Mediagazer: NPR's Schiller Says Juan Williams Was Fired Because of Ethics Guidelines (Brian Stelter/Media Decoder)

3:20 AM ET, October 24, 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: Trib Nation, Gretawire and Mixed Media

Reuters:

Tribune to detail bankruptcy plan, but fights loom — Newspaper publisher Tribune Co. is expected to unveil a plan on Friday to settle billions of dollars in debts and end its two-year bankruptcy, but it still faces some potentially nasty legal fights. — The owner of the Los Angeles Times …

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, NewTeeVee and New York Magazine

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: BuzzMachine, Guardian, BlogPost, Datablog, International Media, New York Times, The Daily Dish and Aljazeera

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News: WikiLeaks suggests news outlets publishing Iraq docs soon

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

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog, Politics Daily, Outside the Beltway, CNN, BBC, Guardian, The Atlantic Online, The Nation and The Huffington Post, more at Techmeme »

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: The Huffington Post, New York Times, Hot Air, The Maynard Institute, Reason, Opinionator and ThinkProgress

Abe Sauer / The Awl:
NPR Should Have Let Juan Williams Go Years Ago

Discussion: Mediaite, Media Matters for America, Online NewsHour, Los Angeles Times, The Plum Line, rbr.com, Broadcasting & Cable, St. Petersburg Times, The Nation, George's Bottom Line and Fox News

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.

Andrew Alexander / Washington Post:

Post's Amazon links in stories raise ethical questions — When you're reading a Post review online, click on a highlighted book title and you'll likely be directed to Amazon.com, where you can purchase it instantly. It's convenient for readers. But is it costly to credibility?

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

Foster Kamer / Runnin' Scared:

Media Moves: Doree Shafrir to Rolling Stone — Doree Shafrir — who was responsible for, among other things, being one-half of the author of the blog-to-book phenomenon that was Postcards from Yo Momma and being responsible for the “Hipster Grifter” story during her tenure …

Discussion: The Doree Chronicles

Steven Zeitchik / Los Angeles Times:

Hollywood's little secret: movie purgatory — Sometimes, studios change their minds about releasing a movie, even if it has already been completed. Films with big stars such as Matt Damon, John Cusack, Eddie Murphy and Mel Gibson have all been there. — ‘CASE 39’: Even though RenEe Zellweger starred …

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: The Daily Beast, Fast Company and SAI

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: Multichannel and rbr.com