Mediagazer: As Combat Troops Leave Iraq, News Media Ride Along (Brian Stelter/Media Decoder)

10:45 AM ET, August 19, 2010

Top News:

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

As Combat Troops Leave Iraq, News Media Ride Along — The combat mission in Iraq doesn't officially end until Aug. 31 but viewers and readers could be forgiven for thinking it ended tonight. — In a broadcast that Brian Williams said constituted an “official Pentagon announcement,” …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, CNN, B&C, Washington Post, Mediaite, The Wire, Romenesko, Inside Cable News, On Media's Blog, Online NewsHour, Hot Air, Aljazeera, Los Angeles Times, Wonkette, Gawker and New York Magazine

Frances Martel / Mediaite:

NBC/MSNBC All-Stars Exclusively Report On Last US Combat Troops Leaving Iraq — Now we know where Rachel Maddow has been hiding these past few days: Baghdad. The MSNBC primetime star traveled to Iraq, along with embedded NBC reporter Richard Engel, to deliver an exclusive report …

Discussion: Media Decoder, Chickaboomer, Online NewsHour, Florida News Center, TVNewser and Inside Cable News

The Wire:

We Need To Change Copyright Laws To Save Newspapers — Copyright and patent laws were introduced to benefit society by providing authors and inventors incentives to create; by giving authors and inventors an opportunity for personal gain from their own creativity intellectual property protections create …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Journalism.co.uk

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Professor Says News Should Get Special 24 Hour Protections …

Discussion: TeleRead

Mike Shields / Mediaweek:

iVillage to Launch New User-Gen Content Section — iVillage has always maintained a close relationship with its community—particularly its more vocal and active members. — Now the NBC Universal-owned site is looking to channel the energies of several of its vociferous users …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

David Carr / Media Decoder:

Zakaria Jumping to Time From Newsweek — Time magazine will announce Thursday that Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for The Washington Post and Newsweek and editor of Newsweek's international editon, has been named a contributing editor for Time and will write a column for the magazine every other week.

Discussion: Yahoo! News, Romenesko, Folio, FishbowlNY, The Wrap, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, New York Observer, Gawker, TVNewser, The Wire, Mediaite, On Media's Blog and Inside Cable News

C.W. Anderson / The Atlantic Online:

Print Culture 101: A Cheat Sheet and Syllabus — Editor's Note: So, people no longer just read ink printed on paper. Now that the electronic word has become embedded in our lives, we have a new perspective on what might have been special and specific about the last few hundred years of information dissemination.

Dylan Stableford / The Wrap:

Gawker's No Longer a Blog — Gawker is no longer a blog. And Nick Denton no longer runs a blog network. — Gawker Media - which, for better or worse, defined and largely influenced the modern blogosphere as we all know it — is undergoing a massive redesign that will render its collection …

Discussion: NYConvergence

Alex Weprin / TVNewser:

Where Do Media Companies Give Their PAC Money? — News Corp. the parent company of Fox News Channel, gave a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association in June through its News America PAC. The news was buried in a story in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Discussion: Mediaite, On Media's Blog, Slate, Guardian and Most Recent Home Page Posts …

Michael Malone / Broadcasting & Cable:

Gannett Debuts School Sports Microsites — 38 media markets get local HighSchoolSports.net sites this month — Gannett is launching more than 100 co-branded local sports sites out of its HighSchoolSports.net division. Gannett says the “microsites,” a joint operation between Gannett's TV …

Discussion: paidContent, eMedia Vitals and NetNewsCheck Latest

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Skype's Chief Development Officer Leaves Amid TechCrunch Comment Fiasco — Madhu Yarlagadda, who joined Skype as Chief Development Officer last month, has left the company. Generally speaking executives don't leave a startup as it jumps into the IPO process, and they certainly don't leave after just a month on the job.

Discussion: Bits, VentureBeat and paidContent, more at Techmeme »

BBC:

Ofcom report highlights ‘multi-tasking media users’ — Multi-tasking allows people to consume even more — The average Briton spends almost half of their waking life using media and communications, data suggests. — The statistics from regulator Ofcom suggest people in the UK spend seven hours …

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:

Financial Times launches new audience measurement — The Financial Times has launched a print and digital circulation measure that calculates the total number of people who access paid-for FT content each day. — The paper believes the measure is the first of its kind produced by a media owner.

Emily Steel / Wall Street Journal:

As Web Surfers Share, Marketers Track — Add this to the list of consumer-data collection tactics that can raise eyebrows: Clearspring Technologies' “AddThis” button. — The button allows users to alert friends and contacts to interesting or useful material on the Web.

MediaShift Idea Lab:

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference — I recently attended the Walkley Media Conference in Sydney, Australia. It is run by the Walkley Foundation, a very interesting outfit that I'm learning more and more about. The Foundation aims to encourage professional and ethical journalism …

Christopher K. Sopher / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The kids are alright: How news organizations can tap the vast potential of younger consumers — [Christopher Sopher is a senior at the University of North Carolina, where he is a Morehead-Cain Scholar and a Truman Scholar. He has been a multimedia editor of the Daily Tar Heel and has worked for the Knight Foundation.

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Quentin Hardy / Neural Net Worth:

The Tech News Pyramid Scheme — It is a rare time of year: The Tech Conference Latitudes. Behind us are News Corp's AllThingsD, AlwaysOn's AlwaysOn at Stanford, TimeWarner's Fortune Brainstorm, and the eponymous Techonomy. In a few weeks we will have TechCrunch, GigaOm, and Web 2.0.

Wayne Friedman / MediaPost:

Global Pay TV Expect To Hit $312M in 2010 — TV advertising revenues continues to show strength post-recession — as do pay TV revenues. Revenues from global pay TV services — cable, satellite, IPTV — have climbed 9% in the second quarter to $58 billion, versus the same period in 2009 …

Joe Konrath / A Newbie's Guide to Publishing:

The Changing Face of Publishing — Things seem to be happening quickly in the publishing world. Quickly and, unfortunately, not optimistically. — I'm currently in Florida, having just spoken at a mystery writer convention. They flew me here to talk about ebooks.

Ron Mwangaguhunga / eMedia Vitals blogs:

Poetsandquants: BW editor turns media entrepreneur — John A. Byrne created the business school rankings for BusinessWeek in 1988 and now, in his latest incarnation as founder of C-Change Media, is hoping to create a successful content and monetization network for the business audience.

Martin Belam / currybetdotnet:

Lack of hyperlinks exposes the news industry's legacy workflow systems — Last week, spurred on by a Patrick Smith blog post about linking, I wrote about how guardian.co.uk includes external and internal links on our site, and made some points about the user experience of external links on a news website.

Ryan Lawler / NewTeeVee:

Verizon to Put Live TV on the iPad — Verizon unveiled a series of new video applications today, including an upcoming iPad app that will allow FiOS subscribers to watch the same linear programming that is available on their TV screens on their tablet devices.