Mediagazer: Has the BBC become too afraid to take risks? (Maggie Brown/Guardian)

2:38 AM ET, April 26, 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: seobook.com, eMedia Vitals, Domain Name Wire, Forbes.com, @dannysullivan, ReadWriteWeb and Search Engine Land

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

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:
BACKSTORY: How News Outlets Raced To Publish WikiLeaks Gitmo Docs

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

Discussion: The Huffington Post and Salon

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

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 and FishbowlNY

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

Discussion: WWD Media Headlines and MediaPost

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

Discussion: Yahoo! News, FishbowlNY and Hit & Run

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, The Wire, FishbowlNY, Mediaite, The Huffington Post and Gawker

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

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

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.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

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,” …

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: ReadWriteWeb and Soup, Thanks:mathewi

Claire Cain Miller / New York Times:
Filtering the Social Web to Present News Items

Discussion: B&C, Adweek, ReadWriteWeb, Storify, Poynter, Off On A Tangent, MediaPost, Lost Remote and Noted

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 …

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.

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

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 …

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

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

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

Adrianne Jeffries / New York Observer:

BusinessWeek Blew $20 M. on Website Before Sale, Failed DMs Allege — A failed direct message exchange on Twitter between tech blogger Anil Dash and designer/publisher Jeffrey Zeldman just accidentally revealed that BusinessWeek spent an astonishing $20 million on a fancy publishing platform …

Discussion: @stuntbox, @zeldman, @zeldman, @zeldman and @zeldman

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.

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 …