Click here to receive mediabistro.com's Daily Newsfeed via email.

Day of Reckoning at Dow Jones: Bancrofts Said Divided as Deadline Looms (NYT)
The Bancroft family and even some of its advisers seem sharply split over whether to sell Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The divisions make it almost impossible to handicap whether enough family members will vote in favor of a sale or even whether they can reach any conclusion by the deadline of 5pm today. Independent: Last ditch effort against Murdoch at the WSJ. Vanity Fair: Behind the howls of outrage that greeted Rupert Murdoch's bid for The Wall Street Journal were two assumptions: Murdoch is evil. Murdoch is unstoppable. Yet the man who terrorized a generation of journalists may be the last mogul standing who truly loves print, writes Michael Wolff.

Top Fall Pilots Leaked Online (TV Week)
At least half a dozen highly anticipated broadcast network fall pilots have been leaked online. Copies of NBC's Bionic Woman, ABC's Pushing Daisies, The CW's Reaper and several other shows were available Friday for illegal download on sites such as Torrent Spy, The Pirate Bay and Mininova. Most of the titles appear to have been uploaded within the past week.

Fallon May Replace Conan (B&C)
NBC has targeted Jimmy Fallon to replace Conan O'Brien on Late Night in 2009, according to people familiar with the talks. NBC late-night chief Rick Ludwin says he doesn't expect to make an announcement until sometime after the first of the year, but he confirmed that Fallon is on the top of the network's list.

Deep Rift Pulls Apart Redstone Family (LAT)
The Viacom board meeting Wednesday will be plenty tense. It will be the first time father and daughter will see each other in nearly two months and comes on the heels of Sumner's public dismissal of Shari in a recent letter to Forbes magazine in which he said she had made "little or no contribution" to the empire he had built. For Shari, the knife cut deep.

Gossip Columnist Jeannette Walls Leaves MSNBC (MSNBC)
msnbc.com staff: After nearly eight years serving up the Scoop, Jeannette Walls is leaving msnbc.com. Her final Scoop column appeared on Thursday, July 26. She will be turning her full-time attention to another kind of writing — books. ... The msnbc.com family will miss her tremendously and we wish her only the best.

YouTube to Filter Copyrighted Videos by September (CNet)
YouTube will launch a system in September designed to prevent pirated material from going up on the site, a Google lawyer said Friday. Google plans to generate a library of digital video fingerprints that would be used by a computer system to screen clips being uploaded to YouTube. The screening process would take only a few minutes to determine whether a clip is copyright material.

At CNN, Taking On the Cable Guys (WaPo)
Howard Kurtz: Campbell Brown's move to CNN raises two intriguing questions: Why are only two other women (Greta Van Susteren of Fox and Nancy Grace of Headline News) on the air as prime time cable news hosts? And is it possible to succeed with an 8pm show built on news and interviews — as Zahn tried to do — when up against the ultra-opinionated likes of Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann?

AP to End Highly Touted ASAP Service in October (E&P)
ASAP was launched in 2005 as a response to the growth of blogs and so-called youth tabs, and had 24 staff members. It offers a variety of packages and reports (including a lot of video and photo galleries) targeting a younger and/or quirkier audience than the standard AP report. Elements of the service will now be incorporated into the regular AP report.

Should Disgraced Journalists Get Second Chances? (Slate)
Jack Shafer: Despite its self-image as a profession that excommunicates and banishes those who violate its ethical codes, journalism routinely grants its miscreants second chances. Journalist Michael Finkel got his second chance in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic, where he contributes a lengthy cover story on malaria.

When Photoshopping Is Necessary (AdAge)
Simon Dumenco: The magazine industry's "cover lie" is actually the core deception of the celebrity-industrial complex, which most Americans (willingly) buy into to some degree. But the larger, really obvious truth here is that fewer and fewer Americans — females especially, but males, too — have the strength of character to age gracefully or entirely honestly.

Old Game Show Network Reinvents Itself With Interactivity (NYT)
Brian Stelter: Founded in 1994, GSN programmed its first 10 years largely with reruns from the Goodson-Todman game show library like Beat the Clock and To Tell the Truth. In recent years, the network has introduced original programming and embraced interactivity as a way to keep viewers engaged not only on television but also online.

Tabloid Eaten by Aliens! Fake Columnist Loses His Job! (NYT)
In Ed Anger's America, Vanna White is the perfect role model for Sarah Lee, Mr. Anger's overweight daughter. Latino immigrants speak "chili-pepperese" and the obese of America simply need to stop eating as much. After years of talk radio and cable-news pundits, Anger's soon-to-be-defunct column may feel very familiar, but Ed Anger himself does not. Perhaps that is because he isn't real.

The Biography Business (New Yorker)
Louis Menand: At a time when instruments for recording and disseminating information about people's intimate behavior are cheap and easy to use, and when newspapers and magazines and television programs and Web sites purvey that kind of information without restraint ... a defense of the professional biographer's right to pry does not seem something that civilization stands in dire need of. Just in case, though, two such defenses have recently been published

You Can Run But You Can't Hide From TV Ads (NYP)
While folks may cringe at the cluttered landscape, advertisers love the idea of digital TV networks that reach consumers as they go about their daily lives. In fact, Madison Avenue loves the ubiquitous digital networks so much they have recently moved to devise a standardized measuring tool to determine just how successful the new advertising medium is.

Ruling Poses Danger for First Amendment Suits by Student Journalists (Inside Higher Ed)
First Amendment lawsuits by student journalists at public universities become moot when the plaintiffs graduate, according to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The ruling came in an appeal by two former editors of The Kansas State Collegian, who charged that their rights were violated in 2004 when the university removed a journalism professor as the paper's adviser.

- David S. Hirschman