Mediagazer: Search engine optimization won't work forever. (Farhad Manjoo/Slate)

10:55 PM ET, February 8, 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, The Huffington Post, PE Hub Blog, Mediaite and Chickaboomer

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 »

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz / Harper's BAZAAR:

ARIANNA VS. TINA? — As founders of influential news sites the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown seem like natural Darwinian enemies. But anyone hoping for a juicy media catfight will have to get their kicks elsewhere.

Discussion: New York Observer, SAI, FishbowlNY, Online NewsHour, Fortune and the Econsultancy blog

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, The Huffington Post, CJR, SAI, The Wire and San Francisco Peninsula …

Drudge Report:
ARIANNA: $18 MILLION WOMAN!

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

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

Discussion: paidContent, Mediaite and SAI

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

Discussion: Slate, Fortune, @ariannahuff, Mixed Media, Guardian, Scocca, Venture Capital Dispatch, The Awl and AmSpecBlog

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

Discussion: BoomTown, The Wrap, The Huffington Post, AdExchanger.com and GigaOM

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

Discussion: John Battelle's Searchblog

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:
The New HuffPo-AOL Combo: The Free, Anti-Murdoch Alternative?

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, The Wire, SAI and Poynter

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 …

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

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

Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:

Twitter promoted tweets - the AdWords for live news? — Remember all that fuss about newspapers bidding on Google Adwords to drive traffic to their site? Well here's a Web 2.0 twist on the idea: Al Jazeera using sponsored tweets to raise awareness of their Egypt coverage. — Twitter itself has the background.

Discussion: Lost Remote, Media Research Center and Twitter Media

Nikki Usher / Nieman Journalism Lab:
How Egypt's uprising is helping redefine the idea of a “media event”

Discussion: BBC and Future of Journalism

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

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

David Cohen / mediabistro.com:

Social Media Week: The Internet and Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already in a Post-Social-Media World? — The Science and Technology Hub at Google's New York outpost was the site of Monday afternoon's The Internet and Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already in a Post-Social-Media World? …

Discussion: NYConvergence.com

Ben Popper / New York Observer:
The Pied Piper of Social Media

Discussion: mediabistro.com and Media News International

Stephen Coles / Fonts In Use:

The Daily - Design trumps content in launch of first major tablet newspaper. — Founded by the world's most notorious media magnate, preceded by months of speculation and fanfare, and backed with unusually strong support from Apple, The Daily is the most anticipated digital publication since publications went digital.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, TeleRead and MacStories

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 Wire and New York Post

Jay Yarow / The Wire:
Nick Denton Makes A Cash Bet Gawker Media Won't Lose Pageviews With New Format

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, The Next Web and Digits

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 »

Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:

How private is a tweet? — The PCC has made its first rulings on a complaint over newspapers republishing a person's tweets. The background to this is the publication in The Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday of tweets by civil servant Sarah Baskerville.

Discussion: Guardian, pcc.org.uk, paidContent, Anglophenia blog, Jon Slattery and Press Gazette

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.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Spotify Clears Its Throat for a U.S. Launch in “Coming Months” — Spotify can't come to the U.S. until it nails down more deals with the major labels. But here's another indicator of the music service's confidence in an American debut sometime...soonish. — It's a note to the European …