Mediagazer: Pearson Buys Controlling Stake In TutorVista For $127 Million (Mark Sweney/paidContent)

10:20 AM ET, January 18, 2011

Top News:

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

Under Pay Model, Little Effect Seen on Papers' Web Traffic — While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers have started to emerge. — Steven Brill's Journalism Online experiment …

Discussion: Noted, eMedia Vitals, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web, Editors Weblog, Poynter and Stowe Boyd

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Facebook Books $1.86B in Advertising; Muscles In on Google Turf — New Estimate From eMarketer Shows Majority of Social Network's Ad Revenue Comes From Small Businesses — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It turns out Facebook is a lot like Google after all. — As the social network steams past …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, eMarketer, Noted, eMedia Vitals, TechCrunch, Inquirer, Inside Facebook, The Equity Kicker, VatorNews, Fast Company, SAI and Mashable!, more at Techmeme », Thanks:edmundlee

The Huffington Post:

Regis: It's Over — Regis Philbin says he's leaving the show that bears his name. — “This will be my last year on this show,” the 79-year-old host said Tuesday morning on “Live! with Regis and Kelly.” “It's been a long time, it's been 28 years since I've been here.

Discussion: newsfeed.time.com

James Robinson / Guardian:

NoW ‘rogue reporter’ line unravels — Glenn Mulcaire tells high court that News of the World's head of news asked him to hack voicemail messages — News Corporation's defence that phone hacking at the News of the World was the work of a single “rogue reporter” was on the verge of collapse tonight …

Discussion: Editors Weblog, psmith, journalist, Press Gazette, The First Post and Jon Slattery

Claire Atkinson / New York Post:

Nielsen view of new TV just doesn't rate — While more viewers are getting up from the TV set and watching shows on the go, ratings giant Nielsen is stuck on the couch. — Video viewing on Apple's iPad and other mobile devices is exploding. Just last week, Google's YouTube …

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Cheezburger Network Gets $30M for More LOLcats and Failpics — Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog, Engrish Funny and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group …

Discussion: TechCrunch, The Seattle Times, Softpedia News, TECH.BLORGE.com, techrockies.com, Download Squad, eMedia Vitals, NetworkEffect, SAI, VentureBeat, TechFlash, Pulse2 and paidContent, more at Techmeme »

Mark Sweney / paidContent:

Pearson Buys Controlling Stake In TutorVista For $127 Million — Pearson (NYSE: PSO), owner of the Financial Times and book publisher Penguin, has increased its presence in India, buying a controlling stake in education firm TutorVista for $127m (£79m).

Discussion: MediaNama

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Exclusive: Roku Lands Its First Cable Channel — Roku is expected to announce Tuesday an unlikely addition to its programming lineup: WealthTV. This will mark the first time a cable channel has joined the streaming device, which begs an obvious question: How is this even possible?

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Techland, The Next Web, Multichannel and Company Town, more at Techmeme »

Stuart Elliott / New York Times:

H.P. Updates TV's Old Product Demos — A mainstay of early television — live commercials demonstrating products like Polaroid cameras and Timex watches — is making a comeback, updated for a new century by migrating to new media. — Hewlett-Packard is teaming up with the YouTube …

Discussion: Mashable!

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Hulu Rolls Out a Highlights Show-"The Morning After" — Here's Hulu's version of a highlights show: “The Morning After,” a five-minute survey of last night's TV. — It's the show I told you about last month, and I believe it's the first one the Web video site-owned by GE's NBC …

Discussion: Hulu Blog

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

CNN's Piers Morgan puts Twitter to work for TV debut — With a taped interview with Oprah as the premiere episode of “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN on Monday night, the show's host and staff gathered in the Presidential Suite of Mandarin Hotel in New York to watch the show's debut.

Discussion: ArtsBeat, Guardian, Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Goldman Blames Media Attention For Killing Off Its U.S. Facebook Offering — Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are reporting this morning that Goldman Sachs has decided to limit its much ballyhooed private offering of up to $1.5 billion in Facebook shares to international investors only.

Discussion: DealBook, Bloomberg, Felix Salmon, VentureBeat, Techdirt, On Media's Blog, New York Observer and Clusterstock, more at Techmeme »

Brenna Ehrlich / Mashable!:

First Kickstarter-Funded Film Headed to Sundance — In mere days, Matthew Lessner's utopian, tongue-in-cheek film The Woods will be heading to Sundance — a noteworthy occurrence to be sure. But add to that the fact that The Woods is the first Sundance-bound film to be partially funded by Kickstarter …

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Netflix Enrages Subscribers By Limiting DVD Queue — Converting to a streaming-only business isn't easy, as Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) discovered Monday when the company's blog was bombarded by complaints over its decision to remove the ability to add to DVD queues from connected devices.

Discussion: The Official Netflix Blog, ReadWriteWeb, New York Magazine and New York Observer, more at Techmeme »

David Sarno / L.A. Times Tech Blog:

Perfect Market, news ad firm, lands $9 million in funding round led by Comcast — Perfect Market Inc, a start-up that seeks to help news organizations make more money through online advertising, has won $9 million in new funding in a round led by Comcast Interactive Capital, the cable giant's venture arm.

Discussion: paidContent, MediaMemo, PE Hub Blog, VentureBeat and TechCrunch

Shelly Banjo / Wall Street Journal:

Take Two for a Brooklyn Film and TV Studio — One of New York's largest film and TV production studios is about to expand, thanks in part to city and state support for the industry. — Brooklyn's Steiner Studios, where such productions as the “Spider-Man” and “Sex and the City” …

Miles Socha / WWD Media Headlines:

Memo Pad: Nina Ricci Unveils Advertising... Michael Crotty Joins Nordstrom... NIGHT FEVER: Peter Copping, artistic director at Nina Ricci, has unveiled his first advertising since joining the French house in 2009 — distilling his vision via model Malgosia Bela plopped poolside on a velvet banquette in a frothy dress.

Dan Lyons / The Daily Beast:

Leave Steve Alone! — With the Apple founder taking a new medical leave, his alter ego, Dan Lyons, says he's retiring “Fake Steve Jobs” and urges the world to similarly honor the visionary's privacy wish. — I've spent the past few years impersonating Steve Jobs online …

Discussion: 9 to 5 Mac, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, The Atlantic Online and Epicenter