Mediagazer: Meet Facebook's Journalist Ambassador (Yes, We Said Ambassador) (Gregory Ferenstein/Fast Company)

10:45 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, The Corsair, Adweek, Hollywood Life, Mediaite, TV Squad, TVWeek.com 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: Gothamist, NY Daily News and The Atlantic Wire

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

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

On Copyright, Eric Schmidt Is Right and Britain Is Wrong — Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been taking some flak from large media and content companies for comments he made about copyright in Britain, where the authorities have been considering a rewrite of the country's 300-year-old copyright laws.

Discussion: Telegraph, Ars Technica and Future of Journalism, more at Techmeme », Thanks:mathewi

Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Big Content rips into Google, the “corporate imperialist”

Discussion: MPAA Blog, Techdirt, Future of Journalism, PC World, PC Magazine, Digital Trends, RIAA and Softpedia News

Jim Rainey / The Big Picture:

Schwarzenegger child: How Gawker named wrong ‘baby mama’ — The story of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the household worker who bore his child more than a decade ago has created something like the Fog of War, I suggested the other day. When fact, fiction and journalistic standards blur …

Discussion: On Media's Blog, L.A. NOW and Capital New York

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: The Atlantic Wire, Poynter, FishbowlNY, Guardian, MediaPost, 10,000 Words, ReadWriteWeb, Softpedia News, PC Magazine, Editors Weblog, MediaPost, The Huffington Post, CNET News, Search Engine Land and The Next Web

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

Gregory Ferenstein / Fast Company:

Meet Facebook's Journalist Ambassador (Yes, We Said Ambassador) — A 25-year-old Columbia Professor of Journalism, Vadim Lavrusik, is Mark Zuckerberg's media macher. — Facebook now accounts for more than 5% of traffic for many major news outlets. As the Internet floods users with options …

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: MinOnline, FishbowlNY, New York Magazine and Gothamist

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.

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.

Discussion: GigaOM

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: Press Gazette, Future of Journalism and Media Week

Gena Chung / American Journalism Review:

Continuing the Struggle — Her husband, editor of a newspaper in Sri Lanka, was gunned down. Now in exile in New York City, Sonali Samarasinghe presses forward with their fight for press freedom and justice in their native country. Posted: Friday, May 20 2011

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

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.