Mediagazer: As Web Surfers Share, Marketers Track (Emily Steel/Wall Street Journal)

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, Mediaite, CNN, Washington Post, The Wire, B&C, 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: TVNewser, Media Decoder, Chickaboomer, Online NewsHour, Florida News Center 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

Professor Says News Should Get Special 24 Hour Protections So No Aggregator Can Link To It — We've seen all sorts of really bizarre and downright dangerous plans to change copyright law to favor newspapers, but a new one, posted at Henry Blodget's Business Insider may be the most ridiculous of all.

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

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

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.

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

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, AdScam/The Horror!, VentureBeat and paidContent, more at Techmeme »

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

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.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

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

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.

Jolie O'Dell / Mashable!:

YouTube Launches Charts to Rank Top Web Videos — YouTube has just announced it will be featuring its top videos in a new section called YouTube Charts. — This page will keep you updated on which videos are trending right now, which are all-time classics, how various vids stack up against one another and more.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and The Next 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.

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.