Mediagazer: Hearst's Ellen Levine: An ‘IQ Snob’ with a ‘Cosmo’ Soft Spot (Sharon Elizabeth Samuel/New York Observer)

11:25 AM ET, March 30, 2011

Top News:

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 and Poynter

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Tweet late, email early, and don't forget about Saturday: Using data to develop a social media strategy — Tweet more, and embrace the weekends. — That's according to Dan Zarrella, a social media researcher (with 33,000 followers himself). Zarrella works for HubSpot …

Discussion: Lost Remote, Editors Weblog, Future of Journalism and eMedia Vitals

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: NetNewsCheck Latest and eMedia Vitals

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

James Murdoch Marked As News Corp. #3; Promoted To Deputy COO, Moving To NY — Following News Corp.'s win with the regulators over BSkyB (NYSE: BSY), James Murdoch is getting the corporate equivalent of a post-Super Bowl trip to Disney World: a promotion to the new role of deputy COO …

Discussion: News Corporation, FishbowlNY, The Wire, Guardian, Company Town and Journalism.co.uk

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

UX Evolutions: News on iPad — When the iPad launched in April last year, news media companies were among the first to create applications for the new tablet device. We're now a year into the iPad era and some of those news apps have dramatically changed how we consume news.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, eMedia Vitals and Daring Fireball

Lauren Rabaino / mediabistro.com:

How To Start Your Own Local News Site: Tips From a Berkeleyside Co-Founder — The prospect of starting your own news site is more viable an option than ever in the current media climate. Traditional news organizations are plunging left and right, the tools for publishing are free and easy …

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Oprah ‘Tweets’ in a Bid for Viewers — Oprah Winfrey and her colleagues took to Twitter on Sunday night to promote a new episode of a show on OWN, her new cable channel. Did the posting help her ratings? — Probably, but whether it helped in a meaningful way is open to interpretation.

Discussion: TVWeek.com and Techdirt

Kat Stoeffel / New York Observer:

Golden Delicious: Ruth Reichl to Run Gilt Groupe Foodie Site — We hear former Gourmet editor in chief Ruth Reichl is staffing up a food spin-off of Gilt Groupe, the luxury discount retailer Web site. The project remains in stealth mode, but one might expect the site to look like the Gilt MANual blog …

Sharon Elizabeth Samuel / New York Observer:

Hearst's Ellen Levine: An ‘IQ Snob’ with a ‘Cosmo’ Soft Spot — “What about my job turns me on?” Hearst editorial director Ellen Levine asked herself as she delivered a lecture at the Columbia Journalism School last Thursday. — “I like to be around smart people,” she said without missing a beat.

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

What's Project Thunderdome, you ask? Inside Jim Brady's new job at Journal Register Company — So Jim Brady, formerly of AOL, washingtonpost.com, and TBD, is now of the Journal Register Company. That's big news — and not only because it had been an open question where Brady would land after he left TBD in November.

Discussion: paidContent, NetNewsCheck Latest, eMedia Vitals, On Media's Blog, Journal Register Company and Editors Weblog

David Goetzl / MediaPost:

Mediabrands Moves Toward Performance Comp, Cites Nielsen Deal — Mediabrands CFO Jeff Lupinacci said an exclusive deal with Nielsen will allow the group to continue moving in the direction of performance-based compensation. The two-year arrangement gives Mediabrands access to proprietary data …

Larry Kramer / C-Scape:

First Shot Fired in The Great Media War — Make no mistake about it. There have been skirmishes in the past, but this week in the hallowed halls of big media, war broke out. — Just as the “The shot heard round the world,” launched the American Revolutionary War in Concord, Mass …

Dan Frommer / SAI: Silicon Alley Insider:

REVEALED: Daring Fireball's Impressive Traffic Stats — A year and a half ago, we profiled John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog had become the “homepage for Mac nerds.” — Back then, the site was attracting about 2 million monthly pageviews on about 250,000 monthly unique visitors.

more at Techmeme »

Antony Bruno / Billboard.Biz:

Amazon's Director Of Music Talks Cloud Drive: 'We Don't Believe We Need Licenses' — Amazon today launched a new music-locker service called Cloud Drive, sparking a new round of analysis over the potential impact of cloud music services and upsetting a number of major labels in the process.

Discussion: Reuters, GigaOM and hypebot, more at Techmeme »

Emily Witt / New York Observer:

Twelve-Stepper: How Cary Goldstein Went From Publicist to Publisher — Last November, the boutique imprint Twelve had a party at La Fonda del Sol restaurant. The venue is just above Grand Central Station and down the street from Grand Central Publishing, the Hachette division that oversees Twelve.

Sam Gustin / Epicenter:

TV Ad Spending Still Tops, But Web Growing Fast: Study — Here's a real shocker that I know you'll find hard to believe: television is the most popular medium in the United States. — That's why brand advertisers continue to pour more marketing dollars into TV ad campaigns than print, radio or the internet.