Mediagazer: Middle East & North Africa - Media continue to be targets as governments crack down on protests (Reporters Without Borders)

6:25 PM ET, February 23, 2011

Top News:

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Clayman: The Daily's Free Trial Run Will Continue — News Corp.'s The Daily launched Feb. 2 with a two-week free trial sponsored by Verizon, ostensibly enough time to give potential subscribers a full taste. But launch glitches that stretched out for a week kept a lot of those potential subscribers …

Discussion: Poynter, Future of Journalism, NetNewsCheck Latest, Waxy.org, SAI and Soup

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

The Daily's Apple-Only Days Are Numbered: Android Coming This Spring — Rupert Murdoch leaned heavily on Apple to launch the Daily, and for now the iPad is the only place you can read News Corp.'s new digital newspaper. — But that exclusivity will end in a few months …

Discussion: Poynter, Future of Journalism, NetNewsCheck Latest, Examiner, Runnin' Scared, Engadget, VentureBeat, Electronista, MacStories, Techie Buzz, Gizmodo, Erictric, The Next Web and New York Observer, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Clabaugh / bizjournals:

Most TBD.com jobs being eliminated — Two weeks after Allbritton Communications' WJLA Channel 7 assumed operations for its startup TBD.com website, the company is eliminating the majority of TBD.com's jobs, according to an employee with knowledge of the cuts.

Discussion: Mediaweek, Poynter, @mthomps, @chanders, @mathewi, FishbowlDC, We Love DC, On Media's Blog and The Huffington Post

Michael Schaffer / City Desk:

TBD's Night of the Long Knives — Allbritton Communications is giving up on its efforts to reinvent local news for the online era. — Staffers at TBD.com, launched with great fanfare by Politico's parent company last summer, were informed one at a time this morning by editor Erik Wemple …

Discussion: Lost Remote, Washington Post, paidContent, Zombie Journalism, Poynter, NetNewsCheck Latest and @schoolofold

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

NHL Denies Talks To Stream Games Live On YouTube; NBA Looking At Asia — The National Hockey League is denying a Bloomberg report from Seoul that it is in talks with YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) to stream live games. Asked about the report based on comments by Google executives …

Discussion: Bloomberg, more at Techmeme »

Jun Yang / Bloomberg:

Google's YouTube Says It's in Negotiations to Stream Live NBA, NHL Games — Google Inc.'s YouTube said it's in talks with the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League to broadcast live games, building on the popularity of cricket's Indian Premier League last year.

Discussion: MediaPost, NetNewsCheck Latest, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable!, VentureBeat, Click Here Blog, Guardian, Bloomberg, Switched, 901am, The Consumerist, Online Video News, SAI and GigaOM

Mike Taylor / New York Observer:

Huff? Nooo! As Longtime Huffington Hands Cash In, Others ‘What If?’ — A certain amount of grumbling is par for the course in the media business these days—an ambient hum so pervasive you almost forget it's there. But that disconsolate keening seems to have reached a new pitch …

Discussion: Poynter, NetNewsCheck Latest, The Corsair, @lavrusik and The Wire

Reporters Without Borders:

Middle East & North Africa - Media continue to be targets as governments crack down on protests — As more and more people take to the streets in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen to demand democratic reforms and change, the authorities in these countries are responding with violence and are cracking …

Discussion: Jon Slattery and Committee to Protect …

Josh Halliday / Guardian:
Libya calls western journalists ‘outlaws’

Discussion: News: News blog and Libya February 17th, Thanks:joshhalliday

Sam Gustin / Epicenter:
Al-Jazeera in Talks With Comcast Over U.S. Distribution

Discussion: Al Jazeera Blogs and The Daily Dish

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Facebook TV Invasion Looms Via ‘American Idol’ Voting — Television is often included on that list of industries Facebook executives enjoy casually mentioning will have to rebuild themselves around social engagement. Don't look now, but Facebook may have just laid the foundation …

Discussion: Inside TV, Popdust and People.com

Telegraph:

X Factor fans to vote via Facebook — Fans of The X Factor will soon be able to vote for their favourite act on the social networking website Facebook, according to a report. — Executives at ITV's resoundingly popular talent contest are in talks with Facebook about creating a voting application, The Sun newspaper claimed.

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

Journal Register CEO: We Will Beat AOL's Patch and Huffington Post — The Journal Register Company, the big local newspaper chain with nearly 324 publications serving over 900 communities in 10 states, will beat AOL's Patch or the Huffington Post in its home markets, says CEO John Paton in this interview with Beet.TV.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and WebNewser

Elissa Strauss / Forward.com:

New Yorker, Harper's, NYRB and TNR Editors on the Dearth of Female Bylines — After my post last month about the gender disparity in magazine publishing, which was followed by VIDA's much more thorough and ultimately conclusive study, I, perhaps naively, expected to see a comment …

Discussion: New York Observer, New York Magazine, MediaPost, Poynter and Runnin' Scared

freemedia.at:

IPI News Innovation Contest: International Press Institute and Google announce 2.7 Million Dollar Grant — Project aimed to create “breakthrough ideas with the potential to create lasting impact” — The International Press Institute (IPI) today announced that it has been awarded $2.7 million …

Discussion: The Official Google Blog, paidContent:UK, The Next Web and TechCrunch

The Louse & the Flea:

The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism — It is about 1pm GMT and I have been surfing the UK web news sites looking for info about the latest disaster to afflict my homeland: the earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand. — Most of the newspaper and TV sites have treated …

Discussion: Strange Attractor, B2B Memes, One Man & His Blog, @rafat, currybetdotnet and Guardian

Sbotelho / Folio:

Forbes Launching Digital Ad Platform — ‘FMX’ rolls up content networks, segmentation and custom units. — Forbes is launching an ad platform that combines the Forbes Media Network with a new audience segmentation effort called FAST and offers custom units that blend advertising with content according to user preferences.

Discussion: Audience Development

Lisa Belkin / New York Times:

Queen of the Mommy Bloggers — O.K., then, I say, almost begging at this point, almost to the point of tears, is there anyone I can talk to who might see what I've been through and understand? And here's where I say: “Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Google's Decision to Get Into “Real Time” Ads Was Really Smart, Says Google — Google makes almost all of its money selling search ads. But it is pushing hard into display ads, along with technology that lets marketers buy display ads in “real time.” Great idea, Google says.

Discussion: AdWords Agency Blog, AdExchanger.com and ClickZ

Paul Reynolds / BBC:

A glimpse of journalism's future — World affairs correspondent, BBC News website — As I leave my post as world affairs correspondent for the BBC News website, I would like to reflect on the shock I experienced nine years ago when I left the “mainstream” BBC to join the then orphan child of News Online.

Joe Mandese / MediaPost:

Rentrak Cracks Donovan: Deal Is First To Bring TV Set-Tops To Agency Desk-Tops — In a move that could make planning and buying via digital TV set-top data a reality for many big agencies and their clients, Rentrak has cut a deal to integrate its set-top-based audience estimates into Donovan Data Systems …

Lois Beckett / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The context-based news cycle: editor John O'Neil on the future of The New York Times' Topics Pages — “There's are a lot of people in the news industry who are very skeptical of anything that isn't news,” says The New York Times' John O'Neil. As the editor of the Times' Topic Pages …

Discussion: Future of Journalism and New York Times

Cary Spivak / American Journalism Review:

Pay to Play — As cash-strapped newspapers struggle to adapt to the Internet age, more and more are asking readers to pay for digital content. Is that a winning strategy for the future? Posted: Wed, Feb. 23, 2011 — Cary Spivak (cspivak01@gmail.com) is an investigative reporter …

Discussion: Poynter

David Kaplan / paidContent:

WaPo's Print Picture Improves Slightly, As Digital Grows Stronger — Like most newspaper publishers last year, The Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) was able to arrest the declines in revenue, though the print business is far from stable. Digital's growth served as even more of a contrast …

Discussion: mediabistro.com

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Tumblr Unveils Leader Board & Topic Navigation — Tumblr, one of if not the largest blogging and curation platform on the web, today launched a new way to explore content by topic and discover the most popular Tumblr users on the hot topics of the day. Called Tumblr Explore …

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:

Demand Media's Rosenblatt Defends His Company's Content — Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) CEO Richard Rosenblatt used his company's first earnings conference call as a public company in part to defend it against criticism that the content it produces is shallow and of poor quality …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, VentureBeat and Wired In Blog| BNET