Mediagazer: Newsweek's Evan Thomas leaving the magazine (Michael Calderone/Yahoo! News)

6:25 PM ET, August 10, 2010

Top News:

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Demand Media Is Afraid That Google is Going to Compete With It — In the “risk factors” section of its IPO filing on Friday, content-creation company Demand Media raises an interesting possibility: that Google — which Demand said it relies on for about a quarter of its revenue …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, PE Hub Blog and MarketingVOX

James Ledbetter / Slate:

What Happened to Demand Media's Audience? — Something strange has happened on the way to Demand Media's IPO. For the last several years, Demand Media has been like a tornado ripping through traditional media. The company's model is to produce hundreds of thousands of evergreen pieces …

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
The Lesson of Demand Media (And AOL): The Online Content Business …

Discussion: MediaMemo

Mike Taylor / FishbowlNY:

ProPublica's Top-Paid Employees All Made Six Figures in 2009 — Add a fat paycheck (by the standards of today's struggling journalism market, anyway) to the list of reasons why it's awesome to work for ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative outfit.

Discussion: Romenesko, The Awl, WebNewser, eMedia Vitals, New York Magazine and The Wire

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Meet the Prankster Brothers Behind “Jenny”, the Whiteboard-Using, Farmville-Exposing HPOA Girl — Yesterday everyone on the Internet loved Steve Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who quit his job by cursing out his passengers and bolting out of his plane using the emergency slide.

Discussion: TechCrunch, BoomTown, Mashable!, theCHIVE, Tuned In, Going Concern, The Atlantic Online, Dealbreaker, Jezebel, New York Magazine, The Consumerist and Silicon Alley Insider, more at Techmeme »

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

It's Official: Epix, Netflix Announce “Multi-Year” Deal for Streaming Movies — Epix and Netflix, mum yesterday, are now happy to talk. The two companies have confirmed a big, expensive deal that gives Netflix the ability to show the pay-TV service's movies on its streaming video offering.

Discussion: Company Town, paidContent, Gizmodo, VentureBeat and NewTeeVee, more at Techmeme »

Claudia Eller / Company Town:
Netflix and Epix working on major digital partnership to shake up pay TV landscape

Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:

Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead — A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. “vision statement” shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities?

Discussion: MediaPost, Search Engine Land, Gawker, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Engadget, Fast Company, Company Town, Venture Capital Dispatch, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, The Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, John Battelle's Searchblog, Silicon Alley Insider and Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com

Boston Globe:

Back off, critics — TV news benefits from fresher voices — THERE ARE signs of more intelligent life in TV news, but critics, channeling what Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair called “the inside-baseball television-news diaspora,” are trying hard to snuff it out.

Discussion: Romenesko, TVNewser, Mediaite, On Media's Blog, NewsBusters.org and CJR

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Newsweek's Evan Thomas leaving the magazine — Veteran journalist Evan Thomas is leaving Newsweek after nearly a quarter-century with the magazine. — Thomas told The Upshot that he is departing to concentrate on teaching journalism at Princeton and writing books.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Gawker, The Wrap, New York Observer and New York Magazine

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

BoomTown Checks In at the Online-Only Seattle Post-Intelligencer — A little more than a week ago, while I was in the Pacific Northwest for a Microsoft (MSFT) event, I decided to pay a visit on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. — Or, as its brand is known now: seattlepi.com.

Discussion: Romenesko

Kevin Rawlinson / The Independent:

Rupert Murdoch claims to own the ‘Sky’ in ‘Skype’ — Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB is fighting a legal battle with the internet telecommunications pioneer Skype, claiming that it owns the “Sky” in “Skype”. — Skype yesterday announced that it plans to float on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

More Money for iPhone Ads: Medialets Raises $6 Million — We don't know how the mobile ad business will look or how big it will be, but it's a pretty safe bet to assume it's going to be a lot bigger than it is now. Which makes investors quite happy to throw money at it.

Discussion: TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

Big Think:

Carl Bernstein: The “Golden Age” of Investigative Journalism Never Existed — Legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein says that he's not as concerned about the state of investigative journalism as some of his contemporaries are—in fact, he thinks that newspapers like the New York Times …

Discussion: Guardian

Robin J Phillips / BusinessJournalism.org …:

Former BusinessWeek.com editor launches b-school site — John A. Byrne, former editor of BusinessWeek.com and the man behind BusinessWeek's influential b-school rankings, launched a new website today. — PoetsandQuants.com, a site devoted to the coverage of graduate business school education …

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

Times Puts Some Ads Outside The Wall And On iPad As Web Display Reduces — Though they are often cast as distinct business models, advertising and paid content are not necessarily mutually exclusive - or are they? — Observations from Times Newspapers' digital properties point to two different answers...

Discussion: Poynter Online and nicommercial.com

Newsweek:

Take This Blog and Shove It! — When utopian ideals crash into human nature—sloth triumphs. — In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That's when Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—a site that grew from 100,000 articles in 2003 …

Discussion: MediaPost, gapingvoid and Techdirt

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter Online:

AP to Improve Obits of the Famous and Newsworthy — The Associated Press began an initiative this week to give more attention to obituaries, an area of content that is “enormously popular” with readers, said AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Oreskes. — As part of the upgrade …

Andrea Domanick / Multichannel News:

NBCU Digital Studio To Launch ‘Fact Checkers Unit’ — New Digital Series Is A Co-Production With Samsung Electronics — Samsung Electronics and NBC Universal Digital Studio have joined forces on a new original digital series. — Fact Checkers Unit will premiere Aug. 17 and marks …

Discussion: Runnin' Scared and Broadcasting & Cable

Julia Boorstin / Media Money with Julia Boorstin:

Media Industry to Grow Faster than US Economy — A new report out today from Veronis Suhler Stevenson forecasts spending on media and communications will outpace economic growth as consumers invest in mobile and web access and companies pay to reach them there.

Discussion: MediaPost and Business Wire

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

All Our Ideas facilitates crowdsourcing — of opinions — What do readers want from the news? — It's a hard question to answer, and not only because we don't often know what we like until we find ourselves liking it. To figure it out, news outlets have traffic patterns on the one hand …