Mediagazer: Mark Cuban, Charlie Sheen in talks (Tim MacMahon/ESPN)

9:55 AM ET, March 7, 2011

Top News:

The FT's decline — I had a hard-to-follow Twitter debate yesterday about the FT's paywall, where a couple of FT types — Alan Beattie and John Gapper — told me that the latest numbers for digital subscribers show that I was wrong when I criticized the FT's strategy in October 2007.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, blogs.ft.com and @jayrosen_nyu

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:
Digital Media Milestone: News Consumption via Mobile Reaches Nearly Half for Financial Times

Discussion: WebNewser, Talking Biz News, Big News Network.com, Journalism.co.uk and Future of Journalism

Eric Pfanner / New York Times: Financial Times Digs Gold Out of Data

Tim MacMahon / ESPN:

Mark Cuban, Charlie Sheen in talks — DALLAS — Mark Cuban, the outspoken billionaire owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and controversial actor Charlie Sheen could soon be business partners. — Cuban confirmed Sunday evening that he's had several conversations with Sheen recently …

Discussion: The First Post, @thefamousjay, @espn and Gawker

New York Times: Sheen Is Surrounded by a Coterie of Enablers

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

AOL-HuffPo Deal Officially Closes Today-More Big Media Hires Signal New Content Direction Under Arianna — AOL will officially close its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post today, according to several sources close to the situation. — The culmination of the deal-which has already …

Discussion: TechCrunch, Poynter, paidContent and SAI, more at Techmeme »

John Koblin / WWD Media Headlines:

Memo Pad: Joanne Lipman's Newsweek Debut — JOANNE LIPMAN RETURNS: Joanne Lipman, the former Portfolio editor in chief — who has held a relatively low profile since the business magazine was shut down 23 months ago — will write regularly for Tina Brown's new Newsweek.

Discussion: Newsweek and Talking Biz News

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:
Redesigned Newsweek on stands Monday

Discussion: Grids, Wall Street Journal, Poynter, Editors Weblog, ABCNEWS, mediabistro.com, The Daily Dish, The Huffington Post, Mediaite and The Wire

David Carr / New York Times:

The Fading Power of Beck's Alarms — Almost every time I flipped on television last week, there was a deeply angry guy on a running tirade about the conspiracies afoot, the enemies around all corners, and how he alone seemed to understand what was under way.

Discussion: Poynter, The First Post, Inside Cable News, Guardian, Chickaboomer, @mlcalderone, @jayrosen_nyu, @drudge and Mediaite

New York Times:

China Tracks Foreign Journalists — BEIJING — Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained …

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog, AOL News and Big News Network.com

Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:

TV's Next Wave: Tuning In to You — The television is channeling you. — Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people's TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using …

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

‘Today’ Show Moves to Today.com and Stresses Video Clips — The “Today” show on Tuesday morning will produce a second show just for the Web — something that seems inherently competitive with its main telecast. — But the webcast, called “The Today.com Show,” is largely a promotional affair …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Alex Weprin / TVNewser: NBC's ‘Today’ Going Behind the Scenes Tuesday

Dylan Tweney / Epicenter:

Al Jazeera English Plans Show Centered on Social Networking — As the Arab world reels with revolutions fomented in part online, Al Jazeera English is planning a new talk show that has social networking at its heart. — It's just lucky timing, says Ahmed Shihab-Eldin …

Discussion: SAI, Fast Company, Examiner, Runnin' Scared, @lavrusik and The Atlantic Online

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Squall Hits ‘The Atlantic’ — Andrew Sullivan's exit puts mag's turnaround in peril — Less than three months ago, The Atlantic had a lot to celebrate. Thanks to an infusion of digital ad revenue, 2010 had been a good year for the magazine, one in which it turned a profit for the first time in at least a decade.

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet? — As you've noticed by now, we're about a week into our latest experiment in troll-slaying with Facebook Comments. So far, the reactions have been very mixed and very interesting. Publicly, many of the reactions were initially negative.

Discussion: Scobleizer, Media News and broadstuff, more at Techmeme »

Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:

Mobile First, and a Mag — Two French journalists come to me with a question: which business model for their new project? They are about to resuscitate a fairly well-know trade journalism brand, planning to go mostly online — and marginally on dead trees.

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Twitter's “Quickbar Uprising” Is Nothing: Wait Till The Ads Really Show Up — Some people hate Twitter's new iPhone app, and Twitter is listening: It's going to change the app slightly. — Which won't appease the people who hate Twitter's new iPhone app at all.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Techland, TUAW, The Next Web, Examiner, Daring Fireball and Mashable!

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

MSNBC's Newest Pit Bull — Lawrence O'Donnell seems indifferent about his new career as a cable anchor. Howard Kurtz talks to him about his unlikely rise, why people hate him—and why O'Reilly can't get under his skin. — Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't sound like he wants to be talking about himself or his prime-time cable show.

Discussion: The Huffington Post