Mediagazer: Six business lessons from TBD's early demise (Rick Edmonds/Poynter)

4:15 PM ET, February 24, 2011

Top News:

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Pre-HuffPo Merger Changes At AOL; Eun Leaving, Brod To Be Arianna's COO — Regulatory approval of AOL's $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post is still pending but CEO Tim Armstrong already has a new structure for the evolving company. The changes were set off by the plan …

Discussion: TechCrunch, AdAge, Mixed Media, The Wrap, Wall Street Journal, SAI, SAI, @rafat and NetNewsCheck Latest

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

AOL Exec David Eun Out - Here's His Email To Staff — Update: Here's AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's email to staff about the exec team reshuffling. — David Eun, my boss's (Heather) boss since the acquisition, will shortly be leaving AOL. As President of AOL Media and Studios he oversaw …

Discussion: Mediaite, MediaFile, SAI, Digital Trends and @rafat

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Post-Huffpo, an AOL Reorg; Here's the Internal Memo — No surprise here: After paying $315 million for Huffington Post, AOL is shuffling its executive ranks. David Eun, the former Google executive who came to AOL a year ago to run its media business, is out, and several other executives have new responsibilities.

Discussion: SAI, Adotas and Editors Weblog

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

AOL's First Big Change for Huffington Post: Bigger Ads — News Aggregation Site Will Get ‘Project Devil’ Ads, but Will Anyone Else? — After months of negotiations with advertisers and agencies, AOL is starting to roll out “Project Devil,” a larger ad format it hopes will deliver …

Discussion: Poynter, SAI and Adotas

Om Malik / GigaOM:

Old Media Is Being Unbundled, Just Like Telecom Was — One of the biggest stories of my career — as someone who covered telecom industry — happened fifteen years ago: The 1996 Telecom Act was the start of the liberalization of an industry that had been vertical with very little competition.

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

You Can't Play a New Media Game By Old Media Rules — If there's one aspect of the media business that has been disrupted more completely than any other, it's the whole idea of “breaking news.” Just as television devalued the old front-page newspaper scoop, the web has turned breaking news …

Discussion: The Wrap, Thanks:mathewi

Nikki Finke / Deadline.com:

Deadline.com's Parent Company MMC Sends ‘Cease & Desist’ Letter To TheWrap — Deadline.com and its parent company MMC is embarking on an intensified legal campaign to protect its original content. I began Deadline Hollywood Daily exactly 5 years ago in March and have seen it grow …

Discussion: Mediaweek, LA Observed, The Wire, Mediaite and Future of Journalism

Joe Mullin / paidContent:
‘Hot News’ Has MMC Steaming At TheWrap In Cease-And-Desist Letter

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Russ Buettner / New York Times:

Affidavits Say Fox News Chief Told Employee to Lie — It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation …

Discussion: Yahoo! News, The Wrap, Mediaite, CJR, TVNewser, The Raw Story, FishbowlNY, The Huffington Post, Gawker, The Wire, New York Magazine, The New Republic, Inside Cable News and TPMDC

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:

Six business lessons from TBD's early demise — TBD, one of the most ambitious local online launches of 2010, turns out to be a victim of crib death, reduced to an arts and entertainment mini-site barely six months after its launch last August. — Sure, hindsight is 20-20, but looking back …

Discussion: Washington Post, LocalNewser, Reflections of a Newsosaur, Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog, The Buttry Diary, Editors Weblog, Digital Man, Lost Remote, eMedia Vitals, City Desk, paidContent and Zombie Journalism

Bill Carter / New York Times:

Couric Assembles a Book of Essays to Raise Money for Scholarships — It is not, she assured, in any way a statement about her future career plans, but Katie Couric will take a step this spring into a different media arena with the publication of her first book.

Discussion: Yahoo! News, On Media's Blog, Poynter and TVNewser

David Kaplan / paidContent:

National Magazine Awards To Include Magazine Apps This Year — It's an honor just to be nominated, the saying goes, and less than a year after major publishers rolled out magazine apps, tablet-based periodicals are among the finalists for the second annual National Magazine Awards for Digital Media—aka the “Digital Ellies”—this year.

Discussion: MPA and FishbowlNY

Alex Alvarez / Mediaite:

Larry King To Piers Morgan: If You Say “I'm Dangerous,” You Better Be Dangerous — Larry King returned to his old CNN stomping grounds to speak with his successor of sorts, Piers Morgan. Morgan took the opportunity to address King's earlier comment that CNN had been “overselling” …

Discussion: The Wrap, The Wire and BBC

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Laura Rozen joins Yahoo! News — Journalist Laura Rozen, most recently the chief foreign policy writer for Politico, is joining Yahoo! News. As Senior Foreign Affairs Reporter, Rozen will focus on reporting and analyzing foreign policy news out of Yahoo! News' Washington bureau.

Discussion: WebNewser, On Media's Blog and FishbowlDC

Lewis DVorkin / The Copy Box:

Turning Forbes magazine content into Web content — and vice versa — Turning intimate magazine words into digital information (Photographed for Forbes by Evan Kafka) — What's the role of a magazine article in a world gone digital? Can it effectively be retooled for news consumers on the Web?

Discussion: MediaPost and Talking Biz News

Neal Mohan / AdWords Agency Blog:

The three laws of display advertising physics — Labels: DoubleClick, Google Display Network — As we've written on our blogs before, new technologies are profoundly improving display advertising. In the last few years, there's been a technological Big Bang, creating new ways …

Discussion: ClickZ, eMedia Vitals, AdPulp, The Official Google Blog and AdExchanger.com

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo: Google's Decision to Get Into “Real Time” Ads Was Really Smart, Says Google

Patrick Smith / TheMediaBriefing:

Paywall Strategies 2011: Forrester Analyst Nick Thomas on ‘monetising the user, not the content’ — Forrester analyst Nick Thomas kicked off our inaugural conference Paywall Strategies 2011. Nick's a long-time observer of digital content and its place in the consumer economy, so we invited him to get us going.

Eric Spiegelman / The Awl:

How to Watch Al Jazeera on Your Television — Al Jazeera is putting every American news channel to shame with its amazing coverage of the revolutions across the Middle East. But most cable systems in this country won't carry it! If you live in Toledo, Ohio, or Burlington, Vermont, or Washington D.C., you might have it.

Discussion: Mediaite and Media Buyer Planner

Richard Huff / NY Daily News:

Fox biz reporter ready for unfriendly takeover — Fox Business Network reporter Charlie Gasparino has one goal - to pummel the competition. — That's why he's at FBN, he says, and this week he marks his first year at the Fox-owned business news cable network. — “I'd rather be part of a startup,” Gasparino says.

Discussion: TVNewser, Inside Cable News and Talking Biz News

Jeffrey Benzing / American Journalism Review:

“Heeeere's the Newspaper” — The Omaha World-Herald hires a former “Tonight” show writer as an A-section humor columnist. Posted: Wed, Feb. 24, 2011 — Jeffrey Benzing (jbenzing@ajr.umd.edu) is an AJR editorial assistant. — There is generally no shortage of one-liners in the nation's newsrooms.

Steve Smith / MinOnline:

Mags Need Women: The Byline Gap — For years now the gender imbalance on many magazine industry writing staffs has been a subject of casual observations and occasional promises of change. “The Sisterhood” columnist Elissa Strauss at the Jewish Daily Forward decided the other day to put …

Discussion: Mediaite, Editors Weblog and Jezebel

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 …