Mediagazer: Huffpo-Enabled Layoffs Expected By Friday at AOL (Jeff Bercovici/Mixed Media)

9:50 AM ET, March 9, 2011

Top News:

Mark Memmott / NPR:

In Video: NPR Exec Slams Tea Party, Questions Need For Federal Funds — NPR's soon-to-be-departing senior vice president for fundraising Ron Schiller is seen and heard on a videotape released this morning telling two men who were posing as members of a fictitious Muslim Action Education Center that:

Discussion: James O'Keefe's Project …, Fox Nation, USA Today, Mediaite, The Daily Caller, Politics Daily, Big Journalism, The Atlantic Online, Center for Social Media blogs, Hot Air, Adweek, Tuned In, Hit & Run, AOL News and The Atlantic Wire

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

NPR president Vivian Schiller resigns — Romenesko Misc. — NPR board chairman Dave Edwards says CEO and president Vivian Schiller's resignation was accepted “with understanding, genuine regret and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past two years.”

New York Times:

Facing Lawmakers' Fire, NPR Sees New Setback — Already under fire from Republicans who want to strip its federal financing, NPR was forced into damage-control mode on Tuesday after the release of a video that showed one of its fund-raising executives repeatedly criticizing Republicans and Tea Party supporters.

Discussion: Poynter

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:
NPR ‘appalled’ by former exec's comments

Discussion: Weigel, Current.org Blog, The Daily Caller and The Huffington Post

Matthew Boyle / The Daily Caller:
NPR executives caught on tape bashing conservatives and Tea Party, touting liberals

Discussion: Mediaite, Yahoo! News, Salon, Media Decoder, USA Today, The Wire, CJR, Big Journalism, Runnin' Scared, Indecision Forever, Current.org Blog, mediabistro.com, The Atlantic Online and FishbowlDC

James Fallows / The Atlantic Online:

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media — EVERYONE FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA TO TED KOPPEL IS BEMOANING A DECLINE IN JOURNALISTIC SUBSTANCE, SERIOUSNESS, AND SENSE OF PROPORTION. BUT THE AUTHOR, A LONGTIME ADVOCATE OF THESE VALUES, TAKES A JOURNEY THROUGH THE DIGITAL-MEDIA WORLD …

Discussion: Common Sense Journalism, The Wire, @scottros, @romenesko and @chanders, Thanks:jaredbkeller

Daniel D'Addario / New York Observer: What Does ‘The Atlantic’ Know About Its Own Aggregation?

Austin Carr / Fast Company:

Personalized iPad Magazine Zite Learns As You Read, Challenges Flipboard — Have you ever created a Genius playlist on iTunes or set up a station on Pandora? Just plug in one song, and you instantly hear music that matches your tastes. Think of Zite, the free personalized iPad magazine …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, more at Techmeme »

Alex Himel / Facebook Developers:

Real-Time Analytics For Social Plugins — Over the past year, social plugins have become an important and growing source of traffic for millions of websites. Today we're releasing a new version of Insights for Websites to give you better analytics on how people interact with your content …

Discussion: The Next Web, Inside Facebook, Nieman Journalism Lab, VatorNews, Marketing Pilgrim, Techie Buzz, All Facebook and WebProNews, Thanks:malliegator

Amy Chozick / Wall Street Journal:

Television's Senior Moment — As Audiences Get Older, So Do the Characters— And Ads Cost More — In CBS's new cop show “Blue Bloods,” Tom Selleck, at the age of 66, plays a New York police commissioner. Kathy Bates, at 62, snagged the lead role in NBC's legal series “Harry's Law.”

Sarah Kessler / Mashable!:

Al Jazeera Launches Twitter Dashboard To Track Uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Libya & Bahrain — Qatar-based news outlet Al Jazeera has launched a Twitter dashboard to illustrate tweets about uprisings and revolutions around the world. — The dashboard tallies the daily number of tweets …

Discussion: Editors Weblog and New York Magazine

MediaShift:

Why Are Hispanics Missing in Leadership at Media Companies? — Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement.

Discussion: American University …

Peter Beaumont / Guardian:

Libya regime treating journalists like idiots - but ones who are useful to them — At surreal press conferences in Tripoli reporters hear scripted praise for Muammar Gaddafi while being told black is white, attack is retreat and ‘the colonial English’ are fomenting conspiracy

Discussion: CJR and Future of Journalism

Verne G. Kopytoff / Bits:

Hoping to Be the Netflix for the Sundance Crowd — A new Web site focused on independent films is hoping to become Netflix for the Sundance Film Festival crowd. — Fandor, introduced on Wednesday, is a subscription service with a library of 2,500 films like “Dogtooth,” …

Kat Stoeffel / New York Observer:

Among the Assisterati: Bottoms Up with the Highbrow Bottom Feeders — On a Tuesday evening not long ago, a group of publishing assistants in their early 20s gathered in a well-appointed apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. — “Assistants: Meet the person on the other end of the telephone,” the email had said.

Hana N. Rouse / The Harvard Crimson:

Frank Rich Discusses Modern Journalism — New York Times columnist Frank Rich '71 said professional journalists will continue to be important despite changing forms of media at yesterday's ceremony for the Goldsmith Awards in Political Journalism. — Rich, who received the Goldsmith Career Award …

Alexandra Cheney / Speakeasy:

How Does Twitter Verify Celebrity Accounts? … While Twitter continues to give celebrities, athletes, musicians, actors and others a platform to directly connect with their fans, the social networking site remains tight-lipped about how it determines if those stars are really who they say they are.

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Huffpo-Enabled Layoffs Expected By Friday at AOL — Employees of AOL are in a painful limbo this week as they await the inevitable: a wave of layoffs prompted by the $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post. That deal officially went through on Monday, and the word inside AOL …

Dan Frommer / The Wire:

Google Really, Officially, Finally Is A Media Company — In case you still had any doubts, Google is now OFFICIALLY a media company. — YouTube just finally closed its acquisition of Next New Networks, a NYC-based startup in the online video production industry. — (Click here to flip through NNN's most famous videos.)

Discussion: digiday:DAILY, Shelly Palmer Digital Living, AdPulp, Engadget, Company Town and New York Times

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Newspapers Hope Readers Will Throw Money Over the Wall — As the financial screws continue to tighten on traditional media companies, more and more are choosing to throw their eggs into the basket labeled “paywall,” despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that erecting barriers to non-paying readers …

Discussion: Free Press, Thanks:mathewi