According to sources close to the situation, Apple is planning an important — but not large-scale — event to be held in New York at the end of this month that will focus on a media-related announcement.

Per the usual caveat, the tech giant is well known for moving around their public show-and-tells, so this could certainly change at any moment.

But, for sure, several sources underscored that the event is not related to an upcoming version of the iPad 3, the next iteration of the popular tablet device that many expect to be available in 2012.

Also unlikely, the rollout of Apple’s large-scale rethinking of the interactive television initiative that it has been working on. While the company is expected to launch a new Apple TV product later in 2012, such an event would almost certainly be held in the heart of the industry in Hollywood or at least in Silicon Valley.

That leaves some kind of advertising or even publishing announcement, which might be the case, since Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue is reportedly involved.

Cue is in charge of a large swath of Apple’s media units, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, as well as iAd and its iCloud services.

It’s well known in the ad industry that Apple has been searching for a new head of its mobile advertising unit, since Andy Miller left last summer.

But such an appointment has not been made as yet, said sources.

The last time Cue was in New York for an event, by the way, was nearly a year ago, when Apple helped launch News Corp.’s online magazine, The Daily.

And Apple also recently opened a splashy new retail store in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, and has been refurbishing its flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue, too.

The holiday-having Apple PR team declined comment, but wished me a “happy, happy new year.”

As 9to5Mac notes — it published an internal memo from Cook announcing the move — the new title means Cue is now in charge of iAds, Apple’s newish ad-selling-and-serving system. (Andy Miller, who had been running iAds, left last month.)

Beyond that, it’s not quite clear what the move means for Cue in practical terms. Regardless of what his previous title was, he had been Steve Jobs’ proxy for all of the company’s big media deals. Note that Cue appeared in place of Jobs when News Corp., which also owns this site, rolled out its Daily iPad newspaper earlier this year.

But whenever Jobs really needed to get something done with a media partner or would-be partner, he would weigh in as well. So the real question is whether Cook will take on the same role, or expect Cue to handle more of those responsibilities.

And the app is almost ready, at least according to the toilet paper inside the company’s restrooms. “The App for When You Crap … Coming Soon … editions.com,” reads the light blue print on all the rolls supplied in AOL’s bathrooms.

It’s not often you hear the word crap used when promoting a product, but it is oddly refreshing.

AOL employees are also having fun with the TP promotion. Mobile boss David Temkin (whom I recently interviewed on stage) arrived to work on Friday to find his desk and chair covered with the stuff.

The potty-oriented nickname for Editions was used in a YouTube video earlier this year, a video that has since gotten more than 10,000 views (including, I’m told, nearly everyone at AOL).

For more on Editions, check out this story based on a sneak peek AllThingsD got of the product in March.

Still, Stewart did spend eight minutes on the story last night. Here he is on Rupert Murdoch’s visit to Parliament. And, of course, Wendi Deng’s pie-deflection.

Which segued to this bit on some News Corp. properties’ … restraint in covering the story.

And for good measure, here’s Colbert’s contribution from last night — a chat with the New York Times’s David Carr, who does most of the heavy lifting.

Here’s the old version of the Hulu Plus subscription app for the iPad:

And here’s the new version, built to comply with Apple edicts that kick in at the end of the month:

Easy, right? All Hulu had to do was strip out the link that sent potential subscribers to its Web site, because Apple’s new rule will ban “apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app.”

That means that the app can no longer function as an effective advertising tool for the video service, which is a bummer for Hulu (which is owned by Comcast’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox; News Corp. also owns this Web site). It’d be quite useful to offer a smattering of free content on the app, then encourage users who want more stuff to click through to Hulu.com to pony up $8 a month.

But that’s much better than the previous choice Apple offered app developers that wanted to sell access to content: Use Apple’s in-house purchase system — and give Apple 30 percent of all sales that flow from that — or don’t do it at all.

Lots of developers have no problem using Apple’s system, which gives them access to a customer base of 225 million people. But others won’t want to give up that much revenue.

So now we’ll see how other content companies that currently use external links in their apps decide to play it over the next couple weeks.

My hunch is that digital video and music companies like Netflix and Rhapsody will follow Hulu’s lead and drop their “buy” buttons. The New York Times has already said it would work with Apple’s rules, but that was back when it announced its paywall/subscription plan in March, when it had a different set of options. I asked Times officials about their plans 10 days ago, and they declined to comment.

Also not commenting: The Wall Street Journal — which again, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. The Journal hasn’t said a peep about its Apple subscription plans, which seems a bit odd, given that News Corp. and Apple rolled out the first iteration of Apple’s subscription offering, via The Daily, back in February.

Rival business daily the Financial Times, meanwhile, has quite clearly signaled what it plans to do: It has built an HTML5 Web app so it can control every part of the subscription process itself.

Then there’s Amazon, which seems to be one of the clear targets of Apple’s revised rules – note that they specifically rule out the use of a “buy” button that goes to a Web site to purchase a digital book. Hard to believe that Amazon will get rid of its Kindle iOS apps altogether, since they’re a key feature of the Kindle ecosystem. But dropping the app’s “buy” button will be a real drag for the bookseller, too.

Let it be said: For a digital information junkie such as myself, traveling abroad without any cellular or consistent Internet connection on my spanking new white Apple iPhone is agonizing.

To explain: I switched from AT&T to Verizon recently, in order to actually be able to make voice calls with regularity in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Verizon does not go international. And, although I am carrying another local feature phone for calls, I am without the rich multimedia mobile experience that I usually get day to day at home.

Worse still, an “unlocked” iPhone only went on sale in the U.S. — which would allow me to use a SIM card bought in Europe –Tuesday, after I left.

Poor little me, I suppose, and there is certainly no need to cry any big, fat digital tears on my behalf.

Still, without the constant certainty of a Wi-Fi connection as I move around, it’s disconcerting for someone whose life has been jacked into the matrix 24-7-365 for far too long to be without consistent digital interconnections.

More to the point — as I watch endless legions of Europeans, who seem even more entranced by and stranded on their individual smartphone islands than in the U.S., obsessively checking out their devices every second — the concept of being completely out of touch with the pulse of the world while in the world is an odd one.

Or, at least the Twitter-fied world, in which I get short bursts of all kinds of information all the time. It takes the lack to understand what it means to be always checking in.

This is a big dose of the obvious, of course, but it was brought home to me in a can’t-miss piece in The Daily, published yesterday by the iPad news service and available here.

Titled “Speed Journalism,” it’s a succinct but important discussion on the push and pull between the ephemera of information we are increasingly getting from real-time Internet sources such as Twitter and the need for longer and more reflective pieces.

Wrote Trevor Butterworth: “The question is whether technology is diminishing our appetite or capacity for this kind of storytelling.”

This is not a new revelation, of course, but it bears repeating and considering again and again as we increasingly use these myriad social-local-mobile — so-lo-mo — devices.

And, as this so-lo-mo way of the encountering the world grows, it creates deep expectations of ever more detailed and immediate information about the world around you that is mostly immediately consumable and highly useful.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, I cannot tell yet, except to say that the last time I was here in Copenhagen, I was just 18 years old and I mostly wandered around in circles with an outdated guide book and without a clue.

As it turns out, without my super-duper-smart mobile phone being super-duper smart, very little seems to have changed.

The short summary for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which owns this Web site: Results from its movie group are down, but that’s because last year’s results included “Avatar”‘s ginormous numbers. The company’s TV group has rebounded, and its cable division continues to throw off cash.

And MySpace continues to drag the company’s numbers down: The “other” group that News Corp. lumps the social network into reported losses of $165 million, “primarily due to increased losses at Myspace, stemming largely from lower advertising and search revenues partially offset by lower operating expenses.”

No Murdoch on the earnings call today, so no live blog (COO Chase Carey is less likely to say interesting things on a minute-by-minute basis). But I’ll drop in where warranted.

For instance: Asked to comment on The Daily’s performance, Carey says it’s a work in progress, which lost $10 million last quarter. Then, in the background, someone–most likely CFO Dave DeVoe–mentions “800,000 downloads.”

Assuming that’s the actual number, that’s the first time anyone from News Corp. has talked about the iPad app’s performance. I’ve asked News Corp. to confirm.

UPDATE: News Corp. officials say that number–which is for downloads, not paid subscriptions–is “in the ball park” but a bit low. Reminder that The Daily launched February 2.

One argument I’ve heard from media companies that are considering using the plan: Just because consumers can buy subscriptions from iTunes doesn’t mean they will.

They can also buy the subscriptions for iPad/iPhone app content from the media companies’ own sites, and when that happens the publishers will keep all the revenue and all the subscriber data. (When Apple sells a subscription, it collects a 30 percent fee every month, and limits the subscriber info the publishers can see.)

So the media guys are hoping that they’ll sell most of their subscriptions themselves, and that Apple’s sales channel will be relatively small.

Good luck!

I just went through the subscription signup for The Daily, the tablet newspaper from News Corp., which also owns this Web site. The Daily has had a rocky launch, but handing them $0.99 a week using Apple’s new service was silky smooth.

It wasn’t technically a one-click purchase–there was also a confirmation button, and an opt-in screen where I agreed to hand over my e-mail account and zip code to the publisher. But then I was done.

No need to give Apple my credit card info. They’ve already got it, along with 200 million other iTunes users’ data.

Then I got this confirmation e-mail from Apple. Note how it’s written in plain English, and spells out exactly what I’ve gotten myself into, and how I can get out of it. (Click on image to enlarge).

That’s as frictionless, and transparent, as e-commerce can get.

And while I understand, as a media reporter, why the publishers want me to buy through them, as a consumer, I don’t care. The only way to stop me from taking the path of least resistance would be to shut it off altogether. And walking away from 200 million customers is going to take an awful lot of willpower.

[Postscript from 3/27: Just unsubcribed from The Daily. That was easy, too: Did it within iTunes, in just a couple clicks.]

But Garlinghouse convinced him that the New AOL was different than the dial-up Internet Service Provider most people picture in their minds. And Temkin was being recruited for an important job: centralizing the company’s mobile efforts to ensure that emerging non-PC devices got the attention they deserved.

Temkin accepted and, nine months later, speaks excitedly about a number of the company’s mobile efforts, including a revamped HTML5 version of the AOL home page designed for touch screens and a mobile version of Engadget that gets more traffic than than its desktop Website.

“This is not your father’s AOL,” Temkin said.

But he’s even more jazzed about what is yet to come, including an iPad version of Moviefone. It has a very “swipey” feel and even features a recording of the service’s iconic voice (actually that of Moviefone editor Russ Leatherman)

Temkin has also overseen an effort to develop and launch a number of mobile-first projects. One new project, a music app set to be announced at South By Southwest later this week, was built in just a month and a half, Temkin said. That includes the time from concept, negotiating the necessary business deals and building the apps.

Another is the company’s Editions tablet project–a personalized magazine app due to launch by mid-year.

The idea is to have something more highly designed than Flipboard and more customized that News Corp.’s Daily.

Temkin gave Mobilized a brief preview of an early version of Editions. It’s designed to be a 20-to-30-page publication that one can read in a single sitting, made up of articles from more than 30,000 sources–both AOL and non-AOL–sorted into traditional newspaper-like categories such as business, sports and technology.

It aims to offer a measure of local content by tapping into AOL’s Patch effort, though Temkin said that company is looking at ways to deliver even more local stuff.

“I think we need more than that,” he said.

Among its features is the ability to look at a piece of content and say whether you like it and what of its attributes you like.

“We are feeling pretty good about how it is coming together,” he said.

The culmination of the deal–which has already been approved by regulators–is set to be announced by the New York-based company this morning, only one month after it was struck.

And–in a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–sources said the closing will be accompanied by the announcement of the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group unit.

Among the new reporters are some more high-profile grabs from other media giants, including The Daily’s Jon Ward. He has been the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.’s high-profile online newspaper, which only recently launched.

Also set to join AOL is Yahoo’s senior media writer Michael Calderone.

Interestingly, along with more experienced editorial staff, sources said the announcement will also include new hires via the Huffington Post’s Jefferson Program for Young Journalists.

Sources said the new hires are only the beginning of a series of them, as the impact of the leadership of Huffington becomes clearer.

Along with the news and opinion site, the well-known media personality is now in charge of all of AOL’s varied content properties, including its locally aimed Patch.

Huffington, with obviously strong support from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, has been talking a lot in a plethora of interviews since the deal was announced a few weeks ago about the importance of creating a new media organization focused on original reporting.

In a way, AOL is now competing with big news sites such as those on Yahoo, as well as smaller niche content and also mainstream entities.

Even before the deal was struck with AOL, the Huffington Post had been heading down that path of pulling in mainstream journalists. Last year, it hired former New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman and former Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, among others.

The formula? Adding the strong journalism reputation of these reporters to the eclectic mix of socializing, blogging, celebritizing and aggressive aggregating that the site has used to garner huge amounts of traffic in recent years.

As I had previously written, the AOL Way–the same for a strategy document about content on the site–is now the Arianna Way.

Here are Huffington and Armstrong talking about such issues in in an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with them just before they announced the deal on Super Bowl Sunday about a month ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110223/the-dailys-apple-only-days-are-numbered-android-coming-this-spring/ http://allthingsd.com/20110223/the-dailys-apple-only-days-are-numbered-android-coming-this-spring/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:05:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30114 Rupert Murdoch leaned heavily on Apple to launch the Daily, and for now the iPad is the only place you can read News Corp.’s new digital newspaper.

But that exclusivity will end in a few months: Sources tell me The Daily is prepping for an Android tablet launch in the second quarter of this year.

Murdoch and News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) have been clear that they always planned on getting the Daily on as many tablets as possible, so the move isn’t a huge shock.

But I’m still a bit surprised to see the move to Google come this early, given the emphasis that News Corp. had placed on its Apple relationship prior to launch earlier this month.

The Daily has always been a News Corp. project, not an Apple/News Corp. partnership, but Murdoch’s team has gotten plenty of technical assistance from Apple, and this was the first publication to use Apple’s new subscription service. Most telling is that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was initially scheduled to show up at The Daily’s launch event to bless the publication himself; he eventually ended up sending Apple content boss Eddy Cue instead.

That’s the same event where Murdoch said The Daily would show up on non-Apple devices eventually, but that “we think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.”

News Corp. declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Apple is still paying close attention to The Daily. Sources say that last week it summoned the publication’s technology team from New York to Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters to go over the app’s “stability issues”–pokey load times, crashes,  etc.

But those bugs (and plenty of criticism from media critics) don’t seem to have deterred people from trying the app: I’m told that downloads are ahead of News Corp.’s plan (this is net of the re-downloads that the publication asked users to go through after launch). We’ll see what happens this week, as the Daily’s free trial period comes to an end.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110223/the-dailys-apple-only-days-are-numbered-android-coming-this-spring/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20110217/stephen-colbert-rips-rupert-murdoch-rips-off-arianna-huffington/ http://allthingsd.com/20110217/stephen-colbert-rips-rupert-murdoch-rips-off-arianna-huffington/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:30:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29908 If you like metamedia criticism and Web media, then last night’s “Colbert Report” was for you. At least twice!

Colbert started out with an entire segment on the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper. (Note that this Web site, like the Daily, is owned by News Corp. Though apparently, based on Colbert’s montage, we did not cover the Daily’s launch as enthusiastically as some of our corporate siblings.)

But that was just a warm-up! Colbert really got going when he got around to the AOL-Huffington Post deal, with a drop-dead Arianna impersonation.

Even more accurate: “The Colbuffington Re-Post,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

What’s that? You want more meta? Okay. Here’s HuffPo’s repost of Colbert’s post. And now I’m a little dizzy and will have to sit down for a bit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110217/stephen-colbert-rips-rupert-murdoch-rips-off-arianna-huffington/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/videos-the-winklevii-media-blitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/videos-the-winklevii-media-blitz/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:00:08 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3379 Though Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss no-commented me and other reporters in a San Francisco court last month, they can’t seem to stay away from bashing Mark Zuckerberg for long. The twins, who are waiting to hear if appeals judges will invalidate a previous settlement with Facebook, offered videos and TV interviews to multiple outlets, which posted them online Tuesday. It’s still the same old Mark-Zuckerberg-stole-our-idea stuff, plus some creative camera work. And hey, at least they’re not outright stalking Zuckerberg like some other people.

Here’s one from CNN. The Winklevii tell Piers Morgan that it’s not ironic that they are now active Facebook users, despite their ongoing legal and moral crusades against the company. “Technically we’re using our idea….It’s really our product and we’re the originators.” (The two grown men, somewhat oddly, make little effort to differentiate from each other, so I’ll just attribute those comments to both of them.)

And here’s one from the Daily, which shot crazy amounts of creative B-roll of the Winklevosses’ rippling muscles and chiseled jaws (they are Olympic rowers, after all). This is part one of a three-part series by the Daily’s Erin Ade, who discloses she’s a childhood friend of the Winklevii. Cameron and Tyler say they want to tell Zuckerberg to “grow up and admit to the world and yourself what you already know is true…because the moment you do that the chapter will be closed and you can move on as an individual.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/videos-the-winklevii-media-blitz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110206/news-corp-s-first-daily-ad-is-missing-one-word-and-it-begins-with-i/ http://allthingsd.com/20110206/news-corp-s-first-daily-ad-is-missing-one-word-and-it-begins-with-i/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 03:03:19 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29395 News Corp. worked very hard to get Apple’s assistance and endorsement as it launched the Daily. But even though I (and lots of other folks) refer to the Daily as an “iPad newspaper,” it’s not going to be exclusive to Apple’s tablet forever.

Note that the Daily’s first TV commercial, launched during the Super Bowl tonight, never mentions the word “Apple” or “iPad” once–even though it certainly appears to be using an iPad to show off the publication.

During the Daily’s press launch last week, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch was clear that the Daily would eventually make its way to other platforms–Google’s Android, obviously–but said something along the lines of “the iPad is going to be the dominant platform for us for a while.” (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Here’s Engadget’s on-the-fly transcript of Murdoch’s comments: “We’ve been quite honest with Apple, and we’ll be on all major tablets. But we think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.”

So if that’s the case, why wouldn’t News Corp. use the name of one of the world’s most popular companies, and/or one of its most popular products, to add a halo to its own product launch?

It’d be fun to speculate–Did Apple not give permission? Did News Corp. not want to scare off consumers dead set on a Xoom? Some other issue? But there are a couple of minutes left in the game, and I want to get back to it before it ends. Perhaps someone from the Daily can explain tomorrow.

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