Mediagazer: How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010 (Richard MacManus/ReadWriteWeb)

2:10 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, paidContent:UK and Threat Level

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, Reuters, The Wire and TechCrunch

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

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: GigaOM, ESPN MediaZone, TechCrunch, VideoNuze and SAI

Nat Worden / Wall Street Journal:

HBO Could Be Offered Outside of Cable Packages — NEW YORK—Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said Monday that HBO, his company's leading premium cable network, could be offered outside traditional cable-channel packages if another model makes sense as the TV industry evolves.

Discussion: GigaOM

Jon Lafayette / Broadcasting & Cable:
Bewkes Says Digital Should Help Time Warner

Discussion: MediaPost and Multichannel

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

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

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 / SAI:

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 …

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:

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

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

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, the Econsultancy blog and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

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 …

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) …