Mediagazer: News Aggregator Zite Wants to Play Nice With Publishers (Miguel Helft/Bits)

9:00 AM ET, April 26, 2011

Top News:

Sharon Waxman / The Wrap:

EXCLUSIVE: YouTube Finally Goes Hollywood With New Movies on Demand Service (Updated) — YouTube will imminently launch a movie-on-demand service charging users to stream movies off the world's largest video sharing site, TheWrap has learned. — The new service means a full-bore challenge …

Discussion: MediaMemo, 9 to 5 Mac, SAI, Future of Journalism, AppleInsider, The Next Web, paidContent, Engadget, CNET News and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

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: seobook.com, ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Land, Forbes.com, Domain Name Wire and @dannysullivan, more at Techmeme »

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Why Yahoo Bought IntoNow — Yahoo scooped up TV check-in app maker IntoNow Monday, just three months after the startup introduced its first product. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports are putting the price anywhere between $17 and $30 million, and we hear from someone …

Discussion: Media News, Lost Remote, New Media Age, ReadWriteWeb, Electronista and Mogulite

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Yahoo Buys TV Programming Index IntoNow for About $17 Million, Plus Retention Packages

Discussion: VentureBeat, TechCrunch, PC Magazine, The Social, MediaPost, IntoNow, L.A. Times Tech Blog, SAI, The Next Web and Multichannel, more at Techmeme »

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: Yahoo! News, The Informer, Poynter, @emmagkeller, California Watch and FishbowlNY

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Slate rethinks aggregation (again) with a Slatest redesign — Slate was arguably the first major news site to care about aggregation, starting back in 1996, when we only thought we suffered from information overload. (They didn't even call it “aggregation” yet. It was “meta-news.")

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and eMedia Vitals

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 and eMedia Vitals, more at Techmeme »

Jay Rosen / Pressthink:

What I Think I Know About Journalism — Next month I will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years, an occasion that has led me to reflect on what I've tried to profess in that time. — Or, to put it another way, what I think I know about journalism. — It comes down to these four ideas.

Courtney Boyd Myers / The Next Web:

Here's one way TV stations can strategically cash in on the Internet — Have you ever watched one of The Travel Channel's programs? Perhaps “Flavors of Peru,” “Feast India,” or “Cruising to the Northern Lights”? It may have inspired you to embark on a trip to Cusco …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Brian Stelter / New York Times:
The Travel Channel Invests $7.5 Million in Oyster.com

Discussion: rbr.com, AdExchanger.com, The Wrap and paidContent

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, The Huffington Post and Gawker

Dan Snyder / Washington Post:

Why I am suing Washington City Paper — On Tuesday I am refiling my lawsuit against Washington City Paper, a tabloid paper that published false and reckless charges about me in November 2010. The case needed to be refiled in Washington, not New York, for legal reasons; the rest of the complaint is essentially the same.

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

The Times Gains New Subscribers With Groupon Discount — Times Newspapers has added nearly two percent more digital subscribers in the last three days, after discounting its online rates by 70 percent in a deal through Groupon. — On Easter Sunday morning, Groupon recipients received …

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

David Hirschman / Street Fight:

EveryBlock's Adrian Holovaty: Enabling Community Conversation — Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty has been building out local news databases for a while now. A former Washington Post staffer, Holovaty is also the creator of the open-source platform Django, as well as chicagocrime.org (which later was folded into EveryBlock).

CAITLIN DICKSON / The Atlantic Wire:

Over Half of 2011's New York Times Issues Rely on WikiLeaks — Today's New York Times prominently features “The Guantanamo Files,” a synthesis of “700 classified military documents” obtained by WikiLeaks, about the Cuba prison's current and former inmates. It's the latest blockbuster data cache to be trumpeted by the paper.

Discussion: Mediaite, The Nation, Runnin' Scared and Boing Boing, Thanks:jaredbkeller

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:

Facebook introduces first private content-sharing tool with ‘Send’ button — The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post added a “Send” button to their sites today, enabling users to privately send stories to their Facebook friends, Facebook Groups or to an individual email address.

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

TV People Realizing That The Internet Is Global — It's kind of amusing to read this NY Times article about how the producers of Doctor Who had the brilliant idea of showing the latest season in the UK and the US on the same day this season, rather than showing it in the UK and then delaying the US release for a while.

Bradley Johnson / AdAge:

Tweet This: Agencies Get 28% of Revenue From Digital — Mad Ave Better Take Note — You Are Digital, or You Are Very, Very Unimportant — Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising …

Burgess Everett / On Media's Blog:

Olbermann announcement planned Tuesday — Keith Olbermann — on both his website and Twitter account — is gearing up for a Tuesday proclamation about his upcoming show on Current TV. — “Oh by the way, we'll be making a couple of big announcements tomorrow about the new show,” …

Zeke Turner / WWD Media Headlines:

Memo Pad: New York Times' Subscription Push... Mary Berner Opts Out... ALL AROUND TOWN: In an earnings call last week, New York Times Co. chief executive officer Janet Robinson said she'll be spending $13 million, mostly in promotional costs, on the flagship newspaper's new pay wall through the end of 2011.

Julie Moos / Poynter:

The obligatory and the original: 3 things I learned from our week as Romenesko — In the eight-plus years I've worked with Jim Romenesko, I've spent some time talking with him, more time emailing with him, and — most of all — I've admired and observed how he does what he does.

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,” …

Ivanoransky / Retraction Watch:

So who bought Scienceblogs? Retraction Watch exclusive: National Geographic — This afternoon, PZ Myers, of the wildly popular Pharyngula blog on ScienceBlogs, started a post with a few lines that set science writers on Twitter abuzz: … Retraction Watch has learned …

Discussion: Pharyngula

Maggie Brown / Guardian:

Has the BBC become too afraid to take risks? — When Lord Patten went before the Commons culture, media and sport select committee last month to lay out his credentials as the new chairman of the BBC Trust, he deliberately alighted on a key issue for programme makers and viewers …

Discussion: Adweek

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, Gawker, The Atlantic Wire and FishbowlNY

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 …

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, ReadWriteWeb and Multichannel