Mediagazer: Roger Ailes Offered Bush Administration “Off the Record Help” in Private Note (John Cook/Gawker)

12:40 AM ET, November 2, 2012

Top News:

Margaret Sullivan / The Public Editor's Journal:

Under Attack, Nate Silver Picks the Wrong Defense — “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes.”

Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo:

Sorry, Margaret, You Need to Get Out More — Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has a post up taking Nate Silver to task for daring Joe Scarborough to a bet over who would win the election. Basically, she says making a bet like this diminishes the Times and he shouldn't have done it.

Discussion: @moorehn

Christine Haughney / Media Decoder:

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to Lay Off Staff and Reduce Magazines — Like many New York companies, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia had a difficult week. The basement of the company's offices in west Chelsea were flooded by Hurricane Sandy, sending staff members home for the week …

Discussion: Media & Entertainment, Deadline.com, Folio, AdAge, MediaPost, FishbowlNY and paidContent

John Cook / Gawker:

Roger Ailes Offered Bush Administration “Off the Record Help” in Private Note — Fat a**hole and Fox News president Roger Ailes just re-upped to run his network through the 2016 election, and he continues to maintain the grotesque fiction that he operates an independent news outlet …

Discussion: The Wrap, Mediaite and The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post: Fox News Focuses On Benghazi Attack While Largely Ignoring Hurricane Sandy

Elizabeth Jensen / New York Times: At Fox News, a Liberal Pundit Finds the Spotlight

Jeff John Roberts / GigaOM:

HuffPost Live's new iPad app could be a second screen breakthrough — The Huffington Post launched an iPad app Thursday that may one day pave the way for tablets to dethrone TV as king of our living rooms. The app, called HuffPost Live, offers a strong mix of entertainment and social interaction and …

Nat Ives / AdAge:

NBC Universal, News Corp. Set Plans to Help Hurricane Sandy Relief — One-Hour Telethon Friday Night to Feature Bruce Springsteen and Others — Major media companies are beginning to set plans to support relief efforts following Hurricane Sandy, which has been blamed for more than 70 deaths in the U.S. …

Discussion: Forbes, Broadcasting & Cable, @brianstelter, Cable Television News, @jbflint, FishbowlNY, Radio & Television …, Agence France Presse, Mediaite, Softpedia News, TechCrunch, TVNewser and The Wrap

CBS Los Angeles:
Walt Disney Co. To Donate $2M To Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts

Discussion: VH1 Celebrity, PopWatch and The Walt Disney Company …

Dylan Byers / Politico:

The Tea Party gets a news site — Tea Party conservatives are getting their very own news site. — The Tea Party News Network, self-described as “the only trusted news source and the antidote to mainstream media bias,” is already live but will announce its launch tomorrow morning, with plans to start live video on election day.

Discussion: paidContent

Julie Moos / Poynter:

On Twitter, book titles rewritten as New York Times headlines — If books titles were written like New York Times headlines, here is how your shelves would read, courtesy of the Twitter meme #nytbooks — We have made it easy to comment on posts, however we require civility and encourage full names …

Rip Empson / TechCrunch:

Ebook Publisher Inkling Launches Its Own Online Store: An Amazon For Illustrated Learning Content — Not wanting to be outdone by South Korea and others, which mandated the use of digital textbooks by 2015, earlier this year the FCC and the Department of Ed released the Digital Textbook Playbook …

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Back on the grid, with the Daily News, Time, Businessweek and Ali Velshi — After spending the past three days with no power, no cell phone service, and no means of transportation into Manhattan, I'm back on the grid today, catching up on some of the news I missed in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Metropolis and The Huffington Post

Mat Honan / Wired:

Twitter Launches Election Map to Track Candidates' State-by-State Messaging — Twitter's new election map measures voter engagement on a state-by-state basis. — Twitter launched a new interactive map on Thursday that measures the effectiveness of President Barack Obama's and Governor Mitt Romney's tweets on a state-by-state basis.

Discussion: Twitter Blog, The Verge, The Next Web and buzzfeed.com

John Horn / Los Angeles Times:

Film studios starting to release video-on-demand sales figures — The ‘creative accounting’ of movies and more recently pay-per-view releases is giving way to some transparency, as seen with the film ‘Arbitrage.’ — Richard Gere stars in the film “Arbitrage,” which is poised to set video …

Brett Wilkison / Santa Rosa Press-Democrat:

Local group to buy The Press Democrat, affiliated publications — The Press Democrat and two affiliated publications in Sonoma County are being sold by Florida-based Halifax Media Group to a partnership that includes a group of local investors, the principals in the deal announced Thursday.