Mediagazer: Arianna's Nearly Silent Partner (Lloyd Grove/The Daily Beast)

10:15 AM ET, February 14, 2011

Top News:

At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs — Some of the fizz, if not a great big bubble, seems to have returned to media, depending on how you define “media.” — There have been reports in The New York Times and elsewhere that Facebook is now valued at $50 billion, and The Wall Street Journal reported …

Discussion: On Media's Blog, Scripting News, Invisible Inkling, The Atlantic Online, LA Observed, @cyberjournalist, @markbriggs and @carr2n, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Huffpo Editor: Facebook Doesn't Pay You, So Why Should We? — Nico Pitney. Image by Center for American Progress Action Fund via Flickr — Media companies provide their audiences with information; social networks give their users ways to disseminate their own information and keep track of each other's activities.

Discussion: Mediaite, Poynter and Soup

Lloyd Grove / The Daily Beast:

Arianna's Nearly Silent Partner — Amid all the publicity over the Huffington Post-AOL sale last week, few have focused on the PR wizard who played a stealth role in its success. Lloyd Grove on the enigmatic Ken Lerer. — Pay attention to the man behind the curtain—even if he doesn't want you to.

Discussion: New York Observer

Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:
The Traffic Bubble — The new high tech-bubble might not be the one you're thinking of.

Discussion: New York Observer

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

Gutenberg of Arabia — At the critical climax of the Egyptian revolution, one of its sparks, Google's Wael Ghonim, told his followers on Twitter that he would not speak to them through media but instead through the Facebook page he created, the page he'd used to gather momentum for the protest …

Discussion: Too Long For Twitter …, Pressthink, The Daily Beast and Future of Journalism

Lloyd Grove / The Daily Beast:
Ayman Mohyeldin: Al Jazeera's Breakout Star

Discussion: On Media's Blog

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Al Jazeera's Social Revolution (In Realtime)

Discussion: CyberJournalist.net and THINK / Musings

Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal:

CBS, Couric Talks Draw Near — Katie Couric may end up doing something seen as unlikely just a few years ago: stay on as anchor of “CBS Evening News.” — Both CBS Corp. and Ms. Couric appear open to a new deal that would keep her at the network's news division beyond her current five-year deal …

New York Times:

Inside the Muslim (Journalist's) Mind — The Pakistani public, long skeptical of American goals in Afghanistan and the Muslim world, is now outraged over Washington's insistence that the authorities release a former United States Special Forces soldier charged with killing two Pakistani men last month.

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

MSNBC.com Finds Record Video Views with Newly Integrated Site and Blog Pages — WASHINGTON — MSNBC.com has reported that January was the biggest month for online video with 162 million views. — While big news stories including the Tuscon shootings, floods in Australia and the unrest in Egypt …

Anupreeta Das / Wall Street Journal:

J.P. Morgan Plans New-Media Fund — J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., riding the wave of investor interest in fast-growing, privately held technology firms such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., plans to start a fund that would invest in Internet and digital-media companies, people familiar with the matter said.

Discussion: New York Observer, digiday:DAILY and SAI, more at Techmeme »

Noam Cohen / New York Times:

A Conglomerate's Tack to Quash a Parody Site — Satire, George S. Kaufman once said, is what closes on Saturday night. And if that doesn't happen, some corporations may try to close it down in court. — In December, a fake news release was sent out by a group claiming to be Koch Industries …

Discussion: Gawker

Zeke Turner / WWD Media Headlines:

Memo Pad: Jacob Weisberg Blasts The Daily... Arrival at Departures... BLASTING THE DAILY: Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg certainly didn't mince words about Rupert Murdoch's new baby The Daily in a lecture to journalism students at Columbia University last Thursday.

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

Hey Grammys, you can't tape-delay social media — While viewers in most of the U.S. were wrapping up the live broadcast of The Grammy Awards, viewers on the West Coast were just getting started with the tape-delayed version, airing at 8 p.m. PT. As is customary for many viewers now …

Discussion: GRAMMY.com

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Twitter Feed Evolves Into a News Wire About Egypt — While people debated whether Web sites like Twitter were important in organizing protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Andy Carvin was organizing information about the protests in an innovative way. — Mr. Carvin's Twitter account was transformed …

Courtney Boyd Myers / The Next Web:

Silicon Prairie News gives its start-up community a voice — You've heard of Silicon Valley, and likely Silicon Alley, but have you heard of Silicon Prairie? — Silicon Prairie is geographically hard to define but it's there- somewhere between Chicago and Colorado, Dallas and the Dakotas …

New York Times:

Myanmar Arrests a Newspaper Editor — BANGKOK — The Australian editor of an English-language newspaper that publishes in Myanmar has been arrested and jailed in what an associate said Saturday was part of a business dispute. — The editor, Ross Dunkley, founded the newspaper …