Mediagazer: PBS plays Google's word game, transcribing thousands of hours of video into crawler-friendly text (Andrew Phelps/Nieman Journalism Lab)

7:55 PM ET, May 3, 2011

Top News:

PBS plays Google's word game, transcribing thousands of hours of video into crawler-friendly text — Blogs and newspaper sites enjoy a built-in advantage when it comes to search-engine optimization. They deal in words. But a whole universe of audio and video content is practically invisible to Google.

Discussion: Media Decoder, New York Observer, Mediaite, ProPublica, Broadcasting & Cable and The Daily Beast

Chris Lehmann / Yahoo! News:

Bin Laden news finds pundits forsaking usual comfort zones — It's hardly a revelation to note that the cable and talk-radio commentariat is divided on many leading issues of the day. But in the wake of the military raid claiming the life of Osama bin Laden, the range of pundit opinion …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Gothamist and Mediaite

WWD.COM:
Memo Pad: Covering Bin Laden... People Magazine's Royal Gain...

Discussion: @megan

Megan McArdle / The Atlantic Online:

Anatomy of a Fake Quotation — Yesterday, I saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fly across my twitter feed: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” - Martin Luther King, Jr". I was about to retweet it, but I hesitated.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, The Daily What, MediaMemo, Salon, www.wnyc.org, newsfeed.time.com, kottke.org, Cronaca, @lizgannes, Mashable!, @shervin, @gaberivera, NewsGrange, The Blaze and MediaMemo, more at Techmeme »

New York Times:
Turning to Social Networks for News

Discussion: The Business Insider, BRYCE DOT VC, SportsGrid, @joshuatopolsky, Brian Solis, New York Observer, I4U News, The Huffington Post, Neowin.net, CNNMoney.com, The Daily Beast, Media Decoder, Mediaite and Online NewsHour

Patrick Gavin / The Politico:
KEITH URBAHN'S TWEET HEARD AROUND THE WORLD

Discussion: L.A. Times Tech Blog and The Blaze

Jack Mirkinson / The Huffington Post: WATCH: Brian Williams Tells How He Learned Of Bin Laden's Death

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Ownership of TV Sets Falls in U.S. — For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped. — The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers …

Discussion: Company Town, I4U News, Electronista, WatchingTV Online, Nielsen Wire, National Review, @brianstelter, TVWeek.com, Digital Trends, Gawker and PRNewser, more at Techmeme »

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Maybe It's Not Cord-Cutting, But Cord-Nevers: TV Ownership Drops — Americans watch more TV than ever. Except for the Americans who don't have TVs at all any more: Nielsen says the percentage of American homes with TV sets has declined to 96.7 percent, from 98.9 percent last year.

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable and NewsGrange

CBS News:

Scott Pelley named anchor of “CBS Evening News” — Award-winning “60 Minutes” correspondent to fill anchor chair vacated by Katie Couric — Scott Pelley, one the most experienced reporters in broadcast journalism, has been named anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” …

Discussion: Media Decoder, TVNewser, Tuned In, Mixed Media, mediabistro.com, The Huffington Post and Gawker

Steve Myers / Poynter:

How 4 people & their social network turned an unwitting witness to bin Laden's death into a citizen journalist — You've probably heard by now that an IT consultant in Pakistan used Twitter to share what he heard as Black Hawk helicopters swooped down on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

Discussion: New York Magazine, Runnin' Scared, ReadWriteWeb, Technically Incorrect, Media Money … and memeburn

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Reality TV: OpenCourt has begun its livestream of the judicial system — OpenCourt is about as real as reality TV can get when it doesn't involve Kardashians, real housewives, or people trapped on an island. That's because OpenCourt, which launched yesterday, offers a view inside the legal system …

Discussion: WBUR, ReadWriteWeb, Patriot Ledger, OpenCourt and Seattle Times

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Losing Andrew Sullivan Didn't Hurt The Atlantic's Traffic — Andrew Sullivan. Image via Wikipedia — For The Atlantic, the defection of Andrew Sullivan to The Daily Beast could easily have been a disaster. After all, Sullivan's blog, the Daily Dish, averaged more than 1 million unique …

Discussion: Runnin' Scared, The Wire, FishbowlNY and New York Magazine

Joe Mullin / paidContent:

Viacom Takes A Final Shot At YouTube — What is likely to be final set of briefs in the Viacom-YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) appeal has been filed, and the argument is becoming more focused. The case comes down to what kind of copyright-policing system we want. Should it be one where copyright owners need …

Discussion: MediaPost

Megan O'Neill / SocialTimes.com:

85% Of Media Websites Now Use Online Video To Cover News — Is web video becoming the main format for online news? According to a new survey by D S Simon it just may be. According to the survey, 85 percent of online media websites are now using online video content to cover the news, jumping a third from last year.

Discussion: The Page

Jennifer Van Grove / Mashable!:

XYDO Prioritizes & Organizes News Shared on Twitter & Facebook — Social news site XYDO, launching publicly Tuesday, aims to prioritize and organize online news based on each user's social graph and interests. — “What we're trying to do with XYDO is build a social network around news,” explains co-founder Cameron Brain.

Discussion: Business Wire, @dannysullivan, @alexia, @fredericl, ReadWriteWeb, @dannysullivan, @xydoapp, @antderosa, PRNewser and louisgray.com

Andrea Pitzer / Nieman Storyboard:

Eliza Griswold on religion, violence and reporting — We spoke last week with Eliza Griswold, winner of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.” In addition to winning the Lukas Prize …

Teemu Henriksson / Editors Weblog:

OnSwipe: an appless solution for tablet publishing — When the iPad was released a year ago, it was immediately clear that the device offered enormous possibilities for news organisations and publishers in general. With Apple promoting its App Store heavily, it seemed natural to turn to apps as a way of publishing on the iPad.