Mediagazer: Demand Media Is Afraid That Google is Going to Compete With It (Mathew Ingram/GigaOM)

4:35 PM ET, August 10, 2010

Top News:

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

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

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

Discussion: MediaMemo

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, 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 — In a deal that could transform the landscape for digital movie distribution, start-up pay-TV channel Epix is in serious negotiations to give Netflix exclusive online rights to films from its three equity partners …

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

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, CJR, NewsBusters.org and National Review

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

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 »

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 and New York Observer

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

Slate:

Welcome to Slate Labs — Today we're kicking off an exciting new project at Slate called “Slate Labs,” which you've apparently already located if you're reading this. See that “labs” in the URL, where it should say “www”? That means you're officially off the reservation.

Discussion: Brooks in Beta and Romenesko

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

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 …

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 …

Tricia Duryee / paidContent:

How Two Former Ringtone Giants Are Faring As That Market Crumbles — Ten years ago, three brothers in Germany founded Jamba, jumping head-first into the global fad of selling ringtones, which ultimately grew to be a billion-dollar industry. Since then, the well-known mobile content company has taken a number of twists and turns.

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:

Twitter Hires Sales Force From Yelp, Facebook — Meanwhile, Virgin America Uses Automated Tool to Buy Tweets — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Want to buy an ad on Twitter? Now there's someone to call. — The micro-blog service, which still classifies itself as “pre-revenue,” …

Discussion: mediabistro.com, Digits, TechCrunch, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, The Wall Blog and Local Media Watch, more at Techmeme »

New York Times:

Hewlett Took a P.R. Firm's Advice in the Hurd Case — SAN FRANCISCO — As the career of Hewlett-Packard's chief executive Mark V. Hurd hung in the balance, a public relations specialist convinced the company's directors that H.P. would endure months of humiliation if accusations of sexual harassment …

Discussion: Gawker, Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat, BoomTown, Fortune, Globe and Mail, MacRumors, The Conversation, 5 Blogs Before Lunch, VatorNews, DailyFinance, Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Engadget, Electronista and blogs.ft.com, more at Techmeme »

Alex Alvarez / FishbowlNY:

U.S. Magazine Circulation Falls — Well, Food Network Magazine might have cause to celebrate, but, overall, newsstand sales aren't looking so great. The Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that total circulation for 440 magazines dropped 2.3 percent to 313.8 million from this time last year.

Discussion: Publishing Executive News, AdAge, Bloomberg and The Wrap