Mediagazer: The $8 Billion Do Not Track Prize (Ben Kunz/Business Week)

8:15 AM ET, December 23, 2010

Top News:

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: eMedia Vitals, MediaPost and MediaPost Raw, more at Techmeme »

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Video Killed the Radio Star, But Might Save Newspapers — What comes to mind when you think of newspapers? Whatever it is, it's probably not streaming video. Yet one of the interesting facts in a new survey of the online video market (PDF link) from video-hosting platform Brightcove …

Discussion: Lost Remote

Media Decoder:

Approval Talks Delay Comcast-NBC Deal — The long-awaited completion of the takeover of NBC Universal by Comcast will have to wait until the new year. — The outgoing NBC Universal chief executive Jeffrey Zucker sent a memo to staff members Wednesday afternoon explaining that regulatory approval …

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

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: Adweek, The Wrap and WebNewser, Thanks:learmonth

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

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 …

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.

John Cook / Gawker:

ABC News Staffers Produce Propaganda Video Attacking Their Horrible New Boss — Nobody likes Ben Sherwood, a notoriously self-promoting former Good Morning America executive producer who was recently, and inexplicably, placed in charge of ABC News. Some of his new employees hate him so much they made this undermining video about him.

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Hollywood Reporter, Mediaite, The Daily Caller, New York Observer and The Wrap

John Eggerton / Broadcasting & Cable:

Discovery: Dish Does Not Have Right To ‘Sling’ Its Content To Web — Tells FCC Dish does not have their permission to distribute its channels over the Internet — Discovery Counsel Tara Corvo has told the FCC that Dish does not have that company's permission to deliver Discovery's channels via …

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

Conor Friedersdorf / The Daily Dish:

How Neutral Should Journalists Be? — One school of thought contends that balance is paramount: a contested matter demands that the reporter gives equal space to “both sides,” presents the debate to readers, and allows them to make up their own minds. — “We report, you decide!”

Rex Rhoades / The Sun Journal:

Sun Journal changes rules for online commenting … Creating a bold, new electronic community — Sun Journal changes rules for making online comments — American illustrator Norman Rockwell painted what many consider his masterpiece during World War II, a series of magazine illustrations called “The Four Freedoms.”

Chip Le Grand / TheAustralian:

Libel laws ‘must apply’ to new media — FACEBOOK and Twitter should be subject to defamation laws in the same way as newspapers, according to media experts, and all social-media sites should be held responsible for material published on them. — But leading media lawyers say the laws are …

Robert Niles / Online Journalism Review:

How to do better than Groupon in building local advertising market share — By Robert Niles: This year's hottest buzzword in online news publishing - on the business side - has been Groupon. Business managers at start-ups and legacy media websites alike have been pushing the concept of …