Mediagazer: Techmeme Opens the Door to Twitter Commentary by Select People (Marshall Kirkpatrick/ReadWriteWeb)

3:10 AM ET, February 9, 2011

Top News:

Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo — Tom McGeveran asks an important question, in his analysis of the AOL-HuffPo deal: … The answer to this question, I think, is also a key part of the reason why the NYT paywall is a bad idea. — It's worth using a specific example here …

Discussion: Mixed Media, Runnin' Scared, Future of Journalism, PE Hub Blog, Chickaboomer and The Huffington Post

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race — No stranger to controversy, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis threw down a gauntlet at his “content farm” competitors, arguing they're polluting the web and angering Google, to the detriment of searchers and their own companies.

Farhad Manjoo / Slate:

Search engine optimization won't work forever. — Are you wondering, “will AOL's acquisition of the Huffington Post be successful?” I bet you are, as that's been a common search engine query since the announcement earlier this week that AOL will buy the Huffington Post.

Discussion: Washington Post, The Informer, eMedia Vitals and AdScam/The Horror!, more at Techmeme »

David Kaplan / paidContent:

AOL-HuffPo: A Lot Of Scale—But Will Advertisers Care? — The surprise $315 million union of AOL (NYSE: AOL) and The Huffington Post offers some truly monumental scale, with the new Huffington Post Media Group boasting a reach 117 million American internet users and 270 million globally.

Discussion: AdAge, Burst Media Company Blog, CJR, SAI and The Wire

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz / Harper's BAZAAR:
ARIANNA VS. TINA?

Discussion: New York Observer, SAI, FishbowlNY, Online NewsHour, New Media Age and The Huffington Post

Laura Kusisto / New York Observer:
HuffPo Bloggers to Invade Dial-Up Daddy's ‘Funhouse’

Discussion: Kempton, Los Angeles Times and Mediaite

Drudge Report:
ARIANNA: $18 MILLION WOMAN!

Discussion: SAI, The Wire, New York Observer, Hollywood Reporter, New York Magazine, Screenwerk, Gawker and Fimoculous

Scott Rosenberg / Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard:
Huffington is to AOL as AOL was to Time Warner

Discussion: BoomTown, The Wrap, LA Observed, The Huffington Post, mediabistro.com and AdExchanger.com

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Live Blogging: Aol's Tim Armstrong & Arianna Huffington At Signal LA

Discussion: Poynter and John Battelle's Searchblog

Tom McGeveran / Capital New York:
AOL-HuffPo: Acquisition of means of production without being revolutionary at all

Discussion: Seeking Alpha, Fortune, @ariannahuff, Mixed Media and The Awl

Jason Pollock / The Huffington Post: HuffPo AOL Deal is A Gigantic Step Forward for Social Media

current.com:

Keith Olbermann to Host Major New Nightly Primetime News and Commentary Show on Current TV — Keith Olbermann, the acclaimed broadcaster and writer whose verbal pyrotechnics and moral passion have outraged, informed, and dazzled viewers of “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” for the past eight years …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Lost Remote, The Wire, Moneywood, Yahoo! News, LA Observed, Chickaboomer, @laceyvrose, @howardkurtz, The Marquee Blog, rbr.com, GigaOM, NY Daily News, The Wire, Tuned In, Gothamist, Politics Daily, paidContent, AOL News and PopEater

Media Decoder:

For Current TV, Adding Olbermann Is Way to Gain an Identity — The small cable channel Current TV hopes that Keith Olbermann can do for it what he did for MSNBC: give it a clear identity. — The channel, co-founded by Al Gore five years ago, said Tuesday that Mr. Olbermann would start producing …

Discussion: Inside Cable News, Deal Journal, Fortune, Poynter, MediaPost and paidContent

Keith Olbermann / @keitholbermann:
Greetings from Keith Olbermann, Chief News Officer of Current Media! And awayyyyyy we go! #FOK

Discussion: @howardkurtz, @algore, @brianstelter, Gawker, Faster Forward, Moraes on TV, The Daily Caller and AOL News

Latoya Peterson / Poynter:

How Gawker's redesign subverts the scannable culture of the Internet it helped create — It's only Tuesday, and already it has been a tough week for Gawker Media. — The popular blogging house announced its plans for a brand refresher back in December, part of Nick Denton's grand vision to move “beyond the blog.”

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, The Wire, New York Post and Nieman Journalism Lab

Matt Brian / The Next Web:

Why has Gawker disappeared from Google News? [Updated] — Updates at the foot of the post. — Sites belonging to Nick Denton's Gawker Media network have gradually received major facelifts over the past couple of days, introducing a new style that ensures popular articles are never buried by the constant addition of fresh content.

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Techmeme Opens the Door to Twitter Commentary by Select People — Technology news aggregator Techmeme sent an email today to a select group of readers it has put on a whitelist of Twitter users whose short commentary about news of the day will appear automatically on the site.

Discussion: Podcasting News, more at Techmeme »

Nikki Usher / Nieman Journalism Lab:

How Egypt's uprising is helping redefine the idea of a “media event” — In the fall of 1989, television screens in Wenceslas Square in Prague broadcast the massive rallies of the Velvet Revolution to the protesting public. It was a media event where television served as an intermediary, unveiling change as it took place.

Discussion: BBC and Future of Journalism

Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:
Twitter promoted tweets - the AdWords for live news?

Discussion: Lost Remote, Media Research Center and Twitter Media

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Mashable, tackling info overload, launches a Follow function keyed to user networks and interests — Mashable currently boasts 12 million unique visitors per month — making the social media-focused news site the largest independent tech news site on the web. It churns out huge quantities of stories, every day.

Discussion: Mashable!, Thanks:lavrusik

ADM / Fimoculous.com:

Ghost, Blogging — I thought it would be funny. — So I walked into Fimoculous on Christmas and started blogging anonymously, without telling Rex, the owner, beforehand. Which — you guessed it — means that pretty much everything posted here since then is by me, not him.

Discussion: Fimoculous and Snarkmarket

Josh Kalven / CJR:

Stock, Flow, and My Entrepreneurial Origin Story — The founder of newsbound.tv steps off the hamster wheel … I know, I know. I wrote last week that I'd devote my second Launch Pad column to the story of how I came to form Newsbound as a for-profit company.

Media Decoder:

Jeff Fager to Be Named Chairman of CBS News — 4:00 p.m. | Updated Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” will be named chairman of CBS News on Tuesday, with Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, returning exclusively to the sports division as chairman, the network said.

Discussion: The Daily Beast, Company Town, mediabistro.com, MediaPost, Multichannel, Broadcasting & Cable, Poynter, Moraes on TV, The Wrap, rbr.com, Mediaite, Talking Biz News, The Wire, On Media's Blog and New York Magazine

Dan Morrison / CJR:

Reporting Lessons for the Next Revolution — Three ways that conflict-zone journalists can always be prepared — I've been freelancing in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa since 2003. When the Mubarak regime shut down Egypt's Internet last week, I couldn't help wincing for all the reporters …

Discussion: The News About The News and Future of Journalism