Mediagazer: Hitting Pay Dirt on Content Farms Is All About the Traffic (AdAge)

Save Newsweek.com:

A Defense of Newsweek.com — It's always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed. As they put it on Saturday morning, quoting the new CEO of the so-called Newsweek Daily Beast Company, Stephen Colvin: “Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger …

Discussion: Still Not Going To Do …, Gawker, Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard, Felix Salmon, New York Observer, Spiersblr, CJR, Yahoo! News, Editors Weblog, New York Magazine, Guardian, The Daily Dish, The Wire, paidContent and AdAge, via:nicksumm

Newsweek Weds Daily Beast? Good Luck With That — Putting together The Daily Beast and Newsweek makes little financial sense, includes not much in the way of editorial synergies — is it The News Beast or The Daily Week? — and marries two properties that have almost nothing in common …

Discussion: Romenesko, The Life and Times …, New York Magazine, CNN, The Awl and Soup

Russell Adams / Wall Street Journal: New Vision for Old Press

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

Vicious Infighting at NBC News — MSNBC's president vowed to fire Keith Olbermann after he threatened to take his case to other networks. Howard Kurtz on the civil war that has NBC brass—and his own staff—fuming. — Keith Olbermann was having dinner with his manager at an Upper East Side restaurant …

Discussion: CJR, Mediaite, Gawker, Mixed Media, TVNewser, National Review, The Huffington Post and Gothamist

Discussion: Mediaite

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Let a Zillion Users Blab: Yahoo Debuts “Contributor Network” — Yahoo is debuting a new offering for its hundreds of million of users, which takes the Demand Media model and notches up the volume by presumably allowing a thousand flowers to bloom. — Or, more to the point, blab.

Discussion: Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo!, AdAge and Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

David Lieberman / USA Today:

Yahoo to launch network featuring exclusive news — Yahoo became one of the Web's most popular news sources by aggregating and featuring other people's journalism. On Tuesday, it will take its biggest leap yet into the highly competitive business of creating its own news content.

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Josh Marshall on TPM's first 10 years (and its next 10) — Josh Marshall says he “didn't have much sense going in of what TPM would become” when he started blogging on the Florida presidential recount at Talking Points Memo a decade ago. Neither did anyone else.

Discussion: Mediaite

Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo's growth over the last decade: Moving from solo blog to news org — It's funny to think back to the Talking Points Memo of ten years ago, just a strip of text down a single blue page. (It also had a red-background phase before settling in on the beige color scheme it still has today.)

Discussion: Romenesko

Rick Edmonds / The Biz Blog:

Seven Reasons Newspapers Are Not Rebounding Financially — This was to be a year of convalescence for newspapers, not a total recovery but a dramatic improvement on the dismal results of 2008 and 2009. However, with third-quarter earnings in and just seven weeks left in 2010, the industry's vital signs are distinctly mixed.

Jim Romenesko / Romenesko:

USAT chart shows 27 staffers on entertainment beat — Five cover Congress. “To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time USAT's editorial staffing breakdown has been made public,” writes Gannett Blog founder and former USA Today reporter Jim Hopkins. Here's the chart.

Discussion: Gannett Blog

John Heilemann / New York Magazine:

The Education of a Murdoch Man — At News Corp., outgoing schools chancellor Joel Klein will look for ways to build an individualized-online-classroom business. — In the wake of last week's shockeroo announcement that Joel Klein was stepping down as the city's schools chancellor …

Discussion: VentureBeat

AdAge:

Hitting Pay Dirt on Content Farms Is All About the Traffic — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The Examiner and its better-known competition, Demand Media and Associated Content, are often lumped into a sector called “content farms,” which enlist freelancers to write search-friendly content …

Discussion: paidContent, Romenesko, mediabistro.com and eMedia Vitals

Dan Abrams / Mediaite:

News Veteran Mark Joyella To Join Mediaite as TV Editor — I am thrilled to announce that Mark Joyella, a five-time Emmy winning reporter joins Mediaite today as the new TV Editor. Mark has worked as a reporter and anchor at television stations across the country including Miami and New York …

Discussion: TVNewser and Yahoo! News

James Robinson / Guardian:

MailOnline: what is the secret of its success? — It's the most popular newspaper website in the UK, with nearly 18 million readers a month, and is second only to the New York Times worldwide — He probably doesn't worry about falling house prices or the evils of multiculturalism …

Nick Bilton / Bits:

One on One: Tim Wu, Author of ‘The Master Switch’ — Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who came up with the term “net neutrality” in a research paper, has just written a new book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” published by Knopf.