Mediagazer: William Shatner and Amanda Tapping to Co-Star in Web Drama (Etan Vlessing/Hollywood Reporter)

12:50 PM ET, February 1, 2011

Top News:

Apple Moves to Tighten Control of App Store — SAN FRANCISCO — Apple is further tightening its control of the App Store. — The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access …

Ingrid Lunden / mocoNews:
Bad News For The Digital Newsstand: Apple Rejects Sony Reader App

Discussion: TechCrunch, MacRumors and The Loop

Vadim Lavrusik / Mashable!:

How Journalists Are Using Social Media to Report on the Egyptian Demonstrations — With the Internet still inaccessible for the majority of people in Egypt, much of the international community is relying on journalists with satellite phones for real-time updates on the violent protests calling …

Discussion: Boston Globe, CNET News, Techland, Editors Weblog, The Maynard Institute, PC Magazine, The News About The News, Fast Company and NewsLab, more at Techmeme »

Matea Gold / Los Angeles Times:

Through Egypt, Al Jazeera English has an American moment — The English-language channel, dogged by its Arabic counterpart's image, has had little luck in securing U.S. cable contracts in its four years on the air, but the crisis in Egypt has brought American viewers flocking to its online live stream.

Discussion: New York Times, Journalism.co.uk, On Media's Blog, Hot Air, ArtsBeat, The Atlantic Online, War in Context and Babylon & Beyond

Amy Gahran / Knight Digital Media Center All-Site Feed:
How Al Jazeera is putting audio updates from Egypt online fast

Discussion: Wall Street Journal and contentious.com

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
YouTube Steps Up to Shine Light on Egypt

Discussion: YouTube Blog and WebNewser

Julie Moos / Poynter:
How Obama, Clinton legitimized Twitter & Facebook as tools of democracy in Egypt

Discussion: Yahoo! News, Tom Watson, SpringBoardMedia and Committee to Protect …

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:
With Egypt in Crisis, Anchors Head to Cairo

Discussion: Mediaite, NPR, New York Post, On Media's Blog, Broadcasting & Cable, TVNewser, Yahoo! News, Nieman Journalism Lab, Aljazeera and The Daily Beast

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Rupert Murdoch Gives Guests a Sneak Peek of Tomorrow's “Daily” Tonight. Here's What They'll See. — The Daily makes its official debut tomorrow morning, at a press event at New York's Guggenheim museum. — But a select crowd will get to see the iPad newspaper tonight …

Discussion: VentureBeat and TeleRead

Damon Kiesow / Poynter:

The Daily staffers we identified came from NY Post, AP, The Atlantic, AOL News, national media companies — The staff of The Daily — Rupert Murdoch's new iPad newspaper that launches tomorrow — bring a wide range of print, online and broadcast experience, mostly at national media outlets …

Discussion: New York Magazine

Nicholas Carlson / SAI:

LEAKED: AOL's Master Plan — Two years into his tenure as AOL CEO, Tim Armstrong is stepping on the gas. — By April, he wants AOL editorial to increase its stories per day from 2,000 to 15,000. — He wants pageviews per story to jump from 1,500 to 7,000.

Discussion: @womenaredreamer, @carr2n, @romenesko, Poynter and The Wire

Tram Whitehurst / rjionline.org: The Patch Effect: What AOL's new venture could mean for hyperlocal news

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results — Blekko, the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Twist Image and Search Engine Land

Eric Enge / Search Engine Land: The Rise And Fall Of Content Farms

David Card / GigaOM:
Demand Media: Search Spam or the Future of Content?

Discussion: (Re)Structuring Journalism

Zeke Turner / WWD Media Headlines:

Memo Pad: Trailing Tina Brown... Speaking of the Web... TRAILING TINA: After 19 years at The New Yorker, Peter Boyer is going to work for Tina Brown again. He worked for her at Vanity Fair and, in 1992, followed her to The New Yorker. “Tina brought me into magazine journalism,” he said.

Discussion: Poynter, FishbowlNY and Yahoo! News

PR Newswire:
Newsweek and The Daily Beast Merge

Discussion: mediabistro.com and AFL-CIO NOW BLOG

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:
Newsweek and Daily Beast Hire Two More

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Yahoo! News, Poynter, The Daily Beast, NetNewsCheck Latest, LA Observed, MediaPost, On Media's Blog, New York Magazine and Gawker

Guardian:

Lionel Barber's Hugh Cudlipp lecture: the full text — Speech by the Financial Times editor at London College of Communication — The Business of Journalism: a View from the Frontline — Thank you Lady Cudlipp, trustees, and students of the London College of Communication for inviting me here tonight ...

Discussion: Jon Slattery, paidContent, Press Gazette, Future of Journalism and Talking Biz News

Felix Salmon:
Paywalls and cannibalization

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Greg Sandoval / Media Maverick:

Hey iTunes, here comes Google Music, Spotify — Google is getting closer to debuting a music service, according to multiple music industry sources who spoke to CNET on condition of anonymity. — Google Music could launch as soon as next month, wrote Brad Stone of BusinessWeek in a story last week.

Discussion: Guardian, SAI, hypebot, Search Engine Land and Electronista, more at Techmeme »

Alexandra Topping / Guardian:
Music industry struggles to make digital leap of faith

Discussion: MediaMemo, 9 to 5 Mac, hypebot and Telegraph

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Web Video Doubter Mark Cuban Invests in Web Video Studio Revision3 — Mark Cuban, Web video skeptic? Meet Mark Cuban, Web video investor. — The voluble entrepreneur and investor, who made his fortune off Web video during the first Internet boom, is dabbling in it again …

Discussion: VentureBeat

Caroline McCarthy / The Social:

Facebook's next big media move: Comments — Facebook is planning to launch a third-party commenting system in a matter of weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the new product. This new technology could see Facebook as the engine behind the comments system on many high-profile blogs …

Joe Coscarelli / Runnin' Scared:

Gabriel Snyder to The Atlantic Wire: On Growing Up an Aggregator — Gabriel Snyder, who was fired by Nick Denton as the editor-in-chief of Gawker in February 2010, will be joining The Atlantic as the editor of the magazine's Atlantic Wire aggregation website, according to an Observer report today.

Discussion: Noted, I Had A Dream, Joe, Snarkmarket, NYConvergence.com, The Wrap, Mediaite, Yahoo! News and Soup

Etan Vlessing / Hollywood Reporter:

William Shatner and Amanda Tapping to Co-Star in Web Drama … TORONTO - What happens at Comic-Con apparently goes online: William Shatner and Amanda Tapping (Sanctuary, Stargate SG-1) are teaming up in The Zenoids, an animated series to launch on Shatner's social website MyOuterspace.com.

Discussion: Underwire

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg / Wall Street Journal:

Author, Amazon.com Elbow Aside Middleman — Delivering on his promise to try a new publishing model, popular business-book author Seth Godin is releasing his first new title since leaving his long-time publishing house last summer. — While he's doing it without a publisher, he's not exactly going it alone.

Ray Wert / Jalopnik:

Welcome to the new Jalopnik 5.0! — You'll notice Jalopnik's front page looks quite a bit different today. There's this one big story taking up most of the page, and an infinitely scrolling list of today's headlines in a column down the right side of the page.

Discussion: Boing Boing, Gawker.TV, @antderosa and @raywert

Beet.TV:

The AP's Success on YouTube: It's All About the Breaking News — WASHINGTON, DC — The Associated Press has found considerable traction on YouTube, with some 650 million video views registered since the channel launched in 2006. — According to Kevin Roach, who heads broadcast news operations …

Discussion: WebNewser and The Huffington Post