Mediagazer: The Desperate Campaign to Discredit Jane Mayer (Hamilton Nolan/Gawker)

9:00 PM ET, January 5, 2011

Top News:

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:

Glenn Beck Hires Former Huffington Post Chief — Looking to further expand his growing media presence, Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-show host, has hired a one-time chief executive of the left-leaning Huffington Post to lead his new Web site, The Blaze.

Discussion: The Wrap, paidContent, On Media's Blog, New York Observer, SAI and The Wire

William D. Cohan / Vanity Fair:
Huffing and Puffing — Reminiscent of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg …

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

Fimoculous.com:
Arianna is the new Zuckerberg — A few months ago …

Discussion: Vanity Fair

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:

Newsweek Hires New Publisher — After months of staff turmoil that included a new owner, editor, chief executive and scores of lower-level departures, the management ranks at Newsweek are beginning to stabilize. — The magazine has named a new publisher, Ray Chelstowski, a former publisher at Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly.

Discussion: The Wrap

Lucia Moses / Adweek:
Reports: Newsweek Staff Gutting to Continue With Buyouts

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: The Wire, ThinkProgress, New York Observer, Mediaite and The Huffington Post

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
The Desperate Campaign to Discredit Jane Mayer

Discussion: On Media's Blog and The Huffington Post

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

Cecilia Kang / Post Tech:
Nielsen: U.S. consumers crave TVs, mobile devices

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: NetNewsCheck Latest

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Sure, RSS Is Dead — Just Like the Web Is Dead

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

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: Nieman Journalism Lab, Mediaweek, paidContent and SAI

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.

TheAustralian: We didn't kill newspapers, says Google

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, Poynter 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.

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: New York Observer, Gawker and FishbowlNY

James Robinson / Guardian:

News of the World executive suspended over alleged phone hacking — News editor Ian Edmondson taken off ‘active duties’ as paper conducts internal investigation — A senior News of the World executive has been suspended following a “serious allegation” related to phone hacking.

Discussion: The Lede and Jon Slattery

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

Gail Shister / mediabistro.com:

Why Did John Roberts Join Fox News? Roger Ailes — Why did CNN's John Roberts suddenly jump to Fox News this week? — That question has been buzzing in media circles since it was revealed Monday that Roberts — headed to Atlanta as CNN's senior national correspondent …

Discussion: Inside Cable News, mediabistro.com and Chickaboomer

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

Josh Halliday / Guardian:

BBC must refocus - Attenborough — 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 “sails need to be trimmed” …

Jim / Gannett Blog:

How furloughs helped spur $4M in exec bonuses — Gannett's board of directors awards bonuses on advice from its four-member executive compensation committee, pictured below. Left to right, from top: committee members Arthur Harper, Marjorie Magner, Duncan McFarland and Karen Hastie Williams.

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 »

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 …