Infighting Simmers Within Redstone Dynasty (LAT)
Over the years, Sumner Redstone has earned a reputation as a ruthless businessman, cunning legal strategist and limelight-seeking control freak. A lawyer by training, he won both Paramount and its parent company, Viacom, in bitter takeover battles. He is famous for suing his partners and pushing out chief executives who threaten his power or lack his fixation with the stock price. But his behavior in recent years has become erratic, and rivals say Redstone has lost his fastball. Marketwatch: Redstone is heading for a fall, writes Jon Friedman.

Spin Gets Intel to Grow Its Tech Ads (Mediaweek)
Intel is buying pages in Spin magazine for the first time as part of an advertising package that includes sponsorship of online material supported by the chipmaker's technology. The chipmaker is providing the technology for a portion of the magazine's Web site that showcases a video from the shoot of Interpol, the August cover subject; backstage footage of music festival Bonnaroo; and an editorial roundtable on the making of the August issue.

Bill Kristol, Highly Recommended (WaPo)
Howard Kurtz: Bill Kristol's the-war-is-being-won piece in the Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it. President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff. On the other hand, Arianna Huffington called it "the single most deceptive piece of the entire war" and said Kristol had "officially surpassed Dick Cheney as the most intellectually dishonest member of the neocon establishment."

How To Be the Next Network Wunderkind (New York Mag)
Ben Silverman, the new 36-year-old chair of NBC Entertainment, built his career repackaging foreign hits for the States (The Office, Ugly Betty). He's already acquired Australia's Kath & Kim and Colombia's Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso ("Without Breasts There Is No Paradise") for NBC. Now you can do it, too!

Crossing Out Online, for Emphasis (NYT)
For Dickens, the strike-through — a visible line drawn through a word or sentence — was a way to erase a word from the reader's eye (and indeed the stricken sections from his manuscripts didn't appear in the printed versions of his books). But in Internet culture, the strike-through has already taken on an ironic function, as a ham-fisted way of having it both ways in type a witty way of simultaneously commenting on your prose as you create it.

Podcasters Unite to Figure Out a Role for Ads (NYT)
Few consumers will pay to receive podcasts. But advertising, the other potential revenue source for producers and publishers, does not work when marketers have no way of tracking how many times their advertisements are being heard or swapping out old advertisements once they have run their course. But industry executives say they have closed in on a solution in recent months.

More Newsfeed here...