Our user-comments researcher encourages you to listen to an excellent recent On the Media discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic on the value of cultivating an engaging comments section. >>>

While Quebecor declined to comment in a story yesterday that stated federal bureaucrats had posed as “new Canadians” during a reaffirmation ceremony broadcast by its own Sun TV, it was only a matter of time before someone at the news organization spoke up.

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Mobile Ad Network Mojiva Reaches 1 Billion Devices (TechCrunch)
Gwozdz said that the mobile ad industry as a whole will need to start providing better analytics and optimization, as well as more standards around ad serving counts and ad sizes. As for Mojiva itself, not surprisingly Gwozdz said that it will continue to focus on providing opportunities for its advertisers and publishers. More specifically, he said the company will be trying to expand in China.

Gilt City Gets New Look — Providers Members with Improved Shopping Experience (Daily Deal Media)
Some of the new and improved features you will find on the revamped GiltCity.com include: Gifting: The new GiltCity.com introduces a unique gifting functionality allowing members to present a Gilt City service or experience as a sophisticated gift rather than a standard redemption certificate. Navigation: The redesign boasts improved neighborhood filters and enhanced search functionality by offer category, location, and price.

Facebook S-1: The Local Angle (Screenwerk)
There’s a great deal of discussion about mobile in the filing. However I find it strange that there’s almost nothing about local, deals or Facebook’s SMB opportunity. The one discussion of “small business” in the S-1 is a case study about Amex’s promotion of “Small Business Saturday,” used to illustrate Facebook’s capacity to attract brand advertisers that would otherwise use traditional media.

Facebook May Not Be Into Mobile Ads Yet, but Plenty of Others Are (PaidContent)
What’s interesting is that while companies like Google are certainly making huge strides in mobile advertising (more on that below), there are a number of mid-range/smaller players that are also seeing significant growth, in a market that eMarketer projects will be worth $2.6 billion in 2012.

Amazon Buys Teach Street, Folds It Into Amazon Local (LocalOnliner)
The connection between Amazon and Teach Street is partially personal. TeachStreet founder David Schappell previously worked for Bezos from 1998-2004. GeekWire reports that the entire TeachStreet team has already joined Amazon Local, which now has offers in 40 markets. It reports that TeachStreet itself is being shut down.

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One of my New Year’s resolutions is to join Foursquare, the online service that allows you to “check in” wherever you are. (Among my other resolutions: to try absinthe and to be described as “cheeky.” And yes, to exercise more and eat well, with the possible exception of the absinthe.)

On Foursquare, you can earn “points” and “badges,” and you even become the “mayor” of locations that you frequent often. You can share all of this beyond Foursquare itself via Facebook and Twitter.

I have several friends on Foursquare who post their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook, and I was curious about how and why they used it. I wondered why they would feel the need to let the world know that they were at the grocery store, a gas station or the office.

I asked friends and colleagues about Foursquare. What was I missing? Is it worth joining? Here’s how Margret Anne Hutaff, program coordinator for e-learning at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, described how she uses Foursquare:

“I try to check in at unique places and events. I’m not one to check in at my apartment (privacy issues) or Starbucks every morning or the j-school every day. That can get annoying for your friends/followers. And I don’t always publish it to Twitter. Usually I say something or post a photo when I post to Twitter.”

That journalistic approach makes sense: Check in when you are doing something you consider newsworthy to friends and followers. They may not care that you are at the grocery store, but they may be interested to know that you are at a workshop on campus, out of state for a conference, or somewhere that’s simply interesting.

Hutaff also made this suggestion: ”Sometimes I use the app to find places to eat or explore, especially when I travel. I sometimes leave tips about places, and it’s helpful to see tips from others, too.”

Again, I see the value in gathering and sharing information, regardless of the medium or method. That’s what publications like Rough Guides and Zagat has been doing for decades, after all.

I’ve been on Foursquare for about a month. So far, I am enjoying it. Yes, it’s a bit of goofy fun to get “points” for checking in somewhere. I’ve earned a couple of badges and even become a mayor of my gym, at least for the moment.

When I share check-ins on Twitter, I aim to offer something of value to my followers. A check-in by itself is a bit like a robo-Tweet. So I include a comment about what I am doing at that place, and I add a photo on occasion.

The idea is to “contribute to the story,” as this Atlantic article about Twitter suggests, and “to be informative or funny — or, ideally, informative and funny.”

On the latter quality, perhaps I’ll check in when I get around to following through on that absinthe resolution. Or maybe not.

Angus Deayton on sex, scandals and why everybody gets paid too much on TV

The problem with interviewing Angus Deayton is neatly summed up in a one-line email from the PR before we meet. "Angus would like to keep the interview current, so he doesn't wish to talk about Have I Got News For You." What this really means, of course, is that he doesn't want to talk about why he got sacked from the show nine years ago. And who could blame him?

When 2002 drew to a close, Deayton recalls thinking to himself "that the words annus horribilis didn't really cover half of it". That summer, the News Of The World had splashed with a classic cocaine-and-hookers kiss'n'tell, involving the presenter and a woman he'd met in a bar. For Deayton, it came as news that she was a call girl; for the rest of us, that he wasn't quite the pillar of moral rectitude many had supposed. Only a solemn promise of no further revelations – and a pay cut from £50,000 to £25,000 a show – saved his job. But that autumn another woman told the tabloids she'd had an affair with him for two and a half years, during which time his partner was pregnant, and his 12-year reign in the HIGNFY chair was over.

As Deayton observes more than once when we meet, "It all feels like a very long time ago now." And if we have learned anything from the Leveson inquiry by now, it's that tabloid scoops are not always reliable. But the fact remains that we probably wouldn't be talking to each other if he were merely an actor in a new BBC3 series, or the presenter of a new series of a Radio 4 panel game. It was HIGNFY that made Deayton famous – and the scandal amplified fame into infamy – thus leaving quite an elephant in the room between us.

To anyone with access to Wikipedia, let alone a television set, it can be no secret that Deayton has worked pretty consistently for the past nine years. He has, among other things, starred in the award-winning dark BBC comedy Nighty Night, presented Hell's Kitchen and a quiz show for ITV, anchored and starred in several Comic Reliefs, hosted the BBC panel show Would I Lie To You?, presented the British Comedy Awards and appeared in two feature films. "As wildernesses go," he points out, "it's been quite populated, really." And yet every new show he's made has been described by one or other critic as a "comeback vehicle" and almost every press interview presented as a watershed moment, signifying – at last! – the disgraced star's rehabilitation.

"Yes," he agrees drily, "I appear to have had more comebacks than Status Quo. And been 'welcomed back by the BBC', too. And you think, well, I was working at the BBC about two months after Have I Got News For You. I never even left." The observation is delivered in the same ironic tone of detachment with which he used to read out his old show's more bizarre news items – but doesn't it annoy him? "Er, yes. Yeah. I've never quite understood it, other than it makes an interesting story to maintain there's been some great redemption. It's not like audiences suddenly stopped laughing, or – like it was made out in the tabloids – that I was walking down the street and people would shun me as I passed. Actually, it was the opposite. And I never stopped working."

His latest project is Pramface, a comedy drama in which he plays the father of a well-heeled 18-year-old girl who gets pregnant from a rebelliously drunken one-night stand with a less well-heeled 16-year-old virgin. I've seen the first episode and it is very funny – sharply written, quite rude and ideal for Deayton, a master of the urbane middle-class British husband role, whose disappointment and anger is betrayed with subtle economy. He hasn't yet seen it himself and admits, "You just hope, when it goes out, you don't think, 'Oh God, I wish I'd done it completely differently.' There's no audience feedback, so you're kind of in the hands of the director."

Which does he finds more exposing, acting or presenting? "Presenting, I think, definitely. If you mess up, everyone sees you messing up and it's your fault. Acting, you're hiding behind a character, and I've always thought if it isn't any good, then there are all sorts of other people you can blame." He laughs. "You can offload responsibility."

When I ask how close he thinks his presenting persona approximates to his own character, he says, "It's probably easier for you to tell, because I feel as if I'm the same person." I've had limited exposure to the material, I point out, whereas he's had decades to analyse it, so isn't he better qualified to answer?

"Yes," he confesses, laughing, "desperately trying to pass the buck. OK. So, is the persona of the guy behind the desk the same as me? Um, no, I don't think it is. I fell into presenting after doing about a decade of parody shows of presenter-based shows, and a lot of it was me parodying a presenter, so when I started doing Have I Got News For You, I carried on that persona. So in some ways it's a sort of pastiche of my own pastiche – if that doesn't sound too arseholic. Er, which I think it does, actually."

He is a presenter in his other current project – a new series of the Radio 4 panel game It's Your Round, in which every week four guests each devise their own comic round. It didn't sound to me like an idea that would work, until I heard it. Deayton agrees. "You never really know if any show's going to work within the series, depending on which rounds the guests turn up with. But in a way that's built into the format, so if something isn't working, it's quite fun to be able to talk about the fact that it's not really working – and that it's not really," he adds with a laugh, "your fault. It does help if I can turn to the person on my left and say, 'Well, I'm sorry, the reason this is crap' " – and he starts to laugh again – " 'is because you brought it along, and you maintained that it was going to be good.' So it's nice to be able to offload any kind of responsibility – again."

Deayton has a comedian's instinct for a running gag, and this motif of endless buck-passing sounds to me just like that. Further into the conversation, however, I begin to realise it can be read in one of two ways – depending on what you think about the scandal that cost him his old job. "The great British public," he claims at one point, "can tell when someone's being victimised." But that's not how everyone saw it. If you believe Deayton had only himself to blame, then the running gag will probably sound less like a joke than further evidence of an arrogant refusal to accept responsibility. If, on the other hand, you think the scandal was either largely tabloid lies, or none of our business, you'll think he is simply being funny.

Before we met, I'd wondered if he would turn out to be nothing like the Deayton we know from our screens – bone dry, understated, impenetrably poised, with a surgical wit that can be cutting to the point of cruel, but rarely if ever unfunny. I would say now that he's warmer than you might expect, less intimidating, and perhaps more sensitive, but otherwise any distinction between performer and person is barely discernible. His laugh sounds like an unusually grown-up giggle, and he has a gift for injecting it into a word, mid-syllable, making almost everything he says sound amusing. When I ask about his domestic life, which he shares with his long-term partner Lise Mayer, a comedy writer, and their son Isaac, 10, he comes across as the rather droll headmaster of north London's comedy set.

"I bumped into Julia Davis's husband the other day – they live near us in Islington – and he had one of their twins with him. I said, 'Which one's this?' " – Deayton mimes the father peering into the pushchair, looking back up and spreading his hands in a baffled shrug. Laughing, Deayton adds with a sly grin, "A lot of our friends are drifting west now, though. They've passed away to Notting Hill. We do use Notting Hill as an adjective, in a slightly derogatory way. 'It's a bit Notting Hill' means a bit, 'We'll wait and see what else is happening before we commit.' They'll always be the last people to reply to any invites, while they wait to see all their different invitations come in." He affects to check himself with a brisk cough. "I'm being terribly rude about most of my friends."

Some of his former friends have been quite rude about him. Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, HIGNFY's team captains, were widely reported to resent their chairman's pay packet and to have been influential in his dismissal, with Merton describing him as "arrogant". It's Deayton who brings this up, when I remark that it's funny how presenters' salaries make scandalised headlines, whereas no one ever seems to mention how much actors earn.

"Or team captains, interestingly, I've noted over the years. This is, er, yeah, something that I've noted quite a lot in the many years I've been behind a desk," he quips. Why does he think that is? "I genuinely don't know. I find it baffling that for years and years I got tremendous stick for the amount of money I earned. I was often tempted to say" – and he starts to laugh again – " 'If you just cast your gaze to either side of me, there are some other people earning exactly the same as I am. We are on parity.' "

Hislop and Merton were on the same as him? "Yes. And some of them wander in at four in the afternoon of that recording, and other people have been working on it for four days." Again, the clipped dry laugh. "And he's the one who's getting the stick for earning all the money. So it did seem curious – and still does."

Why didn't he get on with them, then? "We always got on terribly well." That's not what I'd heard. "Yes, well, that's another urban myth," he laughs. "Bizarrely perpetrated by them. Which is odd. Certainly Paul has rewritten history a bit in terms of our relationship. We were always the last ones out of the bar on a Thursday night. We were clapping each other on the back, saying how wonderful the show was. 'A phenomenon – it's a phenomenon,' Paul always used to say. So, yeah, we always got on very well."

Urban myths are a recurring theme, because Deayton maintains that most of what's been written about him isn't true. "The Sun once did 20 things you never knew about Angus Deayton – and I didn't know 16 of them. The Daily Mail wrote something about me a few years ago and it had 36 sentences in it, and 33 of them were lies. The only three that weren't were quotes. Everything else you could put a 'not' in the sentence and you'd be closer to the truth." Almost the only much-quoted fact he will confirm was that at the age of five he decided he wanted to be either "a funny man or an advert".

That ambition was quickly forgotten, though. Born in 1956 into a traditional middle-class home counties family – with an ex-naval father and a teacher mother – he attended minor public schools, was good at sport and studied languages at Oxford. But though a big comedy fan, he'd never thought of having a go at it until an Oxford contemporary, Richard Curtis, asked him to stand in for a last-minute drop-out in an Edinburgh festival revue. Deayton enjoyed it, toured Australia with a spoof Bee Gees band, and began writing for comedy sketch shows.

He spent the 80s writing scripts, doing radio voiceovers and commercials, playing the straight man in bigger stars' shows – Rowan Atkinson, Alexei Sayle – and making the Radio 4 comedy series Radio Active, which transferred to BBC2 as KYTV in 1989. But he was basically unknown until 1990, when a part in One Foot In The Grave and the chair of HIGNFY turned him into a household name more or less overnight.

Looking back at his career in the 90s, certain ironies are inescapable. He fronted a programme called The Lying Game, and another called The Temptation Game, and when asked by one interviewer if fame had brought temptations his way, replied, "Actually, there are plenty of reasons why you should not give in. Someone could sell their story to the Daily Mail." So when I now ask if fame had brought with it concerns about his privacy, what I really mean is how did he think he could get away with cocaine trysts with strangers – or a long-running affair – without the papers finding out? But he interprets the question quite differently.

"Well, towards the late 80s, I started working quite closely with Rowan [Atkinson] and I think I learned from him how to deal with fame. He's intensely thoughtful about the whole thing, and private, and quite aloof. I think I probably learned from him how to conduct myself." This is a surprise, given how disastrously public Deayton's private life became.

"Yes, but sadly not anything I could do anything about. You have to kind of put your trust in someone – you can't be mistrustful of everyone you meet and everyone you come across. And sometimes that trust is ill-founded, and what can you do, short of actually never, ever putting your faith in anyone again?"

Some would say the answer's easy – you stay faithful to your partner. "Ye-e-e-es. Yes. Hmm. Well, I think that's kind of being wise after the event. There are definitely people I wish I'd never met, and I wish I'd never placed any trust in. But as I say, unless you go through life expecting everyone to behave in the worst way that you could ever imagine, then, er, there's only so much you can do about it."

A tabloid reader might think Deayton has some nerve to complain about betrayal of trust. The story his former mistress sold in 2002 wasn't pretty: she said she joined him and Mayer on holiday at their Italian villa, where they would sneak off for sex, leaving an unsuspecting six-months-pregnant Mayer lying by the pool. She claimed he enjoyed a threesome with her and a friend the night before his son was born, and would often hire prostitutes to join them in bed when she was unable to satisfy his Olympian sexual appetite.

Deayton says that so many outrageous lies were printed, "it would take an entire book the length of War And Peace to actually unravel it all". But he declines to identify any – "I think it's too little too late, and I don't feel as if I really want to start unpicking it all" – so there's no way to judge his indignation, or to tell if his reticence really might be a rare celebrity example of wisdom and self-control. "I always kind of expected that at some stage someone would explode the myths, but no one really has. And I don't think it should be me who does it."

He did consider giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry, but didn't want to "regurgitate everything again". When I ask if he's been following the hearings, though, his face lights up. "The gift that keeps on giving? Yes, every day." He laughs. "It is extraordinary, reading Hugh Grant's witness statement, I just thought, that's what life was like for me for six months. And, to be honest, it's the tip of the iceberg, because phone hacking is horrendous and ghastly, but what about hacking into bank accounts and medical records, entrapment, blackmail, blagging your way into someone's house or making threatening phone calls to elderly relatives?" He experienced all of that? "Yes."

Deayton tried to stop his ex-mistress selling her story by taking out an injunction, and says criticism of gagging orders "is always dressed up as being about a woman's right to – but to what, though?"

To do with the story of her own life as she chooses, is usually the answer. "Ye-e-e-e-es, but on the whole what they're doing is simply revealing details of a private relationship. I suppose it's technically anyone's right to do that, but you can't divorce the fact that they're making shedloads of money by doing it. And why would anyone," he adds with an expression of utter distaste, "want to do that?"

It's impossible to know if Deayton was more sinned against than sinning. What comes across very clearly, however, is his assumption that most people believe he was. His reluctance to reopen the whole saga is entirely understandable, and probably very sensible. But in the absence of any actual rebuttal, I suspect many readers may infer from all his complaints about betrayal and intrusion not bad luck or injustice, but self-pity.

He looks taken aback, thinks for a moment and for once the air of ironic amusement gives way to a flash of real feeling. "Right. Well, OK. I would say that I've suffered a fair amount of punishment over the years, one way or another. Yes, I would plead guilty to having had an affair which I shouldn't have had. But it's not really anyone else's business than mine. No one is in my relationship, so they can't make judgments about my relationship. There was one two-night stand, and there was an affair. Well, I don't think that's completely unheard of, either in the realms of relationships, or indeed television presenters. There are many who have done as much, if not worse."

I wonder if he was ever tempted to retaliate by identifying some of them. "Certainly on the drug front, yes. It would be like looking at the Manchester United team and pointing at Bobby Charlton as being the alcoholic because he had a glass of beer. I know a lot of people within the business find it quite amusing that I, of all people… well, I'm not necessarily talking about the current crop of presenters, but certainly 10 years ago, it was slightly odd to pick me out. With the exception of Clive Anderson." He pauses to think. "I can't actually think of anyone else. I've never said so before, but now I have. He's the only one."

• Pramface starts on BBC3, on 23 February, at 9pm

The Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, acknowledging that people are hungry for data, has launched a simple tool that makes it easy to turn data into searchable databases. The tool, freeDive, uses the Google Visualization API to pull data from a Google Spreadsheet and generate an embeddable widget that you can drop onto any page — no coding required. You can see an example here.

The video below shows you the end result of a database that includes name, city and donation amount for 25,000 campaign contributors (meaning the tool scales well for large amounts of data).

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Robert Niles: How can you increase your website's traffic by looking at your current website readership data?

The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction - and could be hurting their businesses as a result.

The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be... to look at what's getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.

Don't do that.

Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that's drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive - and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.

So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?

Instead of looking at what's attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what's working, but what isn't.

Use your traffic data to show you what coverage to dump, and not what to duplicate. Why waste precious reporting and writing time on articles that no one's reading, no one's linking to and no one's engaging with? Stop publishing content that your market's rejected and use the resources you'd spent creating that to do something else instead.

Be careful when making those cuts, though, to be certain that you're not eliminating something valuable due to bad analysis of your traffic data. It's not enough to look at raw page view numbers over a limited time period. Some very valuable articles show few initial impressions, but continue to build traffic to your site over years. It's worth the staff time to report and create those "evergreen" articles. Other types of articles might suffer due to the time of day that they're posted on the site. Certain feature pieces that hit your homepage in the early evening due to production habits, only to disappear from the home page before the next morning's traffic rush might draw more attention if you moved their online publication times to mid-afternoon, for example.

So be sure to take a long view when analyzing traffic data when making decisions about cuts and reassignments on your website. And consider what other factors, in addition to topic popularity, might be influencing unpopular articles and pages on your site. Are the pages consistently hitting the site at an unpopular time of day? Are the headlines not engaging? Could you put a different writer onto that beat who would command more respect, attention and engagement? Should does the audience for content want to see it in a different medium, such as a podcast or video blog instead?

You might not choose to walk away from a content topic altogether, but your focus should remain on the bottom of your traffic analytics. If something's not hitting with the audience, work to change that. And if changing publication times, formatting or voice isn't drawing more traffic to an area of the site, don't be afraid to shift the focus of your reporting to something that your audience finds more important to their everyday lives. (Here's my piece on the five most important beats for a local news website, to encourage some creative thought on what your beat mix should be.)

Like a gardener pruning the flower beds, cutting away withered elements of your publication can help encourage more growth elsewhere on the website. That's a healthier way to pursue new traffic than endless trying to clone what's worked best in the past. And it allows you, or your staff, to remain creative in trying to find new ways to lead your community by showing them fresh news and insight that they didn't have but will embrace, instead of always feeling like you are reacting to that community, pandering to what was popular in the past.

Traffic data tells you what your community thinks of the work you've done on the past. You should respect your audience by paying attention to what they're trying to tell you. Great news publishers lead - they don't pander - but you can't be a leader if no one follows you. Use your traffic data to cut what's not working on your website, then spend those resources trying to find better ways to connect with your audience instead.

A couple weeks after introducing its new iBooks Author app, Apple has clarified legal language about what happens to the books users create with the software. Apple continues to insist that users can only sell electronic books in the iBook format via its iTunes store. But it makes it clear that the content of those books can be sold in any other format, without Apple’s approval.

They say that history repeats itself, but that's so easy to forget. It was only as recently as 2006 that analysts were saying that MySpace was likely worth $15 billion (and I was spoofing that conclusion). And you can go back to older social networks like Friendster or Tribe.net or America Online's chat rooms... you get the point. So now that Facebook has laid out its plans to go public, with a possible valuation of $100 billion, what do you think "The Social Network" will be worth in five years? $400 billion? $0? Something in between or unmentionable? Vote in our poll and have your say in the comments.

What do you think Facebook's value will be in 5 years?

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

When Dallas Morning News reporter Tom Benning called a Susan G. Komen for the Cure spokeswoman Friday morning, he got a heads up that something big was about to break.

“I literally called the person who was sending out the… Read more

New York Post | Associated Press
The Post follows up on its story earlier this week about Philadelphia Media Network going on the auction blog, reporting that private equity firms Angelo Gordon and Alden Capital, each of which hold… Read more

By Ryan Chittum The New York Times has an excellent investigation today that shows in a new light how the SEC lets Wall Street off the hook despite repeated fraud. Edward Wyatt reports that the SEC has given banks waivers 350 times in the last ten years that allow it to avoid "the full force of the law" supposed to govern what...

Think of Reuters Social Pulse as a social-media weapon for the C-suite set. That’s because the newly debuted dashboard is designed to make the world of social media less of a shiny toy and more of a daily intelligence tool.

Even as it tries to branch out to reach broader audiences through its news service, Reuters knows its core market is the business set — managers, officers, decision makers. Information is the core of Reuters’ business (even more so Thomson Reuters’) and Social Pulse is their newest attempt at creating a product that can merge their editorial vision and data proficiency. 

“We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with.”

Social Pulse mines things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Klout (we’ll get to that in a moment) to provide concise summaries of news, conversation and sentiment analysis as it pertains to leading companies. The proposed value proposition is in turning those social outputs — which haven’t always reached the corner office as much as the newsroom — into a refined and polished product, said Alex Leo, director of news product for Reuters Digital. “We wanted a social page that was more than trending topics, which are often ‘Rihanna nude,’ which isn’t something our audience necessary cares about,” Leo told me.

Social Pulse breaks down into three big components: the Hit List, a stock sentiment module, and the Reuters & Klout 50, a ranking of CEOs based on their social activity. The Hit List scans the followers of Reuters Twitter accounts (both official and personal) as well as their journalists to find which stories are getting the most mentions and aggregates the top news. (They use Percolate, the same company that makes Counterparties, the Felix Salmon/Ryan McCarthy joint, possible.) The stock sentiment tool, which tracks the mood around specific companies in parallel to changes in their stock price, is powered by a service called WiseWindow. Leo called WiseWindow’s approach to sentiment analysis more nuanced than most, thanks to a combination of keyword tracking, language processing, and predictive modeling. “They can tell the difference between you calling Mitt Romney mean, which is negative, and saying ‘Taylor Swift plays a mean guitar,’ which is positive,” she said.

And then there’s the Reuters & Klout 50, which resembles a yearbook of the most socially active CEOs in the country, featuring names like Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Oprah, Mark Cuban, Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, and Gawker’s Nick Denton, among others. On a daily basis the rankings will shift among a pre-set list of 100 CEOs, winnowed down to 50 based on their Klout. It’s like the CEO equivalent of NFL power rankings or Mediaite’s Power Grid, but based purely on social media acumen. Reuters hopes that competitive spirit will make it catnip for business leaders. It could also be a motivator, Leo said: “There are so many people and so many executives who have their toe in Twitter,” she said. “Some of them are using the social web effectively, and some are not.” (One would hope a CEO would be motivated primarily by factors other than an urge to out-Klout Kevin Rose, but who knows.)

Just as a marketplace developed around aggregating disparate news feeds, a new one is forming for services that can coalesce the raw noise of social networks. Like any good media company, Reuters has tried to be diligent in using the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and now of course YouTube to bring its journalism to new audiences and expand their brand. Social Pulse is an experiment in finding new ways to use these systems as more than just communication channels either in reporting or as solo products, Leo said. “We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with,” she said. “It doesn’t end here — if things are really popular on Social Pulse they will be added elsewhere.”

It also represents a way of bringing all of the company’s various social strands together into one hub. That is, other than Reuters one-man social-media hub Anthony De Rosa. The Reuters social media editor will also have a presence on the site offering up links, liveblogs and more, because, as Leo joked, “You can’t have a social part of Reuters without having Anthony be a part of it.” The man is, after all, the “undisputed king of Tumblr” — take that, Cats with Bread! — but there’s a reason the likes of De Rosa and Salmon have risen to prominence at Reuters: They represent a kind of bridge between what the media company was and what they’d like to become. Social Pulse appears to be another step in that, a way of amplifying and enhancing Reuters journalism for both their core and new audience.

“I wanted to make the Anthonys of the world happy and the wealth managers of the world happy, and everyone else in between excited,” Leo said. 

Viacom's Nickelodeon has been No. 1 pretty much forever among children ages 2 to 11, but Disney Channel has been gaining.

"Doctors studying to become dermatologists have, for years, shared exam questions by memorizing and writing them down after the test to become board certified, CNN has confirmed.

Reports of the use of what are known as "airplane notes" comes after revelations last month that radiology residents around ...

Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is discussion about frictionless sharing on the web, with our without Facebook; building online community engagement around key events; and why community management is more of a discipline than a role.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tewfik Mishlawi, who has died aged 76, was a father-figure and guru to at least three generations of journalists who went to the Middle East. They live in eternal gratitude to him and his daily digest of translation from the local and regional Arabic press and his analytical explorations of what was going on.

The digest, which arrived at the offices, hotels, missions and homes of journalists, diplomats, arms salesmen and other strolling players, was with us every day by about 10am. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the digest was named the Arab World. Later, during the mid-1970s and the torments of civil war, it became the Middle East Reporter, and that is how it has stayed.

Mishlawi and his colleague Ihsan Hijazi ran it from various perches in West Beirut and never failed, through 15 years of turbulence – not to mention two Israeli invasions – to bring their sheet out. The organ survived a Syrian mandate in Lebanon that ran from 1977 to 2005 and an Israeli occupation of Lebanon's south (where Mishlawi's family had been rudely dumped when Israel was created in 1948) that lasted from 1978 to 2000.

Mishlawi and Hijazi were both Palestinians. Mishlawi was born in Haifa, Hijazi in Jaffa, which makes it even more extraordinary how deadpan they were as they transmitted the ipsissima verba of the Arab press. Even when Mishlawi did analysis, explanation and background, there was never spin. These two reporters sent dispatches to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Daily Express. In an age when everyone had something to say, Mishlawi and Hijazi had a lot to report but let everyone else do the talking.

Mishlawi met his beautiful and dauntless wife, Phillipa Fraser-Orr, at the foreign desk of the Express, in 1976, and in the past years, as illness and misfortune took its toll on her husband, she became the backbone of the organisation. She kept his and the digest's spirits up – always taking on young people, teaching them how to write, be accurate and on time, and easing them into the Middle East.

Tewfik is survived by Phillipa and their son, Nadim, and by Rima and Rami, the children from his previous marriage, to Mahfusa.

A new wave of conferences, meetups and events has swept through our convention halls in the last 18 months. TVnext, Social TV Summit, TV of Tomorrow, NewTeeVee and others bring together media, startups and vendors to discuss the future of television. After attending many of these and following all of them I have deduced a way to measure the arrival of “the future of television.”

There is a vast ecosystem of new technologies, social media strategies, digital marketing tools and analytical systems under the umbrella of social TV. Most people think of this new phenomenon as viewers using new digital offerings to socialize while consuming video content. The attendees of “social TV conferences” are therefore from digital product, digital marketing, social media, mobile and research groups.

This is easily understood by looking at the just-released roster of speakers at Hill Holiday’s upcoming TVnext event. It includes executives responsible for digital analytics (Trendrr, SocialGuide, etc.), digital and social marketing at media companies (BET, Bravo, USA, etc.), and third party social offerings (Miso, GetGlue, etc.).

I have nothing but respect for the organizers and their guests, many of whom I work with and have served with on other conference panels. The event’s panels are packed with valuable insights. However, I had an epiphany in realizing that this lineup is similar to previous events:

The future of TV won’t be here until people who make TV are in these conversations!

If social TV is about new digital products and social/marketing techniques then the future is here. If the phenomenon goes deeper, to the core of the TV business, to the very nature of the content we create, then we still have a long way to go. For me, the distinction is between “social viewing” as an evolution in the TV viewing/consumption experience and “social TV” as an evolution in what TV fundamentally represents.

To put it simply, if the TV content is the same then its not social TV. Likewise, social TV conferences can’t claim to discuss the future of TV if they only include digital folks.

The day we’ll know the promise and potential of social TV has arrived will be the day that conferences billing themselves as discussing the “future of TV” feature programming executives responsible for creating the content that drives the core business model of media companies.

Until those media executives invited aren’t relegated to job titles with the words “digital” or “social” in them we’ll know the future hasn’t yet arrived.

Until those vendors and startups invited work with content creators instead of digital marketers and social managers we’ll know the future hasn’t yet arrived.

The future of TV can’t just be about new forms of marketing or new types of mobile apps. It has to be – and will be – about new forms of content based on a fundamentally different relationship between viewers and creators.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and in no way represent any official position, plan or strategy of his employer.

(Guest post by Jacob Shwirtz, who serves as Viacom Media Networks’ expert on social viewing and social media. In this role he blends strategy, business development and product management to steward various pilots and experiments across the company. Jacob brings an entrepreneurial approach to VMN, as the creator of TweetBookz, a service for Twitter users that creates high quality coffee table books of tweets, as well as PodBookz, a partnership with Kevin Smith to allow fans to purchase books of their favorite podcasts.)