Two quick snapshots, via Cristina Cordova, using stats from AppData. Here’s the usage data for the Washington Post’s Social Reader. Note the second steep drop, in the middle of this month:

And the Guardian’s, which has the same pattern and the same mid-May drop:

Note that Cordova runs biz dev for Pulse, the iOS/Android news reader app, so she’s presumably not unhappy about this trend.

But I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I’m delighted with it myself. I’ve always thought the “social reader” apps were bad ideas, executed poorly: I don’t need to automatically know what my friends are reading — I only want to know about the articles they want me to read, and they’re pretty good about telling me that. And I don’t want to have to use an app to read them — the Web works just fine.

The new digerati consensus is that the drops don’t indicate a sudden revulsion by Facebook users, but that they’re the result of Facebook engineers twisting the dials, and ensuring that Facebook users don’t see the apps in their feeds anymore.

There’s an important lesson there for any Facebook partner or would-be partner (hello, Socialcam!). But as a Facebook user, I don’t really care — I’m just glad I don’t have to see these things anymore.

There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps, both of which have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam start-up team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around eight million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred on March 12, more than a month previously, at South by Southwest, and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like the Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to the New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two- to three-week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable fire hose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially since it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouse. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100 percent community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than eight million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

But it’s looking pretty close. The Washington Post is in the process of buying/hiring the news aggregator’s technology team, but isn’t purchasing the business itself, according to multiple people familiar with the negotiations. The Post plans to put the new hires to work alongside the people who built the publisher’s Social Reader Facebook app.

The Next Web initially reported on rumors that the publisher was buying Digg, and TechCrunch later reported that the deal was an “acqhire.” Both the Post and Digg declined to comment.

Once the deal closes, Digg won’t shut down, at least not immediately. The site’s remaining management will try to figure out how to take advantage of its brand name and traffic, according to people familiar with the company.

But given the fact that Digg has been looking for a buyer for months, it’s hard to see how they’ll be able to find another home for the remainder of the company.

Then again, it’s been hard to see how Digg would work for some time. The site was once one of Silicon Valley’s hottest Web 2.0 start-ups, and there was a period when lots of Web publishers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to court Digg’s hordes of users. But that time is long gone (if you’re looking for a social/traffic kingmaker, head to Reddit, which used to be dismissed as a Digg wannabe).

Its current management team — the old guys are long gone, too — has been gamely trying to broaden the site’s appeal by courting mainstream users. But that always seemed like a tough sell.

Given Digg’s track record — which includes a deal to sell to Google that got pretty far down the road before the search giant walked away — you don’t want to write anything about the company with any certainty. But it doesn’t look good.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Rob Byron)

While it’s tempting to see the Huffington Post’s Pulitzer as a “big win for new media,” or something like that, the real story is that these organizations — the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post — are becoming more like each other. Old media and new media are increasingly antiquated terms.

– Journalism professor Jay Rosen to HuffPo media writer Michael Calderone (via GigaOM)

This has got to be the mother of all political ads — directed by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim, narrated by Tom Hanks, and lasting 17 minutes — all part of the campaign of President Barack Obama.

Plus, “The Road We’ve Traveled” video was posted right to YouTube upon its release.

It will be interesting to see how it will be received, and if it will work. The Washington Post is calling it a “docu-ganda,” noting that it cost $345,000.

What do you think?

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Last week at Facebook’s f8 developers confab, I ran right into my old boss, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham.

While I could go on about what a privilege it was to spend my formative journalism years at the legendary newspaper and how critical its steadfast owners were to exemplifying all that is quality about the media, all Don wanted to talk about was now and the future.

And that would be how to make sure his media company was going to successfully make the transition to social. Thus, he was at f8 not only because he is a longtime board member of Facebook, but because he was eagerly showing off the Washington Post’s nifty new app for the social networking giant called Social Reader.

With the motto, “News. Better With Friends,” it’s an elegantly done version of what other publishers are trying, allowing users to instantly share the stories they have read with friends and also seeing what those friends are reading.

Here’s Don talking about Social Reader and showing it off on his Apple iPad, as well as some choice words about the future of news in general.

Listen, because he’d know:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110929/the-washington-posts-and-facebook-director-don-graham-talks-about-social-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fab-com-launches-as-deal-site-for-designed-not-designer-goods/ http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fab-com-launches-as-deal-site-for-designed-not-designer-goods/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:59:13 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=84963 No longer just another pretty domain name, Fab.com launches today as a new deal site for designed goods.

Led by CEO Jason Goldberg, the site’s opening offers are on the sorts of things one might find at a design museum gift shop — fancy plastic chairs, fancy energy-saving light bulbs and fancy signed posters.

With future deals appearing to include personal electronics and apparel, Fab.com is entering a space currently dominated by Gilt Groupe, which offers deals on luxury goods in several categories through its Web site and apps.

In an email, Goldberg said the launch was made possible by a new round of seed funding that included the likes of Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade fund, SoftTechVC and First Round Capital, the Washington Post Company, and Baroda Ventures.

While the amount of the round was not disclosed, Goldberg added that Kutcher will advise the company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fab-com-launches-as-deal-site-for-designed-not-designer-goods/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/amazon-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/amazon-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:07:28 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=5369 If you had any doubt about how large a footprint Amazon Web Services has upon the modern Web, it became readily apparent today as dozens of companies suffered service failures they blamed on the failure of infrastructure belonging to Amazon.

Companies as large and widely known as Foursquare and as small and unknown as CampgroundManager.com all turned to Twitter to advise their customers that service would be down for awhile, apologizing and asking for patience. It’s because of this that Amazon will have to work extra hard to win back the unquestioning confidence it has so long enjoyed. Meanwhile, competitors like Microsoft Azure, IBM and others will do their best to capitalize on this and lure customers away from Amazon.

Amazon wasn’t helped as the day went on and the list of affected customers grew longer and included ever more prominent names: The New York Times lost service on its Projects subdomain at projects.nytimes.com, a section where the Times publishes special projects like this one on the Census (link goes to Google Cache for now).

Another victim was ProPublica. Three days after winning its second Pulitzer Prize in as many years, the section of ProPublica’s site where it hosts its data-heavy news applications, such as this one which displays federal stimulus funding by county, was out of commission. (Again, the link goes to a Google Cache.)

Everyblock, a hyper-local news site that became part of MSNBC in 2009 is still down as of this writing. Foreign Policy, the Washington Post-owned journal, saw its Web site fail too, but as noted by Jim Romenesko today, it quickly switched to publishing its content on Facebook, and made light of the situation on Twitter.

One victim which surprised me was Heroku, the Cloud-based Web development concern that Salesforce.com acquired last year. Heroku kept its users apprised of the situation throughout the day without mentioning Amazon by name. Interestingly, Salesforce’s infrastructure showed no sign of trouble all day.

To its credit, Amazon did its best to communicate about the situation all day, but the incident couldn’t help but give its Web services division–which is relatively small as a percentage of revenue but obviously punches above its weight in terms of influence–a black eye. Late in the day it had isolated the trouble to a single “availability zone,” or group of machines running together in its Northern Virginia data center, and was trying to shift services away from the affected zone.

As of 4:20 PM PT its latest messages indicate it seems to be getting closer to resolving the issue, though many services were still reporting on Twitter that the outage was keeping them offline.

At 1:48 PM PT, the status dashboard for EC2, its compute cloud service, said:

A single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region continues to experience problems launching EBS backed instances or creating volumes. All other Availability Zones are operating normally. Customers with snapshots of their affected volumes can re-launch their volumes and instances in another zone. We recommend customers do not target a specific Availability Zone when launching instances. We have updated our service to avoid placing any instances in the impaired zone for untargeted requests.

Another message concerning its Elastic Beanstalk service came at 2:16 PM PT:

We have observed several successful launches of new and updated environments over the last hour. A single Availability Zone in US-EAST-1 is still experiencing problems. We recommend customers do not target a specific Availability Zone when launching instances. We have updated our service to avoid placing any instances in the impaired zone for untargeted requests.

The outage also affected Amazon’s CloudFormation and CloudWatch.

2:40 PM PT We are continuing to see delays and failures creating and deleting stacks containing EC2, EBS and RDS resources in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. We are working towards a resolution. Please see the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia) and Amazon Relational Database Service (N. Virginia) status for more details.

This message went out to Amazon MapReduce customers at 3:12 PM:

Customers can now start job flows with CC1 instances in the US-EAST-1 region by not targeting a specific Availability Zone.

Not that a big and nasty outage isn’t serious business. It certainly is, and I feel for the people at Amazon and all their customers. But having sat through more on-the-job system outages in my career than I care to count, I know that at the end of the day you have to laugh a bit at the head-slapping frustration of it all, and play a little loud music. In that spirit of sympathy and understanding I offer Freddie King’s “Going Down.” Sorry, Amazon. Here’s hoping tomorrow’s a better day.

(Image and headline obviously inspired by the Judith Viorst book I so loved as a kid.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/amazon-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110420/another-big-media-aggregator-washington-post-unveils-trove/ http://allthingsd.com/20110420/another-big-media-aggregator-washington-post-unveils-trove/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:52:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32001 While News.me, the social news service built with the help of the New York Times, gets ready to launch, another big media aggregator is already out the door: The Washington Post has rolled out Trove, a “personalized site that aggregates news across subjects of interest and important headlines of the day.”

Unlike News.me, which will charge $0.99 a week, Trove is free. And while News.me is designed to be consumed on the iPad, Trove is starting out as a Web-based service that also works on Google’s Android and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry. WaPo says iPhone and iPad editions are coming.

The biggest difference: News.me is based entirely on shared Twitter links, but Trove is part personalized search engine–it says it sorts through more than 10,000 sources on the Web–and part traditional publisher, with a four-person team highlighting interesting stories.

Trove also uses Facebook data to set up initial “channels” for users based on their behavior on the social network.

I haven’t played with Trove on the go yet, and my gut is that it’s going to work best in mobile settings, where limited screen real estate makes news curation services more useful. On the Web, though, it seems like a modest evolution from the personalized home pages many of you have already used–interesting, but not crucial.

But take it for a spin yourself, and let me know what you think in comments below. Meanwhile, if you like those cartoons from the Taiwanese Next Media Animation shop, here’s a treat for you.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110420/another-big-media-aggregator-washington-post-unveils-trove/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110406/exclusive-aol-fires-moviefone-editor-who-offered-fired-freelancers-the-chance-to-work-for-um-free/ http://allthingsd.com/20110406/exclusive-aol-fires-moviefone-editor-who-offered-fired-freelancers-the-chance-to-work-for-um-free/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:28:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42399

Yesterday, AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group got into hot water after the top editor at its Moviefone unit sent a memo to freelancers it was in the midst of firing, offering them an opportunity to “contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system.”

Today, that exec–Moviefone Editor-in-Chief Patricia Chui–was fired by the company, which is in the midst of drastically rejiggering its stable of writers.

Many of those were freelance bloggers under contract to AOL, who are now getting the boot in favor of reallocating staff back to largely paid journalists.

Thus came the controversial email from Chui, which read, in part:

“We will, indeed, be moving away from a freelancer model and toward one relying on full-time staffers. Sometime soon-–this week, I believe–-many of you will be receiving an email informing you that your services as a freelancer will no longer be required. You will be invited to contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system; and though I know that for many of you this will not be an option financially, I strongly encourage you to consider it if you/d like to keep writing for us, because we value all of your voices and input.”

Oh dear. Really, oh dear, especially since the Huffington Post has had its own share of controversies over not paying some bloggers (although it never quite ever offered up a doozie that this letter was).

Sources said Chui was terminated by John Montorio, the HuffPo Media Group’s culture, entertainment and lifestyle editor. Arianna Huffiington is head of all content at AOL, which recently paid $315 million to buy the Huffington Post.

Since she took over, Huffington has tried to stress a return to journalism over more algorithmic content creation. The unloading of its freelance writers was part of that effort.

Thus, Chui’s missteps did not help matters.

But it was not the first time recently that she had made an ill-advised editorial judgment.

Sources said the firing is also due to an incident several weeks ago, in which Chui appeared to defend a marketing employee who sent an email to TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis, asking her to soften a review of “Source Code” due to studio relationship considerations.

AOL bought TechCrunch, a well-known tech news site, last fall. At the time, its CEO Tim Armstrong promised editorial independence and no meddling over advertising concerns.

Instead of taking this minion to task, on Moviefone’s own blog Chui said, in part:

“The reality of our situation is that, as a movies site, we work with movie studios every day, and it is in our best interests to stay on good terms with them. Staying on good terms with studios means that we will relay information if asked. It does not mean that we would ever force a writer or an editor to edit their work for the sake of a studio–or anyone else.”

Even with the last line, it is not exactly a profile in courage, because it was clear violation of the traditional separation of church and state in force at most media organizations.

Typically, editors are supposed to come down on any such communication. That has certainly been my experience in journalism over the years at the Washington Post and Dow Jones–including during its News Corp. ownership. In fact, I have often been shielded from such requests to pass such complaints onto me and only found out much later of advertiser discomfort about my reporting.

At the time, TechCrunch quite clearly called for Chui’s firing and that happened today.

Here is Chui’s full memo to freelancers, as well as the one about TechCrunch, neither of which were apparently cleared with higher-ups:

From: Chui, Patricia
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 11:26 AM
To: MoviefoneWriters
Subject: Moviefone/Cinematical–Status of Writers

Dear Moviefone/Cinematical Writers,

I know there’s been a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of freelancers and your status as a writer for the site. I personally apologize for the lack of communication, but I’ll tell you what I can.

We will, indeed, be moving away from a freelancer model and toward one relying on full-time staffers. Sometime soon–this week, I believe–many of you will be receiving an email informing you that your services as a freelancer will no longer be required. You will be invited to contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system; and though I know that for many of you this will not be an option financially, I strongly encourage you to consider it if you’d like to keep writing for us, because we value all of your voices and input.

Some of you have indicated interest in applying for full-time writer and editor positions, and the status of those positions are also part of discussions that are ongoing right now. I cannot at this point, however, tell you how many positions there are, or what the exact nature of those positions will be.

Despite the move toward a full-time staff vs. freelancer model, I’m told that there will be room for “exceptions”–for example, in the cases of writers who specialize in certain subjects. Again, what these exceptions are for Moviefone, and what the budget for them would be, is still being discussed.

As for Cinematical, the resignation of Erik Davis is certainly a loss. But I am continuing to have conversations with the editorial leadership here, and I am hopeful that we will still be able to maintain the Cinematical brand and voice going forward. Again, I will share with you any pertinent information as I have it.

In the meantime, those of you who already have assignments, please do continue to work on them unless you hear otherwise. If you’re uncertain of the status of your assignment, check with me. It may take me a while to get back to you, so please be patient–but I will respond.

I am sorry that I don’t have more specific details to give you, but I promise that I’ll keep you as well-informed as I possibly can. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or concerns.

Best,

patricia

By now you may have read the recent post in TechCrunch regarding that site’s SXSW coverage of the film “Source Code.” A representative from Moviefone, who set up the interview with Summit Entertainment, received some feedback from the studio and passed it along to TechCrunch (our sister site here at AOL). That email has now caused something of a Internet kerfuffle.

Here is the email–reprinted in the post–that was sent to the TechCrunch writer.

Hey Alexia,

Hope you’re having a good time at SxSW and that it’s not been too crazy busy for you!

First wanted to thank you for covering Source Code/attending the party, etc. But also wanted to raise a concern that Summit had about the piece that ran. They felt it was a little snarky and wondered if any of the snark can be toned down? I wasn’t able to view the video interviews but I think their issue is just with some of the text. Let me know if you’re able to take another look at it and make any edits. I know of course that TechCrunch has its own voice and editorial standards, so if you have good reasons not to change anything that’s fine, I just need to get back to Summit with some sort of information. Let me know.

Thanks!

TechCrunch’s issue with Moviefone is that by sending this email, we, in their words, “asked us to change our post. It’s not just sad, it’s wrong.”

I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify a few things.

1) The person who wrote that email was not acting in an editorial capacity. That person’s job is to act as an intermediary between the studios and editorial–not to dictate content, nor to weigh in on the content of Moviefone or any other AOL site. In fact, the presence of a person with that role is just one means we have of ensuring editorial integrity on Moviefone.

2) This is important: We never told TechCrunch to change the post in any way. A publicist at Summit reached out asking if we could convey the studio’s feedback to TechCrunch. We did so. If the editors had responded that they declined to edit the post–which, naturally, is entirely their call–we simply would have conveyed that information back to Summit.

The reality of our situation is that, as a movies site, we work with movie studios every day, and it is in our best interests to stay on good terms with them. Staying on good terms with studios means that we will relay information if asked. It does not mean that we would ever force a writer or an editor to edit their work for the sake of a studio–or anyone else.

We take editorial integrity seriously at Moviefone, and it’s painful to be depicted as a pawn of the studios when that is emphatically not the case. You may think it unseemly for a studio to request changes in an article; that’s certainly your right. But the accusation of pandering on our part or crossing an editorial line is, to my mind, completely unfair, and I would hope that a reasonable reader would be able to recognize the situation for what it is–overblown and unwarranted.

Patricia Chui
Editor-in-Chief, Moviefone

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110406/exclusive-aol-fires-moviefone-editor-who-offered-fired-freelancers-the-chance-to-work-for-um-free/feed/ 50 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:24:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42209

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/sulia-helps-twitter-sort-the-tweet-from-the-chaff/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/sulia-helps-twitter-sort-the-tweet-from-the-chaff/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:30:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31122 There’s a lot of great stuff on Twitter. And there’s a lot more lousy stuff.

Sorting out the good from the lousy–or at least the OK from the spam–is an important task Twitter hasn’t figured out how to do on its own yet. So it’s getting some help from outsiders: The service is working with “realtime media” startup Sulia to provide curated Twitterstreams to apps and publishers including Flipboard, the Washington Post and Gannett.

Sulia’s pitch is that while Twitter is a free-for-all where anyone can say anything about anything, most people still want to pay attention to a handful of experts. The service says it can find those experts on thousands of topics, using a combination of algorithms and humans, and it assembles them into curated lists.

If you’re already an expert on a particular topic, you may not want to use  Sulia, because you’ve got your own list of sources. But if you’re a general reader who wants a quick snapshot about something you don’t know much about, it can be useful.

You can get a sense of what Sulia is doing by comparing the Sulia “Libya” stream with the results you get if you type “Libya” into Twitter’s basic search tool.

Sulia’s Twitter deal lets it provide custom streams to app-makers and publishers in exchange for a license fee or a share of ad revenue. Sulia hands some of that money back to Twitter. (Disclosure: Sulia is working with WSJ.com, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)

“Curation is one of the top five business opportunities for developers on the Twitter Platform, and Sulia is a great example of the innovation we’re seeing in this emerging space,” Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver says via e-mail. “We made this special agreement with Sulia because publishers are eager for tools like this, that bring the best of Twitter content to their sites and apps.”

Any money Sulia generates for Twitter will be helpful for a service that’s still trying to figure out which business model will work.

More important, if Sulia works as advertised, it will make Twitter that much more useful to mainstream users.

And doing that will also make Twitter much more useful for advertisers. One of the big weaknesses with the ad products Twitter has rolled out so far is that they often require users to look at a string of data that’s confusing or worse.

Take a look, for instance, at the Tweetstream associated with “HTC EVO“, Wednesday’s “promoted trend.” There’s a link to an HTC-sponored Tweet at the top, which arguably has some utility for HTC and for users. But this is what the next four items looked like when I checked in last night:

Twitter isn’t talking about using Sulia within the service itself. But if it works for outsiders, it seems like it’s something Twitter would want to use on Twitter.com and on Twitter-owned apps.

And if that’s the case, then Twitter will either end up buying Sulia, or building its own version of the service. It’s worth noting Twitter has already built an internal “reputation score” system that it hasn’t talked about much. But it’s not a leap to imagine it using that tool to help sort streams on its own.

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/sulia-helps-twitter-sort-the-tweet-from-the-chaff/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/qotd-in-which-google-guilty-even-if-its-not-really-true/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/qotd-in-which-google-guilty-even-if-its-not-really-true/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:04:43 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30795

“I killed newspapers.”

– Eric Schmidt’s suggested epitaph, via Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It’s not accurate, of course–real culprits range from an overabundance of commodity news, to the evaporation of classified ads and monopoly ad pricing to an over-reliance on debt markets–but it is pithy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/qotd-in-which-google-guilty-even-if-its-not-really-true/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/video-boomtown-talks-aol-huffpo-as-webs-conde-nast-on-cnn/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/video-boomtown-talks-aol-huffpo-as-webs-conde-nast-on-cnn/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:15:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40765

Here is a video of a segment I did on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” cable television program yesterday morning–in the wee hours in San Francisco, hence the bags under my eyes–about last week’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.

(Pictured here is AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and HuffPo flagship Arianna Huffington during my video interview with them last week, which is also embedded below.)

“Someone has to be the Condé Nast of the Internet,” I noted in answer to a question from host Howard Kurtz, since it has not been that famous magazine company which has become the big publishing dog online.

(By the way, Kurtz recently decamped to the Daily Beast from his famous columnist gig at the Washington Post, so he obvi gets the meme going on here.)

Here’s the video, which includes Reuters’ financial blogger Felix Salmon and Mark Potts, a former Washington Post reporter and now Internet strategy consultant:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/video-boomtown-talks-aol-huffpo-as-webs-conde-nast-on-cnn/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101224/will-ferrell-john-c-reilly-bing-crosby-and-david-bowie-sing-you-a-holiday-song/ http://allthingsd.com/20101224/will-ferrell-john-c-reilly-bing-crosby-and-david-bowie-sing-you-a-holiday-song/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 18:10:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27479 I’m heading out. Enjoy!

Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, from Will Ferrell.

Still here? It’s Christmas Eve! But since you’ve got time, check out this interesting Washington Post story on the history of the Bowie-Bing original.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101224/will-ferrell-john-c-reilly-bing-crosby-and-david-bowie-sing-you-a-holiday-song/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:44:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38810

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/feed/ 60 http://allthingsd.com/20101112/qotd-the-old-media-new-media-old-media-round-trip/ http://allthingsd.com/20101112/qotd-the-old-media-new-media-old-media-round-trip/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 13:23:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25797

Well, I managed to leave print journalism for all of four weeks.

Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz, whose work used to appear in the Washington Post, and will now appear in Newsweek, now that the magazine is merging with his new employer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101112/qotd-the-old-media-new-media-old-media-round-trip/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101111/newsweek-daily-beast-to-merge/ http://allthingsd.com/20101111/newsweek-daily-beast-to-merge/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 01:56:18 +0000 Russell Adams http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32420 Newsweek magazine and news Web site The Daily Beast have agreed to a deal that will make Daily Beast co-founder Tina Brown the editor-in-chief of the combined operation, according to people familiar with the situation, three weeks after they abandoned talks of a merger over a disagreement about control.

Under the proposed agreement, expected to be disclosed on Friday, the two news organizations will be combined in a 50-50 joint venture called the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, the people said.

The two parties began exploring a merger late in the summer after Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old stereo-equipment tycoon, acquired Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. Initially, Mr. Harman sought to hire Ms. Brown as editor. The courtship sparked talks about combining the two news organizations under the editorial direction of Ms. Brown, who would report to an independent board.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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