Mediagazer: Cox Media Group Plants $6 Million In Content Farm Skyword (Ingrid Lunden/paidContent)

3:30 PM ET, December 19, 2011

Top News:

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:

Times Co. Negotiating to Sell Regional Newspapers — Updated The New York Times Company, which last week announced that its chief executive would depart at the end of the year, is close to selling its regional newspapers to the Halifax Media Group, the company announced Monday.

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM, paidContent, Mixed Media, Newsonomics, @nytjim, Deal Journal and Poynter

Edmund Lee / @edmundlee: Heads up on @nytimes selling regional media group to Halifax. The unit is headed up by Michael Golden, Sulzbergers cousin and COO

Patrick Foster / Guardian:

BBC admits using notorious private investigator to trace paedophile — The BBC has admitted hiring a notorious private investigator who was convicted of supplying newspapers with illegally obtained private information about celebrities and public figures.

United Press International:

ABC News says Walters is not retiring — ABC News says U.S. broadcast journalist Barbara Walters was joking when she told President Barack Obama she plans to retire next year. — TMZ quoted a source whose name it did not report as saying Walters quietly told Obama after she finished chatting …

Andrea Morabito / Broadcasting & Cable:
ABC News Launches New Political Site

Discussion: mediabistro.com and Lost Remote

Katherine Fung / The Huffington Post:
WATCH: ABC's Major New Ad Campaign

Discussion: ABCNEWS

The Root:

Time Losing Only Black Correspondent — Steven Gray of Washington Bureau Announces His Exit — Five years ago, Journal-isms asked Ali Zelenko, vice president for communications at Time Inc., to name the journalists of color at Time magazine. — Among the 15 she listed …

James Robinson / Guardian:

Ferguson medical records ‘blagged’ by NoW — News of the World obtained confidential records about Man United manager's health to stand up tipoff, says former reporter — The News of the World obtained Sir Alex Ferguson's medical records and used them to stand up a tip …

Discussion: Press Gazette

BBC: Call for Guardian corrections on NoW Milly stories

Joel Gunter / Journalism.co.uk: Hoare ‘named eight NoW staff linked to hacking’

Guardian:
Phone hacking was ‘routine’ at Sun and NoW, Sean Hoare allegedly told brother

Discussion: Guardian

Kim Zetter / Threat Level:

Forensic Examiner Found No Match of Cables on Manning's Laptop to WikiLeaks' — FT. MEADE, Maryland — A day after a government forensic expert testified that he'd found thousands of diplomatic cables on the Army computer of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he was forced …

Washington Post:
Soldier's gender identity issues raised in WikiLeaks case

Discussion: Guardian

Wall Street Journal:

Apple Plots Its TV Assault — Apple Inc. is moving forward with its assault on television, following up on the ambitions of its late co-founder, Steve Jobs. — In recent weeks, Apple executives have discussed their vision for the future of TV with media executives at several large companies …

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Cablevision and Time Warner to Offer ‘HBO Go’ — Nearly a year after HBO introduced its online streaming service HBO Go, the two cable hold-outs, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, are about to turn it on for their customers. — Cablevision, which mainly serves the New York metropolitan area …

Discussion: MediaFile and GigaOM

Alex Sherman / Bloomberg: Time Warner Cable Agrees to Offer Users Time Warner's HBO Go

Ingrid Lunden / paidContent:

News Corp./Time Warner's Prince Alwaleed Invests $300 Million In Twitter — Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, an investor in media titans News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), is turning his attention now to social media: he and his investment group …

Discussion: Forbes, Bloomberg, Kingdom Holding Company, Fortune, rbr.com, Boing Boing, The Wrap, GigaOM, CNET News, VentureBeat, MediaPost and AdAge, more at Techmeme »

Stuart Elliott / Media Decoder:

Ad Spending Slowed to a Crawl in the 3rd Quarter, Report Finds — Like traffic on the way to the beach on a summer Friday afternoon, advertising spending in the third quarter barely moved, according to a report to be released on Monday morning. — But like that traffic …

Discussion: AllThingsD

Jeffrey ErnstFriedman / MapLight:

Sponsors of SOPA Act Pulled in 4 Times as Much in Contributions from Hollywood than Silicon Valley — The House Judiciary Committee on December 15 held a markup of the so-called SOPA Act (HR 3261), a bill that has produced surprising allegiances and adversaries and has pit some of California's …

Discussion: ZDNet, The Next Web and Techdirt, more at Techmeme »

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Publishers Challenge Audience Report — Magazine publishers are demanding explanations from GfK MRI after its fall magazine audience report showed more than two-thirds lost audience versus a year ago, many of them by double digits. — Some year-to-year audience fluctuations are common, but the fall report was unusual.

Alan D. Mutter / Reflections of a Newsosaur:

Newspaper job cuts surged 30% in 2011 — The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from the prior year, according to the blog that has been tracking the human toll on the industry for the last five years. — Meanwhile, a separate analysis confirms …

Discussion: Poynter

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Bloomberg TV Hires Former CNBC Anchor — For the third time this month, a former CNBC anchor has found a new job at a CNBC rival. On Monday Bloomberg Television announced that Trish Regan, who was an anchor for CNBC until this year, is becoming an anchor of “Street Smart,” its 3 to 5 p.m. newscast …