Mediagazer: Meredith Makes Big Sales Hire in Ad Slump (Lmoses/Adweek)

4:15 AM ET, June 11, 2011

Top News:

$1M hole in the wall — Conde Nast spent millions when it hired Frank Gehry to design its cafeteria in its current headquarters at 4 Times Square — but the big bucks spent on its upcoming move to 1 World Trade Center will be used for something a little bit different.

Discussion: Runnin' Scared, Curbed NY, FishbowlNY, The New York Observer, The Wire, Felix and New York Magazine

Dbyers / Adweek:

Gawker Hires New Head of Sales From Condé Nast — Gawker Media has hired Andrew Gorenstein, currently senior executive director of digital sales at Condé Nast, as its new chief advertising officer, according to an internal Gawker email. — Gorenstein has been at Condé …

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

The Atavist: How Multimedia Should Be Done in Digital Magazines — As media consumption devices evolve, so too does the form content takes on those devices. A great example is a new iPad and iPhone app called The Atavist, which is changing the way nonfiction stories are created and sold.

Lmoses / Adweek:

Meredith Makes Big Sales Hire in Ad Slump — Mass women's brands publisher Meredith brought in Dick Porter in a new, supercharged sales role, a move that comes at a time when the company has seen ad sales soften as consumer packaged goods advertisers have sliced spending.

Chris O'Shea / FishbowlNY: Meredith Expands, Adds to Leadership

David Corn / Mother Jones:

The Sarah Palin Email Saga — Mother Jones requested Palin's gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. Almost three years later, the wait is over. — Today, at 9 a.m. local time in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent …

Discussion: The Caucus, Guardian, msnbc.com, The Huffington Post, ProPublica, The Atlantic Wire, On Media's Blog, The Note, The New Yorker Blog, USA Today, Hot Air, Boing Boing, Gawker, News for Digital Journalists and The Daily Dish

Jillian C. York:

Journalistic Verification, Amina Arraf, and Haystack — How did a Syrian blogger, who told beautiful and heartwrenching stories of life as a lesbian in Damascus, manage to trick so many people? How did an American software engineer, whose passion for the Iranian cause led him to build …

Discussion: TIME

Reed Johnson / Los Angeles Times:

Sebastian Junger reflects on friendship, war and peace — After the death of photojournalist and friend Tim Hetherington in Libya, Junger resolves to cease front-line reporting. But war, he says, remains one of humanity's master narratives. — Author Sebastian Junger

Discussion: The Wire, The New York Observer, The Atlantic Wire and Jacket Copy

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

‘A cautionary tale for anyone considering freelancing for The Daily’ — Barbara Correa says she got an assignment from The Daily about the business implications of Oprah's final program and was offered 75 cents a word. She wrote the story, turned it in and got an acknowledgement from an editor.

The Atlantic Wire:

Austan Goolsbee: What I Read — How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? What sources can't they live without? To find out, we regularly reach out to well-informed people to learn more about their media diets. Austan Goolsbee is the chief White …

Alex Salkever / Street Fight:

Patch's Main Problem? Paltry Pay — When I was working at AOL a few years back, the recruiter for Patch.com came through the West Coast offices and I spoke to her a bit about building out the fast-growing hyperlocal news blog company that is something of a bet-the-future venture …

Discussion: Future of Journalism, mediabistro.com, Future Journalism Project, NYConvergence.com and memeburn

Nicholas Carlson / The Wire:
Confessions Of A Patch Editor: “The Model Isn't Sustainable”

Discussion: Digital Trends and VatorNews

Maria Popova / Nieman Journalism Lab:

In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship — Editor's Note: Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curation of “cross-disciplinary interestingness” that scours the world of the web and beyond for share-worthy tidbits.

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and AdPulp

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Guardian iPhone app attracts more than 400,000 downloads — Latest figures also reveal newspaper's mobile website accounts for more than 10% of total digital traffic — The Guardian's iPhone app has been downloaded more than 400,000 times since its launch in January …

Discussion: Media Week and Journalism.co.uk

Julie Moos / Poynter:

New York Times draws more “addicted” Web visitors than Huffington Post, which relies on “passers-by” — Early reports Thursday about Huffington Post surpassing The New York Times website in traffic illustrate a critical oversimplification: unique visitors do not equal page views.