Mediagazer: Networks are paying close attention to social media (Steve Safran/Lost Remote)

Johnnie L. Roberts / The Wrap:

It's Got NBCU ... Now Comcast Has a Fight for Reinvention — From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, all eyes will be glued to Comcast's top-priority mission: scripting television's greatest comeback narrative at also-ran NBC, which the cable giant formally took control of on Friday.

Discussion: Multichannel and Broadcasting & Cable

U.S. Media and Entertainment Deal Volume Rose 3% in 2010 … NEW YORK - U.S. entertainment and media industry merger and acquisition activity rose slightly in 2010 when looking at the number of deals and outpaced the overall U.S. deal market, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Discussion: MediaPost

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 CJR

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: Guardian, News: News blog, Lost Remote, Soaring on a Pig …, The Corsair and The Atlantic Online

Curt Hopkins / ReadWriteWeb:
Al Jazeera Releases Egypt Coverage Under Creative Commons (UPDATED)

Discussion: Epicenter, VentureBeat, Nieman Journalism Lab, ShortFormBlog and Wilshire & Washington

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

Steve Safran / Lost Remote:

Networks are paying close attention to social media — Encouraging news came out of Friday's #TVNext conference in Boston: the networks are paying attention to social media and are working on strategies to merge it with their TV shows. The Boston advertising agency Hill Holiday put …

Discussion: CBS Boston and Future of Journalism

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 …

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

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

Nellie Andreeva / Deadline.com:

Aaron Sorkin's Cable News Drama Is A Go At HBO With Pilot Order, Scott Rudin Producing — EXCLUSIVE: Aaron Sorkin long-gestating drama set behind the scenes of a nightly cable news show is becoming a reality. HBO has closed a deal for a pilot order to the project, which reunites …

Discussion: The Wire, Gawker, From Inside the Box, AintItCool and On Media's Blog

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