Mediagazer: How to fix the media ownership debate (Steven Waldman/CJR)

4:25 PM ET, December 23, 2012

Top News:

An Oral History of Newsweek Magazine — For the last print issue of Newsweek, Andrew Romano compiles an oral history of the storied magazine. — Peter Goldman should be famous. As the voice of Newsweek from 1962 to 1988—the ace writer at a magazine read by as many as 20 million people each week …

Discussion: The Daily Beast

Joe Weisenthal / Business Insider:

Newsweek's Final Ever Print Cover Features A... Hashtag? — The last ever print Newsweek cover, via @newsweek, which notes that it has a hashtag on it. — Please follow Business Insider on Twitter and Facebook. — Join the conversation about this story »

Discussion: @thetinabeast, FishbowlNY, The Huffington Post, @sacca, CNET, Mashable!, @mat, @rsarver and The Verge

Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:

Getting It First or Getting It Right? — THE media critic Jack Shafer wrote recently that, in the age of Twitter, the public had better get used to a new fact of life: News stories, especially the early reports of breaking news events, are very likely to be inaccurate.

Discussion: @antderosa, @davidfolkenflik, Kirk LaPointe's … and Pressing Issues

Jack Mirkinson / The Huffington Post:

Wayne LaPierre's Claim That ‘Most’ Of Media Is Protected By Armed Guards Rejected By Media — Members of the media reacted with surprise at the contention by the head of the NRA that most of them are protected by armed guards. — Wayne LaPierre has made media criticism a central point of his response to the massacre in Newtown.

Bryan Glick / TheMediaBriefing:

Computer Weekly editor Bryan Glick on digital publishing, growing revenue and life after print — announced the end of its print edition in April 2011, plenty of people mistakenly associated “shutting print” with “shutting down”. The reaction was symptomatic of a lingering perception …

Thanks:@rorybrown

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

4 Out of 10 Americans Have Connected Internet to TV — Still waiting for the Internet and TV to converge? It may have already happened. — Four out of 10 Americans have connected their TV to the Internet, according to a new Forrester study. If you're just talking about the whippersnappers …

Discussion: Fast Company

Marianne McCarthy / MediaShift:

Can You Still Spot.us? Crowdfunding Pioneer Slumps Under APM — Crowdfunding has skyrocketed in the past couple of years as entrepreneurs bypass traditional keepers of the purse and instead appeal to individual donors to help get their projects off the ground — and journalists have taken notice.

Adam McCauley / The Atlantic Online:

Overexposed: A Photographer's War With PTSD — “One of the truly great things about war ... is that all you have to do is survive.” — As Ashley Gilbertson crept up the dark staircase of a minaret in Fallujah, he hovered closely behind advance troops of the United States Marines.

Michael Depp / NetNewsCheck Latest:

San Diego Newspaper Makes $3M ‘TV’ Play — Daily newspaper U-T San Diego is making an ambitious move into the video space with an all-news TV station — streaming online and running on cable — that will soon run original programming 24-hours per day. The newspaper is hoping its $3 million investment …

Steven Waldman / CJR:

How to fix the media ownership debate — A modest proposal for harnessing mergers — The debate over “who owns the media” is heating up again, and has already become stuck in a bit of a 1980s time warp. That's unfortunate. Smart media policy could actually help local news ecosystems during a critical time.

Discussion: mediabistro.com

Ryan Chittum / CJR:

The Louisiana newspaper war — The Advocate picks up 23,500 readers in less than three months in New Orleans — The Baton Rouge Advocate is making a run at a weakened Times-Picayune in New Orleans. — The paper, which started a daily New Orleans edition in October as the Newhouse family slashed …

Suw Charman-Anderson / Forbes:

Amazon Is Ripe For Disruption — Amazon, the great disintermediator that put a spanner — in fact, a set of 25 spanners in a handy case, yours for just $9.99 — in the businesses of many a retailer, is going to face exactly the same fate if it doesn't start to address its weaknesses soon, particularly in the area of publishing.

Discussion: New York Times, @janefriedman and @tcarmody