Mediagazer: Are Alternative Weeklies Toast? (David Carr/Media Decoder)

5:25 PM ET, August 20, 2012

Top News:

Politico reporter ventures defense of Todd Akin — Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who's seeking a Senate seat in this year's elections, sat down with a St. Louis Fox affiliate and said the following when asked whether abortion should be legal in instances of rape:

Discussion: Mediaite, Capital New York, The Atlantic Online, FOX2now.com, New York Magazine, Slate, The Awl, New York Times and The Daily Beast

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:
Politico's Catanese says it was a ‘bad idea’ to defend Akin's ‘legitimate rape’ comment

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Politico, Mediaite and Capital New York

David Taintor / Talking Points Memo:
Todd Akin Interviewer: ‘I Screwed Up’ By Not Following Up

Discussion: Gawker, The Huffington Post and Boston Globe

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

The Village Voice is not dead yet, contrary to reports — In a BuzzFeed piece about how The Village Voice's management killed the paper, Rosie Gray says The Voice's staff, once an overstuffed sofa of attitude and snark, is down to “one news blogger, two features writers, a music editor …

David Carr / Media Decoder:

Are Alternative Weeklies Toast? — Over the weekend, Rosie Gray, a former staffer at The Village Voice now at BuzzFeed, wrote that the men in charge of Village Voice Media had more or less the run the place into the ground. She pointed to staff layoffs on Friday at the newspaper …

Discussion: Capital New York, @weareyourfek and Vouchification

Mark Potts / Recovering Journalist:

A Vision for the Future of Newspapers—20 Years Ago — It's becoming hard to remember life before digital news. We now take for granted instantaneous availability of news and information on devices ranging from desktop PCs to tablets to smartphones, We now break news …

Discussion: GigaOM, Poynter, @jayrosen_nyu and The Newspaper Guild

Tanzina Vega / Media Decoder:

Condé Nast Invests in Digital Advertising Company Flite — Condé Nast, the high-end magazine publisher, will announce on Monday that it is joining the cloud. — The company will go from being a client of the digital advertising company Flite to owning about 11 percent of it.

Discussion: Folio, MarketingVox News & Trends, MediaPost, The Next Web, MinOnline, NYConvergence.com, Canadian Magazines and blog.flite.com

Christine Haughney / New York Times:

A Media Personality, Suffering a Blow to His Image, Ponders a Lesson — When Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills entrepreneurs who founded POM Wonderful, wanted to host a dinner at their Aspen home in 2006 to talk about the Iraq war, they assembled a list of 22 A-list guests …

Discussion: New York Magazine, Poynter, @jackshafer, Plagiarism Today and The Huffington Post

Campbell Brown / Slate:

Confessions of a Romney Wife — I never thought I was harboring a dark secret. But if you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in. There are quite a number of us who inhabit this world …

Discussion: TVNewser and Mediaite

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Campbell Brown Is Incapable of Understanding the Concept of ‘Disclosure’

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM

Joe Coscarelli / New York Magazine:

Niall Ferguson Smacked Down Over Another Questionable Newsweek Cover — Historian and former John McCain adviser Niall Ferguson is taking his turn today as the Newsweek cover story punching bag for his latest, “Why We Need a New President.” In the article, Ferguson attempts a full survey …

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, Brad DeLong, Politico, Salon, Noahpinion, The Hollywood Gossip, Mother Jones, news.firedoglake.com, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Slate, The Daily Dish, The Huffington Post, Mediaite and Paul Krugman

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

B&N's Nook will finally launch in the UK (but who's going to sell it?) — Barnes & Noble is finally launching its Nook e-readers in the United Kingdom. Starting this October, the Nook Touch and Nook Touch with Glow Light will be available through nook.co.uk. (No Nook Tablets or Nook Color for now.)

Discussion: Barnes & Noble, Inc., TechCrunch, ZDNet, PC Magazine, Pocket-lint, The Verge, Media Decoder, AllThingsD and Softpedia News

Matt Brian / The Next Web: Barnes & Noble to launch NOOK e-readers and digital bookstore in the UK this autumn

Nicholas Watt / Guardian:

Julian Assange row: Britain seeking diplomatic solution in Ecuador standoff — Downing Street says it is obliged by law to extradite Assange to Sweden and ‘it is our intention to carry out that obligation’ — Downing Street has said Britain is still committed to seeking a diplomatic solution …

Discussion: CNET

David Allen Green / New Statesman:
Legal myths about the Assange extradition

Discussion: Guardian

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Yahoo Sales Exec Wayne Powers Heads to Advance's Parade — Another executive departure at Yahoo in the wake of Marissa Mayer's arrival. This time it's Wayne Powers, who had been running U.S. sales since 2010. — Powers will run Parade Publications, the people behind the magazine many people still find in their Sunday newspapers.

Discussion: The Wrap, FishbowlNY and Business Insider

Andrew Wallenstein / Variety:

Hulu CEO faces big changes — Jason Kilar set for mega payday; owners to alter content deals — “Outline transition plan for new CEO. Discuss potential candidates and process.” — These sentences are the topmost bullet points of a confidential internal memo regarding the business of Hulu obtained by Variety.

Discussion: AllThingsD, Fortune, GigaOM, PC Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Digiday, Mashable!, The Verge, fierceonlinevideo.com, VentureBeat, C21Media, CNET, TechCrunch and Business Insider

Keach Hagey / Wall Street Journal:

Online Media Will Star at the Conventions — Networks to Keep TV Broadcasts Slim, But Plan Gavel-to-Gavel Web Streams — Political conventions, long the ultimate made-for-TV presentation, this year are coming of age as digital-media events—highlighting the decline of network television coverage of the gatherings.

Discussion: The Huffington Post, TVNewser and TheBlaze.com

David Carr / New York Times:

Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth — Before writing this column on recent incidents of plagiarism and fabrication, I spent time on the Web reading all known thought on the subject, making notes as I went. When I wrote it up, I used those notes to help create something I am now claiming as my own.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Gatekeeper, getthefive.com, Media Decoder, Slate and The Daily Beast