Mediagazer: Tribune Company Ousts Randy Michaels as Chief (New York Times)

5:25 PM ET, October 23, 2010

Top News:

Tribune Company Ousts Randy Michaels as Chief — The Tribune Company's board of directors resolved on Friday what had been its preoccupation for most of the week: sealing the fate of Randy Michaels, the controversial chief executive who became a dark sideshow to his bankrupt company's financial struggles.

Discussion: Media Decoder, Chicago Reader, The Wrap, Reuters, Trib Nation, MarketWatch, Associated Press, Chicago Business, Gretawire, Radio Ink Magazine, Hollywood Reporter, Mixed Media, blogs.vocalo.org and LA Observed

Jon Bershad / Mediaite:

The Weekend Of WikiLeaks Begins: Embargo Ends And The Torrent Of Classified Info Starts To Seep Out — And, with that, the release of 400,000 classified military documents, dubbed The Iraq War Logs, has begun. WikiLeaks, the organization that previously released 70,000 documents …

Discussion: Guardian, BuzzMachine, Datablog, International Media, New York Times, The Daily Dish, CJR, Aljazeera and Yahoo! News

New York Times:
The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War

Discussion: Politics Daily, CNN, BBC, Guardian, Outside the Beltway, The Atlantic Online, ABCNEWS, The Huffington Post, Agence France Presse, The Nation, The New Yorker Blog and This Just In, more at Techmeme »

Dave Itzkoff / ArtsBeat:

‘South Park’ Apologizes for Lifted Material in ‘Inception’ Parody — Updated — The creators of “South Park,” the animated Comedy Central series, apologized on Friday to the creators of a Web comedy video satirizing the summer blockbuster “Inception”, following a recent episode of …

Discussion: Runnin' Scared, New York Magazine and Movieline

Om Malik / GigaOM:

There is No New Media: It's All New Consumption — “The most ominous of fallacies-the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.” -Freyda Stark — So, now television broadcasters are blocking Google TV from getting access to the content they're putting online.

Discussion: TeleRead and NewTeeVee

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

OpenFile Wants to Re-Invent Local Journalism — When OpenFile founder and CEO Wilf Dinnick was still working as a foreign correspondent for CNN in the Middle East, he was summoned to the network's London office where the senior executives showed off iReport, CNN's citizen journalism project.

The Daily Beast:

Barry Diller Talks Newsweek & the Future of The Daily Beast — Today's lunch interlude at The Daily Beast Innovator Summit in New Orleans — between this morning's Peter Orszag, Spotify investor and Justin Timberlake doppelganger Sean Parker, and this afternoon's General McChrystal …

Discussion: Fast Company and SAI

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

NPR's Schiller Says Juan Williams Was Fired Because of Ethics Guidelines — The timing might not have been perfect. But firing Juan Williams was the right decision, the NPR chief executive, Vivian Schiller, said in an interview Friday. — NPR found itself under fire on Friday for the decision …

Discussion: New York Times, The Maynard Institute and Opinionator

David Kaplan / paidContent:

AOL's Eun: Yes, We Still Want The Best Writers, Editors — Following reports Friday, including ours, that suggested AOL (NYSE: AOL) is shifting editorial strategies again, David Eun, president of AOL Media and Studios, insists that isn't the case. The speculation was prompted …

Discussion: The Now/ledge and MediaFile

Joe Flint / Company Town:

NBC's got a ratings situation on its hands — Every now and then a number leaps out. — Friday morning it was the size of NBC's Thursday's night audience. On a night that NBC owned for decades, the network averaged less than 5 million viewers. To put it into some context …

Discussion: rbr.com

Andrew Baron / TechCrunch:

The Future Of TV Is HTML — The title of this post is both a very old idea and a very new one. With the prevalence of fiber connectivity and pervasive broadband speeds, this year has been a hot one for bringing together the home computer and the living room TV.

Discussion: MediaPost

Mel Gibson / Hollywood Reporter:

Marisa Guthrie joins Hollywood Reporter — Marisa Guthrie, a reporter at Broadcasting & Cable since 2007, will become The Hollywood Reporter's senior writer-television, joining TV editor James Hibberd. — Among other parts of the business, Guthrie will cover television news from The Reporter's expanding New York offices.

Associated Press:

Major NYT Co. shareholder reduces stake to 7.4 pct — NYT Co. shareholders sell 2.9M NYT Co. shares to lower stake to 7.4 pct as publisher struggles — Companies: — Related Quotes — SymbolPriceChange — NYT — 7.63 — NEW YORK (AP) — A major New York Times Co. stockholder …

Discussion: Romenesko

Edmund Lee / Capital New York:

My life in the pictures — On a cool, stubbornly sunny evening in April 2007 I was standing outside the Loews Theater on 34th Street, a dark suit and a Liberty tie sewn tightly around me, my wife Elizabeth, dressed more confidently in a jewel-toned column. The movie actor John Cho of Harold …