Mediagazer: Behind CBS' Morning Show Shakeup (Howard Kurtz/The Daily Beast)

12:40 AM ET, December 1, 2010

Top News:

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: Romenesko, Runnin' Scared, Poynter, CNET News and VentureBeat

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.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, The Atlantic Online, Epicenter, Argo, the Blog, Lost Remote, Young Manhattanite and New York Observer

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

Behind CBS' Morning Show Shakeup — Harry Smith and Maggie Rodriguez got axed from the Early Show Tuesday. Howard Kurtz talks to Smith and CBS News President Sean McManus about the perennial challenges of the low-rated show. — Harry Smith is sounding remarkably upbeat for a man who just got pushed out of his job.

Discussion: Media Decoder, MediaPost, Romenesko and On Media's Blog

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, TVNewser, CBS News, The Wrap, The Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, Moraes on TV, NewsBusters.org blogs, Riptide 2.0, Mediaite, FishbowlNY, New York Magazine, TVWeek.com, Gawker and Inside TV

Wall Street Journal:

Google Set to Launch E-Book Venture — Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold. — The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer …

Discussion: paidContent, The Next Web, Kindle Review, ResourceShelf and Crikey

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: Bloomberg, paidContent, Publishing Executive …, Yahoo! News, Mixed Media, Silicon Republic, The Wrap, NetNewsCheck Latest, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com, Vanity Fair, Poynter Online, The Social, GigaOM, ScribeMedia.org and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

Nick Rizzo / Capital New York:
Richard Branson unveils Jeff Bridges, cars, and fiddly things for Ipad

Discussion: Gawker, SlashGear, Yahoo! News and paidContent:UK

Chris / Project Magazine:
The beginning

Discussion: SlashGear

Bill Oakley / Splitsider:

How We Wrote Classic Simpsons Episodes — Bill Oakley was a writer at The Simpsons from seasons 4-6 and an executive producer/showrunner with his writing partner Josh Weinstein from seasons 7-8. I talked to him at length about his experiences in that famous writer's room.

Discussion: New York Magazine and Soup

John Koblin / WWD:

Memo Pad: Not an Apple of Its Eye — Readers trying to access the latest issue of The New Yorker on the iPad were running into a bit of a problem until early this afternoon: There was no issue available. — The magazine's Dec. 6 issue wasn't available on the iPad for more than 36 hours …

Rem Rieder / American Journalism Review:

A Matter of Interpretation — Why an analytic approach is crucial for mainstream news outlets. — Rem Rieder (rrieder@ajr.umd.edu) is AJR's editor and senior vice president. — When top New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman bailed in September to join The Huffington Post …

Jenna Sauers / Jezebel:

What Vogue Actually Pays Its Models — It's not much! Filings made in association with a $3.75 million lawsuit include the earnings statement of one of the plaintiffs, the Polish supermodel Anna Jagodzinska. That ledger tallies gigs for American Vogue, Vogue Paris, and an H&M campaign.

Discussion: AgencySpy

Jarvis Coffin / The Huffington Post:

The Golden Age of Content — Suddenly, someone — that being Ad Age columnist and ad seer, Bob Garfield — is referring to the possibility that the world is entering a Golden Age of Content. This is something of a revelation after years of worrying instead that content was being destroyed by …

Discussion: AdAge

Blake Eskin / New Yorker:

A NEW LOOK FOR NEWYORKER.COM — Today newyorker.com unveils some changes to its design. Our homepage now features a rotating set of lead stories, a prominent feed of recent blog posts, and more images, large and small, to help readers find favorite writers and stories as well as site features that they might not have noticed before.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online and The Next Web

Andy Alexander / Ombudsman Blog:

Data analysis and the furture of journalism — Sunday's column on numerical errors in Post stories also noted that proficiency with numbers will increasingly be important for journalists. It said that, “in the digital age, with a growing amount of raw data available online from the government …

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Google Cuts Off AppNexus, and the Ad Tech World Shudders — AppNexus, a high-flying ad technology start-up, just had a bad few days. The next few weeks could be rough, too. — That's because over the weekend, Google suspended the company's access to the ad giant's “real time” ad exchange.

Discussion: Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

New York Post:

Google TV in trouble 1 month in — Tweet — Google TV — the first great effort to combine the Internet with television — is in trouble only a month after it was launched. — Makers of the new Google TV hardware slashed the prices for the new device by 25 percent over the weekend.

Discussion: CNET News, Reuters, Search Engine Watch, Bloomberg, Hollywood Reporter and TVWeek.com

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

NBC Local to aggregate influential local Twitterers — NBC's owned-and-operated station sites will soon integrate tweets from the “top 20 Twitterers” in each of its 10 markets. Called “The 20,” the top Twitterers will be invited to discuss hot topics trending in the city …

Discussion: NBC New York, Journalism.co.uk, Poynter, Local Onliner, paidContent and Moraes on TV

Jim Romenesko / Romenesko:

Newspaper execs expect digital ad dollars to grow significantly in 2011 — Kubas Consultants' annual ad outlook report notes that in the past, newspapers executives and managers have tended to be over-optimistic in their digital category projections. Employment and auto classifieds …

Craig Silverman / Regret the Error:

Report an Error Alliance launches, aims to set new standard for news error reporting — After a few months of working together and lining up some partners, Scott Rosenberg of of MediaBugs and I today launched the Report an Error Alliance. This initiative aims to move news organizations …

Discussion: Romenesko and Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard

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 …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and WebNewser

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