Mediagazer: Launch Day at Forbes: What (and how) we're building (Andrea Spiegel/de.tech.ting)

7:40 AM ET, January 25, 2011

Top News:

Olbermann Split Came After Years of Tension — MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.

Lindsay Powers / Hollywood Reporter:

EXCLUSIVE: Subway Won't Advertise on Second Episode of MTV's Skins … Another major sponsor has pulled out of advertising on MTV's controversial show, Skins. — A rep for Subway tells The Hollywood Reporter that the sandwich chain “will not be advertising on [Monday's] episode.”

Discussion: AdAge, Moneywood, Guardian, MediaPost, Advocate, RADAR, Gothamist, Inside TV, TMZ.com and The Wrap

Andrea Spiegel / de.tech.ting:

Launch Day at Forbes: What (and how) we're building — I sometimes think of our effort to reshape Forbes as Extreme Makeover: Media Edition. It's daunting to take on a media entity with a 93-year legacy and a huge sitemap. It's not like tearing down a vacant building and re-imagining from scratch.

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

HuffPo ‘fires’ unpaid blogger for participating in labor demonstration — On Wednesday, January 19, more than 200 union members stormed into a Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Washington, D.C., and held a guerrilla-style demonstration for about 10 minutes, protesting a home-builders' group …

Discussion: Poynter, Runnin' Scared and Talking Biz News

MediaShift Idea Lab:

Salon.com Retracts Vaccination Story, But Shouldn't Delete It — Last week Salon.com, a publication I helped edit for many years, officially retracted “Deadly Immunity,” a 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that had promoted scientific research (never very persuasive and now widely discredited) …

Michael Zimbalist / AdAge:

Out of Digital Chaos, a New Stability for Media — An Ecosystem With Many Different Species of Devices, All Competing for the Scarcest Resource: Our Attention — Somewhere over the Rockies during my flight home from CES, I took a stroll through the cabin to help alleviate the misfortune of having been assigned a middle seat.

Erik Huggers / About the BBC blog:

Reshaping BBC Online — The BBC has always created and embraced emerging technologies to remain relevant. Text based journalism, through Ceefax, didn't really feature in the BBC until the late 1970s, which later evolved into BBC Red Button and the BBC News website, the backbone of BBC Online.

Discussion: Guardian, BBC, Reuters, BBC, Top Digital Journal News, GigaOM, Globe and Mail, FT tech hub, Free Press, Editors Weblog and The Next Web

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:
BBC's Big Online Cuts: Full Details Announcement

Discussion: paidContent, Guardian, Media Week, BBC, Poynter and WebNewser

New York Post:

Condé to 1 WTC: ‘Matter of time’ — Five months after Condé Nast and the Port Authority signed a non-binding “letter of intent,” a completed lease for the glam-magazine factory to move to 1 World Trade Center is inevitable, sources predicted. — The only disagreement is over timing.

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Mark Bittman ends NYT ‘Minimalist’ column after 13 years; heads to opinion section, magazine — Mark Bittman has long considered himself an advocate for eating well. For more than 13 years, Bittman says he's expressed his views “largely through recipes” in the weekly New York Times column, “The Minimalist.”

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Poynter, Media News International and Gawker

MinnPost:

A breakthrough year for MinnPost — In 2010, MinnPost ran its first surplus. — A $17,594 surplus on spending of $1.261 million may not sound like much. But this is tremendous vindication for our business model, because it resulted from 18 percent revenue growth, not budget-cutting.

Discussion: Poynter and KnightBlog

Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:

Twitter App Maker UberMedia Buys Social News Site Mixx — UberMedia, which is behind Twitter clients like Echofon and Twidroyd, has purchased Digg-like news site Mixx. On Mixx, users post interesting stories, photos, or videos and vote and comment on those that others submit …

Discussion: TechCrunch and NetworkEffect

Corbin Hiar / PBS:

NYU's Studio 20 Creates Innovative, Collaborative Hothouse — Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by the USC Annenberg nine-month M.A. in Specialized Journalism. USC's highly customized degree programs are tailored to the experienced journalist and gifted amateur.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Parr / Mashable:

Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format — Facebook is rolling out Sponsored Stories, a new ad format that turns your friends' actions into promoted content. — Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout the News Feed,” Facebook Product Marketing Lead Jim Squires told Mashable.

more at Techmeme »

Ethan Bauley / Data Central:

The Fiscal Times Launches Inaugural Print Edition Through HP MagCloud — In the midst of a surge of news publications moving from print distribution to online-only, today The Fiscal Times became one of the first digital news publications to do the opposite: offer print editions after starting from an online-only model.

Discussion: WebNewser and FishbowlDC, Thanks:hpnews

James Hibberd / Inside TV:

Advice columnist Dan Savage lands MTV pilot — EXCLUSIVE — Savage Love may be coming to MTV. — Columnist Dan Savage is working on an advice show for the network. — MTV has ordered a pilot that follows Savage as he tours college campuses giving his brand of brutally honest (and sometimes graphic) sex and relationship advice.

Discussion: TVWeek.com, Advocate and Gawker

Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:

Apple's bet on publishing — Apple's upcoming subscription plan is making large publishing companies hysterical. Rightfully so. Some of them built a complete business model for the iPad based on a commercial agreement that is now being revoked. Apple is not only changing the rules …

Discussion: Fortune, ReadWriteWeb, TeleRead and GigaOM, more at Techmeme »