Digital First Media announced today that it is creating a national curation team as part of its centralized news operation. That operation, called Thunderdome, will be produced by Digital First’s MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company. The content from Thunderdome will be distributed to its 800 multi-platform products in an effort to bolster the quality of its newsrooms. Julie Westfall will lead the team with Angela Carter and Karen Workman joining as curators. Read more

To succeed in journalism, it is important to not only find your story, but to tell it in a way that’s different from the competition. (And let’s be honest, there is a lot of competition nowadays.) So, to take on that 800-lb gorilla of celebrity news, TMZ, Celebuzz editor-in-chief Dylan Howard says his team works overtime to give readers the most in-depth coverage possible.

“We must provide the most comprehensive coverage of the top 40-plus stories each day that are being aggregated by our rivals. I want our stories to go beyond the headline. That sounds jingoistic, but there’s method behind it,” he said in his Mediabistro So What Do You Do? interview. “When you look around the Web, the top showbiz stories are all covered the same way, packaged like Associated Press copy.”

And how does Celebuzz distinguish itself from the rest? “Putting these stories into context, often through the use of expert analysis,” Howard said.

Read more in So What Do You Do? Dylan Howard, Editor-in-Chief of Celebuzz.

– Andrea Hackett

Thanks to the Online Education Database for naming 10,000 Words one of the best 40 blogs for journalism students. They write:

“This Mediabistro resource is a journalism major’s BFF, because it focuses on technology’s integral role in promoting information these days.”

Other blogs that made the list include some of our favorites: Nieman Journalism Lab, Media Decoder, and Romenesko.

See the full list at OEDB’s site →

Brandon Holley held editor positions at Time Out and GQ, helped launch Elle Girl and headed Yahoo! Shine before taking the helm at Lucky in 2011. And, she says, if you want to snag a top spot on a magazine masthead, you need to be a vocal and proactive voice for the brand.

“I think people make a mistake when they wanna climb the masthead, and they assume the editor-in-chief should pay attention to them. And, now that I’m on the other side of the desk, I love people who come to me,” Holley said in our Media Beat interview.

Holley explained that she succeeded at GQ by giving “steady input without being annoying” to editor-in-chief Art Cooper. “I wasn’t kissing ass, but I would write memos to him and say, ‘I think this section could use this,’ and ‘I think we should start a new section that’s this’… I’m a huge fan of memo writing.”

Part 2: Brandon Holley Calls Fashion Blogging ‘Most Exciting Thing to Happen in Publishing in Decades’
Part 3: Lucky’s Brandon Holley Talks Photoshop and Fashion

Today, Reuters announced a partnership with Next Media Animation (NMA), the Taiwanese company known for its animated news coverage. Reuters will be distributing NMA’s News Direct videos, which cover breaking news and feature stories in 3D animation. The videos offer popular visual coverage of news stories when video footage is not immediately available, and they serve as a medium to explain more technical and conceptual stories. NMA is also responsible for those satirical news animations that have covered everything from TSA security and WikiLeaks to Charlie Sheen’s hotel room antics and the much-discussed Ukrainian Barbie. Read more