Mediagazer: Instapaper's Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs (Ryan Kim/GigaOM)

10:55 AM ET, March 3, 2011

Top News:

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Hunt approves Murdoch plan for Sky — 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: The Wrap, Department for Culture Media …, FishbowlNY, Jon Slattery and Press Gazette

BBC:

Rupert Murdoch to sell Sky News for takeover approval — Mr Murdoch hopes that his offer to sell Sky News will be enough to get the nod from Mr Hunt — Rupert Murdoch has agreed to sell off the loss-making Sky News. — The move is likely to be enough to win government approval …

Discussion: New York Times, The Wire, Telegraph, Guardian, Adweek, Media Week and TVNewser

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, On Media's Blog, SAI and New York Observer

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.

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

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Why Did It Take So Long for Newspapers to Copy Groupon? — Word leaked out today about a new service the New York Times is planning to launch soon called TimesLimited, which is expected to provide readers with special offers on travel and other lifestyle items via email.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, digiday:DAILY and The New York Times Company, Thanks:jeremiahkastner

Lauren Indvik / Mashable!:
New York Times Launching Groupon-Like Daily Deals Service

Discussion: New York Observer, paidContent, Marketing Pilgrim, MediaMemo, Fast Company, Future of Journalism, From the Reporters, Digital Trends, FishbowlNY, The Tech Trade and SAI, Thanks:laureni

David Pogue / New York Times:

Memo From Comcast: Embrace the Web in All Forms — Destroy this top-secret strategy document after reading. It could be devastating to our business interests if it fell into the wrong hands — like The New York Times or something. — Fellow Comcastians, this is a difficult time for the cable TV business.

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 …

Discussion: GigaOM, NetNewsCheck Latest and Multichannel, more at Techmeme »

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

Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:

HBO Doubles Down On TV Everywhere — HBO has been one of the biggest proponents of TV Everywhere, eschewing online distributors like Netflix and instead committing to authenticated digital offerings from cable and IPTV providers. But Netflix's loss will be Comcast, Verizon and AT&T's gain …

Discussion: CNET News and TheFutonCritic.com

MediaShift:

Facebook Pushes Comments Upgrade, But Will Publishers Bite? — Bit by bit, feature by feature, Facebook is making inroads into sites that live outside of Facebook.com. Major publishers now sprinkle their sites with Facebook plug-ins, from fan page widgets to friend recommendations to the ubiquitous “Like” thumbs-up.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Reflections of a Newsosaur, eMedia Vitals, Poynter, Cision Blog, Scobleizer and Quora

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

How Charlie Sheen Got His Twitter Account Verified So Fast — Ad.ly Helped Take Handle From Squatter — Only 24 hours after Charlie Sheen got started on Twitter with @CharlieSheen, he had amassed more than 900,000 followers, easily one of the fastest follower roll-ups the service has seen.

Discussion: de.tech.ting, Hollywood Reporter, the Econsultancy blog, The 6th Floor, Fortune, PopWatch, Local Media Watch, digiday:DAILY, The Wrap, TechCrunch, The Big Picture, Best of the Wire and Gawker, more at Techmeme »

Neal Ungerleider / Fast Company:

Al Jazeera in Talks With Comcast, Time Warner — Al Jazeera English may be coming to American television screens. The Qatar-based network is currently in talks with cable giants Comcast and Time Warner, creating a groundswell of enthusiasm among American news junkies and a collective groan from right-leaning conservative activists.

Gus Lubin / The Wire:
Hillary Clinton Says Al Jazeera Is Putting American Media To Shame

Discussion: MarketWatch, Mediaite, Bloomberg, MediaPost and C-SPAN Video Library

Hugo Lindgren / The 6th Floor:

The Way We Blog Now — Hello? Hello! — You're reading The 6th Floor, the new blog of The Times Magazine, launched in advance of the redesigned print edition, which is out this Sunday, March 6. The first column by The Times's executive editor, Bill Keller, is already online, and other articles will be soon.

Discussion: Capital New York, Runnin' Scared and FishbowlNY

David Cohen / mediabistro.com:

Debut Time for Aol News Real-Time — Aol News is looking to enforce the concept that news is real-time with its launch of Aol News Real-Time, which adds real-time badges to its 100 most active articles, as well as highlighting the top six stories being read at that moment, complete with reading counts.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Echo

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Takeaways for journalists from today's Apple announcement: Better reporting tools and an ebook boom — Apple's Steve Jobs just left the stage after a surprise appearance to announce the new iPad 2. Check Engadget's liveblog if you want to relive the whole event, but I noticed a few takeaways …