Mediagazer: Digital First: The Next Step (Jxpaton/Digital First)

5:45 PM ET, September 7, 2011

Top News:

Digital First: The Next Step — Today marks another important step for Digital First. — As announced earlier this morning, we have formed a new company - Digital First Media Inc. It will manage both the Journal Register Company and Media News Group and its mission will be to accelerate …

Discussion: Journal Register Company, The Buttry Diary, BuzzMachine, Nieman Journalism Lab, NetNewsCheck Latest, paidContent, Beet.TV, The Huffington Post, The Latest Word, Future of Journalism, Felix Salmon, GigaOM, Extra! and Editors Weblog

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

A wave of consolidation? Some context on MediaNews, Journal Register, and Alden Global Capital — The big newspaper news this morning is that two of the nation's largest remaining chains, Journal Register Co. and MediaNews Group, are executing something like a merger-without-merging.

Discussion: News after Newspapers and Gannett Blog

Steve Myers / Poynter:

MediaNews and Journal Register Co. brought under one roof with John Paton at helm — Journal Register Co. announced Wednesday that it is creating a company called Digital First Media Inc. to manage it and MediaNewsGroup. John Paton will be CEO of Digital First and will act as CEO of MediaNews …

Discussion: paidContent

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO — According to sources at the company, Yahoo's Carol Bartz is no longer CEO of Yahoo. CFO Tim Morse has been named interim CEO. — The situation around what is clearly an ouster is uncertain, but Bartz has had a very rocky tenure in her 32 months at the company.

Discussion: GigaOM, Media Week, Business Wire, Between the Lines Blog, The Wrap, rbr.com, CNNMoney.com, Glassdoor.com Blog, Forbes, CNET News, mediabistro.com, Adweek, New York Times, Deal Journal, @snoopdogg, Wall Street Journal, Geek News Central, Mashable!, paidContent, Business Insider, CBS News, Softpedia News, Don Dodge on The Next …, Digits, AppleInsider, ConversionRater, SocialTimes.com, Search Engine Land, VatorNews, Techland, ZDNet, The Next Web, The First Post, 9to5Mac, VentureBeat, WebProNews, AdAge, AdExchanger.com, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Beyond Search, MediaPost, Bloomberg, DealBook, MediaNama, Yahoo! News, Techi.com, BetaNews, TechCrunch, CNET News, SplatF, Gawker, msnbc.com, Computerworld, Mixed Media, ReadWriteWeb, Tech Daily Dose, OzTechNews.com, PC Magazine, Digital Media Wire, Felix Salmon, Shelly Palmer Digital Living, Electronista, Broadcasting & Cable, Seattle Times, GeekWire, Medacity and Fast Company, more at Techmeme »

David Kaplan / paidContent:
Once Display's Ad Sales Leader, Trends Now Favor Yahoo Rivals

Discussion: MediaPost, VentureBeat, AllThingsD, Forbes, New York Magazine, Business Insider, Digits, Softpedia News, GigaOM, AllThingsD, TelecomTV and Future of Journalism, more at Techmeme »

C.W. Anderson / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Information's triumph? Three ways TechCrunch challenges ideas of journalism … In the spirit of doing what one does best and linking to the rest, I'll dispense with a lengthy overview of the controversy that erupted when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Silicon Valley power-broker …

Discussion: BetaNews, Betabeat, TheMediaBriefing, VentureBeat and Portfolio

Chadwick Matlin / Fortune:

The “end of TechCrunch”? It might not be such a bad thing — What would the startup scene be like without the blog that currently animates it? A whole lot better, actually. — FORTUNE — At TechCrunch's Disrupt conference earlier this year, Michael Arrington brought Arianna Huffington …

Discussion: American Journalism Review, Guardian, Fox News, Business Insider and Betabeat, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

How Andy Carvin keeps his sanity while live-tweeting world news — NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has become famous for his prolific tweeting of popular uprisings around the world. On Wednesday he talked about why he does it and how he keeps some balance in his life.

Steve Buttry / The Buttry Diary: Suggestions (but not standards) for live tweeting

Guardian:

Guardian journalist questioned over alleged phone-hacking leaks — Case raises concerns about attempts to criminalise contact between journalists and off-the-record sources — A Guardian journalist has been questioned by police officers investigating alleged leaks of information from Operation Weeting …

Discussion: Press Gazette, FleetStreetBlues, The National Union …, Telegraph, Business Insider and Jon Slattery

Sarah Ellison / Vanity Fair:

Murdoch And The Vicious Circle — As the phone-hacking scandal threatens Rupert Murdoch's empire, people are opening up about the fear he instilled in British society. And while denial is still rife inside News Corp., the author hears how its supposedly hands-off chairman spawned a culture of coarseness and brutality.

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:
Phone hacking: Evidence to MPs gives James Murdoch room for manoeuvre

Discussion: PC Magazine, The Wrap, Media Matters for America, Press Gazette, The Independent, Crikey, Adweek and BBC

Andrew Adam Newman / New York Times:

Bloggers Don't Follow the Script, to ConAgra's Chagrin — IN August, food bloggers and mom bloggers in New York were invited to dine at an underground restaurant in a West Village brownstone run, apparently, by George Duran, the chef who hosts the “Ultimate Cake Off” on TLC.

Discussion: Forbes, NYConvergence.com, The New York Observer and Gawker

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Media Analysts Begin To Slash Ad Spending Forecasts As Economy Craters... When the economy weakens, one of the first expenses that companies cut is advertising spending. — Especially advertising spending on old, dying media in which performance is unmeasurable—e.g., newspapers.

Adobe:

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite To Support iOS 5 Newsstand — For immediate release — Publishers To Create Newsstand-enabled Applications with Full Support for Subscriptions — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that publishers will be able to use Adobe® Digital …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, 9to5Mac, MacStories, App Advice, Startup Meme, Electronista and The Next Web

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:

Top 40 UK news websites: BBC still leads Mail Online — The BBC News website still remains comfortably ahead of the Mail Online in terms of UK online visitors, according to research compiled for Press Gazette. — The UKOM/Nielsen data is based on a survey of 50,000 people accessing …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and The Next Web

Kat Stoeffel / The New York Observer:

Ticker Taped: The 9/11 News Crawl — At 10:49 a.m. on Sept. 11, 21 minutes after the North Tower of the World Trade Center began to collapse, Fox News launched a news ticker—a ribbon of all-caps text along the bottom of the screen made up of headlines from scenes occurring off camera …

Discussion: TVNewser and Inside Cable News

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Hires New President Rob Gregory jumps from Plum TV By Lucia Moses — The Newsweek Daily Beast Co. is getting a new president. CEO Stephen Colvin picked Rob Gregory, a veteran of Maxim and Rolling Stone with whom he worked at Dennis Publishing, for the newly created position.

Discussion: MiamiHerald.com, AdAge and On Media's Blog

Mike Swift / Mercury News:

YouTube becomes entertainment destination — Just for laughs, San Jose's Dylan Hart and a college friend posted a video on YouTube in 2007 about charging an iPod using an onion and a bottle of Gatorade. — More than 9 million views later, that video — uploaded at 5 a.m …

Jeff Roberts / paidContent:

Righthaven Terminates Lawyer, Stops Filing New Cases — Is copyright enforcer Righthaven, which has suffered a series of legal setbacks, folding its cards? (UPDATE with Righthaven CEO quote) — [Shortly after this this story appeared, Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson emailed paidContent to state …

Discussion: Poynter, Threat Level and WebProNews

Matthew Shanahan / eMedia Vitals:

Click-through rates: the metric for missed expectations — Click-through rate (CTR) is often used to describe the advertising performance on a publisher's site. CTR for an ad is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage.