Mediagazer: The New York Times is Capturing the “Character-Driven Drama” … (Andy Plesser/Beet.TV)

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

Stuart Elliott / Media Decoder:

3rd Quarter Ad Spending Accelerated, Report Finds — The recovery in advertising spending gained momentum in the third quarter, according to a report scheduled to be released on Tuesday morning, underlining the belief that Madison Avenue may be poised for continuing gains in the new year.

Discussion: MediaPost, AdAge, Poynter and Gawker

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.

Discussion: Company Town and Wall Street Journal

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

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Chartbeat Says The Rise of the Machines Won't Be So Bad If You're a Cyborg — Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs. — And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It's part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics startup …

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: SAI, Stowe Boyd, Scripting News, Malcolm Coles and A VC

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

USA Today Buys Consumer Electronics Review Network Reviewed.com — The USA Today just announced the purchase of Reviewed.com, a group of 12 consumer electronics review sites that focus on gadgets, technology and more. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Discussion: paidContent, PR Newswire, mediabistro.com and Talking Biz News

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

Walter Mayr / Spiegel Online:

Facebook Generation Fights Hungarian Media Law — As Hungary takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has introduced a new law aimed at gagging the media. The Facebook generation is up in arms. But Orbán remains largely unchallenged …

Ben Adler / Newsweek:

Why Journalists Aren't Standing Up for WikiLeaks — Three reasons that efforts to prosecute Julian Assange aren't drawing more of an outcry about the First Amendment. — If you think prosecuting journalists is the province solely of the sort of authoritarian governments in the developing world …

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 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?

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 …

Discussion: WebNewser

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

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 …

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

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

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

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: Free Press, ReadWriteWeb, VideoNuze and GigaOM

New York Post:

‘Week’ team fears NYC move — The new year is bringing chills to ABC's “This Week,” where anchor Christiane Amanpour's Washington staff worries that the show will be moved to New York. — An insider says a top priority for new ABC president Ben Sherwood is to decide whether Amanpour's …

Discussion: Mediaite, The Empire and TVWeek.com