Mediagazer: Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry (Martin Langeveld/Nieman Journalism Lab)

5:00 PM ET, March 7, 2011

Top News:

Henry Blodget / The Wire:

BUSINESS INSIDER SECRETS REVEALED: An Inside Look At Our Readership And Financial Performance — Most private companies zealously protect details about financial and operating performance, refusing to release so much as a revenue number. — The logic for this secrecy varies.

Discussion: Poynter, TechCrunch, @mathewi and mediabistro.com

Felix Salmon: The economics of Business Insider

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, BW: GUEST HOME, Poynter, paidContent, MediaPost, VatorNews, GMSV, New York Post, Softpedia News, The Wire, CNET News, Fortune, DealBook, Mixed Media and Black Web 2.0

Sam Gustin / Epicenter:
Does Arianna Huffington Have Enough Magic Touch Left to Save AOL?

Discussion: Mixed Media and WebProNews

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.

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News: Will Fox News and Glenn Beck split up?

Robert Hernandez / Online Journalism Review:

Q & A with Al Jazeera Online Producer Bilal Randeree — By Robert Hernandez: Without a doubt, the leading news organization covering the historic Middle East unrest is Al Jazeera. Available in limited markets here, their website has been the home for its impressive coverage.

Discussion: The Huffington Post and Future of Journalism

Dylan Tweney / Epicenter:
Al Jazeera English Plans Show Centered on Social Networking

Discussion: Lost Remote, Fast Company, Guardian, The Wire, Examiner, Runnin' Scared, The Atlantic Online and @lavrusik

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 …

Discussion: Future of Journalism, The Atlantic Online, @iwantmedia, Digits and Technology Liberation Front, more at Techmeme »

Mike Orren:

Paywall, ho! — It's official- the Dallas Morning News paywall goes live tomorrow. We've had about a month to preview the new site and to get used to more rigorous registration requirements. Now, it's game on. After the jump, Jim Moroney's email to the troops and my thoughts: #

Jim Rendon / Mother Jones:

Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban's Gilded Cage — At 79, the former CBS anchorman is still kicking ass and winning Emmys. But with his exposés sandwiched between pro wrestling and Girls Gone Wild, is anybody watching? — Post Comment — DAN RATHER IS EBULLIENT, more so than usual …

Discussion: TVNewser, Poynter and The Wire

Verne G. Kopytoff / New York Times:

Sites Like Twitter Absent From Free Speech Pact — SAN FRANCISCO — When Google, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a code of conduct intended to protect online free speech and privacy in restrictive countries, the debate over censorship by China was raging, and Internet companies operating …

Discussion: GMSV, Switched and Free Press, more at Techmeme »

Atlantic Wire:

Eric Schmidt: What I Read — How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from a conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt …

Discussion: @erickschonfeld, Editors Weblog and The Atlantic Online

Martin Langeveld / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry — Who owns America's newspapers? — In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings …

Jeremy Peters / Media Decoder:

Glamour's iPad Series to Let Viewers Buy Clothes From Gap — The ability to buy products strategically placed on television programs — a handbag clutched by the actress Blake Lively on “Gossip Girl” or a suit worn by the actor Jon Hamm on “Mad Men” — with the click of a button has always …

Discussion: MediaPost, NYConvergence.com and FishbowlNY

Jonathan S. Paul / tenones.tumblr.com:

To the Reader, Thank you for reading 111-111-1111 — To the Reader, Thank you for reading 111-111-1111 — Ten Ones — my real-time edit of NYTimes.com visual matter. At the urging of The New York Times legal department, I have suspended postings and removed the archive.

Discussion: Felix Salmon and Techdirt

New York Times:

Sheen Is Surrounded by a Coterie of Enablers — LOS ANGELES — Since getting sober more than two decades ago, Tom Arnold, the actor and comedian, has been a quiet force in Hollywood's recovery community, helping stage a number of interventions for drug-addicted executives and alcoholic stars.

Discussion: Media Decoder, TMZ.com, Wall Street Journal, TMZ.com, Company Town and Deadspin

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

Discussion: USA Today, AOL News, GigaOM, The First Post, Gawker, PopEater, @thefamousjay and @espn

New York Times:

Even With Protests Averted, China Turns to Intimidation of 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 …

Discussion: Future of Journalism, The New Yorker Blog, AOL News and BagNewsNotes/Quick Pics

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

YouTube Grabs Another Hollywood Guy: Paramount's Alex Carloss — YouTube is still trying to figure out how to link up with Hollywood. Maybe Alex Carloss will help. — Until last week, Carloss was head of digital distribution at Viacom's Paramount. Now he's a Google employee, working on YouTube's content acquisition team.

Discussion: paidContent, Between the Lines Blog and WebProNews

Matt Thompson / Poynter:

A 5-minute framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections — Last week, my news organization announced we were evolving our online commenting practices a bit to improve the quality of discourse on NPR.org. — Our comment threads drew some attention recently when a comment thread …

Discussion: @amichel, @jayrosen_nyu and Ars Technica

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: Lost Remote, TVWeek.com, @insidecablenews, NetNewsCheck Latest, New York Magazine and TVNewser

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: steve's blog, Scobleizer, broadstuff, Adam Sherk and Media News, more at Techmeme »

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: Mediaite and The Huffington Post

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.

Felix Salmon:

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