Mediagazer: How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments (Mallary Jean Tenore/Poynter Online)

6:50 PM ET, May 3, 2010

Top News:

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Success of Pay Walls at Smaller Papers Is Good Sign for Print — Positive Numbers at Local Dailies Give Hope to Bigger Players, but Recipe Has Not Worked for All — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — If you want to know what paid content on the web can do for newspapers' paid circulation …

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Romenesko and NetNewsCheck Latest

Joseph Plambeck / New York Times:

Big Paydays for Chiefs of Top Media Companies — The media industry may be going through some rough times, with the landscape changing day to day, but at least one aspect is business as usual: big paydays for the people at the top. — Top executives at the country's largest media companies continued …

Discussion: Vanity Fair, Gawker, New York Observer, New York Magazine, Big Journalism, The Wire and Gannett Blog

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter Online:

How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments — In recent weeks, some journalists have argued that news sites should stop allowing anonymous comments. They're an “invitation to mischief,” Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote after the paper unmasked …

Discussion: Shaping the Future … and The Huffington Post

Gabriel Sherman / New York Magazine:

Rattled Journal Staff Renew Pursuit of Pulitzers — Last week, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal tried to take his battle with the New York Times into the streets — and sometimes the gutters — with the launch of the Journal's “Greater New York” section.

Discussion: Romenesko

TheAustralian:
WSJ takes no prisoners in home-turf tussle with Times

Discussion: FishbowlNY and New York Observer

Dan Levy / Sparksheet:

The New Yorker On Brand: Q&A with Web Editor Blake Eskin — You were hired as The New Yorker's first Web editor in 2006, when newyorker.com was relatively primitive and “blog” was a four-letter word to most staff writers. How have attitudes toward the Web changed since then? — They've changed a lot.

Discussion: MediaPost

Scott Patterson / MarketBeat:

Buffett: Mind Blowing How Fast Newspapers Losing Ground — Warren Buffett delivered more doom and gloom news for the state of the newspaper industry. — Asked about his views on the struggling industry, which has seen a rising trend of diminishing revenues and distribution in recent years …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and New York Observer

David Carr / New York Times:

The Media Equation: A Lost iPhone Reveals Apple's Churlish Side — Journalists are already getting warmed up for the next big Apple event, the Worldwide Developer's Conference in June, where they will most likely get a look at the next generation of the iPhone.

Discussion: Gawker

Ed Pilkington / Guardian: Apple v Gizmodo: Gawker's Nick Denton on the battle over the lost iPhone

Bill Carter / New York Times:

NBC Changes Strategy of Cutting Prime-Time TV Costs — LOS ANGELES — For Jeff Gaspin, handed the task of pulling NBC's prime-time schedule out of a long, precipitous slide, the first priority is reality — as a concept, not a program genre. — “This is the first year in quite …

Discussion: rbr.com, The Live Feed | THR, Broadcasting & Cable, Media Buyer Planner, New York Magazine, TVWeek.com, Movieline and BLTv

Michael Calderone / Yahoo! News:

Media-intern auction winners pay for chance to work for free — Breaking into the media business is tough, with a seemingly endless supply of bright young college graduates vying for unpaid internships at elite publications. Still, there's another route to getting one's foot in the door, if you have money to burn: Win an auction!

Discussion: Gawker, Romenesko and The Wire

under the wire:

How Wired.com Tracked the iPhone Finder — In response to Wired.com's scoop identifying the finder of the lost iPhone prototype, many have asked me how we did it. The process of uncovering digital footprints to identify Brian Hogan was indeed challenging and enlightening, so I thought I'd tell the story here.

Discussion: WebNewser, Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat and just enough

Twitter Media:

Tweets are the new quotes — Have you ever been quoted in a news article or blog post? If so, you know it can be a strange experience: you recognize your words, but they never sound quite right. It's the peril of transcription. — That's just one of a couple reasons we like ReadWriteWeb's approach …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, CNET News, louisgray.com, VentureBeat, Mashable!, TNW Social Media and TechCrunch

Lloyd Grove / The Daily Beast:

Obama Trounces Leno — Hungry Beast Giving Beast Women in the World — Blogs and Stories — The returns from the White House Correspondents' Dinner are in. Lloyd Grove on how the president thoroughly upstaged the king of late-night comedy at Washington's media prom. Plus, watch the nine best moments.

Phil Rosenthal / Chicago Tribune:

MSNBC boss stands ready in ideological battle with Fox News — Phil Griffin says he learned a valuable lesson from Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News Channel: Viewers will stand behind a news outlet that stands for something — MSNBC boss Phil Griffin looks at what Roger Ailes created at Fox News Channel with no small amount of awe.

Discussion: TVNewser, Mediaite, National Review, The Huffington Post, The Wire, New York Observer and Gawker

Simon Dumenco / AdAge:

Who Really Killed Media? Craig ‘Craigslist’ Newmark? Jimmy ‘Wikipedia’ Wales? Oprah? — Without Non-Disclosing Too Much, the Truth May Lie in a Pair of Alcohol-Fueled Conga Lines — I have something to get off my chest: At 3 a.m. recently in a smoky dance club in Valencia, Spain …

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Apple iPad Sales Pass 1 Million Mark; iBooks Not Flying Off Shelves — Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs is crowing this morning about breaking the one million mark with iPad in 28 days—less than half the time it took for the iPhone to achieve the same feat.

Discussion: Apple, New York Post, mediabistro.com, AppleInsider, Mashable!, Gadget Lab, GigaOM, Fast Company, Kindle Review, Geekosystem, Fortune, Lost Remote, VentureBeat, All Things Digital, TUAW and New York Observer

Norman Gomlak / Washington Post:

AOL seeks to fill need for local news with online news site Patch — AOL Inc. is apparently gearing up to launch dozens of community news sites in the Washington-Baltimore area, part of an aggressive push to fill the void left by newspaper cutbacks and to tap the region's local online ad spending.

Discussion: WebNewser

CBS News:

Conan Breaks Silence on “Tonight Show,” NBC Exit — O'Brien Tells “60 Minutes” Not Possible Show Lost Money Under His Watch; Says Six Months Was Too Soon To Judge His Potential — (CBS) Very few things in this country galvanize public opinion like someone trying to mess around with people's preferences in the bedroom.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline.com, Celebritology 2.0 and New York Magazine

Speakeasy:
Conan O'Brien on ‘60 Minutes’: The Comedian Talks Jay Leno, NBC, His Beard

Discussion: Media on HuffingtonPost.com, The Wire, The Huffington Post, /Film, Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel, rbr.com, The Biz Blog, Z on TV, PopWatch, Mediaite, Media Decoder, The Wrap and blogs.tampabay.com

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Close Encounters of the Regulatory Kind: Google-AdMob Brace for the Worst — While executives at both AdMob and Google are pulling out all the stops to convince federal government regulators otherwise, multiple sources close to the situation said that the pair now expect the Federal Trade Commission …

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider, Bloomberg, MarketingVOX, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, eWeek and bizjournals

Heather Timmons / New York Times:

New Role: YouTube as Outlet for Live Sports — NEW DELHI, India — The Indian Premier League, a 20-team tournament here that turns staid cricket into something fast-paced and glamorous, just ended its third season with a new champion, the Chennai Super Kings, and a new scandal revolving around allegations of financial fraud.

Discussion: Fortune