Mediagazer: How Does Twitter Verify Celebrity Accounts? (Alexandra Cheney/Speakeasy)

12:05 AM ET, March 9, 2011

Top News:

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? — Say this, good or bad, for The Atlantic—its left hand does not seem to know what its right hand is doing. The magazine's new story about Gawker—getting buzz already for Nick Denton's note that he wouldn't have clarified …

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 …, Mediaite, The Atlantic Online, Hot Air, Politics Daily, Tuned In, Hit & Run, Big Journalism, Center for Social Media blogs, The Atlantic Wire, Adweek and AOL News

Matthew Boyle / The Daily Caller:

NPR executives caught on tape bashing conservatives and Tea Party, touting liberals — A man who appears to be a senior National Public Radio senior executive, Ron Schiller, has been captured on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement. — “The current Republican Party …

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

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

NPR ‘appalled’ by former exec's comments — Former NPR executive Ron Schiller slams Republicans and the tea party movement and suggests that NPR would be better off without any federal funding in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday by conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe.

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

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

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

Gregg Kilday / Hollywood Reporter:

Warner Bros. to Rent Movies Digitally on Facebook, Starting With ‘Dark Knight’ … Warner Bros. is turning to Facebook, where it hopes to find an electronic audience interested in digitally renting The Dark Knight. — Warners said Monday that it is the first Hollywood studio to offer movies directly on Facebook.

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:
Meet Your New Media Company: Facebook

Discussion: Company Town, MediaPost, Media & Entertainment, Lost Remote, Multichannel and Broadcasting & Cable

Brett Pulley / Bloomberg:

Gannett Considers Charging for Online Newspaper Content, CEO Dubow Says — Gannett Co., the owner of 82 newspapers including USA Today, is considering charging for its online content, Chief Executive Officer Craig Dubow said. — The company, which also owns television stations …

Discussion: Poynter, Editors Weblog, Guardian, Noted and Gannett Blog

Matt Waite / Nieman Journalism Lab:

To build a digital future for news, developers must be able to hack at the core of old systems — Editor's Note: Matt Waite was until recently news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, where — among many other projects — he was the primary developer behind Politifact, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Discussion: Hot Type Consulting

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Comments, Video, Push Slate Ad Revs Up 33 Percent In '10 — The Slate Group, The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Co.'s online-only unit house Slate.com, The Root.com, and ForeignPolicy.com, says that combined ad revenue from all those sites gained 33 last year.

Discussion: Poynter

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, AdPulp, Engadget, Mashable!, Techie Buzz, SAI, Pulse2 and Company Town

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:

Nine Questions on the Dallas Morning News Pay Plan — Don't mess with Texas, Lyle Lovett has advised us. That may be worth keeping in mind as publisher Jim Moroney turns a lot of conventional wisdom on its ear and launches a pay wall in America's fifth-largest metro area and eighth-largest city.

Discussion: Mike Orren

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Newspapers Hope Readers Will Throw Money Over the Wall

Thanks:mathewi

Evgeny Morozov / Guardian:

Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go | Evgeny Morozov — Cyber-utopians who believe the Arab spring has been driven by social networks ignore the real-world activism underpinning them — Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED.

Discussion: Mark Follman

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

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

A perpetual motion machine for investigative reporting: CPI and PRI partner on state corruption project — There is a flaw in the investigative reporting model and it has to do with longevity. Follow me on this for a second: A reporter works months at a time scouring documents, meeting sources …

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

Happy Birthday Mediagazer: Congrats to Megan McCarthy, the New Doyenne of the Media Scene — On a freezing Manhattan night in February, virtually all of the media industry's top reporters, blogger and editors showed up for drinks with a newly arrived California woman who was unknown just a few months earlier.

Discussion: Mediagazer News, @ekrangel, @edmundlee, @lostremote, @owenthomas, @kunur, @mikepilarz and @madlid

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.

Associated Press:

Supermom Blogger Kelly Oxford Has Book Deal — Kelly Oxford, blogger and Twitter star, has book deal for memoir to be published in 2012 — Kelly Oxford is a blogger, Twitter star and inspiration for a new CBS sitcom. Now, she has a book deal. — It Books and HarperCollinsCanada …