Mediagazer: Q&A: Former NYT Shanghai Bureau Chief Howard French (Joel Meares/CJR)

8:40 AM ET, January 26, 2011

Top News:

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 …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

News Corp. Showdown: Roger Ailes vs. Rupert Murdoch's Kids — Lachlan Murdoch. Image by Getty Images via @daylife — Rupert Murdoch turns 80 in less than two months, and he's finally acting like it. According to The Daily Beast's Peter Lauria, the News Corp. chairman is moving toward …

Discussion: Yahoo! News, Ben Smith's Blog, TVNewser and Runnin' Scared

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
News Corp.'s Daily iPad Newspaper Launching “In the Next Few Weeks”

Discussion: Guardian and New York Observer

Peter Lauria / The Daily Beast:
Rupert Murdoch's Family Reunion

Discussion: Gawker, MediaPost, FishbowlNY, The Corsair and Company Town

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

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

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, Online NewsHour and On Media's Blog, 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

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, Ars Technica, Bits and paidContent, Thanks:mathewi

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

Discussion: Media Junkies, Unite!

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

Discussion: Top Digital Journal News, VentureBeat and The Wall Blog

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

Discussion: Noted and Mixed Media

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: NetNewsCheck Latest, News: News blog, Runnin' Scared and New York Observer

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:
NY Times considers creating an ‘EZ Pass lane for leakers’

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

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

Joel Meares / CJR:

Q&A: Former NYT Shanghai Bureau Chief Howard French — On how the press covered Hu Jintao's visit … Much of the coverage of President Hu's visit, outside of the business pages at least, focused on the joint press conference Hu and Obama gave at the White House on Wednesday.

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog

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

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: rbr.com and Future of Journalism

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.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

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, GigaOM and Broadcasting & Cable

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

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