Mediagazer: Hard economic lessons for news (Jeff Jarvis/BuzzMachine)

5:15 PM ET, April 25, 2011

Top News:

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

Hard economic lessons for news — I'm working on a talk that I hope will become the canonical link to my essential message about the business rules and realities of news. I continue to be astonished at the economic naiveté I hear in discussions of the business of news.

Discussion: MediaPost, FishbowlNY, Future of Journalism, Kirk LaPointe's … and Poynter

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

BACKSTORY: How News Outlets Raced To Publish WikiLeaks Gitmo Docs — NEW YORK — On Sunday night, more than a half dozen major news organizations in the United States and Europe began publishing shocking new revelations from a long-rumored WikiLeaks trove of documents about prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

Ian Cobain / Guardian:
Guantánamo Bay files: Al-Jazeera cameraman held for six years

Discussion: Runnin' Scared

New York Times:
A Note to Readers: The Background

Discussion: Aljazeera, Guardian, Guardian, New York Times, The Lede, CNET News, Hillicon Valley, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic Wire, Mother Jones, Mediaite, Boing Boing, The Nation and @chanders

Claire Cain Miller / New York Times:

Filtering the Social Web to Present News Items — SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, Lost Remote, Poynter, Adweek, Storify, ReadWriteWeb, MediaPost, The Business Insider, Off On A Tangent and Noted

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

The Future of Media: Storify and the Curatorial Instinct — The explosion of real-time information through social networks and information services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has produced a never-ending firehose of content. It has also created an opportunity for tools such as Storify …

Discussion: Soup, Thanks:mathewi

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Couric Is Expected to Say She's Leaving CBS — This week, Ms. Couric is planning to acknowledge one of the worst-kept secrets in television: that she is leaving the “CBS Evening News” after five years. Then, as soon as she returns from London, where she will be anchoring the network's coverage …

Discussion: NY Daily News, Adweek, TVNewser, Hollywood Life, Future of Journalism, On Media's Blog, TVLine, The Daily Caller, Bloomberg, Yahoo! News, Newsweek, Mediaite, The Huffington Post, PopEater and The Wire

Adweek:

The Hot List — The magazine industry emerged this year from the most perilous downturn in its history with a set of unmistakable powerhouse titles celebrated here in Adweek's 31st annual Hot List. Those that made the cut, from Food Network Magazine at No. 1 to Vanity Fair at No. 10 …

Discussion: Poynter, FishbowlNY, Adweek, Adweek, @iwantmedia, Talking Biz News and Curbed National

John Swansburg / New York Magazine:

The Comic Stylings of Brian Williams — How's an anchor to cope when network newscasts keep losing ground? Having a second career helps. — Over dinner at The Four Seasons, Brian Williams takes off his regimental tie and discusses his burgeoning side career in comedy.

Discussion: Poynter, Mediaite, On Media's Blog, @davidfolkenflik and TVNewser

The Atlantic Wire:

Joe Weisenthal: What I Read — How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is drawn from a conversation …

Discussion: Felix

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Yahoo Buys TV Programming Index IntoNow for About $17 Million, Plus Retention Packages — In a move to strengthen its television listings, Yahoo said it had acquired IntoNow, a TV indexing company. — The deal is designed to bolster the Silicon Valley start-up's data set in a key vertical.

Discussion: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Multichannel, IntoNow, SAI, CNET News, The Next Web and Mogulite, more at Techmeme »

Lois Beckett / Nieman Journalism Lab:

With three cups of luck, Byliner builds pre-launch buzz for its longform-focused platform — When former NYT Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati spoke at Berkeley earlier this spring about saving long-form journalism, he tossed out an interesting idea: Someone should assemble a “hive” …

Discussion: John Keehler's Random …

Julie Bosman / New York Times:

Tales of Reading in Reintroducing a Color Device — “TILL rhymes stop rhyming, and pots stop boiling,” a voice-over says, “by hook or by crook, by book or by nook.” — Make that Nook Color, the e-reading tablet that Barnes & Noble is hoping to reintroduce to consumers in an advertising campaign that begins on Monday.

Discussion: Fast Company, TechCrunch, CNET News and Future of Journalism, more at Techmeme »

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Mary Berner Exits Reader's Digest Association — Four-Year Run Saw Company Modernize, Reorganize, Struggle With Debt and Chapter 11 — Reader's Digest President-CEO Mary Berner has left the company after four years in the post, a run that saw the company file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection …

Discussion: Adweek, Media Decoder, The Fix and Media News International

Max Read / Gawker:

The Onion Fools The New York Times — You may have been surprised to see President Obama's smiling face on the cover of Tiger Beat in last week's The New York Times article about the “original teen-girl tabloid.” Your surprise was not unwarranted, as the Times admitted today: More »

Discussion: Yahoo! News, FishbowlNY and Hit & Run

MediaShift:

Why I Gave Up the Newspaper to Save Newspapering — The following is a guest post from Nicholas White, the CEO of The Daily Dot, a new startup in community journalism. White leaves a long lineage of newspaper men and women in his family to join digital media and explains why.

Thanks:joshdilworth

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:

Mort Zuckerman vs. the Daily News: An Owner Adrift — Last July, New York Daily News editor Martin Dunn abruptly left the paper due to his wife's illness. Kevin Convey, who'd been working as editor of the Boston Herald, was named his replacement. But now, we hear, unsatisfied NYDN owner Mort Zuckerman …

Peter Lauria / Mogulite:

Exclusive: Peter Chernin Loses Top Deputy Nicky Weinstock to New Fox Studios Venture — Hollywood mogul Peter Chernin, who vacated his post as the chief lieutenant to Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. in 2009, has lost one of his top deputies to his former company.

Robert Mankoff / The New Yorker Blog:

Roger Ebert Wins the Cartoon Caption Contest — Two years ago, Roger Ebert wrote on his Chicago Sun-Times blog: … Done. To the delight of film fans, film criticism fans, caption contest fans, and Roger Ebert fans—and count me among all of the above—Mr. Ebert has finally fulfilled …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Gavin O'Malley / MediaPost:

Click-Through Metrics Come Under Fire — While marketers continue to rely on click through rates as a primary measure of campaign effectiveness, new research suggests that the metric should be taken with a grain of salt — or completely taken out of the equation.