Mediagazer: Tribune lenders targeting Zell (Josh Kosman/New York Post)

1:45 PM ET, December 7, 2010

Top News:

BBC:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrested in London — Julian Assange denies sexually assaulting the two women — The founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been arrested by the Metropolitan Police. — The 39-year-old Australian denies allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden.

Discussion: TheAustralian, Salon, CNN, New York Times, Guardian, Press Gazette, The New Yorker Blog, Politics Daily, The Lede, Tom Watson and Gawker, more at Techmeme »

Dan Gillmor / Salon:

Defend WikiLeaks or lose free speech — Journalists should wake up and realize that the attacks on the whistle-blower are attacks on them, too — Journalists cover wars by not taking sides. But when the war is on free speech itself, neutrality is no longer an option.

Discussion: The Wire, paidContent, Jon Slattery, Mark Follman, Mediaite and Clay Shirky

Richard Cohen / Washington Post:
WikiLeaks and the trouble with transparency

Discussion: Gawker and paidContent:UK

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:
Some news outlets stop calling WikiLeaks a ‘whistle-blower’

Discussion: Guardian, The Next Web, Crikey, The Nation, CNET News, Online NewsHour, Salon, Slate, Jon Slattery, newsfeed.time.com and News: News blog, more at Techmeme »

Kat Stoeffel / New York Observer:
Julian Assange Leads TIME Person of the Year Poll

Discussion: The Nation, Guardian, The Wire and TechCrunch

Sam Gustin / Threat Level:
Columbia University Reverses Anti-WikiLeaks Guidance

Discussion: Reuters, The Lede, CNN, Arabist.net, Guardian and TPMMuckraker

Josh Kosman / New York Post:

Tribune lenders targeting Zell — Tweet — Tribune lenders are expected to file a lawsuit by midnight against real estate mogul Sam Zell alleging the leveraged buyout he engineered caused the business to quickly collapse, The Post has learned. — Lawyers for the lenders …

Discussion: Gawker, The Wrap, FishbowlLA, New York Magazine and NewscastStudio Blog

New York Post:

John Roberts to leave ‘American Morning’ in the new year — Tweet — Shake-ups at CNN under new boss Ken Jautz will begin as early as the start of the new year, insiders say. John Roberts is finalizing a contract to leave “American Morning” and start a new life as a CNN national correspondent …

Discussion: Mediaite, The Huffington Post, Inside Cable News and The Page

Agence France Presse:

Washington Post watching online pay experiments — NEW YORK — The Washington Post is monitoring efforts by The New York Times and other newspapers to charge readers online but has no plans to do the same for now, the Post Co. chairman said Monday. — “On pay models, obviously …

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:

Graham: Washington Post not ‘going to be a pioneer’ in charging for online news — Washington Post Company CEO Don Graham's candid take on trends in the news business has been a staple of the 10 media conferences I've attended each December in New York City.

Discussion: MediaPost

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010 — One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook).

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Google ‘cooperating’ with New York Times to prevent paywall abuse — At a UBS media conference Tuesday morning, New York Times Co. executives discussed the online metered pay model that the Times website will adopt in 2011. But when pressed about when the paywall will launch and how much it will cost, they offered no new details.

Discussion: Poynter Online and Mixed Media

Henry Blodget / Clusterstock:

You're Not Going To Believe This But The Future Of The New York Times (NYT) May Now Actually Be Bright — The New York Times (NYT) almost went bust two years ago. — If not for emergency asset sales, cost cuts, debt-restructuring, and an 11th-hour bailout by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim …

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Bravo Builds Twitter Showcase @BravoTV — Bravo has launched @BravoTV, a browser-based dashboard offering fans who use Twitter an enhanced environment for discussing the channel's shows 24/7. — It's yet another indication of how aggressive this NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) …

Discussion: MediaPost and WebNewser

Steve Buttry / The Buttry Diary:

News Foo Camp: where TBD is ‘mainstream’ — In another context, I might have protested being labeled part of the “mainstream media.” — We launched our website in August. We're trying to be innovative and edgy in our mobile apps, use of social media, breaking-news coverage, blog network and other respects.

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Which TV Channels Can't Cord-Cutters Live Without? — If the never-ending stream of data on cord-cutting has faded into a blur, here's one new finding that may be of actual interest. In her latest research note, Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin reported the results of a simple request …

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, GigaOM, NetNewsCheck Latest, ESPN MediaZone, TechCrunch, VideoNuze and SAI

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Why a Day of Tumblr Down Time Matters to the Entire Web & World — Fast growing lightweight blogging service Tumblr has been down for most of the past day and its users are being mocked for their concern. “Can Tumblr do a Twitter and recover?” laughs economics writer and funny man Paul Kedrosky, for example, on Twitter.

Discussion: New York Observer and the Econsultancy blog, more at Techmeme »

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Victim Of Its Own Success: Tumblr Redefines The Concept Of “Back Shortly”

Discussion: GigaOM, Associated Press, CNN, Gawker, Most Recent Home Page Posts …, The Awl, PC Magazine, Techland, CNET News, New York Observer and The Huffington Post

New York Observer:

Best of 2010: The Year's Biggest Media Launches (Such as They Are) — Well...it wasn't a big year for big new media ventures. But compared to the year preceding it, 2010 actually saw a few media jobs opening up — a Great Media Hiring Thaw, if you will. And alongside the job openings came …

Discussion: Guardian, mediabistro.com and NetNewsCheck Latest

Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:

One ambassador's embarrassment is a tragedy, 15,000 civilian deaths is a statistic — Few things illustrate the challenges facing journalism in the age of ‘Big Data’ better than Cable Gate - and specifically, how you engage people with stories that involve large sets of data.

Discussion: Media Diary and The Wire

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

The Education of Luke Russert — Charges of nepotism flew after the NBC reporter stepped on stage following the death of his famous father. Howard Kurtz talks to Russert about stage fright, weight loss and his critics. — For Luke Russert, adolescence was more than a tutorial in Beltway politics …

Discussion: Vanity Fair

Boston Globe:

Boston magazine editor resigns — Andrew Putz, the editor of Boston magazine, has resigned from the glossy publication about city life and events, executives at the magazine announced today. — Putz, the magazine's third editor in five years, will leave Friday, less than a year and a half after he was named in July 2009.

Natalia Brzezinski / The Huffington Post:

Washington Post's Ezra Klein: A Millennial Perspectives Interview — Millennials are being called the most progressive generation ever; they believe in civic responsibility and their own ability to make change. Through blogs, tweets and Facebook movements, Millennials are staging …

Mike Farrell / Multichannel:

Ad Growth Continues At Viacom — Sales Should Rise Again In Q4 — New York—Coming off strong third-quarter domestic growth, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said that ad sales, up 8% in the period, should rise even higher in the fourth quarter. — Dauman, speaking here at the UBS Global …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable

Macy Halford / The Book Bench:

The Google eBookstore: Mostly Good, a Little Bad — We heard last week that Google would launch its eBookstore (which for a time was going to be called Editions, but is now simply eBookstore) by the end of the year, and today it arrived. For many of us (particularly those of us who do not own Kindles) …

Discussion: GigaOM, Media Money …, TeleRead, Search Engine Roundtable, paidContent and Yahoo! News, more at Techmeme »

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Google's New Bookstore Cracks Open the E-book Market

Discussion: USA Today, TechCrunch, Media & Entertainment, Boston Globe and Search Engine Land

Ann Marie Kerwin / AdAge:

10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption — Ad Age Has the Stats From the TV Penetration Rate in Kenya to the Number of World Cup Watchers and More — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — While we've been obsessed with the carnage in American media markets for the last couple of years …

Discussion: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim