Media News
Morning Media Newsfeed 05.29.12
Click here to receive mediabistro.com's Morning Media Newsfeed via email.

Canada's Postmedia Cuts Copy Editing Jobs, Stops Some Print Editions (Poynter / MediaWire)
At company-wide meetings held late Monday afternoon, Postmedia Network, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, announced it is cutting editing positions at several of its largest city dailies and will stop printing paper editions on certain days. Reuters To trim expenses, it plans to stop printing a Sunday edition of the Edmonton Journal, the Ottawa Citizen and the Calgary Herald. For the fourth straight year it will not publish a Monday edition of the National Post through the summer. HuffPost Canada The Post will "look closely at its publication schedule going forward," Postmedia said in an internal memo obtained by The Huffington Post, suggesting the newspaper could see a shorter publication schedule going forward. GigaOM The company added that it is accelerating its plans to install paywalls at many of its papers, after experimenting with one in Montreal. Canoe Money In its most recent quarterly results, the struggling media company reported a net loss of $11.1 million for the three months ended Feb. 29.
Former PM Blair Says Feared Fight With Britain's Media Barons (Reuters)
British leaders have no choice but to court powerful media barons such as Rupert Murdoch or risk savage press attacks which are "full on, full frontal, day in, day out," former Prime Minister Tony Blair told an inquiry on Monday.
WSJ Blair on Monday told a public inquiry that News Corp. chairman and chief executive Murdoch wielded "substantial power" in Britain that had to be accounted for in devising political strategy and running the government.
Times-Picayune Employees To Learn Their Fates Next Week (Gambit / Blog Of New Orleans)
Individual meetings with Times-Picayune employees, at which they will learn whether they have lost their jobs or will be offered new positions with the new NOLA Media Group, are set to begin in about a week -- probably starting Monday, June 4 or Tuesday, June 5. NYT Nothing gets print romanticists more dewy-eyed than The Times-Picayune, which we learned last week will no longer be a daily presence on newsprint in New Orleans. I was in the city right after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the role the newspaper and its website played cannot be overestimated. AdAge / Media News The risk is that taking four days off the table could further accelerate readers' shift away from print -- even on the days that advertisers still want it. When advertisers buy print, they pay higher ad rates than they would for the Web. That's partly why The Times-Picayune collected $64.7 million in print ad revenue last year but only $5.7 million on its website, according to Kantar Media estimates.
Bryant Gumbel Returning To The Mornings (TVNewser)
Former NBC Today and CBS Early Show anchor Bryant Gumbel is returning to the mornings the week of June 4. Gumbel will be the guest co-host of ABC's syndicated program Live! with Kelly on Monday, June 4 and Tuesday, June 5.
Big Spenders Push Ad Line, But Facebook Holds Ground (AdAge / Digital)
GM wanted to brand Facebook. And Facebook wasn't selling. In a now-notorious meeting between General Motors Global CMO Joel Ewanick and other top marketing brass and Facebook sales executives, the automaker's team asked whether it was possible to run bigger, higher-impact ad units than the current offering, according to people familiar with the discussion. Advertising on Facebook has always been subtle. But GM wanted to do something bigger. To GM, Facebook's audience was interesting; its ad formats were not.
Atlantic Media Business Website Staffs Up And Strategizes (Capital New York)
Two months ago, Chris Batty, the former Gawker sales boss who'd just been tapped as publisher, told AdAge that the venture -- subsequently named Quartz -- would be "a run at the space The Economist and the Financial Times currently occupy." Apparently he wasn't kidding around: Quartz has hired the Economist's media editor, Gideon Lichfield, to oversee its news content.
The Lash Stand: Will New Attitudes And Regulatory Oversight Hit Delete On Some Photo Retouching In Print Ads? (Adweek)
After a decade of deafening criticism, capped by the American Medical Association condemning unrealistically retouched models as a public health hazard in 2011, digital doctoring may be entering a new age of regulation.
Parade And Condé Nast Partner On Dash iPad App (minOnline)
The Dash monthly newspaper magazine from Parade has joined with Advance Publications sister company pubs Bon Appetit, Gourmet and Epicurious on a special summer grilling recipe app for the iPad.
Amid Tweets And Slide Shows, The Longform Still Thrives (Adweek)
In the age of 140-character tweets, aggregated blog posts and throwaway slide shows, common sense says you can't expect the Web generation's ADD-addled minds to spend more than a few minutes with any sort of content. Yet somehow we've found ourselves in a golden age of longform journalism, with everyone from old-school print magazines to digital outlets producing extended articles. And people are actually reading them. So what gives?
NBC Set For An Olympic Feat Without Longtime Captain (LA Times)
On July 27, a torchbearer will trot into a new $770-million stadium in London and light that famous flame. And for the next 17 days, NBC will race to ensure that Americans stay glued to every second of the 2012 Summer Olympics -- on tablets, smartphones, laptops and (oh, yeah) conventional TV sets.
Cable's Cloudy Future (Multichannel News)
Ciao, Old Cable: The days of services being anchored to specific pieces of operator-supplied hardware are fast receding.
Top Five Mags In June: Give 'Em Elle, Allure And Guns (minOnline)
A rather eclectic group of advertising gainers sport min's top five monthly mags in our June collection.
From Two Dissimilar Magazines, A Special Design Issue (NYT / Media Decoder)
Combining content from two different magazines can make for interesting, sometimes awkward matchups. Consider the risk in joining a magazine that offers readers design tips like how to avoid tripping over a lamp's electric cord with a magazine that recently ran a 5,600-word cover article on the heart-wrenching decline of an aging parent. But this October, the modern design guide Dwell will introduce an annual publication with New York magazine tied to a weeklong design festival.
Wall Street Titans Outearned By Media Czars (Bloomberg / View)
Think Wall Street is the land of plenty when it comes to compensation? Think again. If 2011 pay to top executives is a window into the Wall Street compensation machine, then compared with other industries -- the entertainment media, for instance -- the bloom is definitely off the rose.
A New York Times Whodunit (NY Mag)
Who slew Times CEO Janet Robinson? Was it Arthur Sulzberger's new lady friend? The advertising market? The frustrated Web guru? Or the ambitious Sulzberger cousin?




