Most of the nation has a rather tumultuous relationship with Al Jazeera. This stems from a few things, but mostly it’s just ignorance. A majority of people still see Al Jazeera as some radical Islamic media company, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Despite all the negative feelings toward the network, New York City has consistently embraced  Al Jazeera - The Huffington Post reports that New York provides more traffic to its websites than any other city in the world - so now it’s hugging us all back.

Last night, at midnight, Al Jazeera English launched on Time Warner (Channel 92), and it will launch on Verizon’s FiOS in the near future. Al Anstey, Al Jazeera English’s Managing Director, said that New York’s support is critical for the network succeeding:

New York is a very important city. It’s looking at all directions on the globe and all directions are looking back at New York City. So it’s a truly global city. It’s got a very outward looking, diverse, intelligent audience – obviously an influential audience in some quarters as well. So it’s a key part of our strategy.

While the network has strong support here (and from Hillary Clinton), it still has a long way to go to get people to switch from either their local news or CNN, MSNBC or any of the other news mainstays. But getting a foot in the door in New York is a good place to start.

Time Warner is rumored to have offered between $30 and $35 million for the United States version of OK! magazine. According to Sky News the timing for the acquisition might be right, as the owner of OK! – Richard Desmond – is looking to sell off his newspaper and magazine titles.

Talks are in the early stages right now, so Sky News doesn’t have any insight into whether Desmond considers the offer appropriate.

OK! would be a natural fit for Time Warner if the deal does end up going through. It already publishes celebrity-focused titles People and InStyle, and despite OK! leaning more toward a tabloid, there always seems to be an audience for that kind of thing.

On that note, FishbowlNY would like to announce that we’re having a baby! It’s going to have fins and legs! Alright, aside from that being extremely creepy, it’s also not true, we just got caught up in the OK! spirit.

A new opportunity has just popped up for media startups in New York. NYC SeedStart Media 2011 is a 12 week summer boot camp specifically for startups in the digital media space, including ad infrastructure, mobile, digital content and ecommerce businesses.  Each of the 10 companies selected for the program will receive  $20,000 in funding, space to work, and mentoring from an impressive group of media, advertising, and tech companies in New York City that includes AOL Ventures, Comcast, Google, Hearst, MTV Networks, News Corporation, New York Times, Ogilvy, Time Warner, and Vivendi, as well as veteran VCs and entrepreneurs.  The ideal applicant is a media-focused team of two with at least one technical co-founder and a source code or beta product ready to go.  The program begins on June 15th and they’ll be accepting applications through March 31st.  To apply, click here.

That would be speculation from The New York Post (update: just confirmed by The New York Times), which announced that former EVP of global marketing and affairs for Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp., Gary Ginsberg, will be taking on a similar role at Time Warner, reporting directly to CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. Ginsberg’s arrival would coincide with the departure of Time Warner’s heavy-hitter communications guy Ed Adler last week, though sources at the media conglomerate are quick to point out that these two events are entirely unrelated.

Read More: Update: Ginsberg to Join Time Warner — New York Times, Exclusive: Time Warner’s Bewkes taps ex-News Corp. exec Ginsberg as senior adviser

The tension between news orgs and Google has finally come to a head after a year of growing unease and muddled Internet copyright laws.

While Rupert Murdoch has been very vocal about wanting The Wall Street Journal and other News Corp. entities’ stories pulled from Google News, other groups like the Associated Press have been more quietly pushing for different terms of their contract with the search engine. The AP’s contract with Google News is set to expire at the end of January.

As of the time of this article, no new AP stories have appeared in Google News since December 23, which some are speculating is a power-play on Google’s part: akin to Fox threatening to pull their content from Time-Warner every time their contract expires. Except, as TechCrunch noted in an article yesterday, the deal works the opposite way on the Internet, “distribution is king, not content.”

Without all the incoming traffic that Google provides to news organizations, will media moguls relent and admit that they need the powerful search engine? Or will the AP, like Murdoch, start going to similar sites like Microsoft’s Bing out of spite for the corporate giant?

Read More: Foxy Tactics: Google News Pulls The AP’s Content As Contract Comes Up For Renewal –TechCrunch

Lesson to AP: Don’t Mess with the Google –BayNewser

New York Times: Another look at what went so wrong with the Time Warner-AOL merger.

Financial Times: A profile of Newsmax.

All Things D: A Demand Media manifesto.

Washington Post: British journalist Rupert Hamer was killed Sunday by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Fashion Week Daily: Fashionista.com editor Abby Gardner has made an exit from the blog, and will be replaced by Lauren Sherman, formerly of Forbes.

Media Nation: A federal investigation provides an explanation for why the president of The Boston Globe‘s union, Dan Totten, signed another union officer’s name to his paycheck, an action that resulted in him being removed from union management.

Silicon Alley Insider: Ten years later, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin apologized for the AOL merger.

PRNewser: PR maven Kelly Cutrone (of “The Hills” and “The City” fame) has a new book out, set to hit stands at the same time as her new reality show debuts on Bravo.

The Awl: Author and contributing editor for The Morning News, Clay Risen, is joining The New York Times‘ op-ed page.

New York Times: Eunice Johnson, the widow of Ebony magazine founder John Johnson, died Sunday at age 93. She was famous for directing the traveling fashion shows Ebony Fashion Fair since 1961.

Folio: Battered consumer business magazines hope to bounce back in the New Year.

Gannett Blog: Two new newspaper publisher-related blog offerings from Gannett Blogger Jim Hopkins: New York Times Co. Blog and News Corp. Blog

Well, we Time Warner Cable subscribers may not have to live without Fox, thanks to last-minute negotiations between News Corp. and Time Warner, but millions of Cablevision subscribers in the tri-state area have lost access to Food Network and HGTV.

While the battle over subscriber fees between News Corp. and Time Warner raged publicly in the days leading up to the New Year’s Eve contract deadline, Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns the two yanked channels, was quietly dealing with Cablevision. And the latter negotiations didn’t end as pleasantly as the others. Although Scripps says it “remains open to discussions,” Cablevision “has yet to engage in good faith negotiations for their subscribers.”

In the face of losing their culinary TV and home improvement channel, Cablevision subscribers are fighting back with over 120,000 calls and 35,000 e-cards sent to the cable provider, Scripps said in a press release today. The company has set up the Web sites ilovefoodnetwork.com and ilovehgtv.com for Cablevision subscribers to log on and send messages of “outrage and disappointment” to the company.

It comes as no surprise to us that Cablevision’s 3 million subscribers are missing their Food Network fix. And if you find yourself agreeing with us, you might want to check out some Food Network alternatives. Some of our favorite Web sites are crowd-sourced cookbook food52.com and local culinary faves like Edible Brooklyn, Edible Manhattan and Edible Queens. And epicurean magazines abound, from classics like Bon Appetit to the sleek Saveur to even Food Network Magazine, if you’re missing the channel. What are some of your favorite foodie media outlets?

All this week, mediabistro.com is featuring foodie-related content as part of its Profit From Your Passion Month. Today, learn about four gigs that can open the door to a career in food media. Just because you can’t watch Food Network right now doesn’t mean you can’t work towards starring on it one day!

Previously: January Is Profit From Your Passion Month

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s time for us to sign off and head out to celebrate the end of 2009. Before we go here’s one last round up for the year:

TVNewser: How many Sunday shows will get a new host by the end of 2010? What will Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck be up to by this time next year? Cast your vote in the TVNewser 2010 prediction challenge polls.

AgencySpy: If this was “the worst year in advertising”, then we can only go up from here, right? Right?

New York Times: Will we have Fox on Time Warner Cable tomorrow morning? Negotiations are still continuing in the eleventh hour, so News Corp. might pull its channels as we ring in the New Year.

Gawker: And some good news to end the year: a series of exclusives have boosted Gawker‘s traffic during the typically slow month of December.

And finally…Happy New Year from FishbowlNY! May you have a fun and safe celebration tonight and a prosperous and productive 2010.

–Amanda and Drew

Right now, Time Warner and News Corp. are locked in a battle over whether the cable company will be able to continue to carry News Corp.’s seven broadcast channels.

News Corp. is threatening to pull its channels from Time Warner Cable (of which we are subscribers, along with many other Manhattanites) by the end of this week if the cable provider doesn’t pony up extra fees, as high as $1 per month per subscriber.

Either way, it’s lose-lose for us customers. We’ll either lose “Glee” or have those enormous fees passed on to us once a deal is inevitably reached. And we don’t know about you, but our TWC bill already went up this month. Still, News Corp. needs the extra cash to make up for lost advertising revenues.

“Good programing is expensive,” News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. told shareholders this year. “It can no longer be supported solely by advertising revenues.”

Just consider it another version of a pay wall.

Broadcasters Battling For Cable Fees –New York Times