Mediagazer: AOL Huddles With Top M&A Team (Ki Mae Heussner/Adweek)

10:55 AM ET, August 26, 2011

Top News:

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Slate Lays Off Staff. Does Its Model Still Make Sense? — You don't have to be an ink-and-paper newspaper to be a dinosaur. — Slate, one of the original internet-only magazines, has laid off four journalists, including someone whose words I often quote in this column, press critic Jack Shafer.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, Washington Post, Slate, Adweek, The New York Observer and FishbowlNY, Thanks:beet_tv

Russell Adams / Wall Street Journal:

Slate's Layoffs Signal Flaws in Web Model — Unexpected ‘Head Winds’ Buffet Online Pioneer's Ad Sales — Since its mid-1990s launch, the online magazine Slate has been a study in whether a Web-only news organization can support a staff of professional journalists churning out original, reported content.

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Twilight of the Media Critics

Discussion: Medacity, The Daily Caller, Future of Journalism and Media Nation

Chris Ariens / TVNewser:

Contessa Brewer Leaving Daily Anchoring at MSNBC — Contessa Brewer, who has been a fixture on MSNBC since 2003, will no longer be an anchor on the network, TVNewser has learned. — For the last year-and-a-half Brewer has anchored the NoonET hour on MSNBC as well as hosting the weekend documentary series “Caught on Camera.”

Discussion: Inside Cable News, The Huffington Post, TVWeek.com and LA Observed

David Smydra / Google News Blog:

Google News now crawling with Googlebot — (Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog) — Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google's primary user-agent, Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers. Any news organizations that wish …

Discussion: Softpedia News, Search Engine Land, Future of Journalism and WebProNews

Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:

In Britain, a Meeting on Limiting Social Media — LONDON — British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met Thursday to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest, while trying to dodge charges …

Discussion: The Next Web and The Business Insider

Ki Mae Heussner / Adweek:

AOL Huddles With Top M&A Team — AOL has retained two of the biggest names in mergers and acquisitions, law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and investment banking company Allen & Company LLC. A team from those firms, including Wachtell, Lipton founding partner Martin Lipton …

Discussion: TVWeek.com, CNET News, The New York Observer, Deal Journal, Between the Lines Blog, Forbes and SAI

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

The Twitter effect: We are all members of the media now — Anyone who has gotten the latest news about Steve Jobs' resignation or the revolution in Libya from Twitter is probably used to the idea that the real-time information network has become a powerful tool for journalism — a point we've made often.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, Thanks:rawporter

Jodi Enda / American Journalism Review: Campaign Coverage in the Time of Twitter

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

How Steve Jobs has changed (but not saved) journalism — Steve Jobs resigned Wednesday as CEO of Apple Inc., but his legacy will be felt in the news industry for years to come. — In the past five years, Jobs' Apple has simultaneously disrupted, transformed and aided the news industry.

Discussion: MediaFile, The New York Observer, AllThingsD, Softpedia News, Garcia Media, Globe and Mail, Forbes, digiday:DAILY, ZDNet, Epicenter, Digital Trends, Yahoo! News, Fortune, The Tech Report, HBR.org and The Business Insider, more at Techmeme », Thanks:jeffsondermanch

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Study: iPad users spend most time with news apps compared with other types — An app analytics company says that news apps generate the longest periods of use among iPad owners. “Based on data from apps subscribing to the firm's analytics platform, users spend over two and a half times …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Future of Journalism, GigaOM and The Loop

Carl Sessions Stepp / American Journalism Review:

Hyperlocal Heroes — A firsthand look at how some members of the burgeoning roster of hyperlocal news Web sites do their jobs Mon. August 29, 2011 — Carl Sessions Stepp (cstepp@jmail.umd.edu), AJR's senior editor, teaches at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Discussion: Street Fight

Steve Buttry / The Buttry Diary:

Advice for building engagement through newsroom Twitter accounts — Like many institutional Twitter accounts, Journal Register Co. newsroom accounts need to be more engaging and conversational. — We tweet a lot of links to our content. But we're not very personable.

Seth McGuire / Gnip Blog:

Who Knew First: Steve Jobs or Aron Pinson? — While Steve Jobs' resignation yesterday had investors anxiously watching how $AAPL fared in trading, we at Gnip were having fun watching a different ticker- the realtime Twitter feed. — As you can see from the graph below (these represent the number of …

Jay Rosen / Pressthink:

Why Political Coverage is Broken — My keynote address at New News 2011, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, co-sponsored by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation at Swinburne University of Technology. (Melbourne, Australia, August 26, 2011.) — This talk had its origins …

Bloomberg:

‘Today’ Promotes Curry to Hot Seat as Surging ABC Closes Gap — NBC's “Today” show, making its biggest talent change since Katie Couric left in 2006, heads into the new television season with its 15-year dominance of morning TV challenged by a resurgent ABC.

Discussion: Inside TV and MediaPost