Mediagazer: Hearst Closing In on Deal for Hachette Titles (Lucia Moses/Adweek)

1:05 PM ET, December 2, 2010

Top News:

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, The Wrap, CNET News, On Media's Blog, The Huffington Post, Company Town and New York Magazine

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: IAC - Media Room, AdAge, Multichannel, Gawker, paidContent, New York Observer, FishbowlNY, MinOnline, MediaMemo, Deal Journal and SAI, more at Techmeme »

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: Poynter

Anthony Ha / VentureBeat: Huffington Post CEO: We will be worth more than the Wall Street Journal

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: Ars Technica, Guardian, AppleInsider, THINQ.co.uk, SlashGear, The Next Web, MacStories, App Advice, paidContent:UK, Electricpig.co.uk, techeblog.com, Poynter, MacNN, Engadget, Financial Times, PC Pro, Gizmodo and TUAW, 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: Free Press, Mediaite, Money & Company and Multichannel

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: Gawker and FishbowlNY

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

Martin Bryant / The Next Web:
Forget Murdoch and Branson, could TRVL's gorgeous iPad magazine …

Thanks:bradtnw

Clare O'Connor / Filthy Rich:
Want Access To Richard Branson's Billions? Ask His Daughter

Discussion: Mixed Media, New York Magazine and MediaMemo

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: Guardian, Media Maverick, L.A. Times Tech Blog, TechCrunch and Epicenter, more at Techmeme »

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.

Discussion: GigaOM

Anil Dash:

Gawker Is A Blog. Just Like Twitter. — I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker's blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length …

Discussion: Stowe Boyd and Bits, more at Techmeme »

Felix Salmon:
The new Gawker Media — Gawker Media's big company-wide redesign …

Discussion: John Gapper's Business Blog, The Wrap, The Wire, PSFK, New York Magazine and Guardian

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

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 …

David Carr / New York Times:

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.

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, GigaOM, MacStories and The Atlantic Wire

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Vice founder: 'If we're the guys doing news, the situation has to be pretty bad' — Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice magazine and the international media conglomerate it spawned, had just gotten back from a four-day tour of Afghanistan. — “We were filming the poppy palaces,” he told The Cutline.

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

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

Celia McGee / New York Times:

Once an Editor, Now the Subject — IT doesn't really matter whether Serendipity, the restaurant on East 60th Street in Manhattan, was already serving footlong hot dogs in 1975, or its frozen hot chocolate. Neither Nan Talese nor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would have ordered them anyway.

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Oprah Network Denies Talks with Outgoing CBS Exec — Oprah Winfrey's cable venture denied a report on Wednesday that it was in talks to hire Terry Wood, a television guru who groomed Phil McGraw, Rachael Ray and other stars of syndication. — “Absolutely not true,” Christina Norman …

Discussion: Mediaite, B&C, The Wrap and New York Post

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, paidContent, Business Week and ReadWriteWeb, more at Techmeme »

Oliver Chiang / SelectStart:

Google: Actually, News Sites Helped Promote Bad Online Merchant — In response to the disturbing New York Times article about an online merchant, Decor My Eyes, who apparently thrives on actively dissatisfying customers in order to drum up web chatter and make his site more prominent …

Discussion: New York Times, Online Journalism Blog, PC World and New York Observer, more at Techmeme »

Wall Street Journal:

Hulu Open to New Investors for Global Expansion — Hulu LLC wants to expand its online video service internationally and would be willing to take on new investors to help it do so, Jason Kilar, its chief executive, said in an interview Wednesday. — Mr. Kilar said there is an “unmet need” …

Discussion: Online Video News, WatchingTV Online, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM

New York Times:

F.T.C. Backs Plan to Honor Privacy of Online Users — WASHINGTON — Signaling a sea change in the debate over Internet privacy, the government's top consumer protection agency on Wednesday advocated a plan that would let consumers choose whether they want their Internet browsing and buying habits monitored.