Mediagazer: An Anchor Drops the Tie (James Barron/City Room)

1:25 AM ET, September 14, 2010

Top News:

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: Rebooting The News, MediaShift, Romenesko and Journalism.co.uk

Melvin Felix / NYU Local:

NYU, NYTimes Launch Hyper-Local News Blog for East Village — That's right, we're rollin with the New York Times. — Launching today is The Local: East Village, a new hyper-local, interactive news site run by the university in collaboration with the Times.

Discussion: Gawker, The Next Web, Lost Remote and EditorandPublisher.com

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: Editors Weblog and eMedia Vitals

People-Press.org:
Americans Spending More Time Following the News

Howard Kurtz / Washington Post: Media Notes: A new poll shows ‘old media’ holding their own in an Internet world

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

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: Romenesko, more at Techmeme »

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.

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.

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

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.

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 »

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.

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: Multichannel News and NewTeeVee

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: ReadWriteWeb, Lost Remote, MediaPost, VentureBeat and NetNewsCheck Latest

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

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 »

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Wherewereyou: WaPo puts the humble hashtag to work — In our new age of two-way news, news organizations sometimes struggle to find a way to foster productive conversation: to move beyond superficial gestures of inclusiveness — empty questions, atomized responses — to create conversation that is meaningful and purposeful.

Discussion: SocialTimes.com and Lost Remote

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

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

Mike Reynolds / Multichannel News:

Cable's Upfront Trifecta — CAB Estimates Ad-Supported Cable's Take At $8 Million For 2010-11 TV Season — The final tally for cable's upfront for the 2010-11 TV season was a strong one as the medium notched its best performance ever during the annual Madison Avenue bazaar.

Brian Ries / The Daily Beast:

The Meanest Commenters on the Web — It was supposed to be a meaningful conversation with readers of his Politico blog. Instead, it has degenerated into a screaming pit. Brian Ries on the state of talk-back on the Web. — Ben Smith, the popular Brooklyn-based political journalist who blogs at Politico.com, is under attack.

Discussion: Media Matters for America, Mediaite, New York Observer, On Media's Blog and Ben Smith's Blog

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.

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 …

Felix Salmon:

How the WSJ magazine fails its readers — Lucas Conley's piece on Ugg for the WSJ's magazine is a perfect example of why the WSJ shouldn't have a glossy, fashion-friendly magazine. — Conley does a reasonably good job of covering the way in which Deckers Outdoor Corporation …

Discussion: The Awl

Janko Roettgers / NewTeeVee:

The Boxee Box: Intel Inside, Available for Preorder — Boxee and D-Link are announcing today that their upcoming Boxee Box will be powered by Intel's CE4100 Atom processor. The online video set-top-box, which will ship in early November, can also be pre-ordered from Amazon.com starting today.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Lifehacker, VentureBeat and Faster Forward, more at Techmeme »