Tangled Web

When AOL acquired Huffington Post last year, Arianna Huffington was given editorial control of the company’s online properties, including Patch, MovieFone, PopEater, and TechCrunch. Since taking the reigns, Huffington has folded websites and eliminated journalists’ jobs while increasing the practice of utilizing unpaid bloggers leaving her with a critic or two.

Now it’s Huffington’s turn to face a downsizing, in the form of her job duties. She will now be solely in charge of the Huffington Post, according to a report by The Washington Post.

Huffington says the change was her idea. “What I asked for is for us to be more independent, to have technology, marketing and [business development] now into Huffington Post, so that we can accelerate all our growth, and for me to be freed up to just concentrate exclusively on HuffPost,” she stated at a conference Thursday.

The Huffington Post is continuing to grow, with a current focus on international expansion and the launch of a live video streaming network.

Full disclosure: This fishie blogs for the Huffington Post.

100,000 followers! Wow. Thanks for following us. And no, Sarah Phillips, @LAKings is not for sale.

— LA Kings (@LAKings) May 2, 2012

The Los Angeles Kings Twitter account is at it again — this time taking a shot at 22-year-old fraud Sarah Phillips, who Deadspin exposed  in a scathing article Tuesday.

If you don’t get the joke, check out our earlier post about Phillips.

• California credits Facebook with 1,400% increase in organ donors. AllFacebook
• Hunger Games, The Help, and other literary adaptations land MTV Movie Award nominations. GalleyCat
• The Fox News mole is shopping around a memoir. TVNewser
• Warner Brothers to sell classic film scripts as eBooks. AppNewser
• Publishing powerhouse Time Inc. had a lousy first quarter. FishbowlNY

Already syndicated on hundreds of U.S. and international radio stations with his program “Intelligence For Your Life,” former Entertainment Tonight host John Tesh has added a new dimension to his personal media empire – kteshla.com.

The Southern California headquartered destination is anchored around Tesh’s show and a similar offering from his wife, Connie Sellecca, “Intelligence For Your Health.” From today’s press release:

Partnering with various churches in the Southern California area, K TESH LOS ANGELES features a directory of churches and links to their organizations for listeners to explore local ministries and events in the surrounding areas. The site displays a “verse of the day,” “video of the day” and “featured topics” with related articles and videos that listeners can “share” with their friends and family via Twitter and Facebook.

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Among the NBCUniversal headlines being made today at the Digital Upfronts in New York City is the news that Telemundo Media has partnered with movie ticketing behemoth Fandango for Fandango Cine, a Spanish-language Web venture scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The co-branded service will be embedded into telemundo.com, mun2.tv and fandango.com. It will offer movie-related editorial and video programming, as well as of course theater show times and online ticket purchasing. From today’s press release:

“While Hispanics make up about 16% of the U.S. population, they represent 28% of today’s frequent moviegoers, according to Nielsen, and they are nearly twice as likely as general market moviegoers to see a movie on opening weekend,” said Peter Blacker, evp of digital & emerging media, Telemundo Media.

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The LA Times got it right with their headline “Pandora: The No. 1 Radio Station in Los Angeles?” Because it’s highly doubtful that this is actually the case.

As Radio Ink magazine points out,* the top LA station in the March 2012 PPM ratings, KFI AM 640, very suspiciously failed to crack the top five of this separate fall 2011 Media Audit phone survey. Which perhaps suggests – more than anything – that young Internet-savvy music listeners are most likely to pick up the phone when Caller ID displays “Unknown” or a toll-free telemarketing number. Per Radio Ink:

During the months of September and October, The Media Audit conducted phone surveys of adults 18+ who said in the previous week they had listened to Pandora. Pandora was followed by KIIS-FM/KVVS-FM, KNX-AM, KROQ-FM and KOST-FM.

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Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal breaks it down for us. The comic below is from Inman’s highly educational This Is The Web Right Now series, which also shares insights on Google +, Instagram, and Valve.

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Katie Couric has just become the first TV news mega-personality to dive headfirst into the waters of online news. Yahoo and ABC News have partnered to produce Couric’s latest news venture Katie’s Take, which will air exclusively online.

From AdWeek:

Katie’s Take will be one of the shows Yahoo rolls out this afternoon during its NewFront event—one of several upfront-style ad buyer presentations designed to more or less ask buyers to move a chunk of their TV dollars over to digital as that market expands into programming models similar to those on television.

Yahoo is hoping the addition of traditional TV news vets like Couric and the rest of the ABC News crew will add some flavor to its content, which is mostly aggregated. “It’s given us more editorial voice and personality,” said Yahoo vp of video programming Erin McPherson. Presumably, Yahoo and ABC News hope that if launch sponsor Nestlé is seen advertising its Poland Spring brand on Katie’s Take as the starter pistol is fired, other companies will see the program as a good advertising opportunity.

Katie’s Take will have it’s own page on Yahoo. Couric, meanwhile, will continue to appear on TV as a correspondent for ABC News.

An article posted this week by Easy Reader News editor and publisher Kevin Cody perfectly encapsulates the Dickensian state of 21st century journalism.

On the best-of-times side, there’s the fact that Cody – who manages a 50,000-circulation print weekly as well as a respected companion website – recently got to spend time with former contributors who have gone on to Pulitzer Prize winning success. He partied in the Hollywood Hills with Wall Street Journal national news editor Sam Enriquez and had dinner in Redondo Beach with politico.com’s Matt Wuerker, who just won this year’s prize for editorial cartooning.

At the worst-of-times end of things, he had a long conversation at the first party with an LA Times employee about the newspaper’s paywall:

I assumed the Times web reporter would be happy at the prospect of people paying to read his stories, rather than reading them for free. He wasn’t. He thinks the paywall is a bad idea. Every morning, he reads Google News for free, so why would he or anyone else pay to read the Los Angeles Times online, he asked.

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The Hollywood Reporter has rolled out “The Hollywood Reporter Social Reader,” a free Facebook app dubbed “the first social reader for entertainment news.”

Fans of THR will be able to view a majority of their web content without having to leave Facebook.

“People love to share and talk about anything that has to do with Hollywood and the entertainment industry,” THR editorial director Janice Min said in a statement. ”The Hollywood Reporter Social Reader offers readers a seamless way to share and discuss the entertainment content they love.”