Mediagazer: Sheen Brings Piers Morgan Best Ratings Yet (Brian Stelter/New York Times)

11:45 PM ET, March 1, 2011

Top News:

Was a Vanity Fair Editor Secretly Working for the Church of Scientology? — Gawker.com, where the author is employed a staff writer, declined to publish this story. — Did the Church of Scientology use a Vanity Fair contributing editor to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the cult's enemies in the media?

Discussion: Poynter, @joecoscarelli, @jeffbercovici, @johnjcook, The Wrap, @felixsalmon, @felixsalmon, New York Magazine and FishbowlNY

Joe Coscarelli / Runnin' Scared: Why Did Gawker Refuse to Run John Cook's New York Observer Article on Scientology?

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Charlie Sheen, Now On Twitter At @CharlieSheen — Because if I don't write this somebody else will: After blazing a colorful trail through some obscure radio show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, TMZ, CNN and so on, media obsession of the moment Charlie Sheen has brought his antics to Twitter.

Discussion: Media Decoder, New York Times, Walter Kirn's Permanent …, Show Tracker, @seanrad, The Wrap, Sean Percival's Blog, Slate, SAI, Mediaite and The Daily What, more at Techmeme »

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Sheen Brings Piers Morgan Best Ratings Yet — Charlie Sheen's surprise appearance on “Piers Morgan Tonight” delivered that six-week-old talk show its highest rating in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers and cable news executives covet. — The hourlong interview garnered …

Discussion: Speakeasy

Julie Moos / Poynter:
Media acting as enablers with excessive coverage of “Two and a Half Men” star Charlie Sheen

Discussion: The Wire, Kansas City Star, The Daily What, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
Exploiting Charlie — When I arrived in Detroit to intern …

New York Magazine:

Frank Rich Joins New York Magazine — Frank Rich is joining New York Magazine, beginning in June. Rich will be an essayist for the magazine, writing monthly on politics and culture, and will serve as an editor-at-large, editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay.

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:
Sneak peek: What's new in the New York Times Magazine

Discussion: Poynter, Adweek, Media Research Center, FishbowlNY and New York Observer

Michael Barbaro / New York Times:

Bloomberg Testing the World of Opinion — Over the last year, representatives of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg quietly reached out to a handful of the country's top journalists with an intriguing job offer: Divine and distill his unique brand of political philosophy and disseminate it around …

Discussion: Mixed Media, Poynter, The Big Picture, City Room, The Empire, The Wire, Gothamist, FishbowlNY, On Media's Blog and The Huffington Post

Jodi Enda / American Journalism Review:

The Bloomberg Juggernaut — While many news organizations are struggling and retreating, Bloomberg News keeps adding talented journalists, expanding its empire and elevating its ambitions. Posted: Wed, March 1, 2011 — Jodi Enda (jaenda@gmail.com) writes about politics and government from Washington …

Discussion: Poynter

Jack Shafer / Slate:

Darrell Issa e-mail leaks: Why John F. Harris is massively overreacting. … Like This Story — Follow Slate's Press Box … - How Warren Buffett Is Making Millions Off His Smart Bet on Trains- Why Do Workers Need a Law Allowing Collective Bargaining? Can't They Just Do It?

Discussion: The Caucus, The Politico, Washington Post, CNN, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, TPMMuckraker and Washington Wire

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Recommendation Is Still the Holy Grail For News — If you count all the different media-related apps for the iPhone and iPad, there are almost an infinite number of ways to consume the news — some are specific to a particular newspaper or magazine, while others try to aggregate different sources of news for you.

Discussion: PC World

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:

Source: Politics Daily, Daily Finance Being Folded Into Huffpo — In your trampled Tuesday media column: rumors of blog consolidation at AOL, Darell Issa's spokesman canned for leaking to the NYT, Dan Abrams is a proud television journalist, the new NYT Magazine considered, and fairness is dead.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Apple Lines Up Random House, Its Last iBook Holdout — Apple's iBookstore, launched in conjunction with the iPad last year, has a big problem: It doesn't carry titles from Random House, one of the world's biggest publishers. — But that may be set to change very soon.

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Globe and Mail, CNET News, Ars Technica, Engadget and App Advice, more at Techmeme »

Mike Shields / Adweek:

Hulu Set for Meteoric Growth in 2011 — Ad revenue haul could be as high as $500 million — Hulu is on pace to haul in half a billion dollars in ad revenue in 2011, according to CEO Jason Kilar. That would represent nearly a 100 percent increase from the $263 million the company …

Discussion: SocialTimes.com and NetNewsCheck Latest

Lois Beckett / Nieman Journalism Lab:

A hive of long-form journalists: Gerry Marzorati and Mark Danner on a new model for long form — Yesterday at the Berkeley School of Journalism, former New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati and author and former New Yorker writer Mark Danner sat down to talk about the “the fate of long-form journalism in a new media age.”

Discussion: Snarkmarket and Future of Journalism

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

Dirty Percent — It's not hard to make the case that Apple's new in-app subscription system offers numerous benefits to users, developers, and publishers. But whatever those benefits, they stem from the mere existence of these new subscription APIs. What's controversial is the size of Apple's cut: 30 percent.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab and CrunchGear

AdAge:

Why Video Advertising Needs to Dump Impressions and Move to ‘Cost Per View’ — When a “view” is counted on a site like YouTube, audiences and brands alike know what it means: someone chose to watch a video. Increasingly, there are a proliferation of video ads that capture the same characteristic …