Mediagazer: BBC to buy out Lonely Planet (Mark Sweney/Guardian)

11:50 AM ET, February 18, 2011

Top News:

Regulators Eye Apple Anew — Enforcers Interested in Whether Digital-Subscription Rules Stifle Competition — WASHINGTON—U.S. antitrust enforcers have begun looking at the terms Apple Inc. set this week for media companies who want to sell their content on its popular iPad and other devices …

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Newsonomics of Apple/Press+/Google's pay-for-all — Editor's Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. — We could call this week a paid content free-for-all, but that's self-contradictory.

Discussion: PadGadget, Canadian Magazines, PC World, mediabistro.com, Tech Trader Daily and O'Reilly Radar

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:

Time Inc. Chief Executive Jack Griffin Out — The chief executive of Time Inc., Jack Griffin, is leaving the company after less than six months on the job — forced out over what company executives said was a widespread sense that his management style was brusque and did not fit the corporate culture there.

Keith J. Kelly / @media_ink: Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin fired after only five months on the job. Stunning development

Victoria Barret / Upside Potential:

Is Pure Journalism Unaffordable? — Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider is in Barcelona this week covering the Mobile World Conference. In a post about the event, he mentions this aside: … Woah. Let's be clear, here. Samsung is buying influence. If they didn't think they were …

Discussion: CJR and Crikey

Jim Romenesko / Poynter: Tech firms help news sites with Mobile World Congress expenses

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

BBC Finally Turns iPlayer In To A VOD TV Aggregator — Commercial public TV broadcasters are about to get a big boost to their web-based VOD services from the BBC. — Nine months after it first announced it, the BBC has finally started including in BBC iPlayer linked VOD listings for counterpart sites.

Discussion: GigaOM

Claude Brodesser-Akner / New York Magazine:

YouTube Offering Millions for Celebrity-Created Content — In a move designed to vastly improve the quality of its content, Google's YouTube is undertaking what's understood to be a massive bid to attract Hollywood talent — one that has agents practically leaping out of their John Lobbs …

Discussion: GigaOM

Hollywood Reporter:

How the Kardashians Made $65 Million Last Year … Sitting cross-legged on her black-sheeted bed amid stacks of papers and photos, Kris Jenner — matriarch of reality TV's juggernaut family— is trying to explain the unexplainable: Why the Kardashians? Why are her children's squabbles …

Discussion: Celebritology 2.0 and Gawker

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Spotify Signs On EMI for U.S. Launch. At Least One More to Go... It's getting closer: Spotify has finalized a U.S. distribution deal with EMI Music, multiple sources tell me. — Both EMI and Spotify declined to comment. — Coupled with last month's Sony deal, Spotify now has the approval …

Discussion: Music Ally, hypebot, Electronista, SAI, The Next Web and Gizmodo, more at Techmeme »

Marauder / Daily Marauder:

THE FUTURE OF NEWS: FLIPBOARD VS. THE DAILY — Taking a stance on Flipboard vs. The Daily, two iPad applications which supply news content to their audiences, highlights the friction between old media and new and distinguishes the ways two companies are bringing information to users.

Discussion: The Huffington Post

ReadWriteWeb:

Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn't Work — For almost four years, since the Facebook Platform was launched, I have been involved in delivering Facebook apps for top brands such as CBS, NBC, Lifetime, Universal Music, Visa and more. Here's what we have learned doesn't work, and more importantly, what does work.

Peter Walker / Guardian:

Glenn Mulcaire ‘passed information to several News of the World journalists’ — Lawyer for agent Sky Andrew tells high court that private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's claim 'hits paper's defence for six' — Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News …

Discussion: Press Gazette

Michelle Minkoff:

An inside look at life at PBS News — Our industry of “news application development” is still in its infancy. As I'm given the freedom to reinvent how we do news apps over at PBS News, I'm relying heavily on staying plugged in to what's going on elsewhere in the community. What have people done so far?

Discussion: Poynter and Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry / SAI:

After Its Big Redesign, Gawker Media Pageviews Seem To Be Coming Back — Analytics data seems to show that pageviews are dropping on Gawker Media sites since its redesign — but that the people who do stick around click more. (TechCrunch) — Gawker Media's redesign has attracted tons of criticism.

Discussion: TechCrunch and Poynter, more at Techmeme »

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

BBC to buy out Lonely Planet — BBC Worldwide to pay £42m to complete controversial purchase of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet — BBC Worldwide is paying A$67.2m (£42.1m) to acquire the 25% of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet that it does not already own.

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Disney Interactive Media Group: The Turnaround Plan — The new chiefs at struggling Disney (NYSE: DIS) Interactive Media Group pledged to put the division in the black by 2013 at an investors conference for the conglomerate Thursday in Anaheim, Calif. Making their first public appearance since joining Disney …

Discussion: VideoNuze, Media Money … and Future of Journalism

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

CBS News Grows Online Audience with Distributed, Live Streaming Strategy — WASHINGTON — CBSNews.com has been building a growing audience, passing ABC News and Fox News in online traffic late last year. — Part of the success around the network's growth has been by streaming programming …

Chris Roush / Talking Biz News:

Will someone please teach Dennis Kneale to stop promoting himself? — TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE — Dennis Kneale, who left CNBC in the fall for a new gig at Fox Business Network, is doing a lot of shameless promotion on Twitter in recent weeks. — Kneale was on the Don Imus show this morning …

Discussion: Inside Cable News

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Jarvis: Publicness Needs Its Advocates, Just Like Privacy — At a conference in British Columbia this morning, author and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn't want to hear: that society needs more protection …

Discussion: BuzzMachine and rebootconference.com

Molly Stark Dean / mediabistro.com:

Dana Loesch once thought CNN was the ‘Biggest Bunch of Idiot Blockheads’. Now she works for them — CNN hired Dana Loesch as a political contributor last week; however, MediaMatters dug up some blog posts dating back several years in which Loesch calls CNN “the biggest bunch of idiot blockheads …

Discussion: Media Matters for America, Media Matters for America and Big Journalism