Mediagazer: ¶ Why I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Dismantled Two Blogs and Jumped to Tumblr in a Single Weekend (Steve Rubel)

3:40 PM ET, June 1, 2011

Top News:

Henry Blodget / The Wire:

THE ATLANTIC: Andrew Sullivan Who? We're Crushing It! — A few months ago, when The Atlantic's biggest star, Andrew Sullivan, ran off with The Daily Beast, some folks worried that he would take The Atlantic's online business with him. — Nope! — Like a lot of other news sites …

Discussion: Bloggasm, @mathewi and @jayrosen_nyu

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Bin Laden (and cats!) deliver record month for news sites — Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group, tweeted an impressive statistic Tuesday afternoon: “Slate's biggest traffic month ever is ending with a sprint to 100m PVs.” — The final tally for May was 101 million pageviews …

Discussion: Bloggasm

Jenn Webb / O'Reilly Radar:

News organizations still party like it's 1899 — Ben Huh (@benhuh), CEO of the Cheezburger, Inc., loves his Cheezburger project, but he's also ready to have a fling with news. In a recent blog post, Huh addressed the stagnant state of news presentation and consumption, which he's hoping to address with his new project Moby Dick.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller Set to Land at NBC News — Former National Public Radio head Vivian Schiller, who left her last job under a political cloud, looks to have found a new position. She's in talks to work at NBC News, where she'll oversee digital projects.

Discussion: Mediaite

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Web Hackings Rattle Media Companies — It might just be the most worrisome letter to the editor any news organization can receive. — PBS fought on Monday and Tuesday to restore the Web sites for two news programs on public television, “Frontline” and “PBS NewsHour,” …

Discussion: Company Town and eMedia Vitals

Felix Salmon:

Did the NYT hack Fabrice Tourre's email? — Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson have a long and rambling story about the court case against Goldman's Fabrice Tourre, which is mainly interesting for how it was sourced: … I'm sure this was extremely carefully formulated, but it does raise a lot of questions without answering them.

Discussion: New York Times, Litigation and Trial, Gawker, New York Magazine, Betabeat, Yahoo! News, The Atlantic Wire, CJR, The Atlantic Online, msnbc.com, The Awl, The Wire and DealBook

Jonathan Mahler / New York Times:

Can Bill Simmons Win the Big One? — For Bill Simmons, the walk on Laker game days from his office at ESPN to the Staples Center — or “the Silicon Center,” as he once referred to it in a column — is an excruciating 250 yards, a nauseating gantlet of purple and yellow jerseys …

Discussion: The Wire, SportsGrid and Deadspin

Steve Rubel:

¶ Why I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Dismantled Two Blogs and Jumped to Tumblr in a Single Weekend — In military circles, a scorched earth policy - according to Wikipedia - is a strategy which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through …

Christopher Mims / Technology Review:

How Facebook Leveraged Publishers' Desperation to Build a Web-Wide Tracking System — Facebook's “Like” button isn't there for your convenience — it's crack rock for publishers in need of pageviews — Graph by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land — We already know that Facebook …

Ben Parr / Mashable!:

Fox News Launches Its iPad App [EXCLUSIVE] — Fox News is announcing Wednesday the release of its official iPad application, a visually-focused news experience with a big-name sponsor. — The app, which is now available [iTunes Link] in the App Store , was built from the ground up.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, rbr.com, Lost Remote, Editors Weblog and eMedia Vitals

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

What's to Become of Condé Nast's Digital Orphans? — Whither Condé Nast Digital? The division that comprised the company's magazine-branded websites has shrunk as those venues were handed to the individual publishers after executives decided that print and digital should be operated together.

Discussion: mediabistro.com, Press Gazette and Media Week

Martin Belam / currybetdotnet:

5 reasons news organisations prefer in-house web publishing tools — At the end of the live blogging panel session at news:rewired, my colleague Matt Wells wanted to answer a question that had been posed on Twitter - if the PA can use ScribbleLive for their live blogging tools, why do the BBC feel the need to build their own?

Discussion: news:rewired

Nat Ives / AdAge:

As Magazines' Print Demos Drift Wrong Way, Publishers Anticipate Tablet Metrics — Shifts in Reader Age, Income May Be Reflective of Media Platform Migration — Some say magazines are rushing toward the iPad at the risk of undermining their existing business, but here's one reason they might …

Discussion: FishbowlNY and AppleInsider

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Blip.tv Signs Distribution Deal With Fred, iJustine, And Other Collective Video Producers — Online video is growing up, and so are the young video stars who first found an audience on YouTube like Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) and iJustine. Both are part of the Collective Digital Studio …