Mediagazer: HuffPo's new ‘Conversations’ will improve comments — and make money for AOL (Jeff John Roberts/paidContent)

7:20 PM ET, January 28, 2013

Top News:

Christine Haughney / New York Times:

The New Republic Reimagines Its Future — WASHINGTON — There are not many firsts for a politically savvy, 98-year-old publication like The New Republic. But Franklin Foer, its 38-year-old editor, experienced one recently when he passed a Hudson News store at Union Station here and saw …

Discussion: Deadline.com, The Atlantic Online, FishbowlNY, Poynter, New Republic, Mashable! and Capital New York

Chris Hughes / The New Republic:
Welcome to Our Redesign - A letter from The New Republic's publisher and editor-in-chief

Discussion: Adweek and Kirk LaPointe's …

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD: New Republic, Old Pay Wall

Alyson Shontell / Business Insider:

Nick Denton Is Resurrecting Valleywag — Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog Gawker killed off in 2009, is making a comeback. — Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, says he'll be bringing the site back to life, and he's currently hunting for an editor or two to run it.

Discussion: PandoDaily and @megan

The Atlantic Wire: What Old Valleywags Think About the New Valleywag

Charlie Warzel / Adweek: Deadspin: An Oral History

Colleen Taylor / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Ends 2012 With A Solid Q4: $1.22 Billion Ex-TAC Revenue, Non-GAAP EPS 32 Cents — Yahoo today released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, marking the end of a key year for the long-running web portal. — Q4 2012 was Yahoo's second full quarter with Marissa Mayer …

Discussion: AllThingsD, Forbes and The Wrap

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Q4: Will Marissa Mayer's “Back to Its Roots” Strategy Get Yahoo Back to the Future? — At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said the long-suffering Silicon Valley giant would be returning “back to its roots,” as part of an effort to finally turn it around.

Discussion: Forbes, Bloomberg, Adweek, VentureBeat, Street Fight, NetNewsCheck Latest and MarketBeat

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg / Wall Street Journal:

B&N Aims To Whittle Its Stores For Years — Barnes & Noble Inc. expects to close as many as a third of its retail stores over the next decade, the bookseller's top store executive said, offering the most detailed picture yet of the company's plans for the outlets.

Discussion: Gawker, LA Biz Observed, The Wrap, paidContent, The Week, GeekWire, VatorNews, CNET, PublishersWeekly.com, The Consumerist, InvestorPlace, TechCrunch, Top Digital Journal News, Fast Company, The Loop and Bookseller news

Christine Haughney / Media Decoder:

Times Announces Masthead Restructuring and Top Newsroom Appointments — 6:12 p.m. | Updated The New York Times announced on Monday a restructured masthead and some key newsroom appointments, while also saying that the staff reductions the company was seeking had been accomplished primarily through voluntary buyouts.

Discussion: Politico and Poynter

Eric Ostermeier / Smart Politics:

The Price of Palin: $15 per Word Spoken During FOX Contract — Sarah Palin uttered more than 189,000 words over 150 appearances on various FOX broadcasts during her three years as an analyst at the network, or $15.85 per word — With the three-year contract now expired between FOX News and Sarah Palin …

Discussion: Chickaboomer, JIMROMENESKO.COM, The Wrap, msnbc.com, Change of Subject, Mediaite, The Raw Story and The Huffington Post

David Carr / New York Times:

“South Park” Creators Fortify Their Content Empire — When it comes to success stories in the entertainment world, it doesn't get much better than the one about a pair of regular guys from Colorado, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who took cutout paper dolls, animated them and triumphed on cable television …

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM, The New York Observer, Splitsider and The Corsair

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

HuffPo's new ‘Conversations’ will improve comments — and make money for AOL — I'm not a regular reader of the Huffington Post but when I go there, I'm astounded how many people leave comments on a given story. Last week, for instance, more than 20,000 readers offered their two cents …

Discussion: Marketing Pilgrim

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Start-Up Puts Streaming TV on Campus — At Harvard, resident students do not have to borrow their parents' HBO GO passwords to watch “Girls” and “Game of Thrones” online. They can log in with their own college credentials, getting in the habit of having a cable subscription at an early age.

Discussion: Media Decoder

Dylan Byers / Politico:

Reading the new New Republic — Last week, I attended a panel in New York City on “the unexpected future of media” hosted by The New Republic. Chris Hughes, the 29-year-old owner, publisher, and editor-in-chief of the magazine, said a few introductory words.

Discussion: @morning_joe and Daily Download

Dan Kennedy / Media Nation:
TNR's new owner crosses a line with Obama interview

Discussion: Mediaite, Mother Jones and The Rural Blog

Eric Pfanner / New York Times:

Print Media Bastion May Be Giving Way — MUNICH — Long after newspaper audiences started defecting to the Internet in other Western countries, Germany still looks like a bastion of print. — On any train, plane or bus, readers unfurl broadsheets that still do justice to the word, thick with advertising.

Jim Romenesko:

Ben Yagoda claims The New Republic ‘borrowed’ from his ‘lady resurgence’ piece — From BEN YAGODA: The new-look New Republic may be cool and rich and everything, but the extent to which its piece (posted yesterday) about the resurgence of the word “lady” borrowed (that is the polite word) …

Discussion: http://annfriedman.com/

Stephen Cohen / Poynter:

Inside Advance's Post-Standard newspaper as it transforms this week to digital first — There's a small statue of a paperboy inside Stephen A. Rogers' plush corner office overlooking Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse. In his right hand, the paperboy holds a colorful miniature newspaper …

Ken Wheaton / AdAge:

For a Master Class in Trolling, Just Turn to The New York Times — Forget Buzzfeed or Gawker, Times' Real Estate and Lifestyle Sections Are Have the Formula Down — It's become fashionable to complain about the state of online “journalism” as various sites do what needs to be done to boost page views and goose the most-emailed list.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Nathan Ingraham / The Verge:

Hardcore porn briefly climbs to the top of Vine's 'Editor's Picks,' Twitter blames it on ‘human error’ — The launch of Twitter's video-sharing service Vine has brought with it another look at pornography on Apple's tightly-controlled iOS platform, and that scrutiny may be about to increase …

Discussion: CNET, VentureBeat, Forbes, Business Week, ZDNet, MacRumors, TechCrunch, Gawker, PandoDaily and Business Insider

Barry Petchesky / Deadspin:

How Two Newspapers Wound Up Staging The Same Sob Story About The Ray Lewis Murder Case — Richard Lollar was one of two men killed in the 2000 Super Bowl week stabbing outside an Atlanta nightclub that led to Ray Lewis's pleading guilty to obstruction of justice.

Discussion: Poynter

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Buyer interested in Advocate, which now sells about 22,000 copies a day in New Orleans — A private buyer is interested in buying the Baton Rouge paper, Timothy Boone reports. Circulation at The Advocate is up since the seven-day-a-week paper made a play for readers of the New Orleans Times-Picayune …

Abe Epton / Chicago Tribune:

From Google News to the Chicago Tribune: Observations after a month in the newsroom — In my five years at Google News, I'd barely ever heard anyone use the phone or raise their voice. But the newsroom at the Chicago Tribune, a 165-year-old urban stalwart, is a much more boisterous cubicle suite than anything at the Googleplex.

Ian Burrell / The Independent:

Murdoch apologises for ‘offensive’ Scarfe cartoon in Sunday Times denounced as anti-Semitic — Rupert Murdoch last night personally apologised for a “grotesque, offensive” cartoon in the Sunday Times which has provoked a wave of protest from Jewish organisations who have declared it anti-Semitic.

Discussion: Guardian, Telegraph, Politico, Deadline.com, @michaelwolffnyc and The Atlantic Wire