Mediagazer: Contessa Brewer Leaving Daily Anchoring at MSNBC (Chris Ariens/TVNewser)

7:50 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: Washington Post, Slate, The New York Observer and Adweek, Thanks:beet_tv

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Twilight of the Media Critics

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Dylan Byers / Adweek:
An Interview With Jack Shafer

Discussion: Medacity, The Daily Caller, Media Nation, Poynter, FishbowlNY, The Awl and Future Journalism Project

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, TVWeek.com, The Huffington Post and LA Observed

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, Garcia Media, Globe and Mail, Forbes, digiday:DAILY, ZDNet, Epicenter, Digital Trends, Yahoo! News, Fortune, The Tech Report and HBR.org, more at Techmeme », Thanks:jeffsondermanch

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: Between the Lines Blog, Forbes and The Business Insider

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: Future of Journalism, Search Engine Land and WebProNews

CmdrTaco / Slashdot:

Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda Resigns From Slashdot 77 — from the steve-got-front-cutsies dept. — After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college.

Discussion: Guardian, Computerworld, This is my next, Underwire, ReadWriteWeb, ExtremeTech, Computerworld, The Tech Report, @ericries, TechCrunch, The Daily Caller and MetaFilter, more at Techmeme »

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Slashdot and CmdrTaco — the end of another geek era

Discussion: Computerworld and Erik Wemple

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 …

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.

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: GigaOM, The Loop and App Advice

Dan Gillmor / Guardian:

The ghostwritten op-ed: an unacceptable deception | Dan Gillmor — If I'd fail a journalism student for a paper written by another, why does the media give a pass to the rich and powerful? — My former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, recently ran an opinion column …

Discussion: Felix Salmon and Kirk LaPointe's …

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

The disintegrating economics of newspaper circulation — Anna Tarkov calculates that the Chicago Tribune's Groupon deal — two years of the Sunday 'bune for $20 — works out to 19 cents an issue. — What's at work here is the myth of legacy media, that every reader sees every ad thus every advertiser pays …

Discussion: The Daily Groupon

Eric Wilson / New York Times:

Art and Fashion in Dasha Zhukova's Garage — LOOKING at the debut issue of Garage, one of the most intriguing magazines to come along in years, it is not entirely clear whether this is a fashion magazine that takes more than a passing interest in art, or an art magazine that knows its stuff about fashion.

Discussion: The Wire and The New York Observer

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: MediaPost and Inside TV