Mediagazer: Exclusive: AOL Will Lay Off Several Hundred Employees, Starting Tomorrow (Kara Swisher/BoomTown)

2:00 PM ET, March 10, 2011

Top News:

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Exclusive: AOL Will Lay Off Several Hundred Employees, Starting Tomorrow — The AOL layoffs are finally here, and they are smaller than some had been expecting. — According to several people close to the situation, the New York-based Internet giant will lay off up to several hundred …

Nicholas Carlson / SAI:

THE GORY DETAILS: Tim Armstrong's Layoffs Memo — UPDATE: We've been covering AOL's layoffs all morning long. Below is a memo from CEO Tim Armstrong detailing what's happening. — Other stories we've covered: — AOL is planning a big re-org in its tech division, with HuffPo's people getting a bigger role.

Discussion: Mediaite and MediaNama, more at Techmeme »

David Kaplan / paidContent:

@ Media Summit: AOL's Armstrong: Layoffs Today, Hiring Tomorrow — AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong took the stage at Bloomberg Media Summit and confirmed last night's big news: the company would be laying off 900 staffers, with be 400 layoffs in India, 300 jobs outsourced and 200 left.

Discussion: Mediaweek and FT Tech Hub

Nicholas Carlson / The Wire:

AOL To Slash More Destination Sites And Media Brands Than Expected — As a part of today's layoffs and the integrations with the Huffington Post, AOL is going to shut down many more of its media brands than previously expected. — A source close to company tells us the decisions on which sites …

Discussion: SAI

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The newsonomics of AOL/Patch buying Outside.in — Editor's Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. — There are two ways to be local, we've learned.

Discussion: Bloggasm

Wall Street Journal:

Video Kills the Radio Czar — CEO Is Second NPR Executive to Resign Following Activist's Sting Operation — The head of National Public Radio quit under fire as the organization became ensnared in a fresh scandal at a time when Congress is debating whether to pull its government funding.

Discussion: American Journalism Review, BoomTown, Hit & Run, NPR and Poynter

New York Times:

Resignation Comes at Sensitive Time for NPR — In the midst of a brutal battle with Republican critics in Congress over federal subsidies, NPR has lost its chief executive after yet another politically charged embarrassment. — Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR two years ago …

Discussion: Los Angeles Times, Company Town, Washington Post, Online NewsHour, The Atlantic Online, Current.org Blog, The Future of Capitalism, Boing Boing and New York Times

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
It's Time For NPR to Get Off the Government Payroll

Discussion: Pressthink, The Atlantic Online, Washington Examiner, NPR, On Media's Blog, rbr.com, Most Recent Home Page Posts …, Tuned In, Epicenter, GroundReport.com, MediaPost, The Huffington Post, Broadcasting & Cable, MediaFile, The Atlantic Wire, Weigel and Jezebel

TechCrunch:

LinkedIn Is About To Make Headlines — Editor's note: The following guest post was written by Mrinal Desai, an early employee of LinkedIn who is also co-founder of CrossLoop and addappt. You can follow him on Twitter. — A lot has been written about social news and how Twitter and Facebook …

Discussion: VentureBeat, paidContent, The Wire, SAI, GigaOM, NetworkEffect and Bloggasm, more at Techmeme »

Farhad Manjoo / Slate:

Why we need to get rid of anonymous comments. — Once or twice a week, I get a letter taking me to task for Slate's commenting policy. The reader wants to tell me that I suck, but he doesn't want to log in to Slate's comment system using his credentials for Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Twitter.

Thanks:malliegator

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

NY Times responds to backlash against portrayal of 11-year-old rape victim — The New York Times came under attack Wednesday from bloggers claiming that James C. McKinley Jr.'s disturbing March 8 article about the alleged gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl laid blame on the prepubescent victim.

Discussion: Mother Jones, mediabistro.com, New York Times, The Atlantic Wire, Jezebel and New York Magazine

Martin Belam / currybetdotnet:

The Guardian's Paul Lewis on crowd-sourcing investigative journalism with Twitter … Last week I attended an event at the Royal Statistical Society looking at data and news sourcing, and one of the panel sessions was about crowd-sourcing using the internet.

Discussion: Jon Slattery

BBC:

Gaddafi forces beat up BBC team — Goktay Koraltan and Feras Killani said other detainees had been badly beaten — Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi's security forces detained and beat up a BBC news team who were trying to reach the strife-torn western city of Zawiya.

Discussion: New York Times, Yahoo! News, Time, Lens, AOL News, Guardian, The Lede, War in Context and Jon Slattery

Hollywood Reporter:

Katie Couric Pursuing Syndicated Talk Show … The following story appears in the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine on newsstands Thursday. — With Katie Couric's contract set to expire in early June, the anchor is closing in on a decision about whether to stay at CBS News …

Discussion: TVNewser, The Huffington Post and TVWeek.com

John Plunkett / Guardian:

BBC World Service Arabic cuts not as ‘severe as planned’ — Africa and Middle East political crises force change but wholesale reversal of alterations to Arabic operations ruled out — The BBC's global news director Peter Horrocks has indicated a further U-turn over planned cuts …

Discussion: Media Network

Claire Cain Miller / Bits:

Need Advice on What to Read? Ask the Internet — Netflix uses a software algorithm to recommend movies and Zappos uses one to recommend shoes. Now Goodreads, the social network for book lovers, is introducing an algorithm to recommend books. — Goodreads was started in 2006 for people who wanted to talk about books online.

Bill Keller / New York Times:

All the Aggregation That's Fit to Aggregate — According to the list makers at Forbes, I am the 50th most powerful person in the world — not as powerful as the Pope (No. 5) but more powerful than the president of the United Arab Emirates (56). Vanity Fair, another arbiter of what matters …

Adam Bernstein / Washington Post:

David Broder dies; Pulitzer-winning Washington Post political columnist — David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes.