Mediagazer: Meet the Man Responsible for Rebecca Black (Adrian Chen/Gawker)

12:45 AM ET, March 31, 2011

Top News:

On NBC, the missing story about parent company General Electric — Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press - The story that General Electric did not pay federal taxes last year was widely reported everywhere but NBC. — It's the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow …

Discussion: ThinkProgress, Mediaite, TVNewser, Company Town, Yahoo! News, Poynter and mediabistro.com

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage — A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app. — The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and Electronista, more at Techmeme »

New York Post:

Paltrow said to be cooking up a food magazine — Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has been remaking herself in recent years as a food expert with strong ties to celebrity chef Mario Batali — and now, according to a reliable source, she is trying to expand her empire outside of the Hollywood realm with a magazine project.

Discussion: The Wire, The Huffington Post, Movieline, FishbowlNY and Gothamist

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

How The Daily Is Doing So Far*: 500k Downloads, 75k Users — The Daily's editor, Jesse Angelo, introduces the new iPad-based publication at its launch event. — How many subscriptions to The Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only multimedia newspaper, have been sold since the expiration of the free trial period last week?

Discussion: FishbowlNY and CNET News

Los Angeles Times:

KCET-TV said to be in talks to sell landmark studio to Church of Scientology — KCET, which has been struggling to rebuild viewership after its split from PBS, plans to move to a smaller location, real estate brokers say. — The KCET building on Sunset Boulevard.

Discussion: LA Observed and Show Tracker

paidContent:

The paidContent 50: The Most Successful Digital Media Companies In The U.S. — For all the endless debates about monetization, it's easy to lose sight of which companies are actually generating significant digital revenues. Welcome to the paidContent 50, our inaugural list …

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Poynter and Media Buyer Planner

Howard Kurtz / The Daily Beast:

The Era of Sound-Bite Warfare — Mike Huckabee's remarks about Natalie Portman's out-of-wedlock pregnancy weren't incendiary—until Eric Hananoki got his hands on them and found just the right snippet to get the media fired up. Howard Kurtz on how partisan groups are deploying sound bites to discredit public figures.

Adrian Chen / Gawker:

Meet the Man Responsible for Rebecca Black — This month Rebecca Black's “Friday” hit the Internet like audio-visual swine flu—and the Internet hit back. She seemed to come out of nowhere, possibly autotuned from her first word. But Black was spawned by the vanity production company Ark Music Factory.

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Popular Science iPad Edition Has Sold 10,000 Subscriptions — Only Apple Knows Who's Subscribing, but They're Paying for Digital Content — Popular Science magazine sold the 10,000th subscription to its iPad edition sometime on Sunday, nearly six weeks after accepting Apple's terms for selling subs on its tablet.

Discussion: Electronista, App Advice, CrunchGear, Editors Weblog, Mashable!, MacStories, Folio, FishbowlNY, The Loop, NetNewsCheck Latest and eMedia Vitals

Julie Bosman / New York Times:

Richard Holbrooke's Papers Entrusted to George Packer — When Richard C. Holbrooke died in December, he left behind the notes for a project he never had time to finish. — Mr. Holbrooke, a prominent diplomat in Democratic administrations since the 1960s, had planned to write a memoir …

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Google Seeks Answer to Facebook With ‘Social Search’ — Google Inc., seeing a threat from social-networking companies such as Facebook Inc., plans to allow people to reorder the way websites are ranked on its core Web-search engine based on which sites they and their friends like or find useful, said people familiar with the matter.

Discussion: The Official Google Blog, Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, Mashable!, The Next Web, Geekosystem and MarketingVOX, more at Techmeme »

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Bloomberg's Bascobert: Bloomberg BusinessWeek Doesn't Need A Paywall — Last week, Bloomberg decided to reform the division that houses its TV, print, radio, mobile and digital media properties as part of the continuing quest to reach a more general business audience.

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Ben Popper / Betabeat:

Magazine Icon Roger Black: The iPad is Not a Magic Pony — The legendary magazine designer Roger Black sat in the lounge of his Fifth Avenue studio, rows of leather-bound volumes arrayed on the wall behind him. At first glance they seemed like compendiums of classic literature …

Discussion: TeleRead and Poynter

MediaShift Idea Lab:

Why the New York Times' Pay Model is Similar to NPR and Spot.Us — From the launch of Spot.Us, I've always said the following: — Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It's just about being transparent …

Discussion: Tom Foremski, Nieman Journalism Lab, Digital Inspiration … and The Wire

Nicholas Carlson / SAI:

MySpace CEO Mike Jones Swears There's A Growing Product Buried Under The Rubble Of A Failed Social Network — MySpace CEO Mike Jones swears that, buried under the rubble of the failed social network he gamely took over last year, he and his team have planted the roots of a new, perhaps smaller …

Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:

I Want My iPad TV: The Slogan for a New Generation — When is an iPad not an iPad? When it's a TV screen. — That distinction is becoming increasingly important as battle lines are being drawn between distributors like Time Warner Cable, which claim the right to broadcast live TV …

Discussion: Company Town, Electronista, Time Warner Cable Untangled and Multichannel