Mediagazer: Katie Couric Eyeing AOL, Yahoo Partnership With Talk Show (Hollywood Reporter)

1:00 PM ET, April 4, 2011

Top News:

Team From Engadget Makes Jump to SB Nation — In 2005, Jim Bankoff was working at AOL as executive vice president in charge of products and programming. He decided that AOL needed to move aggressively into news if the business, then still a portal clinging to dial-up customers …

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

SB Nation Sacks AOL in Raid of Former Engadget Team for Competing New Tech Site, As AOL Zeroes in on New EiC — Jim Bankoff, the fomer AOL exec responsible for buying Engadget for the Internet portal, has grabbed eight staffers who had recently left the huge tech site amid tensions, in order to start a new gadget property.

Discussion: New York Magazine, BoomTown, Engadget, everwas, TDW Geeks, VatorNews, mediabistro.com, Talking Biz News, Stowe Boyd, @karaswisher and Soup

Associated Press:

AP source: Couric leaving news anchor post — NEW YORK (AP) — Katie Couric is leaving her anchor post at “CBS Evening News” less than five years after becoming the first woman to solely helm a network TV evening newscast. — A network executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity …

Hollywood Reporter:

Katie Couric Eyeing AOL, Yahoo Partnership With Talk Show … The media circus surrounding Katie Couric's future continues with the sort of fascination that in four and a half years, her evening news broadcast was rarely able to garner — With her CBS contract set to expire in early June …

Henry Blodget / The Wire:

IT'S OFFICIAL: AOL Fires Freelancers — A couple of weeks ago, AOL threw its freelance journalists into purgatory: — They were supposed to sit tight and wait to hear from their editors on their roles in the post-merger Huffington Post Media Group. — The freelancers, naturally …

Discussion: Guardian, FishbowlNY and mediabistro.com

Henry Blodget / The Business Insider:

AOL: We're Not Firing All Our Freelancers — We're Hiring Some Of Them Full-Time — Earlier today, we published a note from an AOL freelance journalist reporting that AOL's business-and-finance freelancers had been canned. — AOL's business-and-finance editor Peter Goodman sent us the note below in response.

Tanzina Vega / Media Decoder:

Center for Public Integrity to Start New Site for Investigative Journalism — The Center for Public Integrity will start a new Web site this month dedicated to investigative journalism. — The Web site, called iWatch News, will be updated daily with 10 to 12 original investigative pieces and aggregated content from other sources.

Discussion: Mediaite, FishbowlNY, Big News Network.com and Free Press

Wall Street Journal:

Making Facebook Ads More Buyer-Friendly — Specialist Agencies Emerge to Offer Big Marketers Help Navigating Site's Ad System — A new generation of agencies is trying to crack the code for placing ads on Facebook Inc. in a bid to lure more big-ticket marketers to the website.

Discussion: The Wire and AdExchanger.com

Ken Auletta / New Yorker:

What is Robert Thomson doing at the Wall Street Journal? — What is Robert Thomson doing at the Wall Street Journal? — Read the full text of this article in the digital edition (subscription required), or on our iPad app.

Discussion: Mediaite, Clusterstock, On Media's Blog, Poynter and Talking Biz News

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Tug of War Between Cable Companies and Channels Comes to the iPad — The iPad, which went on sale a year ago, is becoming the latest battleground in a long-running fight over how TV programs will be delivered in the digital age, and who will deliver them. — Last week, Time Warner Cable …

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:
Updated: Cablevision Launches Optimum for iPad: 300 Channels And VOD

Discussion: MediaPost and Lost Remote

Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:

Newspapers get 3x too many ad dollars, says study — Even though newspapers have lost nearly half of their ad revenues in the last five years, some analysts believe they still are getting three times more advertising than their readership deserves. — This good news/bad news for publishers comes …

Discussion: rickwebb's tumblrmajig

Amy Ma / Wall Street Journal:

News Chief Pushes Multimedia — These are busy times for Emmanuel Hoog, chief executive officer of Agence France-Presse, the global newswires service. Major news events such as the earthquake, tsunami and radiation threat in Japan, and the continuing strife in Libya, typically come around one at a time.

Great Speculations:

Arianna, AOL Get Nice Goose If Gray Lady Chases Away Readers — Marvelous Arianna feeds on NYT's folly? — Since its spin-off from Time Warner in December 2009, AOL has pushed forward with a variety of strategic initiatives to resurrect its struggling business, not always in a linear fashion.

Discussion: BuzzMachine

Felix Salmon:

GE and the power of iterative journalism — On March 25, the NYT's David Kocieniewski splashed a bombshell of a story across the front page; its current headline, online, is “GE's Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether”: … Cue a massive scurrying sound, as dozens of journalists around …

Discussion: The Hillman Foundation blogs, Poynter, Clusterstock and ThinkProgress

David Gelles / Financial Times:

Interpublic discloses stake in Facebook — Interpublic, the advertising group, has emerged as an unlikely beneficiary of the surging value of Facebook. — The company owns a stake in the social network that is today valued at somewhere between $200m and $300m, depending on Facebook's valuation and the actual size of the stake.