Mediagazer: MTV, Universal Call Truce in Digital Rights Battle for VMAs (Edmund Lee/AdAge)

4:15 PM ET, August 13, 2010

Top News:

Dawn C. Chmielewski / Los Angeles Times:

News Corp. plans national newspaper for tablet computers and cellphones — It's the latest bid by a major media company to build readership using new devices such as the iPad. The new publication would offer short, snappy stories and operate under the auspices of the New York Post.

Discussion: Guardian, FishbowlNY, The Atlantic Online, Gawker, Romenesko, Company Town, Big Think, Gannett Blog, Felix Salmon, Noted, The Wrap, Gizmodo, New York Observer, Media Nation, Jon Slattery, On Media's Blog and Tech Trader Daily

Joe Pompeo / Silicon Alley Insider:

Meet The Print Guy Who Will Lead Rupert Murdoch's Digital Newspaper — Rupert Murdoch is planning to launch a paid national US newspaper that will be exclusively available on tablets and mobile phones, one with its own resources and reporting staff, and that will rival papers like The New York Times and USA Today.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

The Secrets Behind a Viral Web Hit-And the Huffington Post's Success — Everyone who makes stuff for the Web wants it to go “viral”. But you can't just make your stuff go viral - if anyone actually knew how to do that, they'd be very, very rich. — Still, there are ways to increase your chances of making stuff go viral.

Discussion: The Wire, Boing Boing, TechCrunch and New York Magazine

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

MTV, Universal Call Truce in Digital Rights Battle for VMAs — Talks With Vevo Still at an Impasse, but Label Gives MTV.com Temporary Break so Viewers Can Vote on Videos — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — MTV and Universal Music Group have kissed and made up — temporarily.

Discussion: Crain's New York Business

Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:

Facebook Launching Official Live Streaming Channel: Facebook Live — Today at 3 PM PST (6 EST), Facebook will unveil its new official live video streaming channel, Facebook Live. To kick off the launch, actress America Ferrera will stop by Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto …

Discussion: Fast Company, MarketingVOX and The Next Web, more at Techmeme »

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Demand Media Faces Harsh Spotlight En Route to IPO — Updated: Whenever a company files for an initial public offering (IPO) — particularly in the IPO-starved technology sector — it gets put under a microscope, since it's the first chance observers have to see the actual numbers behind the business.

Discussion: BoomTown and Beyond Search

Byrne Hobart / Silicon Alley Insider: Demand Media's IPO: Everything You Need To Know

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Which White House reporters had lunch with Obama? — Reporters wouldn't say yesterday who joined President Obama for an off the record lunch at the White House. — And The Upshot noted the irony, given that news organizations have been at the forefront of the fight to make White House visitor logs public.

Discussion: Romenesko

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:
With Off-the-Record Lunch, Obama Extends a Hand

Discussion: Mediaite, Strupp, Gawker, Romenesko, Hot Air, Yahoo! News, Runnin' Scared, New York Observer, FishbowlNY and New York Times

Jack Shafer / Slate:

The Tabloidy Goodness of TBD.com … - Donald Duck Groped a Woman? Don't Forget the Bum Sex-Abuse Rap Against Tigger.- The Four Most Common Clichés in Movies About Divorcées- Should I Let My Kid Volunteer at an Animal Shelter? - The Awesome Comic Book That Gave Us Scott Pilgrim …

Discussion: Romenesko, Matthew Yglesias and FishbowlNY

The Huffington Post:

The Problem With Financial Journalism — What's Your Reaction: … The peculiar sport of fox hunting was described by Oscar Wilde as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” I feel a similar aphorism can be applied to most financial journalism: “The unspeakable perusing the unreadable.”

Ian Shapira / Story Lab:

Print guy learns video—how's he doing? — For the last several weeks, I've been leading a double life in journalism. During the weekdays, I've been doing essentially the same job at The Washington Post for the last ten years — churning out feature and news stories for our print editions and website.

New York Times:

Net Neutrality Issue Divides Media Companies — In an emerging battle over regulating Internet access, companies are taking sides. — Facebook, one of the companies that has flourished on the open Internet, indicated Wednesday that it did not support a proposal by Google and Verizon …

Discussion: TorrentFreak, Epicenter, New York Magazine, The Official Google Blog, TIME.com, Post Tech, Mercury News, A VC, Bits, On Media's Blog and Free Press, more at Techmeme »

Joel Meares / CJR:

Q & A: New York Times Reporter Michael Powell — “My tendency is to want to go longer, to zig rather than zag.” — The New York Times's Michael Powell leapt from the metro pages to the business section this May—a place he never saw himself while a student at the Columbia J-School in the early 1980s.

Discussion: New York Observer

The Huffington Post:

Blogger Beats Mexico Drug War News Blackout — MEXICO CITY — An anonymous, twentysomething blogger is giving Mexicans what they can't get elsewhere - an inside view of their country's raging drug war. — Operating from behind a thick curtain of computer security, Blog del Narco in less …

Erik Huggers / BBC:

HTML5, open standards, and the BBC — Recent commentary on this blog has suggested that our use of Flash on BBC iPlayer and across BBC Online in general, betrays our commitment to open standards. Is this a reasonable assumption? I do not think so. — Open standards have always been part of the BBC's DNA.

Discussion: paidContent, NewTeeVee and WebNewser, more at Techmeme »

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

Trinity Mirror's Birmingham Mail Linking Out To Local Bloggers... It's been clear, for at least three years now, that local papers, which have been laying off editorial staff, should probably welcome in the amateur news sites sprouting in their patches. — Now Trinity Mirror's Birmingham Mail is doing it.

Bill Krueger / Making Sense of Media:

Did Deadspin Go Too Far in Publishing Story Alleging Brett Favre Sexting? — Deadspin has grown from a scrappy startup website that was playing with the big dogs of ESPN and Sports Illustrated. It gained legitimacy almost immediately as a serious player as it dug up stories other sports sites missed or ignored.

Discussion: The Blotter, Romenesko, Poynter Online and Deadspin

Jason Stverak / Online Journalism Review:

Watering-down press credentials, or denying citizens news? — By Jason Stverak: Recent articles and opinion pages have lambasted what many are calling the “watering-down of press credentials.” They claim that the more people that obtain press credentials, the less influential press credentials are to the legacy media.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

Eliot Van Buskirk / Epicenter:

Gregory Brothers of ‘Bed Intruder’ Fame Discuss TV Pilot, Antoine Dodson — Even if you don't spend a lot of time online, you've probably heard “Bed Intruder,” the similar “Double Rainbow” song, or the “Auto-Tune the News” series at some point over the past year.

Colby Hall / Mediaite:

What Do You Think Of The Gawker Redesign? — Back in February, Gawker Media owner Nick Denton surprised the New York digertati when he announced that he was acquiring CityFile, and replacing Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder with CityFiles's founder Remy Stern, despite record traffic numbers under Snyder.

Discussion: Brooks in Beta and Soup