Mediagazer: Katie Couric is closing in on a deal with ABC for an afternoon talk show (Dawn Chmielewski/Company Town)

4:50 PM ET, May 20, 2011

Top News:

Dawn Chmielewski / Company Town:

Katie Couric is closing in on a deal with ABC for an afternoon talk show — One of the most high-profile media courtships may soon be consummated: Katie Couric is closing in on a deal with Walt Disney Co.'s ABC to host an afternoon talk show. — Couric, who anchored the CBS Evening News …

Discussion: TVNewser, TVWeek.com, Mediaite, The Corsair, Adweek, Mediaite, TV Squad, Hollywood Life and Guardian

Alessandra Stanley / New York Times:

Quiet Departure Is Stark Contrast to Heralded Arrival — “CBS Evening News” bade farewell to its anchor, Katie Couric, on Thursday with a five-minute highlights reel and a rendition of the Beatles ballad “In My Life,” but there wasn't much sadness on the set.

Discussion: NY Daily News, Gothamist and The Atlantic Wire

The Huffington Post: Katie Couric Signs Off ‘CBS Evening News’

Carly Carioli / Phlog:

Google abandons master-plan to archive the world's newspapers — In an email today to publishers including the Boston Phoenix, Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers …

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Poynter, MediaPost, Guardian, Search Engine Land, 10,000 Words, CNET News, Softpedia News, ReadWriteWeb, PC Magazine, The Huffington Post, Editors Weblog and The Next Web, more at Techmeme »

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:

From Schoolhouse Rock to ‘The Fracking Song,’ explainers as ‘acts of empathy’ — In all the years he's been playing the guitar and keyboard, David Holmes never pictured himself recording a song about hydraulic fractured drilling. — But Holmes, a journalism student in New York University's …

Discussion: @romenesko

Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:

Big Content rips into Google, the “corporate imperialist” — The knives are out for Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Within hours of making comments to UK media during a press conference, major US rightsholders attempted to brand Google as an arrogant, out-of-control company bent …

Discussion: Future of Journalism, GigaOM, PC World, PC Magazine, Digital Trends, RIAA, Softpedia News, A VC and Forbes.com

Kat Stoeffel / New York Observer:

The Barbarian Group at the Gate! How Long Will ‘The Daily’ Stay Top Secret? — Since its launch three months ago, the goings-on at tablet newspaper The Daily have been kept tightly under wraps by News Corp's—not to mention Apple's—trademark wall of secrecy and non-disclosure agreements.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Noah Davis / The Wire:

ELIZABETH SPIERS: 'New York Observer Was Sluggish When I Got Here And Now It's Back On Track' — The visual metaphor is obvious. — Last week, Elizabeth Spiers — Gawker founder, Breaking Media founder, and currently editor-in-chief of the New York Observer — posted a picture …

Discussion: New York Magazine, @iwantmedia and FishbowlNY

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

After Layoffs, ‘Pink Slip’ Virus Hits Dow Jones — Dow Jones has been battling the nasty “pink slip” computer virus all week. And its arrival just days after two dozen or so techs were laid off has led to speculation that the company was a victim of sabotage.

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Mark Little / Storyful:

The Human Algorithm — When I became a reporter, almost 20 years ago, my job was to dig up scarce, precious facts and deliver them to a passive audience. Today, scarcity has been replaced by an unimaginable surplus and that audience is actively building its own newsroom.

Shira Ovide / Deal Journal:

Insane! John Malone Offers to Buy Barnes & Noble — Whaaaa??? … John Malone, the cable mogul who owns a mishmash of assets such as home-shopping channel QVC and a German cable operator, for some reason just offered $1 billion in cold cash to buy book retailer Barnes & Noble.

Discussion: Fast Company, Epicenter, USA Today, bookforum.com and GalleyCat

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:
Breaking: Liberty Media Offers Nearly $1 Billion For Barnes & Noble

Discussion: Forbes.com, Multichannel, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, MediaPost, Globe and Mail, CNET News, Home Media Magazine, Future of Journalism, Tech Trader Daily and The Wrap

Reinventing the Newsroom:

Where Papers' Linking Problems Begin — Why aren't news organizations better about linking? That question reverberates in digital-journalism circles periodically, and since the link is one of the more fundamental tenets of the web, if not the fundamental tenet, a failure to link …

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch Europe:

Twitter sued for ‘breaking’ UK super injunction. Oh yes. — We've been watching the British legal system turn itself into knots for the last couple of weeks, largely due to the ability of Twitter users to break just about any legal ‘super injunction’ a ‘celebrity’ (usually footballers) …

Discussion: Gawker, Guardian, Bloomberg, paidContent, Guardian, BBC, Crave, The Next Web, Guardian and @joshhalliday, more at Techmeme »

New York Post:

Battle over Condé Nast office space at 1 WTC — When Condé Nast finally moves into its new downtown digs at 1 WTC, many of the denizens of the city's glitziest publishing house will be in a for a rude surprise: the new office plan calls for open floor seating in the 1 million square feet of office space.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, New York Magazine and Gothamist

Adam Tinworth / One Man & His Blog:

bbcsms - Technology and Innovation — Nic Newman — Social media is your friend, not your competitor. Visits to news sites is growing at about the same rate as social media visits. — So who is losing? — Search is starting to fall as a source of information - being replaced by social discovery.

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Tablets Tip Future To First Digital Profit — Future says tablet magazine sales of over £100,000 ($161863.16) per month pushed its digital activities in to their first ever profit during the first half of this year. — Although publishers often cite growing digital revenue …

Discussion: Media Week

Todd Haselton / BGR:

Internet and telco TV eat away at cable TV market share — According to new data from ABI Research, internet TV and and television services run by telecoms - such as Verizon or AT&T— are slowly eating away at cable TV's market share. Cable TV subscriptions dropped from 72% in 2009 to 69% in 2010 …

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

The Evolution of TechCrunchTV: A Slick NY Studio and the Power of Videoblogging — Launched just over a year ago, now with 1700 videos and millions of streams, TechCrunchTV is expanding with new programming, a state-of-the-art studio at the Aol headquarters in Manhattan and a focus on videoblogging.

Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:

Hyperlocal Network Main Street Connect Buys CentralMassNews — Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, is expanding its portfolio significantly: The company has just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts.

Discussion: Street Fight, Media Nation and NYConvergence.com

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

The CW to reward viewers for watching commercials — At its upfront presentation today, the CW network announced an unique partnership with the shopping app Shopkick. The app serves up shopping deals and special rewards for users who visit top retailers like Target and Home Depot.

Discussion: Media Buyer Planner, MediaPost, Broadcasting & Cable, GigaOM and rbr.com

Brian Morrissey / digiday:DAILY:

Cheezburger's Ben Huh on Viral Snake Oil — Ben Huh is an Internet pioneer. He popularized the Internet meme of drawing funny, misspelled captions on cute cat photos, called LOLcats, using it as the basis of his media company Cheezburger. Its sites include Failblog and The Daily What.

Discussion: Poynter