Mediagazer: Would you ‘like’ (or dislike) a TV commercial? (Cory Bergman/Lost Remote)

5:30 PM ET, January 28, 2011

Top News:

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

TV Crews Struggle in Egyptian Chaos — Television crews in Cairo fought to stay on the air on Friday as protests enveloped major cities in Egypt. — Egyptian authorities adopted various tactics to halt live broadcasts from the capital city, but for the most part networks like CNN and NBC were able to send signals out.

Discussion: Multichannel, Lost Remote, Broadcasting & Cable, The Huffington Post, Poynter, GigaOM, Josh Braun's Blog and Wilshire & Washington

New York Times:

Seizing a Moment, Al Jazeera Galvanizes Arab Frustration — By ROBERT F. WORTH and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK — The protests rocking the Arab world this week have one thread uniting them: Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel whose aggressive coverage has helped propel insurgent emotions from one capital to the next.

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

NYT interviews Egyptian blogger via Skype — It looks like much of Egypt is without internet access at this hour, but earlier the NY Times interviewed Gigi Ibrahim (@Gsquare86), an Egyptian blogger and activist, who's been sending out a steady stream of tweets from Cairo. And they did it via Skype:

Discussion: Multichannel, Mediaite, Broadcasting & Cable, The Lede and NYConvergence.com

Curt Hopkins / ReadWriteWeb:

Al Jazeera Releases Egypt Coverage Under Creative Commons (UPDATED) — Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera has a long relationship with Creative Commons licensing. Now, for its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, it has released photographs via Flickr and video on a CC license.

Claire Atkinson / New York Post:

Zucker-Katie redux — Former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, expected to set up shop Monday on Park Avenue, is already lining up his next gig — he's talking about starting a syndicated talk show featuring CBS News anchor Katie Couric, according to three separate sources.

Discussion: Gawker, TVNewser, MediaPost, TVWeek.com, rbr.com, Company Town, Chickaboomer and New York Magazine

Damon Kiesow / Poynter:

New York Times, ProPublica explain how e-books help monetize old news, grow audience — New e-books from The New York Times and ProPublica highlight the potential for journalists to find new audiences, and possibly new revenue, for long-form reporting. — The two e-books launched this week …

Discussion: Epicenter and bookforum.com

Adam L. Penenberg / Washington Post:

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange: ‘Anarchist,’ ‘agitator,’ ‘arrogant’ and a journalist — The State Department called Julian Assange, the founder of the stateless anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, “an anarchist.” Sarah Palin taunted him as “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

Discussion: Gawker, The Firewall and SlashGear

Mark Hosenball / Reuters: Exclusive: The Next Generation of WikiLeaks

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

NBC News Digital Chief: Video News Consumption is Bigger Than Ever — Powered by a “billion” cameras, coupled with new devices for viewing, more consumers are watching video news than ever before, says Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News VP for Specials and Digital.

Discussion: msnbc.com, WebNewser and Josh Braun's Blog

Brett Pulley / Bloomberg:

New York Times Fixes Paywall Glitches to Balance Free vs Paid — New York Times Co. has been working to fix about 200 glitches in the technology for charging online readers of its namesake newspaper, just weeks before the project is scheduled to debut, said a person familiar with the matter.

Discussion: Poynter and Talking Biz News

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

MoJo's Egypt explainer: future-of-context ideas in action — This week's unrest in Egypt brings new relevance to an old question: How do you cover an event about which most of your readers have little or no background knowledge? — Mother Jones has found one good way to do that.

Discussion: Mediaite and Daily Kos

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

Would you ‘like’ (or dislike) a TV commercial? — You're liking lots of stuff on Facebook, why not “like” a commercial you see on TV? Google TV executive Mark Piesanen threw out that idea at the NATPE conference this week, explaining that technology under development by Canoe Ventures could power it.

Brad Stone / Business Week:

Larry Page's Google 3.0 — The company co-founder and his star deputies are trying to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth — Every Monday afternoon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., more than a dozen of Google's (GOOG) top executives gather in the company's boardroom.

Discussion: Fortune, The Atlantic Online, Search Engine Roundtable, Engadget, Search Engine Land, broadstuff, Gizmodo Australia, TiPb, New York Magazine, GigaOM, Electronista and 9 to 5 Mac

Ben Sisario / Media Decoder:

Spotify Close To A Deal With EMI — Spotify, a digital music service that has been popular in Europe but met roadblocks in its plans to enter the American market, is inching closer to its goal. A week after it signed an arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment for distribution in the United States …

Paul Farhi / Washington Post:

NPR probe of Juan Williams firing questions Ellen Weiss's management style — When Vivian Schiller became NPR's chief executive in early 2009, she knew enough to know that she didn't know very much about producing radio news. For that, Schiller, who formerly headed the New York Times' cable …

Discussion: Poynter, On Media's Blog and Gawker

Joseph Berger / New York Times:

Near City's Old Newspaper Row, the Media Are Returning — In the late 19th century, a cluster of buildings along or near Park Row, close to those busy news engines, City Hall and the city's courts, housed almost every daily newspaper in town — The Herald, The Sun, The Tribune, The World, The Journal and The Times.

Discussion: FishbowlNY and MediaPost