Mediagazer: SJ-R gets a sour Apple from GateHouse (Bruce Rushton/Illinois Times)

4:50 PM ET, September 29, 2011

Top News:

Claire Cain Miller / Bits:

Should Google Tweak the News We Consume? — Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news? — That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google's co-founder and chief executive …

Discussion: @mathewi, @thomnagy, @penenberg, @j_fuller and Stark Insider, more at Techmeme »

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Is it Google's job to somehow improve the media?

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Bloomberg:

Microsoft Said to Add Comcast, Verizon Pay TV to Xbox Live — Microsoft Corp. plans to offer online pay television service from Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) through Xbox Live, in an bid to channel more entertainment to its video-game console, people with knowledge of the situation said.

Discussion: Multichannel, Deadline.com, CNET News, GigaOM, @pkafka, Between the Lines Blog, Engadget, Electronista, MarketBeat and WPCentral.com, more at Techmeme »

Kunur Patel / AdAge:

Amazon's Kindle Fire Could Ignite Tablet Media Consumption — At Less than Half the Price of iPad, New Device Pulls Down Barriers to Entry — By pricing its new Kindle Fire tablet at less than half the cost of an Apple iPad, Amazon is setting up tablet consumption of media to spread …

Discussion: Poynter, MediaFile, Epicenter and GigaOM, more at Techmeme »

Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal:
Magazines Join With New Tablet Challenger

Discussion: Deal Journal, eMedia Vitals and Mashable!

Brad Stone / Business Week:
The Omnivore — First it was Earth's Largest Bookstore.

Discussion: GigaOM, GeekWire, Techland, Forbes, Gizmodo, Editors Weblog, Mashable!, Xark!, Nieman Journalism Lab, broadstuff, Amazon Silk, PSFK, New York Magazine, New York Times, Guardian, ZDNet, Digits, Business Insider and Bloomberg

Felix Salmon:

Business Insider and over-aggregation — Henry Blodget has a long and detailed response to Marco Arment, which is fascinating to anybody interested in the nuts and bolts behind a modern for-profit blog. — If you boil Blodget's 4,000 words down to a single idea, it's basically this: over-aggregation.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, Business Insider and Poynter

Henry Blodget / Business Insider: Dear Marco Arment! Sorry About Last Week. We Finally Figured Out What Happened...

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:

The Michael Wolff Era at Adweek Is Over — Media bomb-thrower has been editor of Adweek for less than a year. Earlier this month, rumors began circulating that he would soon be replaced. Now, we hear, Wolff's days at Adweek are definitively coming to an end.

Discussion: Poynter, FishbowlNY and New York Magazine

MG Siegler / parislemon:

Fake Steve Jobs: Funny. Real Dan Lyons: Sloppy, Lazy, Too Old For This S**t. — Like everyone else, I used to be a big fan of Fake Steve Jobs. Then he was revealed to be Dan Lyons. The magic was over. The 15 minutes was over. He had to go back to doing his actual job — though not before he got a book out of it.

Discussion: @mathewi

Dan Lyons / Real Dan Lyons Web Site:
Kindle Fire, and the tricky business of chasing scoops

Discussion: TeleRead, The Daily Beast and parislemon

Jim Romenesko / Poynter:

A female columnist writes about football and is told to ‘stay in the kitchen next time’ — Albany Times Union columnist Jennifer Gish wrote last week that the Buffalo Bills' 2-0 start “has brought the worst out” in some fans and that “one of you left voicemails for the [Times Union] …

Discussion: The Huffington Post and Albany Times Union

Bruce Rushton / Illinois Times:

SJ-R gets a sour Apple from GateHouse — While employees at the State Journal-Register fear for their jobs, brass at GateHouse Media, the daily newspaper's parent company, has announced a turnaround plan for a corporation that has shown precious little profitability.

Discussion: Poynter and Deal Journal

David Plotz / Slate:

Meet the New Slate — The same great stories, but a better home page, improved tools, and a brand-new CMS. — Did you notice that Slate looks a little bit different today? It's not a new haircut, and we haven't lost weight. There is a series of small, but we hope excellent …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, ShortFormBlog and CyberJournalist.net

Peter Farago / Flurry:

iOS & Android Apps: Prime-time All the Time — On broadcast television, brands seek to reach their target audiences as efficiently as possible. For example, a brand might run a TV campaign targeting 24 - 35 year old females through prime-time shows that reach that desired audience.

Discussion: GigaOM, AllThingsD, VentureBeat and VatorNews, more at Techmeme »

Sabrina Ford / Reuters:

Warner Bros puts your face in Facebook Web series — (Reuters) - Warner Bros. on Thursday will unveil a Web show from “Charlie's Angels” director McG that seeks to create a new genre the studio calls a “social series” by taking pictures, music and information from a viewer's Facebook page and putting it in the video.

Discussion: rbr.com, Home Media Magazine, Lost Remote, The Wrap and WatchingTV Online

Neal Ungerleider / Fast Company:

The Netflix Of Terrorism — Terrorist organizations are notorious videographers—particularly when it comes to uploading clips to the web to spread messages or recruit sympathizers. Now private company IntelCenter has assembled one of the world's largest collections of streaming terrorist videos for viewing on demand.

Discussion: Gizmodo

Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:

Righthaven copyright suits tossed in Colorado, too — In the last year, newspaper copyright troll Righthaven has brought its dubious lawsuits in two states: Nevada and Colorado. (Update: a lawyer in South Carolina says Righthaven filed a single case there as well.)

Discussion: Techdirt, TeleRead and Plagiarism Today

Jalopnik:

Why we're pissed Arianna Huffington is destroying Autoblog — Last night, the newly-formed Huffington Post Media Group had to fire another writer — the second this month — for an obvious and preventable ethical breach. — Jeff Glucker, an Autoblog contributor, published what seemed …

David Skok / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Why we need to separate our stories from our storytelling tools — Edward R. Murrow was a pioneer in television who has shaped the way we tell stories in that medium for over 60 years. He has been immortalized in film and even has a J-school named in his honor.

Walter S. Mossberg / AllThingsD:

Encyclopaedia Britannica Now Fits Into an App — The Encyclopaedia Britannica has been the most prestigious general encyclopedia in the English language for what seems like forever. But it has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy. Today, when people need to look up information …

Discussion: MediaPost

Declan Fahy / CJR:

Skeptical of Science — Among other new roles, journalists becoming more critical of research — The recent coverage of the subatomic particles found to have travelled faster than the speed of light—tentative evidence that could mean a revision of Einstein's special theory of relativity …

Discussion: Climate ShiftClimate Shift

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ media blackout myth: Plenty of stories, none of them big — News interest in the demonstrators presently camping out in a park in the Financial District appears to have increased after a high-ranking police officer was caught on camera apparently pepper-spraying a pair of protesters Sunday.