Mediagazer: Bravo Will Make You a Reality Star (if the Web Agrees) (Stephanie Clifford/New York Times)

4:15 PM ET, June 6, 2010

Top News:

Does the Internet Make You Smarter? — Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture, says Clay Shirky. — Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media …

Discussion: Hillicon Valley, Gizmodo and Rough Type

Stuart Elliott / Media Decoder:

Upfronts: Two Down, Three to Go — Two of the five big television networks that broadcast in English have completed their sales of commercial time for the coming season in what is called the upfront market. — Fox Broadcasting, part of the News Corporation, and CW, owned by the CBS Corporation …

Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:

Bravo Will Make You a Reality Star (if the Web Agrees) — THE new Bravo reality show “Bethenny Getting Married?” is ready to tape, and its star, an outspoken brunette named Bethenny Frankel, is right on time. She walks into Fig & Olive, an airy Manhattan restaurant, and exchanges cheek kisses with Bravo producers and cameramen.

Discussion: New York Magazine

Chris Bowers / Open Left:

Amateur blogosphere, RIP — Today the New York Times announced that it will incorporate fivethirtyeight.com into the NYT website: … Only five years ago, the progressive political blogosphere was still predominately a gathering place for amateur (that is, unpaid or barely paid) …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb

Mike Henry / AdAge:

What a Toddler Can Tell You About the Future of Media — Just Put One in Front of an IPad, Take Notes, and Say Goodbye to Passive Media — Anyone pondering the future of television programming and related business models had better talk to my son Carson.

Rupal Parekh / AdAge:

Ten Questions With @BPGlobalPR — Leroy Stick: 'This Isn't a PR Nightmare, It's an Actual Nightmare' — Leroy Stick has a beef not just with BP, but with the PR industry as well. After posting a manifesto explaining his assumed identity and his purpose, we reached out to the man claiming …

Marc Ambinder / The Atlantic Online:

PDF10: Truth Telling and Shaming — I don't know why people assume that fact-checking and truth-telling are easy. I think they are hard. They involve choices — more so than fact-checkers care to admit sometimes. But a measure of doubt should not ever prevent a journalist from noticing …

Peter Lauria / The Daily Beast:

Sex War at MTV — Blogs and Stories — Viacom's frisky chairman, Sumner Redstone, is forcing MTV to produce a show about a sexy but talentless all-girl band. Peter Lauria on how the Electric Barbarellas may drive out his CEO. — A few weeks ago, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone …

Brian Moylan / Gawker:

British Newspaper Has Given Up on Writing Headlines Entirely — The cover of yesterday's British newspaper Times & Citizen never bothered to replace the filler text for its main feature story headline. We know things are rough out there, but here's what happens when you let the copy editors go.

Andrew Vanacore / Associated Press:

Publishers see signs the iPad can restore ad money — NEW YORK - Good news for the news business: Companies are paying newspapers and magazines up to five times as much to place ads in their iPad applications as what similar advertising costs on regular websites.

Audrey McAvoy / Associated Press:

154-year-old Honolulu Advertiser prints last issue — HONOLULU — For more than a century, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser have competed to chronicle Hawaii, from the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the Pearl Harbor attack to statehood and the election of island-born Barack Obama.

/Film:

LOL: The Reoccurring Prop Newspaper — If you watch enough television shows and movies, then you might even start to notice that a bunch of the same props are used over and over again. I first noticed this with a magazine prop in various television shows including Married With Children …

Discussion: Gawker

INMA:

INMA agenda doubles down on integrated ad sales, content value, tablets — INMA has focused on one big theme thus far in 2010: how to generate financial value from the integration of audience, content, and platform. — We believe this is a central theme as our industry transitions from “newspapers” to “newsmedia companies.”

Media Week:

FT iPad app proves more popular than its iPhone app — The Financial Times' iPad app has registered three times more downloads in its first two weeks since launch, than its iPhone app managed, according to the publisher. — FT iPad: more initial downloads than its predecessor iPhone app