Mediagazer: Times Appoints Ad Vice President (New York Times)

10:15 AM ET, September 14, 2010

Top News:

Jack Anderson's Nixonian tactics — There was a time in Washington when Jack Anderson was a hero, the columnist who kept unearthing Richard Nixon's dark secrets, a Pulitzer winner who revealed the administration's secret tilt toward Pakistan in its war against India.

Discussion: Romenesko

Jay Rosen / PressThink:

The Virtual Assignment Desk and The Launch of the Local East Village — Today The Local East Village launches. That makes it a big day for me and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. And for Studio 20, which developed for the launch a new piece of software: the Virtual Assignment Desk.

Discussion: MediaShift, Romenesko, New York Times and Rebooting The News

Melvin Felix / NYU Local:
NYU, NYTimes Launch Hyper-Local News Blog for East Village

Discussion: blogs.journalism.co.uk, Gawker, The Next Web, Lost Remote and EditorandPublisher.com

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Washington Post to start running front-page ads — Washington Post readers in the D.C.-metro area probably noticed a Capitol One-sponsored advertisement wrapped around Sunday's paper. The removable wrap, which covered half the front page and all of the back page, was an advertising first for the newspaper.

Discussion: The Huffington Post, On Media's Blog, Romenesko and Guardian

The Wrap:

Michael Eisner and the L.A. Times—A Marriage Made in Heaven? — Michael Eisner running to the Tribune Company, the man in charge of the Los Angeles Times? That seems to be the word - and, actually, it does make perfect sense. After all, more than most companies what does a newspaper need to thrive?

Discussion: The Wire

Robert Hernandez / Online Journalism Review:

Online Journalism or Journalism Online? There is a difference — By Robert Hernandez: [Editor's note: Robert Hernandez of the USC Annenberg faculty will be posting frequent commentaries to OJR about online journalism this academic year.] — I'm a journalist, first and foremost.

Daily Front Row:

Armstrong to the Rescue! — (NEW YORK) It's a bird! It's a brain! It's AOL execu-hunk Tim Armstrong! Fresh from planet Google, he wants to turn the Web's first megaportal into the world's largest content creator. The best part? He needs your help to do it. Is this the hero we've been waiting for?

Discussion: Hollywood Reporter, Romenesko, Silicon Alley Insider, the Econsultancy blog, Gawker and New York Magazine

Claire Atkinson / New York Post:

Disney's Iger aims to put ABC back in game — Tweet — Bob Iger is marking his fifth anniversary as CEO of the Walt Disney Co. with an extreme makeover of ABC — in an attempt to save the network from falling into last place among the nation's Big Four broadcasters.

Daily Front Row:

The Reign of King David — How's life in the Hearst Tower? — The combination of the people, the products, and the openness to new ideas makes my 60- and 70-hour weeks a lot of fun. There is so much change facing the industry, and the companies that are going to be the most comfortable facing it are going to win.

Keach Hagey / On Media's Blog:

Brauchli's restless troops — Scott Sherman has an exhaustive look - not yet online — into the Marcus Brauchli era of the Washington Post in the lastest Columbia Journalism Review, and the take-away is that his situation is a bit like Obama's at the moment: He was served a no-win economic situation …

Vadim Lavrusik / Mashable!:

The Future of Social Media in Journalism — This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details. See how it works here.

Discussion: The Next Web and Kirk LaPointe's …

Marc Fest / Knight Foundation News Releases:

Locally Focused Foundations Increase Support for Community News and Information Projects — Nineteen Ideas Receive $3.14 Million In Matching Funding from Knight Foundation — To help ensure that communities are informed on key issues, 19 locally focused foundations will support local news …

Discussion: paidContent, WebNewser, Romenesko, News for Digital Journalists and KnightBlog

Robbie Brown / New York Times:

Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informant — ATLANTA — That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His.

Discussion: MIJE.org, New York Magazine and Boing Boing

Jon Lafayette / Broadcasting & Cable:

Oprah Sends Fans to Australia in Season Opener — Surprises audience of 300 during farewell season premier show — In the premiere show of her farewell season, Oprah Winfrey surprised an audience full of 300 of her biggest fans by telling them she was flying all of them to Australia.

Discussion: Media Decoder

New York Times:

Times Appoints Ad Vice President — The New York Times announced Friday that Kerrie Gillis had been named a vice president for advertising. — Ms. Gillis, 54, who joined The Times in 1985, was most recently the advertising director, corporate, for The Times and as the advertising director …

Dianne de Guzman / Silicon Alley Insider:

Disney Hates On HTML5 — Disney-ABC EVP Albert Cheng told a crowd at the Appnation conference today that HTML5 video is “not ready” for ABC. — He gave two reasons: — No room for ads. Without the ability to insert ads, Disney-ABC has little interest in moving towards HTML5.

Discussion: Electronista

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

A Suspicious Hunger for ‘News’ — News consumption is finally growing again, according to a new study, thanks to growing internet use. Sadly for the beleaguered makers of news, many Americans have simultaneously redefined “news” to include friends' status updates and Justin Bieber tweets.

Discussion: Guardian, Mashable! and GigaOM

Andrew Wallenstein / Hollywood Reporter:

EXCLUSIVE: HBO subscribers dwindling — DirecTV deal impasse just part of the problem — The channel that turned vampire killers into hit television is quietly facing the draining of its own lifeblood: subscribers. — 2010 would seen have the makings of a big year for HBO given …

Discussion: Thompson on Hollywood, NewTeeVee and Multichannel News

Mihai Parparita / Official Google Reader Blog:

A welcome and a look back — The Reader team was saddened to hear that Bloglines will be shutting its doors on October 1. Bloglines was a pioneer in the feed reading space, and for Web 2.0 in general. — We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users …

Discussion: GigaOM and paidContent, more at Techmeme »

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Scribd Redesign Is An Attempt To Become A “Social Network For Reading” — Reading isn't a particularly social activity, but talking about reading and sharing books, articles, and other documents is highly social. Book clubs are so popular because people identify with other people who share the same reading interests.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

“The Social Network” Is Just as Brutal as Mark Zuckerberg Feared — It's hard to feel sorry for a billionaire. But here I am, feeling bad for Mark Zuckerberg. If you see the “The Social Network” you're probably going to feel bad for him, too. — I saw a screening of the movie last week …

Discussion: Gawker, /Film, Silicon Alley Insider, Anil Dash, VentureBeat, Most Recent Home Page Posts …, DealBook, The Wrap, The Not-So Private Parts, BoomTown, New Yorker and kottke.org, more at Techmeme »

Dave Winer / Scripting News:

How to reboot RSS — I was not able to influence the VCs who started the RSS companies — famous companies like Newsgator and Feedburner, and not-so-famous ones. Like most VCs they thought they understood better, so they went their own way and most of their companies flopped.

Discussion: TechCrunch and Scobleizer, more at Techmeme »

John Koblin / New York Observer:

CBS Abandons U.S. Open Final Mid-Match — The men's final is currently in a rain delay here in Queens with the rain expected to conclude sometime in the next 30 minutes. — But in a stunning move, CBS has decided to abandon its coverage of the Men's Final in order to maintain its primetime lineup …

Discussion: Multichannel News

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Brightcove: Online Video Discovery Shifting From Search To Social Media — Even in the depths of the recession, online video ad growth continued to surge by double digits. Spending is still expected to rise robustly over the next few years, but a report from cloud-based online video platform Brightcove …

Discussion: MinOnline, Lost Remote, ReadWriteWeb, IR Web Report, Jon Slattery, MediaPost, VentureBeat and NetNewsCheck Latest

James Barron / City Room:

An Anchor Drops the Tie — David Ushery has boldly gone where no male anchor on a local newscast in New York seems to have gone before, at least not in the studio: into the uncharted territory beyond the jacket-and-tie look. Into tie-lessness. — Mr. Ushery, an anchor on the Saturday night newscasts …

Discussion: New York Times

Sharon Waxman / The Wrap:

Letter from Toronto: Transition Grips the Film Business — The sense of transition in the film industry is palpable at this year's Toronto Film Festival, where they are still doling out one press pass per online news organization as if they've not yet noticed that online is where everyone has landed.

Discussion: Variety

Bill Krueger / Poynter Online:

Sports Illustrated's Peter King Shows You Can Teach Old Dogs New Tweets — Peter King didn't particularly want to write a weekly online column and he certainly wasn't interested in Twitter. He had a full-time job covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, thank you, and that was quite enough.

Joe Pompeo / The Wire:

Atlantic.com's New Tech Channel Will “Take A Broader And More Cultural View Of Technology” — Back in July, former Wired science blogger Alexis Madrigal joined The Atlantic as a senior online editor who was hired to oversee a new tech channel on Atlantic.com.

Steven Church / Bloomberg:

Tribune Creditors Seek to Sue Shareholders, Zell — Tribune Co. creditors asked a judge to let them sue real-estate billionaire Sam Zell, who took the newspaper publisher private in 2007 for more than $8 billion, and shareholders who benefited from the deal.

Discussion: Romenesko

Natalie Zmuda / AdAge:

Gap Taps Foursquare Cofounders for Holiday Ad Campaign — Crowley and Selvadurai Participate in Exchange for Donation to Nonprofit CampInteractive — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — What do Foursquare cofounders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai have in common with Lauren Bush? The Gap, apparently.