Mediagazer: ‘The conditions are finally right to give newspaper paywalls a fair shake’ (Jim Romenesko/Poynter)

2:00 AM ET, April 5, 2011

Top News:

Katie Couric Has a Few Regrets — When you started hosting the “CBS Evening News” in 2006, there was a lot of talk about mold-breaking. Now the show looks very much like the other network broadcasts. — In retrospect I would have given people what they were used to, a traditional newscast.

Discussion: Tower Ticker, The Wire, newsfeed.time.com, Mixed Media, TVLine, PopWatch, The Huffington Post, The 6th Floor, Tuned In, Associated Press, TVNewser, MyFox New York, Random Pixels and Loose Talk and Inside TV

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:
Amid Rumors She's Leaving CBS, Couric Heads to Iraq

Discussion: TVNewser and The Wire

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

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: TechCrunch, Guardian, Marketing Pilgrim, WebProNews, GigaOM, mediabistro.com, FishbowlNY and New York Times

Henry Blodget / SAI:
AOL: We're Not Firing All Our Freelancers — We're Hiring Some Of Them Full-Time

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Informer:

Conde Nast Paid $8 Million To Scammer Who Sent One Email — By William P. Barrett and Janet Novack — With a Parade of fancy fraud cases centered on Wall Street so much in Vogue, here is Chatter about a swindle with no Glamour at all but still a certain amount of Allure.

Discussion: Threat Level, New York Magazine, FishbowlNY, Techdirt, Poynter, Gawker and Geekosystem

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

Report: San Francisco Chronicle to put up paywall — Report: San Francisco Chronicle to put up “hard” paywall as early as the end of the month. http://journ.us/h86Mdu 2 minutes ago — Loyalty ain't what it used to be: @roypeterclark justifies journalists as ketchup & explains …

Discussion: Gannett Blog and MediaPost, more at Techmeme »

Damon Kiesow / Poynter:

Six things aggregator app News.me must do to beat Zite, Flipboard — Personalized news app Zite made headlines last week for a minor skirmish with a group of major publishers, but the personalized aggregation app expected to make news any day now is Betawork's News.me.

Robert Niles / Online Journalism Review:

Whining isn't winning — Please quit whining about “aggregation,” or whatever other phenomenon on the Internet you're blaming today for the fact you no longer enjoy the monopoly over local publishing you once had. — To be blunt, whining about the competition is the act of a loser.

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Tanzina Vega / Media Decoder:
Center for Public Integrity to Start New Site for Investigative Journalism

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

Ian Burrell / The Independent:

FT: The Pink 'Un powers on — The Financial Times's online subscription model is 10 years old and has just posted huge subscription figures. What's its secret? — It's the 10th anniversary of the Financial Times introducing subscription charges for access to its digital content.

Discussion: Editors Weblog and Press Gazette

Georgina Prodhan / Reuters:

INTERVIEW-FT won't give up subscriber relationship to Apple — * Hopeful of positive outcome to negotiations with Apple — The Financial Times wants to keep selling subscriptions for its digital news directly to readers rather than surrender control of new customers who sign up via Apple's iPad, the managing director of FT.com said.

Discussion: iClarified, App Advice, Gizmodo, MacRumors, thinq_, MobileBurn.com, TUAW, MacStories, Electronista, Talking Biz News, Gizmodo Australia and Daring Fireball, more at Techmeme »

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

The New York Times launches its first Tumblr blog — More than eight months after media reporters first stumbled upon a URL that the New York Times had quietly registered with Tumblr, the paper of record has finally launched its inaugural editorial product on the influential blogging platform.

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Neil Vidyarthi / SocialTimes.com:

Tumblr's Mark Coatney: Do Most Websites Treat Commenters As Second Class Citizens? [Video] — Mark Coatney, Media Evangelist for Tumblr, recently made the trip down to our mediabistro office in Manhattan to let us in on a few secrets about Tumblr's growth and progress over the last year.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

Who's afraid of Arianna Huffington? — The New York Times has been gunning for The Huffington Post lately, which makes me wonder what exactly Arianna Huffington has done to scare or anger them so. Or perhaps that's the wrong question. Given that our enemies are often those we don't understand …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Rebooting The News, Stowe Boyd, On Media's Blog, FishbowlDC, New York Observer and Geekosystem

Great Speculations: Arianna, AOL Get Nice Goose If Gray Lady Chases Away Readers

Jon Lafayette / Broadcasting & Cable:

EXCLUSIVE: Bounce TV, New Broadcast Net Aimed at African Americans, To Launch in Fall — Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III among founders — A group led by Ambassador Andrew Young and Martin Luther King III is expected on Monday to announce plans to launch a new over-the-air television network aimed …

Discussion: rbr.com, The Wrap, MediaPost, Company Town, Multichannel News, TVWeek.com and mediabistro.com

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

‘The conditions are finally right to give newspaper paywalls a fair shake’ — That's what former NPR chief executive and ex-head of NYTimes.com Vivian Schiller said at the 12th International Symposium on Online Journalism. This is the first time I've felt this way, and possibly the first time I've …

Discussion: CJR

rickwebb's tumblrmajig:

On The Bubble — Okay, a few more thoughts on this Chris Dixon article and whether it's a bubble, since going and reading the article, I am surprised to see Dixon arguing that not only is it a safer bubble (private investors, discussed in my last entry) but that perhaps it's not a bubble at all.

Discussion: Betabeat, AdAge, digiday:DAILY and NoahBrier.com

Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspapers get 3x too many ad dollars, says study

Newsweek:

Save the Media! — Let the ‘Times’ charge readers, says ad titan Martin Sorrell—but news needs subsidies, too. — Sir Martin Sorrell has always been a bit of a flamethrower. Today, the British advertising tycoon—who amassed one of the largest ad-agency groups in the world …

Discussion: GigaOM and Poynter

Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic Online:

The View From Somewhere — Neither ideology nor politics defines my work, but that doesn't mean I'm without bias - consider me a partisan for public discourse, California roots, and disagreement in conversation. — The press critic Jay Rosen often complains about The View From Nowhere …

Marc Berman / Adweek:

Filling the Oprah Void — Will the strong ad sales market make talker queen's exit a nonevent? — Oprah Winfrey's exit in May might not be the end-of-days scenario for the syndication upfront many predicted when she announced last year that her daytime juggernaught was ending.

Mark Coddington:

Engagement, shovelware, magic bullets, and expanding the idea of journalism: Six themes from ISOJ — As expected, this year's International Symposium on Online Journalism (my first) was an illuminating collision between the academic and practical sides of journalism — I'm sure most everyone left …

Dan Levy / Sparksheet:

Slate of Mind: Q&A with David Plotz — Slate has always labeled itself an “online magazine,” even as a whole ecosystem of blogs and content websites and tablet newspapers has sprouted around it. How is Slate different from the Gawkers and HuffPosts and Daily Beasts, not just in terms …

Discussion: Poynter.