Breaking News

CNN is reporting that passengers aboard an American Airlines heading from San Francisco to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport following a hijacking threat.

The telephoned threat, which claimed that the plane would be hijacked but which did not apparently include any sort of hostage threat, prompted TSA officials to interview and re-screen all passengers aboard flight 24 while law enforcement inspects the aircraft.

No suspicious materials have been found in or on the plane as of yet.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

The New York State Department of Labor just announced that Congress has approved legislation to extend eligibility deadlines for extended unemployment benefits to November 28, 2010. Details and instructions for claimants in New York are below:

Congress Passes and President Signs Unemployment Extension (Updated for the week of July 19, 2010)

Legislation was approved by Congress on July 22, 2010 extending eligibility deadlines for benefit extensions to November 28, 2010. Please continue to claim weekly benefits in the usual manner, unless you have received instructions to file a new claim. Claimants whose benefits had stopped because they were not able to begin receiving EUC by the week ending June 6, 2010, or were not able to move to a new Tier of EUC or collect Extended Benefits starting on the week ending June 13, 2010, will receive payment in their account by the middle of next week for back weeks claimed. The new legislation does not extend the additional $25 weekly payment, known as Federal Additional Compensation or FAC, for individuals who file a new claim on or after May 31, 2010. For updates on benefit extensions, continue visiting this website. For an estimate of the number of weeks you may be currently eligible for, see Chart or use the Benefits Calculator.

Since our last post, the average unemployment rate has fallen from 8.5% to 8.3% for April through June, which affects eligibility for EUC funds in Tier 4. More instructions after the jump:

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UPDATE: The tsunami warning has been canceled for all of Hawaii.

To celebrate, here’s some footage of CNN anchor Rick Sanchez teaching us, in English, about weather, physics and the metric system. Don’t worry; he’ll talk slow:

For those of you interested in following the events unfolding right now in Hawaii, “Hawaii News Now” is offering live footage of the islands’ shorelines as well as ongoing newsroom and on-the-scene coverage.

Click here to watch.

It looks like 2010 has given a new life to Editor & Publisher, which was shuttered two weeks ago. We noticed that new content was being published on E&P‘s website earlier today, and former editor Greg Mitchell has just confirmed that the publication has been bought, though he is no longer on staff. Some employees will be kept, we are told, though not all. Check back for updates as they develop.

Update: E&P announced on its Website that it has been sold to Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based magazine and newspaper publisher that owns publications such as Boating World. Charles McKeown will be staying on as publisher of E&P and Mark Fitzgerald will be taking over the editor post from Mitchell. Senior editor Joe Strupp is also out.

On his blog, Mitchell writes, “One week ago in a meeting [the] new owner told me flatly, ‘Extremely impressed with your great work and definitely will retain you.’”

The February issue will be published as planned.

Previously: New Life For E&P?

Just as Thanksgiving has the Macy’s Day Parade, so does Christmas in New York have its annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. The event, scheduled for tomorrow, is a time where celebrities gather and NBC grabs ratings with its “Christmas in Rockefeller Center” tree lighting special.

This year, however, the threat looms large that there will be no lights, cameras or action as the network remains stalled in negotiations with the local chapter of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. The union claims that since its contract with NBC expired in March there has been very little progress in the talks and “management has grown increasingly hostile, ignoring the concerns of the union’s membership.”

Now the NABET-CWA is threatening to strike during the Christmas tree lighting unless network executives set dates for further negotiations. They have also set up a Web site, NBCStoleChristmas.com, where parties can read the union’s case against NBC.

We reached out to NBC for comment, but they have yet to return our emails.

Press release from the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians Union, after the jump.

(Photo via)

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Gmail and Google chat services are both down right now, which means we feel effectively cut off from the world.

But weird things are happening…we are getting emails on our Blackberry and Gmail Notifier is working. What are you experiencing?

Hopefully it will all come back soon. We don’t know how much more we can take.

Update: Looks like gchat is also still functioning on Blackberries. So, there’s that.

Earlier this week, a deadly distributed denial of service attack crippled Gawker Media. Today, we’re devastated because Twitter is down, due to a similar attack. We managed to get out one Tweet, and have been seeing intermittent updates from other users, but they are few and far betweeen.

We’ve also heard that Facebook is experiencing problems, too. Has an influx of Twitter users jammed Facebook, or are they facing an attack, too?

Without Twitter and Facebook, how are you finding out what friends are thinking today?

Twitter was ablaze Friday evening, thanks to TheMediaisDying, the ten-week-old Twitter account that posts news of media closures and layoffs and is obsessively followed by many media watchers. It published an item Friday evening saying the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was “officially closing.” However, the bad news turned out not to be true for the time being, and was the unfortunate result of a bad tip that spread rapidly across the microblogging platform even as its veracity was being publicly questioned.

Back on January 9, Hearst Corp. announced it was putting the Post-Intelligencer on the block and would shut the paper down if a buyer wasn’t found within 60 days. Friday’s initial TheMediaIsDying post about the P-I, however, indicated the paper was closing ahead of schedule. FishbowlNY spoke with Post-Intelligencer managing editor David McCumber shortly after the message first appeared on Twitter, and he told us TheMediaIsDying’s original report about his paper was false “as so many rumors are on Twitter.” So, we pieced together how the inaccurate story made its way on to myriad media watchers’ screens.

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The entire staff of Page Six Magazine will be packing up their desks on the heels of today’s announcement that the weekly New York Post insert would move to a quarterly publication schedule. A former staffer tells FishbowlNY that the only full-time employee left standing will be editor-in-chief Margi Conklin, who will put out the magazine with a team of freelancers after the final weekly edition gets tucked into the Post on Sunday, February 15, 2009.

However, it’s not all heartbreak once the mag moves to its quarterly schedule just after Valentine’s Day…

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As FishbowlNY reported Wednesday afternoon, Reader’s Digest Association said late the same night that it will eliminate 8 percent of its global workforce in what it has dubbed its “Recession Plan,” according to a company release.

In addition to staff reductions, other initiatives RDA will be implementing as part of the plan to cut cost and stave off further layoffs include the suspension of 401K matching and the introduction of unpaid time off in fiscal ’09 and ’10. “We hope and expect that most of these moves will be temporary,” RDA CEO and president Mary Berner said in the statement.

According to a company spokesperson, no magazine closings are being announced as part of this plan. Whether they’re on the way as part of some other plan remains to be seen.

Full release after the jump.

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