You may most recently remember him, Jacob Soboroff, from the west coast end of HuffPost Live. She, Cara Santa Maria, is a former senior science correspondent for The Huffington Post and host of embedded HuffPo Web series Talk Nerdy To Me.

Together the pair are now co-hosting TakePart Live, the weekday late-night talk show component (12 a.m. ET/9 p.m. PT) of Participant Media’s new TV network Pivot, which launched yesterday. The pair looked comfortable on their handsome new set as they discussed – yes, live – Edward Snowden and various other topics.

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Brian Stelter to Guest Host Reliable Sources (The Washington Post / Erik Wemple)
Brian Stelter, a New York Times reporter covering television and digital media, will guest-host an edition of CNN’s Sunday program Reliable Sources, the media-watchdog show that longtime host Howard Kurtz recently left for a job with Fox News. In doing so, Stelter will join the likes of NPR’s David Folkenflik, CNN contributor John Avlon and others in CNN’s Reliable Sources bake-off. TVNewser Stelter will host Aug. 11. In the meantime, he will avoid covering CNN, as well as Fox News and MSNBC. Mediaite Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren is not taking the news well that Stelter will be guest-hosting Reliable Sources in August. In a blog post Tuesday, Van Susteren called Stelter’s move a “conflict of interest” and labeled him a “hypocrite” for his paper’s criticism of her husband’s ties to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. Gretawire Van Susteren: “Stelter writes about CNN (and MSNBC and Fox News) and is now either hustling CNN or the other way around… there is no clearer conflict of interest. Stelter now knows where his bread is buttered (and where is the New York Times public editor?)”

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Barnes & Noble CEO Lynch Out After Nook Woes Deepen (Forbes)
Another dreary chapter for Barnes & Noble came to a close Monday with the resignation of chief executive William Lynch, the man brought on board to build the company’s tablet business. Officially, Barnes & Noble offered no explanation for Lynch’s departure. It’s not difficult to read between the lines, though. Lynch, a one-time Palm executive, was unable to push Barnes & Noble into the tablet business, a market heavily dominated by Apple’s iPad, and to a far lesser extent, Amazon.com’s Kindle. NYT The moves on Monday appeared to be a step toward separating the digital and retail divisions, as the company has indicated it might do. Barnes & Noble has been in talks over a potential sale of its digital assets, as well as its 675 bookstores. Microsoft is one potential buyer of the Nook business; last year it invested hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire 17.6 percent of the division. TechCrunch E-readers never managed to beat back competition from the ever-strong Amazon, and the move into Nook tablets, based on Android, never quite hit the mark, either — a position that only seemed to get worse over time. Barnes & Noble’s last quarter saw the company report a loss of nearly $119 million, more than double the loss in the quarter a year before. The Nook division specifically, the thing on which B&N has pinned its future, made only $108 million in revenue in that period, a 34 percent drop from a year ago. GalleyCat “I appreciate the opportunity to serve as CEO of this terrific company over the last three years,” said Lynch in a statement. “There is a great executive team and board in place at Barnes & Noble, and I look forward to the many innovations the company will be bringing to its millions of physical and digital media customers in the future.” Read more

Get ready to read a whole lot more about New York gay porn entrepreneur Jake Jaxson.

Just before the July 4 holiday, Jaxson – under his real name, Jason Buchtel – posted a remarkable Tumblr item about his previous business partnership with Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian reporter who broke the Edward Snowden story. He was belatedly responding to reports on BuzzFeed and in the New York Daily News about his past dealings with Greenwald.

Buchtel details his struggles with the media attention and how it led him to reveal to his parents, for the first time, that he is now operating gay porn websites. He also explains how the burgeoning X-rated sideline started:

Like many, I came to the adult space by accident. With Master Notions, the company I co-owned with Glenn, we were on the forefront of developing online “street” and viral marketing, and we had taken on a few adult clients… I really enjoyed being able to work in a strategic space that had no boundaries, where we could see immediately what worked and what did not work — not the long tail approach to more traditional marketing.

It was only a matter of time before my partners and I saw that running our own customer friendly adult sites – built on customer satisfaction and loyalty – was a lucrative business. So we began acquiring properties in the adult space and cockyboys.com is now the crown jewel.

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Networks Scramble to Cover Asiana Airlines Flight 214 (HuffPost)
News of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday sent broadcast and cable networks scrambling for coverage. Cable networks including MSNBC, CNN and Fox News broke into wall-to-wall coverage of the event after reporting the crash around 3 p.m. ET. CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield and Don Lemon anchored hours of coverage, as did MSNBC’s Craig Melvin and Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett and Heather Childers. MSNBC was live through 11 p.m. Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren hosted a two-hour special from 9-11 p.m. ET. Fox News aired two more hours of special coverage, lasting until 1 a.m. TVNewser ABC News produced a special report, with David Muir anchoring, from 3:15 p.m. to 4:02 p.m. NBC News’ Lester Holt anchored a three-minute special report at 3:30 p.m. On CBS, Jim Axelrod anchored a special report at 3:55 p.m. THR Passenger David Eun, a Samsung exec who was formerly president of AOL Media and Studios, posted his first tweets at 12:13 p.m., within minutes of the crash-landing and fire. Eun, a Harvard Law graduate who also has worked at NBC, calmly posted short but clear bulletins on the crash and the condition of the passengers. San Francisco Chronicle As Eun’s posts came to light, media entities sought him out. At one point CNN asked him to get on the phone for an interview, but he declined. “I don’t want to divert attention away from crash,” he tweeted. “[I] posted updates to let everyone know that majority of passengers seem OK.” NBCNews / Technology Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that she, her family and some of her colleagues from the company had originally planned to take Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul, South Korea. “We switched to United so we could use miles for my family’s tickets,” she wrote. “Our flight was scheduled to come in at the same time, but we were early and landed about 20 minutes before the crash.” Valleywag It’s not news when someone isn’t somewhere, but Facebook’s top celebrity author sure convinced the Internet otherwise: Sandberg had thousands buzzing about the fact that she was not aboard a crashed plane, despite zero initial reports that she ever was. Read more

Alec Baldwin, currently among the leaders in the race to become the most annoying celebrity of 2013, wants to interview Edward Snowden for his WNYC podcast. The 55-year-old actor told Vanity Fair that he’s doing everything in his power to make it happen:

I want to try to interview him [Snowden] for my podcast on WNYC. I’m pressing all the buttons I have in London with friends of mine who know [Julian] Assange. I’m going to fly to Russia and try to interview Snowden.

That sounds great.

Baldwin also said that he’s never going to use Twitter again because “It’s just another chink in your armor for people to come and kill you.”

One could argue that if you’re not an idiot, people don’t try to “kill you,” but hey, what do we know? Other than there’s no way Baldwin stays away from Twitter, we mean.

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Megyn Kelly Moving to Primetime at Fox News (TVNewser)
Megyn Kelly is moving to primetime for Fox News Channel, the network announced Tuesday afternoon. But to which hour is not known. Since 2010, Kelly has anchored the two-hour afternoon show America Live. “Megyn is an exceptional talent who has successfully filled and surpassed each role we have given her at the network,” Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes said in a statement. The Washington Post / Erik Wemple Just how Fox News will install Kelly in primetime is a matter of great mystery, given that its stars in the various time slots — including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren — appear to be locked down on contracts. NYT Fox did not announce a specific show for Kelly or whose place she would be taking in the network’s primetime lineup. However, speculation has centered on Van Susteren, the 10 p.m. anchor. Van Susteren recently signed an extension of her Fox contract but her future role is not certain at this point. TheWrap / MediaAlley According to an insider with knowledge of the situation, Van Susteren approached CNN chief Jeff Zucker about a possible job at her former cable network last spring. Though they met several times, CNN ultimately wasn’t interested in her. The Atlantic Wire The only option we see is a co-hosting gig, or perhaps they dump the 11 p.m. O’Reilly Factor re-run for a brand-new late night show. But late-night is not primetime and any way you slice that (8-to-11 or 6-to-11), it seems Fox News has more highly-paid hosts than there are hours in the day. Let the battle begin.

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Soledad O’Brien Named Special Correspondent for Al Jazeera America (TVNewser)
As TVNewser first reported was in the works last week, Al Jazeera America has signed former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien to a development deal, and will feature her as a “special correspondent” for its primetime newsmagazine, America Tonight. O’Brien’s company, Starfish Media Group, will produce long-form documentary specials for AJAM when the channel launches in August, with O’Brien appearing on-air for shorter-form reports on AJAM’s newsmagazine. TheWrap “O’Brien’s career producing and reporting on the human side of many of the most important stories of the past decade will fit in perfectly with what Al Jazeera America will be covering every day,” said Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of Al Jazeera’s international operations and the senior executive developing the new channel. “Her dedication to that type of journalism is what makes it so exciting to announce that she and her production company are joining the Al Jazeera America team.” HuffPost It’s a move that makes sense for O’Brien, who ended her day-to-day job at CNN amidst that network’s rebranding. Al Jazeera has promised a less celebrity- and politics-focused network, something that jibes with O’Brien’s high-brow approach to TV journalism. Deadline Hollywood Would a CNN alum hire in this post advance efforts to get the biggest distribution holdout, Time Warner Cable, to carry the network? Back in January, when Al Jazeera coughed up a reported $500 million to buy Al Gore’s little-watched Current TV and replace it with Al Jazeera America, Time Warner Cable said its deal with Current had been terminated and it would no longer carry the service — a big distribution hit for the network. Shortly thereafter, however, Time Warner Cable said it was keeping an open mind about Al Jazeera’s plans. Politico O’Brien’s morning show program on CNN struggled in the ratings and ended March 29. Last month, HBO announced O’Brien is joining the network’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

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Journalists Tracking Edward Snowden Tricked Into Flying to Cuba (TVNewser)
Since NSA leaker Edward Snowden apparently left Hong Kong, journalists have been trying to track his whereabouts. He supposedly flew to Moscow, Russia (though no reporter saw him there) and Russian state media reported that he would be flying to Cuba, before moving on to Venezuela and likely Ecuador. A slew of reporters, believing the Russian media report, booked tickets on the Aeroflot flight to Havana. When they boarded, it became clear that Snowden was not going to be joining them. The Washington Post / WorldViews More than two dozen reporters and photographers reportedly tried to board that Aeroflot SU-150 from Moscow to Havana on Monday morning. It’s not clear how many of them made it on, but they made clear in a flurry of tweets as the plane pulled away from the gate that the man they were after wasn’t on the plane. Reuters All eyes were on seat 17A as a planeload of journalists strapped themselves in for an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Cuba with former U.S. intelligence contractor Snowden. Their first disappointment was that Snowden didn’t show up. The second was that it was a booze-free flight — all 11 hours and 35 minutes of it. HuffPost / The Backstory For years, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has argued that journalists in Washington often seem too cozy with the political figures they’re supposed to hold accountable and too quick to amplify the government’s perspective on national security. Meet the Press host David Gregory’s suggestion Sunday that Greenwald “aided and abetted” Snowden, his source for a series of bombshell stories, only seemed to validate that viewpoint. NYT Until he re-emerged this week as an ally for Snowden, Julian Assange looked like a forgotten man. WikiLeaks had not had a major release of information in several years, its funds had dwindled and several senior architects of its systems left, citing internal disputes. Assange himself is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he fled to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on allegations of sexual abuse. Read more

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Snowden on the Run, Seeks Asylum in Ecuador (CNN)
The computer contractor who exposed details of U.S. surveillance programs was on the run late Sunday, seeking asylum in Ecuador with the aid of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the organization and Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry announced. Edward Snowden left Hong Kong after Washington sought his extradition on espionage charges, according to WikiLeaks, which facilitates the publication of classified information. TechCrunch / CrunchGov While Ecuador has been a safe haven for world-class leakers in the past, including WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, the country is no utopia for journalists. Given a “Partly Free” rating by Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press scale, their report notes: “Attacks on journalists and media houses continue to rise. In 2011, Fundamedios, the national press freedom watchdog organization, cited nearly 150 incidents of aggression (physical, verbal, and legal) against the media by authorities as well as by ordinary citizens.” HuffPost Meet the Press host David Gregory asked columnist Glenn Greenwald why he shouldn’t be charged with a crime for working with Snowden. At the tail end of the conversation, Gregory suddenly asked Greenwald why the government shouldn’t be going after him: “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” he asked. Greenwald replied that it was “pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” and that there was no evidence to back up Gregory’s claim that he had “aided” Snowden. TVNewser Following his appearance on Meet the Press, Greenwald called out Gregory on Twitter for asking a question about whether Greenwald or the Guardian should or will face charges for their role in the Snowden NSA document revelation. Howard Kurtz asked Greenwald the same question two hours later on Reliable Sources. PressThink / Jay Rosen Gregory does not know it, but journalism with a point of view, journalism in the style that calls for viewlessness, and advocacy journalism can all deliver good work in the imperfect art of source-driven reportage and commentary. BuzzFeed / Ben Smith Snowden’s flight and its surrounding geopolitics are a good story; what he made public is a better one. I’m not sure why reporters should care all that much about his personal moral status, the meaning of the phrase “civil disobedience,” or the fate of his eternal soul. And the public who used to be known as “readers” are going to have to get used to making that distinction. Read more