion: Press Gazette and Journalism.co.uk

Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:

Wiki journalism: the experiences of WikiCity Guides — I asked Pat Lazure, co-founder of the wiki journalism project WikiCity Guides, to tell me more about his experiences with the project. This is what he said: — Key Factors Driving Citizen Journalism

Adrian Cockcroft / Adrian Cockcroft's Blog:

Netflix in the cloud and HTML5 — One of the fun things about working at Netflix is that we are always “leaning forward” and looking for new technologies to leverage. As we roll out our website to run on the Amazon cloud, we are also re-architecting the code base, adding internationalization support …

Discussion: TechCrunch, NewTeeVee, Poynter Online, Hacking NetFlix and VentureBeat

David Kaplan / paidContent:

IDC: Online Ad Revs Poised To Grow Higher Than Expected — Despite worries about Europe's financial problems over the past few weeks, expectations for online ad spending this year are continuing to rise. Just two months after researcher IDC projected U.S. online ad spending to shoot …

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider and MediaPost

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Newsonomics of content at the margins — [Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.] — Yahoo's purchase of Associated Content, for over $100 million, seemed to come out of the blue.

Discussion: Media Thresher, Webmetricsguru and MediaPost

Greg Sargent / The Plum Line:

Who woulda thunk it: Fact-checking is popular! — Has anyone else noticed that the Associated Press has been doing some strong fact-checking work lately, aggressively debunking all kinds of nonsense, in an authoritative way, without any of the usual he-said-she-said crap that often mars political reporting?

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Ben Smith's Blog and Washington Monthly

Reporters Without Borders:

Thailand - Journalists under attack, reporting brought to a halt — Reporters Without Borders condemns the violence against journalists by Red Shirt demonstrators and the government's continual violation of the right to information. Thailand has rarely experienced the level of violence …

Discussion: Guardian

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Whiskey Media's (And Former CNET CEO) Shelby Bonnie Talks Content and More! — Yesterday, BoomTown caught up with Shelby Bonnie, the former CEO of CNET who is now running Whiskey Media, the social publishing start-up. — Sausalito, Calif.-based Whiskey is debuting its latest site today …

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider