Mediagazer: Newspapers Try to Reimpose Scarcity on News With Ongo (Mathew Ingram/GigaOM)

4:15 AM ET, January 26, 2011

Top News:

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Newspapers Try to Reimpose Scarcity on News With Ongo — In what feels like another attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, three traditional media companies — the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Gannett chain, publisher of USA Today — have launched a new service called Ongo …

Discussion: Lost Remote, Thanks:mathewi

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:
LATer to NYT: I pray you're never run by ex-radio hatchet men

Discussion: Media Junkies, Unite! and Media Buyer Planner

Brett Pulley / Bloomberg:
New York Times, Washington Post Join to Sell Content to Subscribers Online

Discussion: Noted

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
Ongo: Aggregation So Good, You'll Pay for It. (Maybe.)

Jay Yarow / The Wire:
Craziest Startup Idea Ever? …

Discussion: The Wall Blog

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

NY Times considers creating an ‘EZ Pass lane for leakers’ — The New York Times is considering options to create an in-house submission system that could make it easier for would-be leakers to provide large files to the paper. — Executive editor Bill Keller told The Cutline …

Discussion: News: News blog, Guardian, Salon, SAI, msnbc.com, ArabCrunch, The Atlantic Wire, George Dearing dot com, FishbowlNY, Poynter, Gawker and The New Yorker Blog

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

New York Times, Al-Jazeera Do An End-Run Around WikiLeaks — The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to executive editor Bill Keller.

Discussion: Runnin' Scared and New York Observer

Lauren Kirchner / CJR:

The Most Tech-Enhanced SOTU Yet — More reasons to ditch your TV and watch online — Don't have a TV to watch tonight's State of the Union address? Or do you just get bored with all the standing-applause breaks without constant visual and informational input? You are in luck.

Discussion: Esquire, Sunlight Foundation Blog, On Media's Blog and techPresident, more at Techmeme »

Tommy Christopher / Mediaite:

National Journal Skirts Embargo, Posts Full Text Of Obama's State of the Union Address — The White House has taken more care than usual that President Obama's State of the Union address not leak to the press early, advising reporters that their advance copies of the text would be sent out very close to the speech's scheduled start.

Discussion: The Wrap, Gawker, Yahoo! News and On Media's Blog

NetNewsCheck Latest:

Newspaper Site Generate Big Traffic In Q4 — Newspaper sites generated an average monthly audience of over 105 million unique visitors — 62% of all adult Internet users — during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to a study from comScore and the Newspaper Association of America.

Erik Sass / MediaPost:

Newspaper Web Sites Reach 62% of Online Population — Newspapers are not dying — at least online. An average of 105.3 million people pre month visited a newspaper Web site during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to comScore data cited by the Newspaper Association of America …

Lynn Cowan / Dow Jones Newswires:

Demand Media 8.9M-Share IPO Prices At $17 Each, Above Range — Internet content specialist Demand Media Inc. priced its 8.9 million-share initial public offering at $17 a share Tuesday, above its expected $14 to $16 range. — The company's shares will list Wednesday in the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DMD.

Discussion: Money & Company, more at Techmeme »

Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Why so much fuss about Demand Media's IPO?

Discussion: Future of Journalism, rbr.com and Editors Weblog

Greg T. Spielberg / Nieman Journalism Lab:

How Sam Spratt is finding a niche for illustrations in the text-heavy world of digital journalism — Sam Spratt is a freelance artist, but thanks to journalists, not a starving one. Since graduating from college in July, the illustrator has done hundreds pieces for Gawker Media …

Discussion: Strobist and Future of Journalism

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

News Corp.'s Daily iPad Newspaper Launching “In the Next Few Weeks” — The “Daily,” the iPad news app News Corp. was supposed to launch last week, should hit the market “in the next few weeks,” according to James Murdoch. That's not technically news, since it confirms what I had heard last week …

Discussion: Guardian and New York Observer

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
DLD11: James Murdoch On The Daily, Paywalls, Google And Apple

Discussion: paidContent, paidContent, Guardian, Yahoo! News, App Advice, MacNN, Poynter, MacStories, Macgasm and Noted

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Real Blogs Don't Have Interstitial Ads — Hey, if I dish it out, I have to be able to take it, too. And take it today I have. We've put up this ridiculous interstitial ad here on TechCrunch that appears the first time you visit the site. — It's an ad for Dell.

Discussion: Gawker

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Fortune:

The iPad newsstand that works — Zinio's digital revenues have grown 350% since last April. Will Apple put a stop to that? — When we wrote a few weeks ago about the signal failure of Apple's iPad to halt the magazine industry's downward spiral (See Why digital newsstands stink), we had forgotten about Zinio.

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and Poynter

Greg Sandoval / CNET News:

Netflix: Why Time Warner slams us — Time Warner's very public bashing of Netflix in recent weeks is a result of the media conglomerate's frustration over having to bid against the Web's top video-rental service for Warner Bros. content, says a Netflix executive.

Discussion: paidContent, Hollywood Reporter, Broadcasting & Cable and GigaOM

David Goetzl / MediaPost:

WPP's Sorrell Calls For Pay Model For Content — WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell said Monday he believes it is imperative that a pay model for content should dominate, since media companies need more than ad dollars to afford continued production of top-tier content.

Discussion: Noted

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Obama has pre-SOTU lunch with TV news stars — Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, one of the attendees at the traditional, pre-State of the Union lunch at the White House, couldn't discuss specifics of the President Obama's address while on the air Tuesday afternoon.

Discussion: Mediaite, FishbowlDC and TVNewser

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

ASME Unveils New Guidelines for Magazine Web Sites — Group tries to lay down law on advertising, editorial distinction — With Web sites increasingly permissive about the kinds of ads they'll accept, the American Society of Magazine Editors is trying to push back.