Mediagazer: The newsonomics of thin ice, from the BBC and FT to The New York Times and The Washington Post (Ken Doctor/Nieman Journalism Lab)

9:15 PM ET, November 17, 2012

Top News:

Twitter is pivoting — Peter Chernin had this to say during his days as President of News Corp, owners of MySpace, in 2006: … This was the justification and mentality that MySpace employed as they blocked various fast-growing platform partners that they felt impinged in MySpace's core user experience.

Discussion: TechCrunch, @jayrosen_nyu, @techsoc, @mathewi, Marco.org and GigaOM

Muhammad Lila / ABCNEWS:

Oops! Taliban Reveal Identities of Their Mailing List Members — Somewhere out there, Mullah Omar must be shaking his head. — In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference.He publicly CC'd the names of everyone on his mailing list.

Discussion: The Register, The Inquisitr, FP Passport, Ars Technica, Techdirt, CNET, Betabeat, The Next Web, Fast Company, Business Insider and Gizmodo

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Yahoo CEO Mayer Cuts End-of-Year “Week of Rest” for Employees, While Prepping Plans to Identify Bottom 20 Percent of Staff — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is now starting to unveil the flip side of free lunches and smartphones, with two employee-focused moves that are a little more tough love in nature.

Discussion: Beyond Search, PC Magazine, New York Magazine, Business Insider and CNET

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The newsonomics of thin ice, from the BBC and FT to The New York Times and The Washington Post — The cracks got a little louder this week. — For most of a decade, news companies have been operating on thinning ice. This week, events on both seaboards of the Atlantic displayed anew …

Discussion: GigaOM, The New Yorker Blog, The Daily Beast, Media Decoder and CJR

Gabriel Beltrone / Adweek:

Reuters, NewsCred Launch New Entertainment Package — If you're a brand looking to play pop culture publisher during the 2012-2013 entertainment awards season, Reuters and NewsCred want your business. The media company and the content licensing and syndication company have partnered up to launch …

Discussion: The Drum

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Food Network is eyeing YouTube for exclusive online content — Food Network is in advanced negotiations with YouTube about launching a new channel with exclusive online content on the site, the cable network's senior vice president and general manager of online brands Bob Madden told me during an interview this week.

Discussion: New Media Blog

Paul Sawers / The Next Web:

Earth Unplugged: BBC Worldwide launches its first ever original-content YouTube channel — Back in October, BBC Worldwide announced two new YouTube channels, including a nature channel, delivering new films from its BBC Earth Productions company. Well, the first channel is now live.

Discussion: T3, TechRadar.com and Engadget

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Avid library ebook borrowers claim it doesn't affect their book buying — Publishers have grappled with how and whether to make ebooks available to libraries — fearing, in part, that a library ebook checkout means a lost sale. A new survey from digital library distributor OverDrive …

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Apple Now Owns the Page Turn — If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office. — This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface …

Discussion: Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Patent Progress, Mashable! and Techdirt

Michael Wolf / Forbes:

Three Ways Social TV Analytics Is About to Change the TV Business — While talk of social TV is not new, the industry is still stuggling to understand what exactly the intersection between social media and the TV business will mean. — For consumers, today it's a watercooler conversation …

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

B&N shuts down the pioneering Fictionwise digital bookstores — When Fictionwise launched in 2000, it was a pioneer in a Kindle-less, Nook-less, iPad-less world. The site sold ebooks in a variety of formats like Palm, Rocket and Microsoft Reader. It let users download ebooks to their mobile phones — in 2001.

Discussion: PublishersWeekly.com and TechCrunch

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Hey, Tim Ferriss: Book banning isn't a marketing gimmick — Huckleberry Finn, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, To Kill a Mockingbird: Those are among the titles that schools and libraries have most commonly banned over the years. An Illinois school district banned a book this year because it included a reference to gay families.

Discussion: Fortune, The Official BitTorrent Blog and GalleyCat

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
With Amazon Publishing Stonewalled By Retailers, Tim Ferriss Taps BitTorrent To Market His New Book

Discussion: Fast Company, mediabistro.com and Business Wire

Reuters:

Tribune Co gets FCC approval, nears bankruptcy exit — Tribune Co, the owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and 23 television stations, said on Friday it received a key regulatory approval needed to end its nearly four-year stay in bankruptcy. — Tribune said it received approval …

Discussion: Cable Television News

Tribune Company: Tribune Wins Approval Of Federal Communications Commission

Jim Romenesko:

Geneva Overholser to step down as USC Annenberg J-School director — Geneva Overholser, who has led the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism since 2008, is stepping down in June when her five-year term ends. A release says: “During the past four years …

Discussion: USC Annenberg School … and CJR