Mediagazer: Meet the Prankster Brothers Behind “Jenny,” … (Peter Kafka/MediaMemo)

9:25 PM ET, August 10, 2010

Top News:

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.

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

The Quitting Tale That Suckered the Whole Internet — Photos of an aspiring broker purportedly telling off her boss garnered widespread news coverage and more than 105,000 Facebook “likes” Tuesday. Too bad the story was published by two guys who have pranked the media before.

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 …

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 and PE Hub Blog

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, Fast Company, The Awl, WebNewser, eMedia Vitals, New York Magazine and The Wire

Joe Pompeo / Silicon Alley Insider:

Former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller Dishes On His Forthcoming Food Website — We just got off the phone with Jim Spanfeller, the former Forbes.com CEO whose Spanfeller Media Group announced today it has closed an initial funding round to launch a food website, “the first in a series …

Joe Pompeo / Silicon Alley Insider:
Former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller Raises Money For Content Startup

Discussion: Romenesko, WebNewser and paidContent

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: rbr.com, MediaPost and Business Wire

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, NewsBusters.org, CJR and On Media's Blog

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, New York Observer, The Wrap and New York Magazine

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:

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: NewTeeVee, Company Town, The Wrap, Light Reading, Cinematical, Fast Company, Ars Technica, paidContent and VentureBeat, more at Techmeme »

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

Tanzina Vega / New York Times:

A Weekly Magazine Meant for Mobile — A small group of former magazine journalists and editors, including the former president of Newsweek, plan to launch a weekly digital magazine this fall that they hope will capitalize on the idea of creating content specifically for mobile technology.

Vadim Lavrusik / Mashable!:

How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream — In honor of Mashable's five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Join social conversations to market your brand with IDG's social advertising platform, IDG Amplify. Learn more about how it works here.

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

AdAge:

How Steve Slater Is Stifling JetBlue's Social-Media Strategy — Even Good Practitioners Must Bow to Legal Department During Crisis — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At a time when every brand wants to master social media, what's a marketer who's already pretty darn good at it to do when it's muzzled by lawyers?

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

Laura McGann / Nieman Journalism Lab:

To click or not to click: Could tiered data plans water down advertising possibilities for news publishers? — In the good old days (of three months ago) you could surf the web on your iPhone with abandon. Do I want to watch this video? Sure! Do I want to download this huge attachment?

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

Rick Edmonds / The Biz Blog:

Can Newspapers Create New Revenue Stream with ‘Digital Malls’? — Newspaper consultant Jim Chisholm has looked five years into the future and sees the industry's best bet for vitality in digital shopping. — Updating a futures report he did 18 months ago for the Newspaper Association of America …

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Disney's Iger: Getting Aggressive On ‘Premium’ DVD Rental Window, Pricing — With this morning's announcement of an estimated $1 billion streaming movie deal between Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Epix in the minds of analysts on the Disney (NYSE: DIS) Q2 earnings call, CEO Bob Iger says that he is looking …

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 …