Mediagazer: Where news of the weird is king: AOL is serious about U.F.O.s, magic trees, Vicki Lawrence statues (Dana Rubinstein/Capital New York)

6:20 PM ET, March 3, 2011

Top News:

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Newsweek's 'not your Grandpa Jon's magazine anymore' — Tina Brown has been shopping her redesigned Newsweek prototype to advertisers for weeks. But on Wednesday, the rank-and-file workers at Brown's recently integrated Newsweek-Daily Beast operation finally got a peek.

Discussion: Folio, On Media's Blog, Runnin' Scared, Media Buyer Planner and FishbowlNY

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Plum TV's Lehman Named NBCU's President, Digital Networks — Nicholas Lehman, formerly CEO of lifestyle Plum TV, has joined NBC Universal (NSDQ: CMCSA) as president of Digital for NBCUniversal's Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media division (E&DN/IM).

Discussion: MediaMemo

David Kaplan / paidContent:
@ pC2011: Zalaznick: Don't Blame Hulu For Lack Of Cable Programming Streams

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable

Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:

Facebook comments: Friend or foe for pubs? — In its highly successful effort to insinuate itself into every aspect of our lives, Facebook now is offering publishers the opportunity to outsource comments on their websites to the social networking juggernaut.

Discussion: MarketingVOX

MediaShift:
Facebook Pushes Comments Upgrade, But Will Publishers Bite?

Discussion: TechCrunch, Fortune, Poynter, eMedia Vitals and Cision Blog

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Gawker Media traffic down 25 percent since redesign — A few weeks ago, Gawker Media disputed reports that its traffic had plummeted due to the redesign recently implemented across its blog network. And Gawker boss Nick Denton had even recently made a cash bet that the relaunch wouldn't cost him page views.

Discussion: paidContent, The Wrap, The Wire and Soup

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

Demand Media Buys Liveblogging Tool CoverItLive — On the heels of its entry to the public market, content farm Demand Media has just acquired CoverItLive, a liveblogging tool. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. — CoverItLive provides an extensive tool one can use …

Discussion: Investor Relations, The Charlotte Observer, Time, VentureBeat, GigaOM, paidContent and Adweek, more at Techmeme »

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

The Twitter Story Fail — It's amazing to me how wrong The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were on their Twitter fundraising stories last week. All claimed multiple independent sources, but everyone got the story wrong in the same way.

Discussion: Reuters, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Best of the Wire, Fortune, New York Magazine and Post Tech, more at Techmeme »

Bill Reader / E.W. Scripps School of Journalism:

TBD is CTD: The fast rise and fall of a CJ startup — Just six months after it launched to much fanfare, the Washington, D.C., area community journalism site TBD.com (short for, it is suggested, “To Be Determined") is CTD (short for “circling the drain"). Some suggest it was too ambitious …

Discussion: The Buttry Diary and Poynter

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

NY Times vs. Bloomberg News: It's War! — The stated goal of Bloomberg News is to be “the world's most influential news organization.” That's unsettling to The New York Times, which currently holds that distinction, or at least likes to think of itself that way.

Discussion: Poynter, FishbowlNY, On Media's Blog and New York Observer

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Baseless speculation! Frank Rich and the price of paywalls for writers — Jack Shafer summed up Frank Rich's upcoming move from The New York Times to New York magazine like so: “Unless the deal came with Bloombergian bags of cash, it makes no sense.” — True.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, The Huffington Post, Scocca, MediaPost, Poynter and Runnin' Scared

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Hunt approves News Corp plan for Sky News — Sky News to be spun off into new company to pave way for News Corp takeover of BSkyB — The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has approved News Corporation's plan to spin off Sky News, clearing the way for its proposed £8bn purchase of the 61% of BSkyB it does not already own.

Discussion: Media Week, Press Gazette, Department for Culture Media …, The Wrap, Jon Slattery, Company Town, Editors Weblog, FishbowlNY and TVNewser

Kim Zetter / Epicenter:

TED 2011: Al Jazeera Director on Power of Middle East Revolutions — LONG BEACH, California — “I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for [in the Middle East] has eventually arrived,” Wadah Khanfar, director general of the Al Jazeera network, told the audience …

Ben Fritz / Company Town:

DirecTV poised to launch premium video-on-demand as theater executives voice outrage [Updated] — DirecTV is in advanced talks to be Hollywood's first partner for early video-on-demand, a plan that is putting it in the cross hairs of the nation's top theater chains.

Discussion: paidContent and TVWeek.com

Mandy / Zombie Journalism:

Four key things TBD did right — There's been all kinds of stories, analyses and blog posts written by journalism thinkers about “why TBD failed” or “things that went wrong at TBD”. While these have made some valuable notes for those who want to launch or work for startups in the future …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Randall Rothenberg Talks About Coming Back to IAB — And What He Found at Time Inc. — At the Interactive Advertising Bureau's conference on Feb. 28, Randall Rothenberg could barely get a bite or a word out before someone in attendance came up to quickly offer thanks for his return.

Discussion: Poynter

Ryan Kim / GigaOM:

Instapaper's Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs — Marco Arment, the former chief technology officer of the Tumblr blog platform, is best known these days for his time-shifting reading app Instapaper. But he could start a side-job as a financial advisor to start-ups.

Discussion: New York Observer and Bloggasm, more at Techmeme »

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

March Madness Comes to the iPad, for Free — Big sports events generally shy away from the Web, because they're still worried-with good reason-about trading analog dollars for digital dimes. — One exception to the rule has been the annual March Madness NCAA college basketball tournament …