Mediagazer: Now This Is a Content Mill: Narrative Science Raises $6 Million … (Peter Kafka/MediaMemo)

8:30 PM ET, January 29, 2011

Top News:

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Why Al-Jazeera Owns Internet TV's Egypt Coverage — Tanks were greeted by protesters, police vehicles went up in flames and looters started to empty the building of the ruling party NDP in Cairo late Friday: These and more astonishing images of a regime on the verge of collapse …

Discussion: Al Jazeera Blogs and Epicenter

Robert F. Worth / New York Times:

Al Jazeera Covers Protests Despite Hurdles — WASHINGTON — As street protests raged across Egypt on Friday, with the future of the Arab world seeming to hang in the balance, rapt viewers across the region — and the globe — watched it unfold on Al Jazeera, which kept up an almost continuous …

Discussion: Soaring on a Pig …, The Corsair, The Atlantic Online and Lost Remote

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:

BBC protests at police assault on its Cairo correspondent — The BBC is to make an official protest to the Egyptian authorities after one of its journalists was assaulted by police in Cairo today. — Assad Sawey, the BBC's Cairo correspondent, was deliberately assaulted by police …

Discussion: BBC, Committee to Protect … and Reporters sans frontières

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Now This Is a Content Mill: Narrative Science Raises $6 Million for Human-Free Stories — Demand Media and its peers pay lots of writers small sums in order to generate lots and lots of content, with the help of computers. But you can do it for even less if you eliminate the writers altogether.

Discussion: Trends in the Living Networks

Joe Coscarelli / Runnin' Scared:

Brisenia Flores Is Still Not Quite National News: Why? — We've written twice this week about the trial of Shawna Forde, a troubled anti-immigration crusader, who stands charged with first degree murder for the 2009 killing of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arizona.

Discussion: Hit & Run and Joe Coscarelli

Arianna Huffington / Prospect Magazine:

If I ruled the world: Arianna Huffington — If I ruled the world, my first goal would be to make it easier to cut through to the facts. At the moment, we are all drowning in spin, smokescreens and lies. Those who perpetrated the two biggest policy disasters of the past ten years …

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Was Jeff Zucker Really So Bad For NBC Universal? — Today is Jeff Zucker's last day as CEO of NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), where he spent nearly a quarter of a century. Not since Gerald Levin destroyed about $200 billion in shareholder value has a more maligned executive emerged from the media world, which is really saying something.

Discussion: GigaOM

Dylan Stableford / The Wrap:

From Suicide Bombs to ‘Rahmageddon’: A Day in the Life of the Homepage — News moves fast in 2011, almost as fast as the websites that cover it. What it also reveals is that not all digital media is equal. — TheWrap spent one mind-numbing day on Jan. 24 looking at the world's …

Discussion: WebNewser

Melissa Ulbricht / MediaShift Idea Lab:

How WNYC Used Texts from Citizens To Map Snowstorm — The radio station WNYC is creating on-air and online stories using two things that are very familiar to people in the Northeastern United States: mobile phones and snow. — A snowstorm over the holidays was the heaviest December snowfall in six decades.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab

Rachel Rose Hartman / Yahoo! News:

Biden thinks The Onion's spoofs of him are ‘hilarious’ — A mock photo of Vice President Joe Biden washing a Trans-Am shirtless. Strange? Distasteful? Crossing the line? — Not so, Biden says. — “I think it's hilarious,” Biden told Yahoo! in a wide-ranging interview Thursday.