Mediagazer: The Content Project: Building an ‘EZ Pass’ for paid content (eMedia Vitals)

6:15 PM ET, November 16, 2010

Top News:

Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker's Music Critic, Will Be Editor at News Corp.'s iPad Newspaper — Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development …

Discussion: paidContent, Gawker, New York Observer, Nieman Journalism Lab, Romenesko and New York Magazine

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

New York Times restructures its Web newsroom — The New York Times announced a Web reorganization Tuesday that will further consolidate its online and print operations. — Web producers will now report directly to their respective desks, said a source. Meanwhile, digital news editor Jim Roberts …

Discussion: New York Magazine and The Atlantic Online

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Masthead for News Corp's tablet ‘newspaper’ is starting to fill up — News Corp. has so far managed to keep the details of its nascent tablet “newspaper” under lock and key. But it appears that the forthcoming digital publication, simply called The Daily, is starting to take shape.

Discussion: Romenesko

Ben Smith / The Politico:

2 Dems claim Arianna Huffington stole website idea — Two Democratic consultants are accusing Arianna Huffington and her business partner of stealing their idea for the powerhouse liberal website Huffington Post. — Peter Daou and James Boyce charge that Huffington and partner Ken Lerer designed …

Discussion: Techdirt, Mediaite, Romenesko, New York Magazine, SAI, thedp.com, BlogPost, Gawker and WebNewser

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:

Sanders Tells Regulators to Block Comcast-NBC Deal — Comcast is expected to announce a new management lineup for NBC Universal as soon as Wednesday, in anticipation of completing its takeover of the company by the end of the year or early next year. — But at least one senator says strongly …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, Company Town, Guardian, Hillicon Valley, MediaPost and Free Press

Georg Szalai / Hollywood Reporter:

EXCLUSIVE: Do Online Viewers Watch Less TV? New Poll's Findings Might Surprise You … NEW YORK — Pay TV industry folks have heatedly debated this fall whether consumers are dropping their cable or other TV subscriptions to watch more TV content online. A new study by Nielsen …

Discussion: New York Magazine, TV Squad, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM

Georg Szalai / Hollywood Reporter:

Ben Silverman's Electus Launches Online Morning Show ‘AOL Daybreak’ … NEW YORK - AOL Inc. on Monday launched a new morning video show, called AOL Daybreak, on its home page in partnership with Ben Silverman's multimedia studio Electus. — Lindsay Campbell, best known …

Discussion: New York Observer

Google News Blog:

Credit where credit is due — News publishers and readers both benefit when journalists get proper credit for their work. That can be difficult, with news spreading so quickly and many websites syndicating articles to others. That's why we're experimenting with two new metatags for Google News …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab and ReadWriteWeb, more at Techmeme »

Matthew Creamer / AdAge:

Why Tina Brown Might Not Be Crazy to Kill Newsweek.com — Awful for Newsweek Brand, but The Beast is Stronger Site if You Look Past Simple Traffic — For some time now, the best way to understand Newsweek, est. 1933, has been through the microblog Tumblr, est. 2007.

Tanzina Vega / Media Decoder:
Tina Brown Postpones Her Book on the Clintons

Discussion: New York Observer

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

New Forbes C.E.O. Mike Perlis weighs in on Lewis D'Vorkin's ‘content continuum’ — For the first time in nearly a century, the Forbes media empire won't be captained by someone named Forbes. — Late Monday, Forbes Media announced that it was tapping Mike Perlis, a publishing industry veteran …

Discussion: paidContent and Romenesko

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
Forbes Hires SoftBank's Mike Perlis As President/CEO

Discussion: New York Post

Ethan Klapper / 10,000 Words:

How they did it: The New York Times' budget interactive — The buzz this weekend in the online journalism world was about an interactive created by The New York Times, “Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget.” The puzzle was an online companion to a story by Times reporter David Leonhardt in Sunday's Week in Review section.

Discussion: Democracy in America, Guardian, Ezra Klein and The Huffington Post

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Oprah Releases Mag App For The iPad; Ad Placements Are Limited And Premium — Oprah's still got her TV show and the upcoming debut of her Discovery TV network next year. But what she hasn't had is an iPad app dedicated to her Hearst-published monthly, O, The Oprah Magazine—until now.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

C.W. Anderson / Nieman Journalism Lab:

“That heady feeling of being totally integrated”: The elusive promise of community, flattened and “real” — In the future-of-journalism business, we're obsessed with adoption: getting online, getting hip to the web, leaving old analog practices behind, embracing the interactivity of social media.

Larry Kramer / MarketWatch:

Gawker figures out secret sauce of media — Commentary: Why curation is important — Stock selloff goes global … NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Thirteen years ago when we were launching CBS MarketWatch, while describing the business to potential investors in Silicon Valley, I would be asked what was so good about the site.

eMedia Vitals:

The Content Project: Building an ‘EZ Pass’ for paid content — Motorists in the Northeastern U.S. are familiar with the EZ Pass, a payment system that allows drivers to zip through tollbooths without stopping. The Content Project is developing what it believes is the equivalent of the EZ Pass for premium online content.

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

NewsWorks: Back-to-the-future community news — Yesterday brought the launch of a news site with a promising tagline: “For you. With you. By you.” — The evocative motto belongs to NewsWorks, a web portal overseen by WHYY, the public radio station serving metro Philadelphia.

Discussion: Newsworks