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 …
RELATED:
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, BoomTown and FT Tech Hub
Nicholas Carlson / SAI:
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
RELATED:
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 …
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:
The LinkedIn Blog, paidContent, VentureBeat, The Wire, CNET News, L.A. Times Tech Blog, 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
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 …
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, AOL News, Lens, Guardian, The Lede, War in Context and Jon Slattery
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.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
On Apple TV Special Apps, Sports, And The Slow Bleeding Of Cable — Buried today in the iOS 4.3 release is an unmentioned, but very interesting update for the Apple TV: access to both MLB.tv and NBA League Pass. Yes, the live sports are coming to the Apple TV!
Todd Spangler / Multichannel News:
Operators, Content Owners At ‘Strange Crossroads’ For Online TV — Industry Execs Still Debating Economic Model for Internet-Distributed Video — New York — Pay-TV distributors and programmers are “at a very strange crossroads” as they adapt to changing viewer demands and try to negotiate deals …
Discussion:
Media Buyer Planner