Mediagazer: Media companies have three ways to innovate, each with its own barriers (Rick Edmonds/Poynter)

4:50 PM ET, September 8, 2011

Top News:

Marissa Mayer / The Official Google Blog:

Google just got ZAGAT Rated! — “Did you know there's a place in Menlo Park near the Safeway that has a 27 food rating?” one of my friends asked me that about two years ago, and I was struck because I immediately knew what it meant. Food rating... 30 point scale... Zagat. And the place... had to be good.

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:

Google acquires Zagat, enters original content business — Summary: Google said that Zagat will “be a cornerstone of our local offering.” Zagat is best known for its original reviews and rating service. — Google on Thursday acquired Zagat in an effort to bolster its local products with the restaurant rating service.

Discussion: broadstuff, MediaFile, Computerworld and WebProNews, more at Techmeme »

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Paton: Too Early To Say Whether MediaNews Paywalls Stay Up — Journal Register CEO John Paton has been a vocal opponent of using paywalls to increase digital revenue for newspapers, as have his advisory board members Jeff Jarvis, Emily Bell and Jay Rosen. But what happens now that he is also the CEO …

Discussion: Poynter, mediabistro.com, Guardian, San Francisco Peninsula … and eMedia Vitals

Felix Salmon:
When digital ads pay for local news

Discussion: BrauBlog, Street Fight, GigaOM, News for Digital Journalists, NetNewsCheck Latest and Digital First

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:
The newsonomics of ComboCo — Editor's Note: Each week …

Discussion: Future of Journalism and paidContent

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

Washington Post publisher Weymouth sees new media as ‘them,’ not ‘us’ — Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth draws a big, bold line between “old media” like the Post and “new media” such as blogs and citizen journalists. — The Post is embracing the new “tools” of online journalism …

Discussion: Zombie Journalism and J-Lab

Jon Lafayette / Broadcasting & Cable:

ESPN Signs News Rights Deal With NFL — Keeps ‘Monday Night Football’ through 2021 — Jumping the gun on the kickoff of the pro football season Thursday night, Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN unit has signed an extension with the NFL that will keep Monday Night Football on the cable channel for eight more years.

Discussion: Multichannel, Adweek, Forbes, MediaPost, The Wrap and mediabistro.com

Los Angeles Times:
How high can fees for sports rights go?

Discussion: rbr.com and Company Town

Wall Street Journal:

Content Deluge Swamps Yahoo — Yahoo, Rivals Fetch Less for Ads as Services That Sift Through Web Gain an Edge — Ousted Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Carol Bartz faced a plight all too familiar to many of her peers: Making money off digital content isn't easy and it's getting harder.

Discussion: Fortune, On Media's Blog, GigaOM, George Dearing dot com and Editors Weblog, more at Techmeme »

BBC:

Nato-led forces killed BBC reporter in Afghanistan — Ahmed Omed Khpulwak sent text messages saying: “Death has come” — The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan has admitted it mistakenly killed BBC reporter Ahmed Omed Khpulwak in July.

Discussion: Guardian, TVNewser, Mediaite, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Jon Slattery and msnbc.com

Choire Sicha / The Awl:

Inside Gawker Media's First Company-Wide Meeting — Last night, Gawker Media held its first real company-wide meeting at the Crosby Hotel screening room, down in the hotel's swank basement. Honcho Nick Denton gave a speech from the stage—just like a real grown-up company, and also totally not.

Discussion: Poynter and @weareyourfek

Dan Primack / Fortune:

Arrington out at AOL (for real this time) — Not TechCrunch editor. Not AOL Ventures employee. Michael Arrington is on his own. — It has been a very long week for AOL. And it's about to get even longer. — Last Thursday, word leaked that one of its employees …

Anthony DeRosa:

David Karp discusses Tumblr's growing pains — The very platform this post is appearing on is undergoing a bit of a revolution. The rise of blogs over the past decade has begun to give way to microblogging platforms, such as Twitter and Tumblr. The difference between the two is that microblogs tend …

Discussion: Betabeat and ShortFormBlog

AdAge:

Glamour Publisher Job Goes to Jason Wagenheim, Publisher of Entertainment Weekly — Conde Nast's decision to name Jason Wagenheim the new publisher at Glamour sparks yet another turnover in the publisher's job at Entertainment Weekly. Mr. Wagenheim had only been running EW since December.

Discussion: MediaPost, MinOnline, FishbowlNY and The New York Observer

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Our Policy On Anonymous Sources — Last week, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen asked about our policy on anonymous sources. — Here is that policy: — We will grant anonymity to any source at any time for any reason. — The logic for this policy is simple.

Discussion: Poynter

Alex Goldman / On the Media:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RIGHTHAVEN — Over the past year, we have reported a couple of times on a company called Righthaven, which buys certain copyrights on newspaper content and sues bloggers and aggregators who repost said content, either in part or in full. This week, several news outlets …

Discussion: Threat Level

Jeff Roberts / paidContent:
Righthaven Terminates Lawyer, Stops Filing New Cases

Discussion: Threat Level, Poynter, Plagiarism Today and WebProNews

Dean Starkman / CJR:

A Heavy Blow to The Wall Street Journal — Anyone who thinks the departure of Alix M. Freedman, the WSJ's Page One editor, a twenty-seven-year Journal mainstay, and winner of one of the more storied Pulitzers in my old paper's storied past, is inside-baseball for media types is dead wrong.

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:

Media companies have three ways to innovate, each with its own barriers — Deteriorating advertising revenues in 2011 have brought skeptics in news organizations around to what their critics have been saying for years: Innovation is an imperative. — But how, exactly?

Discussion: MediaPost

Jim Colgan / Poynter:

How journalists are using the iPad to enhance their reporting — Many journalists know what it's like to have a source freeze when you pull out a microphone or start recording them on camera. What were once colorful anecdotes can quickly turn into stilted monologues.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals