Mediagazer: ‘South Park’ Apologizes for Lifted Material in ‘Inception’ Parody (Dave Itzkoff/ArtsBeat)

3:50 PM ET, October 23, 2010

Top News:

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

New York Times:

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: Gretawire, Mixed Media and Associated Press

Chicago Tribune:

Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels resigns amid accusations of crass behavior — Four-member Executive Council to run company as it struggles to exit bankruptcy. — Having lost the support of many employees, his board and the creditors who will soon take over the bankrupt media company …

Discussion: Media Decoder, Chicago Reader, The Wrap, Romenesko, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, MarketWatch, Associated Press, News & Tech, Radio Ink Magazine, Agence France Presse, Hollywood Reporter, Chicago Business, blogs.vocalo.org and LA Observed

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

WikiLeaks suggests news outlets publishing Iraq docs soon — The Pentagon has been bracing all week for online whistleblower WikiLeaks to publish roughly 500,000 classified Iraq war documents, perhaps again in collaboration with news organizations who provide context and analysis of what's in the massive cache.

Discussion: ABCNEWS, Agence France Presse and This Just In

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 and Aljazeera

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

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

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

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 …