Mediagazer: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race (Danny Sullivan/Search Engine Land)

10:55 AM ET, February 9, 2011

Top News:

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.

Discussion: Adam Sherk and SAI, more at Techmeme »

Tim Rutten / Los Angeles Times:

AOL ♥ HuffPo. The loser? Journalism — To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates. — Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL's $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape …

Discussion: Washington Post, Poynter and LA Observed

Keith Richman / AdAge:

Now That AOL Has Huffpo, Where's the Video? — AOL's Leaked Planning Document Says Video Is the Game, but Huffington Post Won't Help Them Get There — As everyone now knows, AOL agreed yesterday to acquire The Huffington Post. There has been a lot of solid analysis as to the rationale of the deal …

Discussion: GigaOM and LA Observed

Felix Salmon:
Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo

Discussion: Mixed Media, Soup, Runnin' Scared and Future of Journalism

David Kaplan / paidContent:
AOL-HuffPo: A Lot Of Scale—But Will Advertisers Care?

Discussion: Future of Journalism, The Wire and Burst Media Company Blog

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land: Demand Media & Being “The Best Click” On Google

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

Discussion: Kempton, Los Angeles Times and paidContent

Drudge Report:
ARIANNA: $18 MILLION WOMAN!

Discussion: The Wire, New York Observer, Hollywood Reporter, New York Magazine, Screenwerk, Search Engine Land, Fimoculous, Gawker and The Huffington Post

Andrea Morabito / Broadcasting & Cable:

New CBS News Chair: 'I Don't Know Whether' Couric Wants To Stay — Jeff Fager says splitting news and sports jobs represents a recommitment to news by the network — On the day his new position as Chairman of CBS News was announced, Jeff Fager says he doesn't know yet whether Katie Couric wants …

Discussion: Poynter, On Media's Blog, B&C, mediabistro.com, The Huffington Post, Company Town, Yahoo! News and Chickaboomer

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

CBS Wants Contract Extension for Katie Couric — The network, which is shaking up its management, has asked anchor Katie Couric to stay on through the 2012 elections—for significantly less money than her original $15 million deal, a source tells Howard Kurtz.

Discussion: Yahoo! News and The Huffington Post

Media Decoder:
Jeff Fager to Be Named Chairman of CBS News

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

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: The Huffington Post, Media & Entertainment, Inside Cable News, Deal Journal, Fortune, Poynter and MediaPost

current.com:
Keith Olbermann to Host Major New Nightly Primetime News and …

Discussion: 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, paidContent, @keitholbermann, Politics Daily, Media Decoder and AOL News

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: Guardian, Webmetricsguru, The Informer and Washington Post, more at Techmeme »

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

Discussion: Future of Journalism, The Huffington Post, Poynter, New York Observer, FishbowlNY and SAI

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.

Discussion: isolani: weblog

Latoya Peterson / Poynter:
How Gawker's redesign subverts the scannable culture of the Internet …

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

Associated Press:

Newspaper stocks jump on content hopes — Newspaper stocks jump after AOL deal shows content still matters — Related Quotes … NEW YORK (AP) — Newspaper stocks jumped Monday after AOL agreed to buy online news site Huffington Post for $315 million, the latest in a string of deals …

Discussion: blogs.journalism.co.uk and Mediaite

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Charlotte Observer shows how news orgs should mix journalism and business — Editors at the Charlotte Observer have taken some heat for using the North Carolina public records law to seek the e-mail addresses of about 23,000 people who signed up for alerts related to city services.

Daniel Danker / BBC:

BBC iPlayer apps, coming soon to Android and iPad — There's been a lot of speculation over the last 24 hours about BBC iPlayer apps for mobile, so I wanted to clarify our plans. — BBC iPlayer app on an iPad — As Erik Huggers announced at Mobile World Congress last year …

Discussion: Guardian, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, paidContent:UK and The Next Web

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

Biz Stone: Twitter Drives “Let's Watch It When It's On” Viewing — Twitter doesn't claim to have caused the biggest Super Bowl viewing audience in history, but maybe it helped, says Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Stone sees Twitter as helping drive live viewing by creating a shared experience.

The Wrap:

The Nikki Finke Photo: The Daily vs Deadline — Since last Thursday, the little-seen blogger Nikki Finke has been hunkered down in a war of attrition with News Corporation over the thing that she apparently fears more than anything on earth: a current photograph.

Discussion: @iwantmedia

Daniel D'Addario / New York Observer:

Gladwell Book Generator Reaches the Tipping Point — The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator, a website which launched yesterday, is catching on faster than those trendy shoes from The Tipping Point. The site allows readers to refresh and see a new, pastel-on-white cover of a book on scientific ideas.

Discussion: bookforum.com, Speakeasy, The Atlantic Wire, GalleyCat and TechCrunch

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Future Says Online Growth Now Off-Setting Print Shrinkage — October-to-January digital ad revenue at magazine publisher Future was 25 percent up from the same period a year earlier. — Future says that “more than compensated for a 10 percent decline in print advertising revenue …

Discussion: online.hemscottir.com and Future of Journalism

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

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.

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: TVNewser, BBC and Future of Journalism