Mediagazer: Roger Ebert Wins the Cartoon Caption Contest (Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Blog)

10:05 PM ET, April 25, 2011

Top News:

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Google Traffic to Demand Media Sites Down 40 Percent — Are the halcyon days of content farming over? Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr — Here's some plain, easy-to-understand proof that Google's recent algorithm overhaul is doing exactly what it was meant to do …

Discussion: Forbes.com, ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Land, seobook.com, Domain Name Wire and @dannysullivan

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: The Huffington Post and Runnin' Scared

New York Times:
A Note to Readers: The Background

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

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

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

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: Poynter, ReadWriteWeb, Storify, Lost Remote, Off On A Tangent, Adweek, MediaPost and Noted

Jack Shafer / Slate:

Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane's stupid ideas on how to cover the press. — New York Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane advanced the flummoxing idea in his column yesterday that the Times should not diss or needle other news organizations, nor should its writers grill the competition in interviews.

Discussion: Poynter, @emmagkeller, The Informer, California Watch, FishbowlNY and The New Republic

Max Read / Gawker:
The Onion Fools The New York Times

Discussion: Yahoo! News, Hit & Run and FishbowlNY

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:
A Tale Of Two Timeses: A New York Meter, A London Wall

Discussion: MediaPost

Hadley Freeman / Guardian:

Rachel Maddow: 'I'm definitely not an autocutie' — The top US news anchor on why she prefers jokes to anger and why she is proud to be gay — It's 10.05pm on a rainy Tuesday night in the MSNBC studio in the now famous New York address, 30 Rock, and Rachel Maddow - one of the highest profile news anchors …

Discussion: The Maddow Blog, Mediaite, The Wire, FishbowlNY, Gawker and The Huffington Post

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: newsfeed.time.com, FishbowlNY and The Atlantic Wire

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: mediabistro.com, John Keehler's Random … and NetNewsCheck Latest

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, IntoNow, MediaPost, PC Magazine, CNET News, L.A. Times Tech Blog, SAI, VentureBeat, The Next Web, Multichannel and Mogulite, more at Techmeme »

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: Adweek, Poynter, FishbowlNY, TVWeek.com, Adweek, Adweek, Talking Biz News, @iwantmedia and Curbed National

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

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Netflix: We'll Do a Couple More “House Of Cards"-Style Originals — Netflix says the high-profile move it made into original programming this year won't be its last. — The video rental service, which made a splash when it bought the first-run rights to “House of Cards,” …

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

Glynnis MacNicol / The Wire:

Take A Look Inside The Swanky Studio Of Al Jazeera's New Social Media Show — Earlier this week Al Jazeera English launched its brand new, much-talked about, social media news program The Stream. — The show was created in the wake of the Middle East uprisings — many of which were powered by social media …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab and Multichannel

Miguel Helft / Bits:

News Aggregator Zite Wants to Play Nice With Publishers — Zite, a news aggregator for the iPad whose app has irked major news publishers, said Monday that Mark Johnson, a longtime adviser to the company, would become its new chief executive. — But the announcement those news publishers focused …

Discussion: Zite - Blog, 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, MediaPost, Media News International, Media Decoder and The Fix

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 …

Discussion: New York Observer

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.

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

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.