Mediagazer: Sir David Attenborough: BBC's sails need to be trimmed (Josh Halliday/Guardian)

William D. Cohan / Vanity Fair:

Huffing and Puffing — Reminiscent of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington is being sued by two political consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce, who claim a critical role in creating her top-ranked Web site, the Huffington Post. So what exactly happened in the fall of 2004 when Huffington …

Discussion: Guardian, Poynter, Gawker, Big Journalism, New York Magazine, Yahoo! News, The Wire, Mixed Media, The Politico, The Atlantic Online and On Media's Blog

Discussion: Vanity Fair

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

An Electronics Show That Media Companies Dare Not Miss — LAS VEGAS — When ESPN announced a high-definition channel nine years ago, its executives barely knew about the Consumer Electronics Association. — By the time it was ready to announce a three-dimensional channel last year …

Discussion: NYConvergence.com

Discussion: Nielsen Wire

Martin Belam / currybetdotnet:

RSS dead for newspapers? Not at The Guardian it isn't — Lots of chatter about whether RSS is dying after this (subsequently updated and calmed down) post from Kroc Camen. Malcolm Coles has weighed in by showing that the subscription numbers to newspaper RSS feeds are way down in Google Reader with …

Discussion: MediaPost, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com, Scripting News, The Atlantic Online, TechCrunch and Stowe Boyd

David Folkenflik / NPR:

American Media's True Ideology? Avoiding One … This is the second in a two-part series looking at ideology in the media. — In a media landscape littered with opinionated talk show hosts and ideology-driven websites, strong points of view are hardly tough to find.

Discussion: Yahoo! News, FishbowlNY and Poynter

Mark Leccese / Boston Globe:

The Future of Newspapers: National and Hyperlocal — One important but unnoted consequence of the Long Dark Decade of the Newspaper Business is the widening circulation gap between America's three national newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times — newspapers and its regional dailies.

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

AOL Goes to Town in Reorg, Closing Men's, Women's Sites — Going downhill fast? AOL's motivational gift to employees. — AOL is sometimes criticized for not having a strategy, but that couldn't be more unfair. Heck, they've got a new one practically every quarter!

Discussion: paidContent, Mediaweek and SAI

David Carr / New York Times:

Cosmo Goes Beyond the Burqa in the Middle East — Like Coke and McDonald's, Cosmo is one U.S. brand that has a significant reach outside American borders. The magazine, which is published by Hearst Magazines and began printing in 1886, now has 61 international editions appearing in 32 languages …

Discussion: Gawker, New York Observer and FishbowlNY

Matt Thompson / Poynter:

10 lessons for the future from women in media — As 2010 drew to a finish and the end-of-year lists started streaming in, I began to feel that there was something missing from the din of bold predictions and celebrated thinkers in the tech and media world: female voices.

Anil Dash:

If You Didn't Blog It, It Didn't Happen — Clive Thompson's newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I've been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact …

Discussion: Stowe Boyd

Emma Barnett / Telegraph:

Spotify 2010 US launch ‘delayed by labels’ high cash demands' — Spotify's long-awaited 2010 US launch failed because the major record labels demanded “extremely high cash advances”. — Spotify until recently has claimed it will launch stateside by the end of 2010.

Discussion: The Next Web, TechCrunch, NewsGrange and SlashGear, more at Techmeme »

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Reports: Newsweek Staff Gutting to Continue With Buyouts — After multiple rounds of layoffs and Daily Beast merger — Between financial instability and a change in ownership, Newsweek has lost a number of its top journalists over the past year. But now talk is spreading …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

New York Post:

Smear disappears — Who is behind the apparently concerted campaign to smear The New Yorker's Jane Mayer? — For several weeks, the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site — co-founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, a former aide to former vice president Dick Cheney …

Discussion: Gawker, New York Observer and The Huffington Post

Kristine Lowe / Journalism.co.uk:

Quora: a tech journalist's utopia, but what does it mean for journalism at large? — “Feels like quora.com just went viral today after months of quiet. Are others seeing lots of new ‘follows’ as the world checks it out?,” Harward Law professor Jonathan Zittrain tweeted last night.

Discussion: Guardian

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Why ProPublica is publishing web ads — and what that means for the nonprofit outfit's funding future — Check out ProPublica's website today, and you might notice — along with blog posts, donation buttons, links to special projects, and the kind of deep-dive investigative journalism …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and Poynter

David Kaplan / paidContent:

VC Money Keeps Pouring In For Ad Targeters: Turn Raises $20 Million — Turn is the latest ad tech firm to greet the new year with a whopping sum of venture capital. The Silicon Valley-based company has raised $20 million in a fourth round funding, bringing its total raised to $57 million in the past five years.

Discussion: Turn, VentureBeat, ClickZ, MediaMemo and Digital Media Wire

Ruth Teichroeb / Safety Net:

Eighteen Months Later: What's happened to Seattle P-I journalists — Six months after Hearst shut down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I surveyed my former colleagues to find out how they were faring. Most were still looking for work, reeling from the shock of losing their jobs in the depths …

Discussion: Guardian and Poynter

Josh Halliday / Guardian:

Sir David Attenborough: BBC's sails need to be trimmed — Veteran presenter says in New Statesman interview that corporation has ‘strayed from the straight and narrow’ — Sir David Attenborough, the face of the BBC's landmark natural history programming, has said the corporation's …

John Del Signore / Gothamist:

Tom Robbins On Why He Quit the Voice, And Journalism's Plight — Yesterday was a sad day for the once-illustrious Village Voice, which lost two of its legendary muckraking reporters, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins. Barrett, who has been with the paper since the Koch administration …

Discussion: Guardian, New York Times, FishbowlNY, Poynter, On Media's Blog, Media Research Center and The Huffington Post