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Morgan Stanley Sells Entire New York Times Stake (Bloomberg)
Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest shareholder in New York Times Co., sold its entire 7.3 percent stake yesterday, according to a person briefed on the transaction, sending the stock to its lowest in more than 10 years. Traders with knowledge of the transaction said Merrill Lynch & Co. brokered a $183 million block trade of 10 million New York Times shares yesterday morning. NYP: The bombshell sale immediately raised questions on Wall Street about who bought the shares — and whether other large institutional investors that had been critical of Times management would also opt to sell their stakes. NYT: Over the last two years, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, led by the fund's manager, Hassan Elmasry, had been conducting a campaign to press the company to change its dual-class share structure. Elmasry's exit may represent a victory for the Sulzberger family. WSJ: "Trying to be an activist shareholder in the NYT is a futile effort, period," said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at Benchmark Co.

FCC Plan Would Ease Limits on Media Owners (NYT)
Kevin Martin, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city. If successful, the plan would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates. LAT: Media consolidation foes said Wednesday that the FCC chairman might be moving too fast.

Viacom to Offer All Clips of Daily Show Online (LAT)
Comedy Central today will unveil a website for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart that's designed to satisfy the most avid fans of the mock-news show with oceans of free video clips. Rather than providing just a sampling of the program's fare, Comedy Central is offering the works: about 13,000 video clips representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception.

Plame Book Criticizes Bush, Journalists (AP)
Four years after her CIA cover was blown in a newspaper column, Valerie Plame is settling scores with the Bush administration, Republican lawmakers and the journalists involved in the White House leak scandal. Plame writes about the leak, the fallout and the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in her memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

As Writers' Strike Looms, Stakes Are Higher for TV Than Film (NYT)
Movie executives generally consider screenwriters to be expendable. But television writers — and particularly the writer-producers who serve as show runners — wield considerable power over a television show, so much so that it often is not clear where their writing duties end and their producing duties begin. That has big implications if Hollywood writers go on strike next month. Variety: Strike potential remains high. LA Weekly: Writers strike interrupts Letterman show.

Dark Day at the BBC as Staff Learn Their Fate (Independent)
The BBC will announce the axing of 2,600 jobs this morning — one in nine of the total staff — risking a wave of industrial action over what is the biggest round of job cuts in the organization's history. Most of the cuts will come in BBC newsrooms, from which hundreds of journalists will be laid off, and in departments making documentaries.

Rush Limbaugh's Threat (New York Mag)
David Edelstein: If Rush Limbaugh was talking about Time's Richard Corliss in describing an incident of with a journalist, he and his cronies must have dug up everything Corliss had ever written for the purposes of intimidation. Gangster stuff. And so reflective of our crazy culture. A blowhard can boast to millions of listeners about blackmailing a member of the press, and someone who once admitted to just doin' what comes naturally cowers.

MySpace Will Open Platform to External Developers (MacWorld)
Social networking giant MySpace will open its platform to outside application developers, a move that was made months ago by its close competitor Facebook and helped boost its popularity. Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's CEO, made the announcement during an appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. AP: MySpace and Skype announce partnership.

'Green' Issues Fail to Convert Magazines to Recycled Paper (Folio:)
Despite a green cultural movement — real or perceived — and a spate of so-called "green issues," magazines have largely failed to convert to recycled paper. Frank Locantore, director of the Magazine Paper Project for Co-Op America, says cost, misconceptions about cost and general ignorance of publishers have contributed to the lack of conversion.

Economist to Put Entire Archive Online (Guardian)
More than 160 years of articles from the Economist are set to become available online with the launch of "The Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003." The archive will contain more than 600,000 pages of the weekly magazine's reporting and analysis. The project is a joint effort between Gale — part of Cengage Learning — and the Economist.

Video Sites Take Hit From Network TV Sites (TV Week)
Video-sharing Web sites took a small hit in traffic in September, as television networks pressed hard to promote streamed episodes of fall premieres on their own Web sites. YouTube, the most-visited video destination, saw its unique audience dip for the first time in more than a year. YouTube recorded 54.5 million unique visitors in September, down from 56.5 million in August.

Magazine Search Unlikely, Says Google (Information World Review)
Google has damped down speculation that it will extend its Google Book Search platform to include magazines with an ISSN number. Technical difficulties with digitizing magazines and a lack of existing archives were cited as the main reasons. Digitizing magazines was first discussed at a Google Book Search publishers meeting.

George Lucas Plans Star Wars TV Series (LAT)
Filmmaker George Lucas said Tuesday that he has "just begun work" on a live-action television series rooted in the Star Wars universe. "The Skywalkers aren't in it, and it's about minor characters," Lucas said in an interview. "It has nothing to do with Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader or any of those people. It's completely different. But it's a good idea, and it's going to be a lot of fun to do."

Will iTunes Survive? (Slate)
Since the iTunes Store opened in 2003, Apple and the world's top media companies have happily shared the profits from consumers' increasing appetite for downloadable songs and videos. This summer, the four-year honeymoon ended. But despite recent defections, Apple's iTunes Store is still responsible for a staggering 75 percent of online content sales.

Turning Off the TV Set (CNN/Money)
Paul La Monica: Fewer people are watching TV overall ... at least on their TV sets. There is something to be said for the fact that more and more people are watching shows on the Web sites of the networks or through places like Apple's iTunes. So it's probably unfair to say that mainstream TV programs are losing cachet.