Mediagazer: Peter Kaplan Loves Murdoch/Branson iPad Projects; O.K. With New Observer (Ross Kenneth Urken/New York)

4:00 PM ET, December 2, 2010

Top News:

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

For Newspapers, the Future Is Now: Digital Must Be First — As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital vs. their traditional print operations.

Discussion: Poynter, Thanks:mathewi

Jxpaton / Digital First:

John Paton's Dec. 2 Presentation at INMA Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass. — The Journal Register Company - the Company I took over in February of this year - could be the poster child for what ails the US newspaper industry. — The company counts its products in the hundreds.

Yinka Adegoke / Reuters:

Diller steps down as IAC CEO, Malone swaps stake for cash — (Reuters) - Barry Diller is stepping down as chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, the company said, adding it had bought out one of its largest shareholders, John Malone's Liberty Media Corp. — IAC said on Thursday Liberty …

Discussion: New York Observer, CNET News, Reuters, The Wrap, On Media's Blog, New York Magazine and Company Town

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:

Liberty Exits IAC For Evite, Gifts.com And $220M In Cash - Diller Steps Down As CEO — Big move for Liberty Media, IAC and the latter's Barry Diller today. The former has exchanged its entire equity stake in the Internet holding company for a combination of assets and cash in a transaction intended to be tax-free to both companies.

Discussion: Media Decoder, MediaPost, Broadcasting & Cable, IAC - Media Room, Mediaite, MediaMemo, AdAge, Mixed Media, Gawker, paidContent, Deal Journal, New York Observer, FishbowlNY, MinOnline and SAI, more at Techmeme »

Joe Flint / Company Town:

Journalism is in hour of ‘grave peril,’ says top government regulator — Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps is taking aim at the state of television news, which he says is “in its hour of grave peril.” In both an interview with BBC World News America that airs Wednesday …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, International Media, Stop Big Media News, Mediaite, Money & Company and Multichannel

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Gawker's Denton reveals site paid $12,000 for Favre scoop — During an interview at Thursday's Ignition conference, Gawker Media boss Nick Denton got right down to talking about what the media world has been buzzing about these past two days — the un-bloggy website redesign that his blog network will undergo in January.

Discussion: The Huffington Post and The Wire

Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:

‘Objective’ journalism is over. Let's move on. — It's time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective. — Let's replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency …

Kent Walker / Google Public Policy Blog:

Making Copyright Work Better Online — There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. It's some pretty fantastic stuff - content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn't have imagined ten years ago …

Discussion: Epicenter, Guardian, Media Maverick, ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Land, L.A. Times Tech Blog and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:

Huffington Post CEO: We will be worth more than the Wall Street Journal — When news blog Business Insider brought executives from the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal onstage this morning, co-founder Henry Blodget went ahead and asked the awkward question: In five years, will the Huffington Post be worth more than the Journal?

Discussion: Poynter

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

BBC Plans Subscription-Only U.S. iPlayer On iPad — This is huge. The BBC will launch the long-awaited global version of its iPlayer TV catch-up service on a subscription-only basis, and initially only on iPad. — The service, carrying BBC shows like Doctor Who on-demand …

Discussion: MediaPost, Ars Technica, Guardian, THINQ.co.uk, The Next Web, MacStories, App Advice, AppleInsider, paidContent:UK, Electricpig.co.uk, techeblog.com, SlashGear, Engadget, MacNN, PC Pro, Gizmodo, Poynter, Financial Times and TUAW, more at Techmeme »

Ross Kenneth Urken / New York | Guest of a Guest:

Peter Kaplan Loves Murdoch/Branson iPad Projects; O.K. With New Observer — Last night former New York Observer editor-in-chief Peter Kaplan lauded the iPad as the future go-to medium for journalism and reflected upon his appraisal of Observer publisher Jared Kushner

Discussion: Yahoo! News

Brett Pulley / Bloomberg:

Wall Street Journal Magazine, New York Section Profitable, CEO Hinton Says — The two-year-old Wall Street Journal weekend magazine and the newspaper's daily New York City section are profitable, according to Les Hinton, chief executive officer of News Corp.'s Dow Jones division.

Discussion: Gawker, Garcia Media and Poynter

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:

Publishers Pile Into Flipboard For Ad Test — OMD Delivers Marketers Like Pepsi and Infiniti for Test of iPad Social News Reader — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Flipboard, an iPad app that turns shared links on the web into a beautiful digital magazine, is out to prove it's got a business model too …

Discussion: GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, paidContent and Business Week, more at Techmeme »

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Hearst Closing In on Deal for Hachette Titles — Word of a deal comes as the French parent revealed it was talking with potential partners — After months of speculation, Lagardère Active is close to a deal to sell to Hearst Corp. its U.S. magazine group, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. …

Discussion: paidContent, Gawker and FishbowlNY

Cary Spivak / American Journalism Review:

The Fact-Checking Explosion — In a bitter political landscape marked by rampant allegations of questionable credibility, more and more news outlets are launching truth-squad operations. Posted: Thu, Dec. 2 2010 — Cary Spivak (cspivak01@gmail.com) is an investigative reporter …

David Carr / Gadgetwise:

Best Media Apps for the iPad — The historical media verticals of radio, television, print and Web evaporate inside the frame of an iPad — it's all just content, backlighted and inviting, waiting for the swipe of a finger. Long-form narrative and news has found a reliable wing man in the iPad.

Gail Shister / mediabistro.com:

As ‘Early’ Overhauls, ‘Today’ Celebrates 15 Years at #1 — It's good to be king. Ask Jim Bell. — The executive producer of NBC's “Today” - No. 1 for 15 years, as of Dec. 11 - is not exactly quaking in his loafers about the all-new lineup for CBS's third-place ‘Early Show.’

Discussion: WebNewser, Media Decoder, Poynter and TVNewser

Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:

Conde Nast digital chief: Murdoch's iPad newspaper “doesn't make any sense” — News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch is making a big bet on the iPad by hiring big-name (read: expensive) reporters for a new “iPad newspaper” called The Daily. And other media organizations are skeptical.

Curtis Brainard / CJR:

Close Encounters of the Media Kind — NASA press release leads to wild speculation about alien discovery — Over the last two days, bloggers at a few of the country's top news outlets have engaged in wild and wholly unsubstantiated speculation about the discovery of alien life.

Discussion: Embargo Watch, msnbc.com, MacStories, The Daily What and The Atlantic Wire

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Bitly News Tries To Create A Hacker News For The Rest Of Us — What are the headlines people are sharing the most? A new headline aggregation site called Bitly News tries to answer that by showing the most clicked-on shortened bit.ly links on Twitter. Bitly News is not an official bit.ly product.

Discussion: Wired Science and CNN, more at Techmeme »

Jim Rainey / The Big Picture:

Parker spitting mad at Spitzer? Why not show it on CNN? — The New York Post reported that freshly minted CNN host Kathleen Parker walked off the set not long ago, fed up with co-host Eliot Spitzer. Rumors of discord might have seemed more real when Parker did not appear on “Parker Spitzer” …

Discussion: Inside Cable News and The Huffington Post

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

YouTube Officially Launches Ads You Can Skip — Yep, you read that right. Today, YouTube is officially launching TrueView, a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren't interested in — and advertisers are actually okay with it. — It's a new format that YouTube has been testing …

Discussion: GigaOM, SAI and WatchingTV Online

MinOnline:

Texterity and Wonderfactory Offer Mag Apps for Everyone Else — As any of the major magazine publishers who have built their own iPad magazine apps from scratch will admit, this is not a cheap, quick and easy process. Hearst may be able to open an App Lab and Condé Nast may have the pockets …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Newsonomics of Google Grouponomics — [Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.] — It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Discussion: paidContent and ReadWriteWeb