Mediagazer: Editorial Tussle at Washington City Paper (Betsy Rothstein/mediabistro.com)

12:45 PM ET, December 23, 2010

Top News:

BSkyB: Without prejudice — On one level the Sky deal is simply business. But the issue of media plurality is more than an argument about competition — It is a much-remarked upon irony of yesterday's humiliating slap-down of Vince Cable that he was both wrong and right.

Nils Pratley / Guardian:

Cable likely to cost Murdoch dear — Vince couldn't stop the BSkyB deal, but he's made News Corp's target somewhat costlier — Vince Cable's removal from the media gig at the Department for Business was worth £250m on BSkyB's market value. That may sound a lot but it is only 2%.

Discussion: Agence France Presse, Reuters, Daily Mail, The Deal LLC and Broadcasting & Cable

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:
The Daily Telegraph: the scoop, a whistleblower, and the denials

Discussion: The Staggers, BBC College of Journalism Blog, Jon Slattery, Media Week, BBC and Editors Weblog

Cecilia Kang / Post Tech:

FCC chair to approve Comcast-NBC merger with conditions for program sharing — The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission issued a draft order approving Comcast's proposed merger with NBC Universal on Thursday, putting the deal up for vote before the agency's other members.

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, MediaMemo, Free Press, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Hillicon Valley and Tech Daily Dose

Media Decoder:
Comcast Takeover of NBC Is Delayed Until Next Year

Discussion: Mediaweek, Philly.com, The Wrap, Multichannel, Susan Crawford blog, Free Press, Hillicon Valley, GigaOM, Broadcasting & Cable, Company Town, MediaMemo, Adweek, Yahoo! News, paidContent and On Media's Blog, more at Techmeme »

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Demand Media's IPO-Which Won't Happen Until After the New Year Now-Depends on How It Accounts for Content — Yesterday, Demand Media submitted another amended S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, part of its march to an initial public offering many had expected to take place sooner rather than later.

Discussion: mediabistro.com, SAI and VentureBeat

Graham Bowley / New York Times:

Computers That Trade on the News — The number-crunchers on Wall Street are starting to crunch something else: the news. — Math-loving traders are using powerful computers to speed-read news reports, editorials, company Web sites, blog posts and even Twitter messages …

Discussion: GigaOM, eMedia Vitals and The Big Picture, more at Techmeme »

TubeMogul.com:

Brightcove and TubeMogul Q3 Research: Facebook Surpasses Yahoo in Streams Referred; Viewing-Times Longest on Game Consoles — We are excited to launch the latest installment of our quarterly research on online video trends with Brightcove, just in time for the holidays!

Discussion: MediaPost, Between the Lines Blog, eMedia Vitals, Brightcove Blog, SAI and MediaPost Raw

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Video Killed the Radio Star, But Might Save Newspapers

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Lost Remote

Ben Kunz / Business Week:

The $8 Billion Do Not Track Prize — Don't be fooled: The FTC proposal to protect online privacy has more to do with big publishers' revenue than Internet users' personal Web data — There's a great moment in All The President's Men, the film based on the 1970s Watergate investigation …

Justin McGuirk / Guardian:

They've shaped the internet, but can designers save the newspaper? — We can see design thinking at work in web phenomena such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but the predicament of printed news remains an unsolved problem — In the 1850s, a New York publisher announced that newspapers were dead: he had seen a telegraph in action.

Bloomberg:

WikiLeaks Joins Forces With Billionaire Lebedev — Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) — Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper controlled by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev, said it agreed to join forces with WikiLeaks to expose corruption in Russia.

Discussion: Yahoo! News, New York Magazine, Hit & Run, New York Observer and FP Passport

Peter S. Goodman / The Huffington Post:

Kaplan Tarnishes Washington Post Legacy — Nearly four decades ago, the Washington Post found itself faced with the sort of agonizing decision that can define a reputation. The New York Times had begun printing classified federal documents known as the Pentagon Papers …

Discussion: Poynter

Greg Sandoval / Media Maverick:

Why Netflix has content and Google TV doesn't — If Google managers hope to license premium TV shows and films for Google TV and YouTube, they should do what Netflix did and “build relationships through traditional means.” — That's the recommendation of one studio executive who was referring …

Betsy Rothstein / mediabistro.com:

Editorial Tussle at Washington City Paper — Oddities began happening at the Washington City Paper last night. The details are still sketchy, but here's what we know: Writer Moe Tkacik published a story involving rape and “hot” women. Last night, a woman named Laura Greenback …

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Barry Diller's IAC Creates Own Content Farm — Joins Yahoo, Demand Media With the Writer's Network, Seeking Freelancers for $10 to $25 Assignments — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Barry Diller appears to be cultivating his very own “content farm” at IAC. Though he recently relinquished …

Discussion: New York Observer, Mediaweek, NetNewsCheck Latest, Media Buyer Planner, NYConvergence.com, The Wrap and WebNewser, Thanks:learmonth

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:

Paywalls, Patch, Public Media & Pointcast Memories: 11 Conventional News Wisdoms We'll Test in 2011 — We love to believe that what is in front of us, often the hottest why-didn't-I-come up-with-that idea, is reality, enduring, never-to-change reality. Pointcast, Palms, Newtons, Lycos, and, maybe, soon Yahoo, say differently.