Mediagazer: The Great Escape: Has One NGO Been Lying About Its Role in Syria? (Simon van Zuylen-Wood/The New Republic)

5:50 AM ET, May 30, 2012

Top News:

Warren Buffett's Newspaper Purchase — Last week, Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, purchased two dozen small newspapers and their related online properties from Media General, a conglomerate with holdings mainly concentrated in the southeast Unites States.

Discussion: GigaOM

Steve Myers / Poynter:
Media General execs realized in 2011 newspaper decline wasn't cyclical

Discussion: Richmond BizSense and NetNewsCheck Latest

Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic Online:

In Defense of Chris Hayes — The MSNBC host is getting beat up for remarks he made about the heroism of American soldiers. Really, his critics are the ones who should be apologizing. — Very few Americans wake up early on weekend mornings to watch public intellectuals chat.

Discussion: The Daily Beast, Politico, Mother Jones, NewsBusters.org blogs, Hit & Run, Baltimore Sun and Daily Mail

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Pundits, Platitudes, and Patriotism: War Heroes and Their Enemies

Discussion: msnbc.com, Mother Jones, Close Read, NewsBusters.org blogs and NewsBusters.org blogs

Erika Fry / CJR:

It's 2012 already: why is opinion writing still mostly male? — Byline counts are better, but not much. How come? — “Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man.” I had Sue Horton, the Op-ed and Sunday opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times on the phone one morning in early March.

Discussion: The Byline Blog, Poynter and The Huffington Post

Erik Wemple / Washington Post:

Business Insider goes investigative on anti-Semitism — Right now the headline on this Business Insider post reads, “What Are the Sources of Anti-Semitism.” Don't get too attached to that formulation, however. The post has been changing at a Business Insiderish pace, as the notes and updates at the foot of the item explain:

Discussion: Business Insider, The Atlantic Wire, Mediaite and HyperVocal

Adam Martin / The Atlantic Wire:
Just In Case You Were Starting to Respect Henry Blodget...

Discussion: Gawker, The Huffington Post and The New York Observer

Nancy Messieh / The Next Web:

Bambuser offers activists and citizen journalists free premium accounts — Bambuser, the live-streaming mobile service has just announced that it will be offering citizen journalists and activists an upgrade to premium accounts for free. — To take advantage of this offer …

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

Lynne Marek / Chicago Business:

Chicago Tribune to leap over pay wall — The Chicago Tribune is mulling a plan to charge online readers premiums for different kinds of content, a structure similar to the fee it charges for the print literary magazine it introduced this year. The city's largest newspaper is charting …

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Alan Rusbridger on The Guardian's open journalism, paywalls, and why they're pre-planning more of the newspaper — Alan Rusbridger is a busy man on two sides of the Atlantic. The editor of the Guardian seems to be everywhere, writing, tweeting, and leading the paper's ongoing coverage …

Simon van Zuylen-Wood / The New Republic:

The Great Escape: Has One NGO Been Lying About Its Role in Syria? — Around 8 a.m. on February 22, Syrian security forces attempting to prop up the Bashar al Assad regime shelled a makeshift media center in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, killing the American war reporter Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik.

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Local TV Stations Cut Costs by Sharing News Operations — SAN ANGELO, Tex. — Call a reporter at the CBS television station here, and it might be an anchor for the NBC station who calls back. Or it might be the news director who runs both stations' news operations.

Discussion: The Rural Blog, Save the News, Media Decoder, B&C, TVSpy, Free Press and Gannett Blog

Miriam Elder / Guardian:

Russian journalist attacked in Moscow — Radio presenter Sergei Aslanyan in hospital after being stabbed 20 times by attacker who lured him out of his home — A Russian journalist is in hospital after being lured out of his home and stabbed 20 times late on Monday night in the latest attack on a member of the press.

Discussion: Committee to Protect …, The Atlantic Wire and mediabistro.com

John Herrman / BuzzFeed:

How Twitter Beat Facebook At Its Own Story — On the day Facebook went public, all eyes were on its biggest competitor. Those hazy months when the IPO was just a rumor, the giddy days and hours before the market opened, the hilariously chaotic trading period, the ensuing backlash …

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

DEAR JOURNALISM STUDENTS: Don't Mean To Intrude, But Your Professor Doesn't Get It — We had a good laugh in the (virtual) newsroom this weekend when folks started passing around this letter-to-students from a journalism professor at the University of Tampa.

Discussion: ZDNet, College Media Matters and Poynter