Mediagazer: So you want to be a viral video? (Fortune)

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: Mixed Media, Mediaweek, SAI, mediabistro.com, New York Magazine and VentureBeat

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, Tech Daily Dose, Bloomberg and Hillicon Valley

Why Comcast/NBCU matters — Since January 2010, I've been writing about the Comcast/NBCU merger. Now we're in the end-game - so let's pull some threads together for this last post for the year. — This merger has more angles than a marathon trick-billiards match, but the most important one is this …

Discussion: Multichannel, rbr.com, Mediaweek and Free Press

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, The Big Picture and eMedia Vitals, more at Techmeme »

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

Tribune's new management team releases updated conduct code — “It's impossible to spell out every possible situation that you might face,” says a memo sent to Tribune employees on Wednesday, so “use common sense and good judgment to steer your behavior and decisions.”

Discussion: Yahoo! News

Guardian:

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.

Discussion: BBC

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

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.

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: Media Myth Alert and Poynter

Rene Lynch / Daily Dish:

Restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila photographed and kicked out of Red Medicine — Our restaurant critic has been unmasked. — S. Irene Virbila, the L.A. Times' restaurant critic for the last 16 years, was visiting Red Medicine restaurant in Beverly Hills on Tuesday night when she was approached …

Discussion: The Big Picture, Gawker, Eater National, Squid Ink and LA Observed

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 …

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

Discussion: Lost Remote and NetNewsCheck Latest

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 …

Fortune:

So you want to be a viral video? — A look at Xtranormal, the company that makes those sardonic robot videos, and how they plan to be the Zynga of intentionally bad online animation. — By Chadwick Matlin, contributor — Screengrab from the Xtranormal Geico commercial

Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:

New CEO wastes no ‘Time’ with shakeup — Say goodbye to the Ann Moore business template — new Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin yesterday smashed it to pieces. — In a major pre-Christmas shakeup, Griffin busted up the single News & Sports Group that contained Time and Sports Illustrated …