Mediagazer: Are One in Four of You Really Going to Cut Cable and Switch to Web Video? (Peter Kafka/MediaMemo)

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Hearst, Lagardère Finally Confirm Sales Talks — French publisher's U.S. arm Hachette includes Elle, Woman's Day — Could the media M&A market be primed to kick off? Hearst Corp. and Lagardère SCA finally admitted they're in sales talks, confirming the growing buzz of an impending deal.

Discussion: Publishing Executive News and FishbowlNY

Discussion: Press Gazette, WWD Media Headlines, MinOnline, Canadian Magazines, Gawker, AdAge and mediabistro.com

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:

Entertainment forecast 2011: Insider predictions on who and what will make headlines — Our informed crystal ball says: Apple will unveil its own TV set and Netflix will buy the Starz channel. Also, CBS will move to gobble up Sony Pictures, and — surprise! — Carl Icahn will continue to make trouble for Lions Gate.

Evan Smith / The Texas Tribune:

Lots of Good News in the Trib's 2010 Analytics — It was a very interesting and newsworthy year for Texas politics and public policy, so it makes sense that traffic on our still-new-ish site would be robust — but even we optimists at Trib HQ didn't imagine that it would be this robust.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Poynter and WebNewser

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

New iTunes Features Aim To Outdo DVD — Some of the coolest so-called “extras” embedded only on the iTunes' version of several recent film releases from Sony (NYSE: SNE) Pictures aren't even mentioned in their promotional materials. That's because Sony Pictures Home Entertainment …

Discussion: GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb and MacRumors, more at Techmeme »

Journalism.org:

Wild Winter Weather Tops the Web — A po werful East Coast winter storm—and complaints about the cleanup effort that followed it—topped the online news agenda last week, according to a special News Coverage Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Discussion: Yahoo! News

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Are One in Four of You Really Going to Cut Cable and Switch to Web Video? — May as well kick off the new year by restarting the cord-cutting debate: Are people really dropping their cable subscriptions in favor of the Internet and some combination of Netflix/Hulu/iTunes/YouTube etc?

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, VideoNuze and GigaOM

Discussion: Click Here Blog, Mediaite and VentureBeat, more at Techmeme »

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Twitter And Facebook Really Are Killing RSS (At Least For TechCrunch Visitors) — Earlier today, we ran a “TechCrunch 2010 In Review” post featuring some key data WordPress.com sent our way for 2010. Interesting stuff all around. However, as some people have noticed, in our top referrers for the year …

Discussion: Malcolm Coles and A VC, more at Techmeme »

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

Ex-Sacramento Bee sports editor launches sports opinion site — Romenesko Misc. — Bill Bradley, who was laid off from the Sacramento Bee in October, says the mission of 27x7com is to fill the sports-opinion void in the Sacramento market. He'll write multiple columns each day that focus …

Discussion: WebNewser

Peter Costa / Wicked Local East Bridgewater MYSOURCE:

Telling stories as journalists — I'm often asked at holiday parties what I do. Usually I respond, “I'm a print journalist.” That used to mean something, but now young people might as well highlight the word “journalist” and hit control-p for print. — What is print? Is that like the opposite of cursive?

Pats Papers / Pat's Papers:

Pat's Papers SOS: Call to Action — Message to readers from Pat Kiernan: — I wish this was a cheery New Year's greeting, but I'll get straight to the bad news. As much as I love producing Pat's Papers each day, the website is a money loser. We've been steadily building our audience …

Discussion: Runnin' Scared

Matthew Creamer / AdAge:

Your Followers Are No Measure of Your Influence — Popularity on Twitter or Facebook Is Just That; It's the Ability to Drive Behavior That Matters — Since Malcolm Gladwell began popularizing his “Tipping Point” theory 14 years ago, marketers have fantasized about a world in which they can identify …

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

St. Louis Beacon On Pace To Raise $3.5 Million — Nearly three years into its publishing life, the nonprofit St. Louis Beacon starts the new year with some breathing room thanks to a $1.25 million gift from the hometown Danforth Foundation. The gift, the largest single donation so far …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and St. Louis Beacon

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

TV Viewing Continues to Edge Up — Historians may someday note with wonder that by the end of 2010, at least six cable television shows were about auctioneers and pawnbrokers. And all were considered successes by their respective channels. — Countless shows were about cops and robbers …

Discussion: Chickaboomer, Nieman Journalism Lab, MediaPost, The Hairpin, Tuned In, Mediaite, TVWeek.com and LA Observed

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

The New York Times is Capturing the “Character-Driven Drama” of Wall Street with Dealbook Videos — The newly expanded Dealbook section of The New York Times, is adding several video elements to its offering in an effort to capture the “character-driven drama” of Wall Street, says Mac William Bishop …

The Wrap:

BBC America Hires Discovery Exec Rachel Smith to Focus on Original Programming — BBC America has hired former Discovery, IFC and Bravo executive Rachel Smith, to the newly-created position of vice president of original programming, a move that signals the network's focus on — you guessed it — original programming.

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel

Rob Horning / The New Inquiry:

Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You … It's fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and reconfiguring serious study of the novel as a bloodless …

Thanks:martinsfp

Dan Frommer / SAI: Silicon Alley Insider:

AOL's Internal Content Structure: “Towns” — We've heard that AOL has organized many of its content properties into what are internally called “towns.” — According to a source, this means that for each “town” — a major content property, along the lines of AOL Entertainment, AOL Health …

Craig Fehrman / Boston Globe:

The incredible shrinking sound bite — It's not just a modern problem — and may not be such a bad thing after all — In the summer of 1992, just as George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot were gearing up for their presidential race, CBS announced a new policy for its nightly news.

Discussion: Guardian and Poynter