Mediagazer: First Shot Fired in The Great Media War (Larry Kramer/C-Scape)

7:00 AM ET, March 30, 2011

Top News:

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: NetNewsCheck Latest

Jonathan Cooper / Journal Register Company:
Online Veteran To Lead Digital Transformation of JRC Newsrooms

Discussion: paidContent, NetNewsCheck Latest, eMedia Vitals, Beet.TV, On Media's Blog and Editors Weblog

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: eMedia Vitals and Daring Fireball

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

Chris O'Shea / FishbowlNY:

New York Times Gets Its Own Blog Wrong — Apparently, readers aren't the only ones stressed out by the New York Times paywall going into effect yesterday. — A Mediabistro colleague spotted this ad promoting digital subscriptions to the Times this morning on the train, and sadly enough …

Discussion: Mediaweek, GalleyCat and TVSpy

Lauren Indvik / Mashable!:
How To Hack the New York Times Paywall ... With Your Delete Key

Discussion: Search Engine Land, Digital Trends, digiday:DAILY and Newspaper Death Watch

Joe Mullin / paidContent:
Ex-Googlers Launch ‘NYT For A Nickel’ As Publicity Stunt; NYT Not Amused

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Poynter and The Next Web

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 »

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.

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.

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.

David Goetzl / MediaPost:

Mediabrands Moves Toward Performance-Based Compensation With 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 …

Mike Farrell / Broadcasting & Cable:

Bewkes: Time Warner's $26 Million Man — Other execs see double-digit compensation increases — Time Warner Inc. chairman and CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, coming off a year of double-digit advertising growth, was rewarded handsomely in 2010, with total compensation of more than $26 million …

Discussion: The Wrap

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 …

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 …

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 …

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

UK Times Claims 79,000 Digital Subscribers — Frequently besmirched since it started charging online eight month ago, News International has, as it promised it would, issued a second set of numbers for Times Newspapers' progress since then (full announcement below, our analysis here).

Discussion: Press Gazette, Guardian, Future of Journalism, The Next Web and Media Week

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Taps Executive From Time Warner — Facebook Inc. said it hired Mark D'Arcy, the president of Time Warner Inc.'s Global Media Group, as director of global creative solutions to help boost the appeal of the social networking service's ad offerings. — In the newly created role …

Discussion: Mashable! and mediabistro.com