Mediagazer: Among the Assisterati: Bottoms Up with the Highbrow Bottom Feeders (Kat Stoeffel/New York Observer)

4:25 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, Mediaite, Politics Daily, The Atlantic Online, Hot Air, USA Today, Tuned In, Hit & Run, Center for Social Media blogs, Big Journalism, Adweek, AOL News and The Atlantic Wire

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: Media Decoder, Salon, Mediaite, The Wire, CJR, Runnin' Scared, Big Journalism, Indecision Forever, Current.org Blog, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 …

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!, Company Town, SAI and Techie Buzz

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.

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

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 …

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

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

Ron Mwangaguhunga / eMedia Vitals:

Entertainment Weekly's smart partnership with GetGlue — There are few weekly print magazines that I wait upon nowadays with breathless anticipation. Time Inc's Entertainment Weekly — what does for pop-culture geeks what Wired does for techies — is definitely one of them.

Discussion: Search Engine Land and AdAge

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 …

Thanks:mathewi

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:
Nine Questions on the Dallas Morning News Pay Plan

Discussion: Mike Orren