Mediagazer: St. Louis Beacon On Pace To Raise $3.5 Million (Staci D. Kramer/paidContent)

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, Gawker, AdAge, Canadian Magazines and mediabistro.com

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

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: Poynter and WebNewser

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: GigaOM

Discussion: Mediaite and VentureBeat, 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

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, MacRumors and ReadWriteWeb, more at Techmeme »

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 …

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 …

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

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

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

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

camen design:

RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried — RSS Is Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried — Update: More reworking of article. I stand by my convictions, but I have been wrong in my delivery. — Also, here's a French translation of the previous version, kindly done by zar / teckee.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Malcolm Coles, Scripting News, The Atlantic Wire and parislemon, more at Techmeme »

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

Matthew Szymczyk / AdAge:

CES 2011: Welcome to the Year of Tablets and Digital Living Rooms — Expect the Tablet Market to Flourish Along With Connected TVs and Kinect — CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2011 is almost upon us and like all gadget-obsessed technorati, half the excitement of an upcoming CES is trying …

Discussion: Multichannel News, rbr.com, Talking Biz News and NetNewsCheck Latest

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.

Colby Hall / Mediaite:

CNN's Former Morning Host John Roberts Expected To Join Fox News — CNN's John Roberts is expected to join FOX News Channel as a senior national correspondent based in Atlanta and will be reporting on major domestic and international stories for the network.

Discussion: Media & Entertainment, The Wrap, Poynter, Moraes on TV, Show Tracker, Broadcasting & Cable, Media Decoder, Multichannel, New York Magazine and Inside TV

Lauren Indvik / Mashable!:

Is Instagram the Next Distribution Opportunity for News Media? — From apps to podcasts, Facebook to Twitter, Flickr to YouTube, and more, mainstream media has embraced a number of new, technology-driven — and often social — platforms in the past decade to grow and engage its audiences.

Discussion: Lost Remote, more at Techmeme »

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 …

Eric Pfanner / New York Times:

What's Ahead for Media and Digital Businesses in 2011 — PARIS — The end of 2010 was greeted with relief by many media companies. “Not as bad as 2009” was a common refrain. Advertising bounced back more strongly than expected, led by television. Experiments in charging for digital content held …

Discussion: New York Times

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation — I bet you didn't know that Twitter was almost named Jittter or Twitch. Well, now you will. — Last year Digg founder Kevin Rose was mulling over a new video show called fforward. Fforward never launched, but the idea did change into something else.

Discussion: MediaPost, VentureBeat and NetNewsCheck Latest