That “smoking gun” that was supposed to link CNN’s Piers Morgan directly to phone hacking and other outrageous practices of the U.K. tabloid press? Well, not so much. As we reported Tuesday, a British blogger claimed to have a recording of Morgan that–he said–”contracts” Morgans flat denials that he ever “hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone or published any story based on the hacking of a phone.” As it turns out, that recording’s a 2009 interview Morgan gave to the BBC, appearing on a radio show, Desert Island Discs.The host, Kirsty Young asked Morgan about “all that nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff” that Morgan was exposed to by being a tabloid newspaper editor. He never says that he personally was involved in any of it.

Here’s his answer from 2009:

To be honest, let’s put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to, and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and the low end of the supposed newspaper market.

In a statement to Mediaite, Morgan says there’s nothing in that interview that contradicts what he’s said about hacking:

Millions of people heard these comments when I first made them in 2009 on one of the BBC’s longest -running radio shows, and none deduced that I was admitting to, or condoning illegal reporting activity. Kirsty asked me a fairly lengthy question about how I felt dealing with people operating at the sharp end of investigative journalism. My answer was not specific to any of the numerous examples she gave, but a general observation about tabloid newspaper reporters and private investigators. As I have said before, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone.

Here’s the original interview, from the BBC, via Newsweek/The Daily Beast:

A British blogger who has repeatedly claimed that CNN’s Piers Morgan can be linked to phone hacking during his days as a tabloid newspaper editor in the U.K. now says he’s got “smoking gun” proof to back up his charges. The blogger, Paul Staines, who writes under the name Guido Fawkes, has told Forbes‘ Jeff Bercovici that a recording exists “which contradicts (Morgan’s) recent claims” that he has never been involved in phone hacking in any way.

On his program Piers Morgan Tonight, Morgan opened a discussion of the News Corp phone hacking scandal with his own statement flatly denying he ever engaged in hacking. “For the record, in my time at The Mirror and the News of the World, I have never hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone or published any story based on the hacking of a phone.” It’s unclear why–if a recording that contradicts that claim exists–the blogger hasn’t published it, but Bercovici discussed the recording’s contents:

Via email, I told Staines what I had heard, that the recording captures Morgan admitting to paying a third party to hack. “You are on the right lines,” he replied. He has not yet posted the recording.

If it delivers as advertised, it will be the first major expansion of the hacking scandal outside the confines of News Corp.

CNN declined to comment on the blogger’s claims to Forbes or to Mediaite.

Wolff explained that the decision to fold Mediaweek and Brandweek into Adweek comes from focusing “not about the subject so much as the brand,” with Adweek being the much better known, and more successful, of the brand’s former titles.

We’d noted that the official press release about the brand’s changes focused quite a bit on Wolff himself, as had the bulk of media coverage surrounding Adweek. Was this, we wondered, a conscious decision – to equate the Adweek brand with one particular personality?

“Well,” Wolff replied, “I am the editor. I have to take responsibility, whether it’s a win or a lose.” He added that he feels magazines definitely “should have strong editors” who are willing to speak of and essentially become “the face” of the magazine.

In the past, Wolff has continually brushed off comparisons between Adweek and AdAge – another ad-focused publication. In fact, a recent Yahoo write-up about Adweek‘s revamp quoted The Observer‘s Elizabeth Spiers – who, it’s worth noting, became embroiled in a particularly nasty feud with Wolff. Said Spiers: “You’re not going to compete with [rival trade] AdAge by having Michael pick fights with small circulation regional newspapers.” Wolff, however, insists the two magazines are not “rivals” in the least. AdAge, he argues, is a trade publication, and Adweek is decidedly not.

“The trade category has problems,” he says. “It’s too niche, and general business too broad.” Adweek, then, is trying to create a product that is about journalism. “It will tell the story of this industry,” Wolff continues. In this way, he believes his magazine is more like, say, Fortune than AdAge.

But, seeing how Mediaite isn’t terribly invested in the advertising world or day-to-day operations of magazines (as beautiful – and plump – as the new issue of Adweek happens to be), we wanted to know a little more about the media’s contentious relationship with Mr. Wolff.

Covering media, we tend to gauge our own little bubble’s thoughts and reactions to news items through twitter, where we noticed that the general consensus among media reporters seemed to focus, primarily on Wolff rather than on the magazine itself, and that this reaction had… a negative tinge, to put it mildly. We asked Wolff whether he sees a difference in the way the ad industry views Adweek versus how media reporters view the brand, pointing out that the revamp was generating negative buzz on Twitter.

Wolff believes that, actually, the buzz around the magazine’s new path has been overwhelmingly positive, and his focus is on his readers, not “the 26 people writing about media.” As he sees it, “Most people writing about media have no idea what they’re talking about.” [Ed. note: Gasp!, thought the media writer for Mediaite. First, Keith Olbermann announces my co-workers and I don't have real jobs, and now Wolff believes my ilk is good for nothing. Also, totally chipped some dishware yesterday. It's been a bad week.) Yahoo! noted Wolff's sometimes contentious relationship with those inhabiting the media world:

Of course fighting is what Wolff is known for. Here he is butting heads with Rupert Murdoch; sparring with former publishing doyenne Judith Regan; shooting spitballs on the grave of late Upper East Side restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; getting kicked out of at least 10 other restaurants in that neighborhood, where he used to live.

And, Wednesday, mediabistro's FishbowlNY blog [Ed. note: Full disclosure - I used to be editor of FishbowlNY] featured an interview with Wolff that… well. Got a lil’ tense:

US: “Wait. We gotta discuss the typo on the cover before you go.”

HIM: “Actually, you already passed up your opportunity to ask that.”

US: “What does that mean? You won’t discuss it?”

HIM: “No. That’s YOUR story.”

US: “Can you at least explain it to the audience? That’s a pretty big typo, and people are talking about it.”

HIM: “No. That’s YOUR story.”

US: “Ok. Well, let’s ask a couple more general questions just so we have enough content for the final video.”

HIM: “I think you’ve got enough content.”

Wolff would later refer to the post’s author as a “putz.”

Then, there’s Jeff Bercovici, who writes Forbes‘ in-depth Mixed Media column, and who – while offering congratulations (kind of, sort of) – had a couple of critiques concerning articles from the new Adweek.

But Wolff isn’t losing sleep over it. “They are of absolutely no concern or interest to me,” he says. “They’re completely irrelevant. They have no audience, make no contribution.”

So how, then, are media reporters different from Adweek staffers – whose numbers will soon rise from 32 to 50? “Here, reporters are covering a beat, and they do an honest job,” explained Wolff. “Unlike Jeff Bercovici.”

We asked Bercovici to comment. First, he pointed us to an article he’d published (pre-Forbes, while he was still at Aol) which documented a particularly heated exchange between the two:

I ran this scenario by Wolff, whose unpleasant personal manner is so famous as to be perversely endearing. “Let’s not have this conversation,” he said. When I pressed him for a comment, he reminded me of a story I wrote last year saying that he was preparing a column for Vanity Fair about how his personal life had become gossip fodder for the New York Post — a column that was never published. I asked him why he’d brought that up. “I’m saying get some stuff right for once,” he snapped, and hung up the phone. (In fact, Wolff himself confirmed to me at the time that he was writing the column, but cautioned that it was a work in progress and might not turn out as I expected.) He didn’t respond to a follow-up email seeking clarification, and an E5 spokeswoman was unable to shed any light.

“The upshot is,” Bercovici told us via email, “a couple of times now, he’s gotten pissed at me because I wrote about something he had in the works before he was ready to talk about it. I think if you follow the links and read the items in question, you’ll see that everything I wrote was 100 percent accurate. So unless he has some other example of my supposed dishonesty, I’d say it’s just him being thin-skinned.”

One thing, at least, if for certain where Wolff is concerned: If it’s true that all publicity is good publicity, then the man most certainly knows how to market himself.

As for Adweek, the reinvigorated magazine’s latest issue is now on newsstands.

Update: Originally, this article noted that Wolff had mentioned he’d “neglected to hire” Bercovici, a claim Bercovici denies. In an effort to determine whether we’d misheard Wolff, we followed up with him via Adweek. When asked to clarify, Adweek said the publication does not discuss those it has neglected to hire. When it was pointed out that Wolff may not have been referring to Adweek specifically, a spokesperson for the magazine relayed that Wolff never said he had neglected to hire Bercovici.

But it seems that AOL engages in a far more egregious practice: running their own video advertisements in front of third-party video content; a big no-no in the world of Internet video aggregation. A high level source at one cable news network, whose videos AOL regularly uses, tells us that there is “no licensing agreement in place.”

First some background: there is no question Mediaite and its sister sites have seen meteoric growth in its first year, which in turn has lead Bercovici and other media navel-gazers to wonder how that success could have occurred so quickly. Bercovici erroneously presumes that the majority of Mediaite’s traffic is a result of syndicated video. Last month, Mediaite had 1.4 MM unique visitors to the site, and in August is on track to beat that number. None of those visits include syndicated video plays, which if added, would more than double the total number of “Mediaite users.” Since many of those Mediaite syndicated video watchers are not coming to the site itself, they are not included in Mediaite’s monthly traffic numbers.

The more important problem with Bercovici’s piece is that in reality Mediaite is in regular contact with the news networks, whose clips we utilize. And at least one of the people quoted in his article told us that his quote was taken totally out of context. While flattering, it is ironic that Bercovici singles out Mediaite for a practice that so many websites engage in, including his own parent company AOL.  His first stop in reporting this story may have been a walk upstairs to check in on the video curating practices of the company that pays his check.

Tim Armstrong‘s AOL is a corporate behemoth that regularly features video clips from television networks on a number of their sites. Maybe most relevant here is a blog called TV Replay, which basically features other networks’ video clips with little news nor analysis. More importantly, TV Replay runs video advertising that is served by the AOL advertising server in front of the third party content, something that Mediaite does not do. Running “pre-roll” in front of another network’s content runs far afoul of currently accepted practices (Mediaite serves a banner ad.) While it’s true that AOL’s video clips are often shorter than Mediaite’s curated video — although Mediaite’s are no longer than many of our competitors – the far more egregious sin appears to be the pre-roll….the dollars.

We reached out to the very copyright and intellectual property lawyer Lloyd Jassin who was quoted in Bercovici’s original piece. He told us “If [AOL] is putting a video ad in front of an aggregated video clip from a third party without a licensing fee, they are arguably diverting revenue streams from the original content.” On the other hand, when available, Mediaite embeds the networks very own player, which means their pre-roll advertisement is included in our embeded player. Through a partnership with Magnify, a leading video platform provider, we are effectively helping networks make more ad revenue. A very different scenario than that at AOL.

When told of AOL’s practice of including video pre-roll in front of third party content, Jassin said “Mediaite seems to have a better argument than AOL.”

In the byzantine world of corporate media giants, there is always the chance that certain arrangements exist, but when we reached out for comment or clarification from AOL, they were unable to provide any material response at this time. In the meantime, it appears that when it comes to video curation, perhaps AOL’s glass house is not the wisest place from which to throw stones.

By now you most likely know the essence of Movember: that magical month in which folks all over the world grow moustaches for charity, be they jaunty, distinguished, menacing, filthy, magnificent, wispy, or “other”.
raise some sweet cash for prostate and testicular cancer research.

The charity is Movember, and the sweet cash has been raised by sites across the internet all month, notably by our friends at Asylum (“Grow a Mustache, Punch Cancer in the Mouth“) and HuffPo (“Why I Grew A Mustache – And Why You Should Care“). That last one was written by a fellow named Ari Herzog, and you can see what he looks like with a fuzzy upper lip (and donate to his team!) here. To donate to team Asylum’s mustaches you can go here; or to put them over the top at the last minute, go to Mustaches vs. Cancer and donate here. Because as they say: “No red states, no blue states… just mustaches.” Indeed.

Well, I can’t grow a mustache and I’m glad of that, but I certainly can donate, so I just did, ’cause a gal’s gotta put her money where her moustache is. I can also show solidarity with the movement in other ways. See above. And, I can also use it as an excuse to celebrate the bountiful, glorious, luxuriant and luscious mustaches that abound in the media world — so that is exactly what I have done below. Click on the image to see not only the name of the mustachioed gent in question, but also my pithy commentary. There are hidden gems like songs and jokes and salty wet kisses from a hairy, hairy face. OK I’m lying, you can’t get that from the Internet. Yet.

From a terrific writeup by Daily Finance’s Jeff Bercovici:

On the feud with MSNBC (Specifically, Olbermann):

“We did not start this abuse, which we thought went way beyond … It was personal and went way beyond — not on me but on others. Finally, we had to allow people to retaliate. The moment they stop, we’ll stop. We don’t believe in it, and we don’t think it’s good business.”

On the White House:

“”As for the tensions with the White House, I think they overplayed it. It’s probably been good for us in terms of ratings … We haven’t really had any continuing problem there at all. We cover them, and they have said publicly that we are absolutely fair in our reporting of the White House. They just don’t like one or two of our commentators, which we understand.”

On  the “icing out” of FNC from interviews with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg

“All our competitors…immediately went to the White House and complained and said, ‘This is not the way to treat anybody in the media.’”

Apart from spicing up what could be a dry bit of business procedure in more cautious hands, Murdoch’s outspokenness during earnings calls is smart media strategy: It allows him to get out of the trap of speaking to reporters who might be hostile or reporters who might be accused of being too sympathetic (odds are, many of whom are his employees) and to simply get his message out to the public.

Related:

Bercovici: Murdoch dishes on Fox News feuds with White House, MSNBC

Peter Kafka also has a great set of running notes on the earnings call over at AllThingsD.

Its clear why FNC loved the controversy — it helped their ratings and allowed them to cover one of their favorite topics: Fox News. But what did the White House get out of it? Many media critics are wrong in saying that the Obama Administration was stupid for going after FNC. Why? Three words: Health care reform.

Most pundits seem to agree that Fox News was the clear winner in this media fracas — or perhaps more to the point, that the White House was the loser. Jeff Bercovici wrote at DailyFinance.com that the “Fox News ‘truce’ with the White House is no victory for Obama.” David Carr chastised the White House for “punching down” … David Corn at PoliticsDaily.com cleverly suggested that the “White House shouldn’t play chicken with Fox.” The list literally goes on and on…

But missing in all of this analysis and critique is any explanation of what the White House had to gain by the brouhaha. Many presumed that the White House intended to marginalize or delegitimize Fox News. But I think there was a more solid logic behind the White House strategy: they wanted to pass health care reform legislation, and this was the best way to do it.

“Health care” was mentioned by Fox 2361 times in August. In October, it was only mentioned 1558 times. Meanwhile, Anita Dunn — who wasn’t mentioned once in August — has been referenced 121 times this month.

A recap: In August of this year, the White House launched a full court press on public health care, and were immediately met with a full court press by their toughest opponent — Fox News. As we mentioned at the time, the real health care debate late this summer was always between the Obama Administration and Fox News; the Republican party itself played only a weak supporting role. You remember those days, right? Town Hall protests, Arlen Specter getting yelled at, Death Panels…good times. Suffice it to say, the White House lost these early but important battles, which basically framed the debate.

It was at this point that senior officials reportedly met at the White House to discuss their media strategy and apparently came up with the concept of going after Fox. I imagine that their thinking was something like this: “We are getting hammered on health care reform. I’ll bet that if we start a fight with Fox News, they’d get distracted enough by their own reflection enough to stop hammering us so hard on the current health care debate.” Were they right?

In early October, Anita Dunn went on CNN’s Reliable Sources and caused an uproar when she said this to host Howard Kurtz: “Let’s be realistic here, Howie, they’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican party: Take their talking points, put ‘em on the air. Take their opposition research, put ‘em on the air. And that’s fine, but let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is…”

Since that fateful moment, Fox News has spent a vast amount of their resources on covering the White House criticism. That’s a smart business decision — not only is it a huge story, but it helps their ratings. It puts FNC’s competitors in a tricky wicket of having to cover a story that not only involves their chief rivals, but also invites their viewers to change the channel and see what could possibly be making such a fuss! Yes, covering this story whole-heartedly was, without question, a win-win for Fox News.

But more importantly, Fox News’s coverage of the “feud” came at the expense of their coverage of the health care debate. Suddenly, there was much less hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over death panels and town hall protests. According to the television monitoring service TVEyes, the term “health care” was mentioned by Fox 2361 times in August. In October, it was only mentioned 1558 times. Meanwhile, Anita Dunn — who wasn’t mentioned once in August — has been referenced 121 times this month.

What does it mean if this is where the White House was coming from? Well, it would show that they were willing to take a hit in terms of popularity and media relations in exchange for a chance at the passage of meaningful health care reform. It remains to be seen whether that will happen. But it shows how deeply invested Obama is in health care as a cause — and how much he has to lose if the push for reform peters out.

At the risk of playing the “first” card so reviled on the Internet, Mediaite called the showdown between Fox News and the Obama administration back in mid-August. Now that it’s officially here, heralded by an attack-dog performance by White House Communications Director Anita Dunn on Reliable Sources and unhindered by a secret coffee date between Roger Ailes and David Axelrod, what does it mean? And which side, if either, will ultimately come out on top? A roundup of pundit reactions from the blogosphere and beyond:

First, here’s what Dunn had to say to Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz:

“Let’s be realistic here, Howie, they’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican party: Take their talking points, put ‘em on the air. Take their opposition research, put ‘em on the air. And that’s fine, but let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is … I’m not talking about people like Major Garrett, I’m talking about the overall programming.”

This in addition to an official blog that has called Fox out on biases and reporting inaccuracies, a la Media Matters. It’s an unusual approach, but will it backfire and boost Fox at Obama’s expense?

• David Gergen seems to think so. Speaking with Wolf Blitzer over the weekend, he said that he “would not advocate” the Obama administration’s fire-with-fire strategy: “If you are going to get very personal against the media, you’re going to find that the animosities are just going to deepen, and you’re going to find that you are almost going to draw viewers to people you are attacking. You build them up in some ways, you give them stature.”
• Fox News also seems to think so. Brian Stelter reports that Fox executives are geared up for the fight, and think that it will help their ratings: “Don’t pick a fight with people who like to fight,” Roger Ailes is said to have remarked in internal discussions.
• Gawker, no big fans of Fox News, thinks it’s more or less a wash. “There is a degree to which the entire ‘war’ is mutually beneficial, with both sides firing up the base. But we imagine the Obama White House has also been surprised by the depths of Fox’s irresponsibility (witch-hunting, actively organizing and promoting protests of the president’s legitimacy, everything Glenn Beck does and says),” writes Alex Pareene.
• Jeff Bercovici also thinks it’s a bad idea on Obama’s part. He acknowledges that Obama’s in a tight spot, but says there’s not much to be done: “Obama can’t win this one, but he can avoid spending his ammunition in a hopeless fight. He should take heed of what I advised John McCain over a year ago: that running against the press is a loser’s strategy. It signals weakness.”
• A roundtable on Sunday’s Morning Joe criticized Obama for adopting a confrontational style against Fox. MSNBC analyst Harold Ford Jr., a former Congressman, put it like this: “I was in politics for ten years in Congress, and I never shied away from a chance to go face-to-face or head-to-head with those I knew may have a different opinion than me. I think it’s unfair to say the President won’t find his way to that forum.” Morning Joe has been pretty evenhanded as the Obama-Fox spat has heated up; they derided Fox for skipping an Obama press conference in July.
• Crooks and Liars’ John Amato takes the dissenting viewpoint: he says that Dunn’s Reliable Sources interview was refreshing because she was telling the truth, and that the bias of Fox’s reporting is so strong that it needs an official response. “Dunn held back no punches and stated fact. That’s nice to see.”

Conclusion: the conventional wisdom seems to be that a fight with Fox drags Obama down and brings Fox up, even if, as Amato says, the White House is right on all of their substantive charges. Attacking may fire up Obama’s base, but he doesn’t really need to fire up his base at this point; even with House and Senate majorities, he needs to build a broad consensus. Attacking a cable network not just on individual points but on the grounds of its existence is an oddly cablish move for a president to take, and even the non-Fox zombies of America are likely to take note.

(image via Say It Ain’t So Already)

“[T]he readership is solid, the readership is holding up, the readers are happy, the titles are thriving,” he continued, saying that he believes Time Warner will still own magazines five years down the line. He also took the opportunity to deny that Time Warner had any interest in buying NBC Universal. But is the company’s CEO really the most reliable source when it comes to potential business dealings? He’s trying to run a business after all.

It seems counterintuitive, but it’s important to recognize the context of Bewkes’ statements when it comes to Time Inc. gossip, considering he has the most to gain (or lose!) when it comes time for negotiations. Anything he says or does has the potential to affect a sale price. It’s also worth remembering the old adage that says everything is for sale — for the right price. The struggling magazine division of a huge conglomerate is no exception and if Time Warner were shopping it, they would want to do so in private and on their terms, not with the media as a middleman.

Then, there’s the source reporting the CEO’s quotes to consider. The article, entitled “Time Warner CEO: We’ll still own Time Inc. in five years” by Jeff Bercovici, was posted at the DailyFinance blog, part of the AOL network owned by none other than Time Warner. The writer discloses the connection briefly but comments that Time Warner will not own AOL “for much longer.” Still, when it comes to business journalism and the sensitive large-scale dealings being covered, readers would do best to keep a skeptical eye and writers should stay candid about their connections as they set the tone for the public conversation. You never know how it could affect the bottom line.

“Nothing like a picture of cops hauling away papers to put the chill in bones.”

Daily Finance’s Jeff Bercovici reported that New York City police officers were spotted at News Corp. headquarters Monday confiscating the fake papers and that the three volunteers who’d been handing them out had been detained. Which is sort of troubling on a number of levels, the primary one being: why are the NYPD confiscating newspaper? But also: who caledl the cops (or the fuzz, as Carr puts it)? Bercovici thinks it was the Rupe man, himself.

Melissa Lockwood, one of the three volunteers involved in the incident, says she arrived at 1211 Avenue of the Americas at 4:30 a.m. to begin distributing copies of the parody…Lockwood says she handed out hundreds of copies over three hours with no trouble.

But that changed sometime after 7:30 a.m., when one of her fellow volunteers succeeded in placing a paper into the hand of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch as he entered the building. Shortly after that, says Lockwood, two police officers who had been observing from a patrol car parked nearby approached her and instructed her to stop what she was doing.

“They were like, ‘These are not the real New York Post. This is a forgery. You could be in big trouble,’” Lockwood recalls. “They said we couldn’t leave until the New York Post officials came to prove that that we had fraudulent papers.”

First of all, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that for fraud to have taken place the Yes Men would have had to been charging for their newspapers, and not handing them out for free (satire is not against the law, actually I’m fairly sure it’s protected under it). Secondly, for a man (and a company) who publishes a newspaper that traffics in cover pages like these, one might expect Rupert Murdoch to have a better sense of humor about the whole thing!

The Post actually has been almost completely mum on the whole debacle, only going so far as to publish an AP piece about News Corp.’s statement saying they were “flattered” (sort of), furthermore the police say no one was technically detained and no papers were technically confiscated. So, yeah, that’s technically a relief. Bercovici has the full deets here.

Features editor Todd Pruzan and media columnist Jeff Bercovici were both cut loose when Portfolio folded in April. and were both snapped up by Daily Finance in short order (Portfolio.com recently relaunched under the Charlotte-based American City Business Journals Inc., another unit of Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast). This move further indicates that AOL, which has done some aggressively smart hiring elsewhere on its blogs (most recently David Corn for “Politics Daily”), is serious about expanding — and spending the money to do so. Where other sites are being forced to cut back and do more with less, AOL seems to be merrily picking up name-brand talent in what is becoming a regular habit.

Gustin will covering tech/digital media and related subjects; a look at the masthead on the right-hand side of the homepage shows that there isn’t much on the beat that they don’t cover. Looks like Politics Daily isn’t AOL’s only trophy blog.

Related:
AOL Blossoms As Print Retreats [NYT]
NY Times Touts AOL’s Inflated Traffic; Ignores Internet Trickery Behind It [Mediaite]
At AOL, It’s Politics Daily, Not Hourly [WaPo]
Is Politics Daily AOL’s Trophy Blog? [Mediaite]

Noting that 10 of Technorati’s top 100 blogs are owned or operated by the Internet giant, Carr writes in today’s NY Times about AOL’s great traffic and terrific content offering. It’s true that since evolving towards becoming primarily a media company just over two years ago, AOL has been successful in both developing compelling content in niche markets and attracting established journalists. But why ignore the real reasons behind their success: the “firehose” of traffic known as AOL’s welcome screen promotion, and that manufactured click-machine known as a “slide show”.

How does it work? Simply put AOL still enjoys an enormous userbase — Quantcast reveals that AOL.com has almost 60 million unique visits a month.  More importantly, they report that each month they receive an estimated 2.5 billion total visits. Which means that each user checks in on average over 30 times per month, presumably to check their email. As a result, the AOL homepage, or “welcome screen,” is incredibly effective for promoting the AOL-owned niche blogs and driving traffic their way.

But it’s not just where the traffic is coming from, but what it does when it gets there — many of these content areas have become particularly adept at manufacturing an enormous amount of “clicks” or “page views” by employing slide shows that get the user to click through to see ten or more images. Like “Take a Dip in Some Amazing Swimming Pools” or “Stars and Stripes Bikinis Indicate that God has Blessed America.” Not exactly the stuff of the Paris Review, but a great generator of traffic clicks.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of great content being created by AOL blogs, and Carr names some of the terrific journalists who now call AOL home (Todd Pruzan, Jeff Bercovici, Lynn Sweet and Carl Cannon among others). And the numbers that AOL puts forth in terms of unique visitors and page views is impressive.

But just how solid is a business model that relies on late-adapter surfing behavior? AOL email addresses are normally a sign that one hasn’t changed his or her Internet settings since joining the World Wide Web in 2002. And the slide show trickery is sure to be replaced by some other smoke and mirror – video?

The larger question is how this will be viewed by Wall Street when AOL is reported to be spun of from Time Warner in Q4? Will they cynically see through the Internet chicanery? Or will they just like big numbers? Size does matter after all. And perhaps this is something Carr should have addressed.

Jeff Bercovici of Daily Finance saw it differently:

Spanfeller did not respond to messages, but his departure is thought by insiders to be a result of pressure by Elevation Partners, the private equity group that bought a large minority stake in Forbes three years ago. In May of this year, Elevation co-founder Roger McNamee resigned from the Forbes board and was replaced by Bret Pearlman, another Elevation Partners executive whose arrival was seen to herald a round of cost-cutting. Since then, rumors have circulated that Spanfeller’s days were numbered, even though he is said to be favored by president/COO Tim Forbes.

Folio’s Jason Fell was able reach the exiting CEO, who set the story straight:

I spoke with Spanfeller this afternoon and he denied reports that his leaving was pressured by Forbes investor Elevation Partners. “That’s just crappy reporting,” he said during a phone conversation. “Unless Elevation has the ability to stick thoughts and actions in my head, they had nothing to do with my decision to move on.”

Crappy reporting,” eh? Luckily for Bercovici, that alleged crappy reporting does not factor in his rankings on the Power Grid. (And yes, we know he checked.)