Mediagazer: Making social gaming scale: Lessons from the Democrat and Chronicle's … (Lois Beckett/Nieman Journalism Lab)

2:40 PM ET, November 30, 2010

Top News:

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Richard Branson's iPad App: $2.99, Instructions Included. You'll Need Them. — Richard Branson will hold a press conference in New York this morning to show off “Project,” his new iPad magazine app. But since it's already live in Apple's iTunes store, there's really no need to wait.

Discussion: Mixed Media, Poynter Online, Yahoo! News, Vanity Fair, Silicon Republic and ScribeMedia.org

Nick Rizzo / Capital New York:

Richard Branson unveils Jeff Bridges, cars, and fiddly things for Ipad — Virgin Group emperor Sir Richard Branson debuts his Ipad-exclusive magazine tomorrow. What will it look like? — Well for starters, the “cover” (or is this called a homepage? or homescreen?) is about Jeff Bridges' coming Tron.

Discussion: mediabistro.com and SlashGear

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Video: Virgin's iPad Mag ‘Project’ Gets Animated, Coming Tuesday — Word reaches us that Virgin's virgin iPad-only magazine is Christened “Project” and is due to hit the tablet's iTunes Store at this link with a launch by Richard Branson in New York on Tuesday; price unknown.

Discussion: L.A. Times Tech Blog, mediabistro.com, Mashable!, GigaOM, Electricpig.co.uk, TechCrunch, BlogsDNA, Electronista, Yahoo! News, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Next Web, Poynter Online and TUAW, more at Techmeme »

Chris / Project Magazine:
The beginning

Discussion: SlashGear

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Netflix Partner Says Comcast ‘Toll’ Threatens Online Video Delivery — Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Level 3, Comcast in a Cat Fight Over Online Video

Discussion: Free Press, SAI, Comcast Voices, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Techdirt, more at Techmeme »

Fast Company:

Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing — It's eccentric. It's unprofessional. And it makes money. How four people who do exactly what they want run one of the most popular blogs on the planet. — Back in 1999, Mark Frauenfelder wrote an article about new web tools …

Discussion: ChasNote, The Atlantic Online, Boing Boing and Free Press

Jay Yarow / SAI: Silicon Alley Insider:

Gawker's Sales Boss Chris Batty Leaving After Serious Disagreement With Nick Denton About Strategy — More news out of Gawker today. Sales boss Chris Batty is leaving to start his own venture, and he's bringing fellow salesman Michael Casco with him. — In an email to staff explaining the move …

Discussion: Yahoo! News and Runnin' Scared

Michael Oneal / Chicago Tribune:

Judge in Tribune Co. bankruptcy being pushed to his limits — Complexity of overseeing four restructuring plans creates what one participant calls ‘four-ring circus’ — WILMINGTON, Del. — The judge in Tribune Co.'s nearly 2-year-old bankruptcy case struggled openly at a key hearing Monday …

Discussion: mediabistro.com and Romenesko

Liz Gannes / All Things Digital:

Twitter Gets a Hollywood Guy: Omid Ashtari [NetworkEffect] — Twitter has hired its first official liaison to the stars: Creative Artists Agency veteran Omid Ashtari. His first day at the microblogging service was today. — Ashtari told me he is “going to be Twitter's L.A. person” …

Discussion: Lost Remote

Nick Denton / Lifehacker:

Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog — The 2011 template represents the most significant change in the Gawker model since the launch of Gizmodo and Gawker in 2002. One could go further: it represents an evolution of the very blog form that has transformed online media over the last eight years.

David Bauder / Associated Press:

CBS News overhauls its morning show — NEW YORK - CBS News is completely overhauling “The Early Show” broadcast team. — Co-anchors Harry Smith and Maggie Rodriguez are out, along with weather forecaster Dave Price. The news of the shuffle came Tuesday from a person with knowledge …

Discussion: mediabistro.com, Media Decoder, CBS News, Romenesko, TVNewser, The Wrap, Yahoo! News, Mediaite and Riptide 2.0

James M. Naughton / obit-mag.com:

A Death Notice for Obituaries? — Tom O'Meara was a close friend of our daughter Lara. As he neared death at the too-soon age of 44 in Santa Monica, I remembered Tom had worked for years to develop electric cars for General Motors. — As Tom's condition grew dire, Lara went to visit him.

Discussion: Common Sense Journalism and The Buttry Diary

Financial Times:

Telegraph plans to charge for online content — Newspaper group is drawing up plans to charge for internet content next year, joining the likes of News International and the Financial Times that already charge for content

Discussion: One Man & His Blog

Don Jeffrey / Bloomberg:

American Media Chapter 11 Financing Approved by Judge — American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer and Star magazine, received court approval for the financing of its exit from bankruptcy. — U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn in New York said today at a hearing he would authorize …

CHRISTOPHER R. GRAHAM / The Morning News:

Nothing Is off the Record, Because I'm Not Coming Back — After 26 years writing Harper's Notebook, Lewis Lapham is packing up his pencil. CHRISTOPHER R. GRAHAM talks with him about history, essays, and flocks of modern journalists. — Most interviews with Lewis Lapham employ …

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Next Issue Media's Digital Newsstand Is Ready To Start Charging — It looks like Next Issue Media, the newspaper and magazine publishing JV, is finally ready to open its digital newsstand for business. The company says it has hired Vindicia to set up its CashBox billing service …

Andy Greenberg / The Firewall:

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets — In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business. — Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out.

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:

Financial Times iPad app scores success — Paper increasing its digital-only subscription base at a rate of about 500 a week, with strong growth in US — John Ridding, chief executive of the Financial Times, said that the iPad edition of the pink, specialist newspaper had been downloaded 430,000 times since its launch in April.

Discussion: Poynter Online

Lois Beckett / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Making social gaming scale: Lessons from the Democrat and Chronicle's adoption of alternate reality — Just over a year ago, Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle launched an ambitious Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called Picture the Impossible. The seven-week game was a collaboration with the Lab …

Dan Frommer / The Wire:

Check Out The New Easter Egg On The New York Times Site — Here's another neat tool from the tech team at the New York Times: Now, if you're reading an article, and press shift twice in a row, paragraph symbols show up at the beginning of each paragraph. — You can click on the paragraph symbol …

Discussion: New York Times and Snarkmarket

Bob Garfield / AdAge:

Why We Will All Live in ‘Curation Nation’ — Somewhere Out There, Someone Is Creating Genius — How Will You Find It? — How did I learn about Failblog.org, the greatest endeavor in the history of mankind? From my daughter. — How did I encounter Antoine Dodson?