Mediagazer: What's a Virtual Assignment Desk ? (Sophie Hoeller/New York Times)

Jack Neff / AdAge:

Magazine Readership Off Sharply Among Affluent — Ipsos Survey: Younger Well-Off Readers More Receptive to Ads Than Elders — BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Magazine readership among the affluent plunged 16% in the past year as the group spent 12% more time using the internet and sharply stepped …

Discussion: MediaMemo and Romenesko

Nikki Usher / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Why SEO and audience tracking won't kill journalism as we know it — [I'm happy to introduce Nikki Usher, a new contributor here at the Lab. Nikki is a Ph.D. candidate at USC Annenberg and, before academia, was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere.

“Squeezing humanity through a straw”: The long-term consequences of using metrics in journalism — [Here's C.W. Anderson responding to the same subject Nikki Usher wrote about: the impact of audience data on how news organizations operate. Sort of a debate. —Josh]

Jeff Bercovici / DailyFinance:

Future Dweller Nick Bilton on What Newspapers Can Learn from Porn — No one knows what the future holds for newspapers, but Nick Bilton's guess is worth more than most. A compulsive multitasker, Bilton has had a peripatetic career path through the realms of film, advertising, technology and publishing.

Discussion: Multichannel News and New York Times

Joe Eskenazi / The Snitch:

Declaring San Bruno Fire ‘Crime Scene’ Kept Media Out — It would be hard to begrudge San Bruno police for moving to keep non-emergency personnel out of the neighborhood impacted by last week's blast and fire. On Friday, police declared the incinerated areas a “crime scene,” which severely restricted access.

Discussion: Romenesko, Boing Boing and The Informant

Niraj Chokshi / The Atlantic Online:

Book Excerpt: Can Videogames Be Journalism? — In July, 2009, Wired magazine waded into the ongoing coverage of Somalian pirate raids with an eight-page visual feature called “Cutthroat Capitalism.” The piece was accompanied by an online game, which, besides being fun to play …

Discussion: knightcenter.utexas …

Howard Kurtz:

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 and Hit & Run

Sophie Hoeller / New York Times:

What's a Virtual Assignment Desk ? — If The Local East Village, a collaboration between The New York Times and New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is an experiment in online journalism, then one of its most ambitious applications, the Virtual Assignment Desk, is an experiment within an experiment.

Discussion: MediaShift, GigaOM, J-Source, blogs.journalism.co.uk, New York Times, Romenesko and NYU Local

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: Yahoo! News, National Media, This Just In, main page collection, Joel On The Road, TPMMuckraker, MIJE.org, New York Magazine and Boing Boing

Laura McGann / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Five important mobile app findings for news orgs — A new report out today gives news organizations reasons to start thinking mobile apps (if they haven't already). The Pew Internet and American Life Project partnered with Nielsen to survey cellphone users on their app habits …

Discussion: MediaPost, Embargo Watch, Pew Internet, ReadWriteWeb, PewResearch.org and The Hill, more at Techmeme »

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

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.

Discussion: Company Town

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

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

Techmeme Turns 5: Interview With Founder Gabe Rivera — This week, leading tech news aggregator Techmeme turned 5 years old. The service launched in September 2005, under the name tech.memeorandum, and ReadWriteWeb was one of the first media publications to review it. — In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs.

Zeke Turner / New York Observer:

Life After Luxury Advertising at Condé Nast: Bon Appétit, Carol Smith — On Sunday afternoon, Carol Smith was thinking about what to order for lunch, but she already knew. She was sitting on the booth side of a table facing the center of the dining room that was set up in Avery Fisher Hall for Fashion Week.

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: Kirk LaPointe's … and The Next Web

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Bebo's Back. And They Plan To Have A Plan (Video) — Bebo is like a bad case of herpes - it just keeps coming back. They sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Then AOL, under new management, sort of just shut it down for tax purposes, selling it for next to nothing to Criterion Capital Partners.

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Looking For More Content, Ad Partners, iVillage Promotes Curbishley — The media personnel shifts keep on coming... iVillage is promoting John Curbishley from VP of strategy to SVP of Business Development, the NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) unit will announce later this morning.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

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 …

Nick Davies / Guardian:

Sienna Miller set to join legal action — Actor poised to take legal action while it emerges Sean Hoare has been interviewed by police under caution — Sienna Miller was today expected to become the latest public figure to join the legal assault on Scotland Yard and the News of the World over the phone-hacking scandal.

Discussion: Press Gazette

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.

Discussion: Gawker

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Twitter queen Susan Orlean on the mini-medium, the interactive narrative, and the writing persona — Susan Orlean is proof that being the consummate narrative journalist doesn't conflict with becoming the consummate Twitterer. In her feed, currently 78,000-plus followers strong …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

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 …