Mediagazer: Yahoo CEO Mayer Cuts End-of-Year “Week of Rest” … (Kara Swisher/AllThingsD)

12:00 PM ET, November 17, 2012

Top News:

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

Dalton Caldwell:

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, @techsoc, @mathewi, Marco.org, GigaOM, AllThingsD and Digits

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

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.

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 — Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and a stalemate between Amazon and big retailers, including Barnes & Noble, over the sale of books from the online giant's publishing imprint …

Discussion: Fast Company, mediabistro.com and Business Wire

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 …

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 …

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: PC Magazine, Patent Progress, Mashable! and Techdirt

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, TechCrunch and TeleRead

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Netflix CEO: Amazon Losing Up to $1 Billion a Year on Streaming Video — Reed Hastings says that, one day, Amazon will provide real competition for Netflix. — But the Netflix CEO says Jeff Bezos will have to spend a lot of money before that happens: Hastings says Amazon is losing between $500 million …

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, Deadline.com, CNET, Engadget, Business Insider and Mashable!

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

Jay Rosen / Quote and Comment:

Is there anyone with the same power and visibility who flat out makes stuff up like Roger Ailes? — I don't think there is. (See this one, for example. Or this.) Here's what he said the other day to TVNewser's Chris Ariens: … As soon as I read that quote, I knew it was wrong.

Discussion: TVNewser

Chris Ariens / TVNewser:
Did Roger Ailes Consider Joining CNN?

Discussion: Gawker

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