Mediagazer: How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded The Old Publishing Model (David Zax/Fast Company)

12:50 PM ET, May 16, 2011

Top News:

How Drudge Has Stayed on Top — For most big news Web sites, about 60 percent of the traffic is homegrown, people who come directly to the site by dint of a bookmark or typing in www.latimes.com or www.huffingtonpost.com. The other critical 40 percent comes by referrals …

Discussion: The Atlantic Wire, ZDNet, CyberJournalist.net, The Wire, @carr2n, @carr2n, @bgrueskin, @scottkarp, @jwherrman, @jwherrman, @jeffsonderman, @dangillmor, @jayrosen_nyu, Future of Journalism, ShortFormBlog and @mlcalderone

Julie Moos / Poynter:

Drudge influence may remain, but numbers show his audience waxes and wanes — Among the findings of last week's Pew report on what drives traffic to — and from — news websites, David Carr today highlights the continuing influence of the Drudge Report. — As Carr noted, Nielsen numbers cited …

Bill Carter / New York Times:

Gay CNN Anchor Sees Risk in Book — Don Lemon, the weekend prime-time anchor for CNN, was on the air on Sunday night this month when the news broke that President Obama would address the nation at the unusual hour of 10:30 p.m. — By the time the news network was confirming the reports …

Discussion: Adweek, NPR, The Atlantic Wire, New York Magazine, Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post, On Media's Blog, iCelebrity, Gawker, Poynter, Jezebel, @donlemoncnn, The New Yorker Blog, Mediaite, Inside Cable News, ShortFormBlog and PopEater

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

Columbia Journalism School to launch The New York World — Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism is launching an ambitious digital project - The New York World - designed to provide New York City citizens with accountability journalism about government operations that affect their lives.

Discussion: CJR, FishbowlNY, Editors Weblog and ShortFormBlog

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Moneyball and paywalls: Lessons on paid content from smaller papers — It's not that hard to find similarities between baseball and the newspaper industry. On one side you've got the New York Yankees: big payroll, extensive resources, and a renowned line-up.

Jane Mayer / New Yorker:

Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state? — Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state? — Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

Discussion: MetaFilter

Steve Grove / The Official Google Blog:

Remembering fallen journalists on video — We live in a world that feels smaller every day. As we become accustomed to nearly ubiquitous coverage of the news and events unfolding around the world, it's easy to forget the price that is sometimes paid to obtain quality …

Russell Adams / Wall Street Journal:

Many Formats, One Price — More Publications Begin Bundling Their Digital, Print and Mobile Subscriptions — Magazine and newspaper publishers are reorienting themselves around a business model that has taken hold in other media: the bundle. — The result is a new ecosystem of pricing …

Discussion: GigaOM, Adweek and Epicenter

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Ad Pages Haven't Yet Rushed to Tina Brown's ‘NewsBeast’ — ‘Tina Touch’ Brings New Editorial Voice But Business Upside to Fused Online/Print Venture Still Unclear — A little more than two months after Newsweek completed its merger with The Daily Beast, landing Beast Editor in Chief Tina Brown …

Discussion: FishbowlNY, The Atlantic Wire, Editors Weblog and The Daily Beast

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

At Bloomberg, Twitter Grabs an Unlikely Convert — Twitter is old news to lots of journalists, but not all of them. Last week, for instance, Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News' editor in chief, sent out his very first tweet. — Straightforward stuff, but still enough to cause a minor stir among the Bloomberg ranks.

Discussion: Talking Biz News

David Zax / Fast Company:

How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded The Old Publishing Model — The party line on piracy is that it's bad for business. But what to make of the case of “Go the F**k to Sleep,” the “children's book for adults” whose viral-pirate PDF launched the book to the number-one spot on Amazon.com a month before its release?

Discussion: The Wire, GigaOM, Bloggasm, TeleRead and Boing Boing

David Kaplan / paidContent:

NYTCo's Nisenholtz On Fixing About.com: It's All About The Guides — Last week, following three consecutive quarters of declining revenues at its About Group unit, the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) decided it was time for a change at the top and dismissed CEO Cella Irvine.

Discussion: Future of Journalism

GQ:

Game On! The Untold Secrets and Furious Egos Behind the Rise of SportsCenter — ESPN wasn't truly the worldwide leader in sports until Keith Olbermann came along. Brilliant, combustible, and allergic to authority, he revolutionized its flagship program—and started a countdown clock …

Discussion: The Wire and Deadspin

David Kaplan / paidContent:

AOL HuffPo Media Group On Editorial Hiring Spree Following Layoffs — After a raft of layoffs and departures that followed AOL's $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post in February, Arianna Huffington is hiring a bunch of new editors to reset the combined entities' newsroom …

Discussion: Saul Hansell's Blog, The Wire, Poynter and Mixed Media

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

Look Out Blogs: Google News Gains Options To Drop Blogs & Press Releases — Tired of seeing blogs or press releases in your Google News results? Google's got a cure for that, new settings that allow you to see fewer results from these sources, or none at all.

Discussion: Search Engine Roundtable

Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:

Dangerous Blend — Last week, the Columbia School of Journalism released “The Story so Far” (PDF here). For news zealots, this is tantamount to the Vatican publishing a sex manual. Still, this work is one of the best reports ever written on the state of modern journalism.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Adweek, MediaPost, The Wire, On Media's Blog and Guardian