Mediagazer: Viacom Profits Surge, But Home Entertainment Revenues Stumble (David Kaplan/paidContent)

Dan Kennedy / Media Nation:

Hard times working the Patch — Boston Globe reporter Johnny Diaz today writes about Patch.com, the AOL-owned network of hyperlocal news sites that is (excuse me) sprouting up around the country. — As I noted earlier, Diaz writes that Patch is up against considerable competition in Greater Boston …

Discussion: Lost Remote and NetNewsCheck Latest

With Patch, AOL offers challenge to local news — A risky Web strategy in a crowded field — Like any online user, Annie LaCourt can easily scour for news from around the world, but sometimes she prefers to make the Internet more intimate and local, all about her hometown of Arlington.

Discussion: Romenesko and The Wire

Russell Adams / Wall Street Journal:

Condé Nast Titles Morph Into Restaurants — Condé Nast is taking some of its best-known magazine names and parlaying them into the restaurant business in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. — The effort reflects a growing openness among magazine publishers to try …

Discussion: Romenesko, New York Observer and Eater National

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Why the San Fran Chronicle Is Running Demand Media Content — Q&A With SFGate.com Digital Media VP Michele Slack — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Two Hearst newspapers' websites have gone live with new sections from Demand Media, one of the content-generation companies that tap thousands of freelancers to generate countless articles.

Google Book Search Blog:

Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you. — When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?” — Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.”

Discussion: The Official Google Blog, TechCrunch, ResourceShelf, GalleyCat and The Atlantic Online, more at Techmeme »

Michael Wolff / Vanity Fair:

The Gray Lady of Cable News — Many think Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S., has lost the cable-news war to Fox. But CNN has racked up record profits by being bland. — MOST BUSTED NAMES IN NEWS? — Jon Klein is an extremely affable broadcast-news executive, a chinos …

Discussion: Inside Cable News, TVNewser, Romenesko, CJR and The Wire

Jonathan Stray / Nieman Journalism Lab:

How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools — The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Patrick Smith / psmith, journalist:

Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010? — Journalists now invariably have to take part in web journalism and an increasing number of them only write for the web. — But despite that, not all of them use hyperlinks - one of the main things that elevate digital journalism above …

Lewis DVorkin / The Copy Box:

At Forbes, “Opening Up”... and a glimpse of things to come — Forbes is on the move. — Actually, it has been ever since 1917. That's when B.C. Forbes, then a nationally syndicated columnist, launched a magazine to publish his prodigious writings and thoughts on American business.

Discussion: Romenesko

Guardian:

Time Warner buys Shed Media — Controlling stake in Supernanny super-indie, valued at £100m by the deal, gives US giant ‘immediate scale in UK production’ — Time Warner is to buy a controlling interest in the British super-indie Shed Media, the company behind shows such as Supernanny …

Discussion: Variety and The Wrap

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Viacom Profits Surge, But Home Entertainment Revenues Stumble — Viacom (NYSE: VIA) showed the true benefits of having the dual revenue streams of advertising and cable, as its networks division, which includes its MTV Networks, saw dollars rise 6.4 percent and profit gain 14 percent.

Discussion: NewTeeVee, Company Town, Variety and The Wrap

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Google, Verizon Deny NYT Story On Their Undermining Of Net Neutrality — Yesterday, the New York Times published a story that detailed an agreement in the works between Verizon and Google that would effectively kill off net neutrality by allowing “Verizon to speed some online content …

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

Whither magazines? — Three people I respect a great deal now lead the big magazine companies: David Carey (ex Condé) at Hearst, Bob Sauerberg at Condé, and now Jack Griffin at Time Inc. — and I'll add Justin Smith at Atlantic. — It's a big challenge to head a magazine company these days …

Discussion: mediabistro.com, Romenesko and Poynter Online

Nathan Yau / FlowingData:

New York Times on how they design their graphics — Leading up to their book, Turning Pages: Editorial Design for Print Media, publisher Gestalten has a chat with Steve Duenes and Archie Tse — of famed New York Times graphics department — about what goes on behind the scenes.

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Newsonomics of the fading 80/20 rule — [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.] — Jim Moroney thinks he may be on to a new formula.

Discussion: Romenesko and Gannett Blog

Beachwood Reporter:

The [Wednesday] Papers — A news organization's business side is (theoretically) separate from its editorial side, but when the business side doesn't conform to the editorial side's values - which in large part establish a media company's brand - the organization loses its moral authority.

yelvington.com:

Algorithmic layout: Another thing the visual journalists are going to hate — Ever since we began using computers to handle news — which is probably a lot longer than you think — there has been a notion of automating the processes of laying out pages. Long before InDesign, long before Quark …

Zeke Turner / New York Observer:

Air Conditioning and ‘Anti-Geithner Jihad’! Marxist Moe Tkacik's D.C. Sabbatical … “I grew up watching McLaughlin Group on Saturday nights, and basically all those calcified old f**kers are still around,” Moe Tkacik told the Media Mob this afternoon on gchat.

Discussion: Gawker and New York Magazine