Variety.com
Tribune innovation chief Lee Abrams (left) says he's "trying to get away from Barbie and Ken sitting behind a desk chit-chatting with each other with their nice teeth." The format, in addition to getting rid of the anchor desk, doesn't use traditional reports from on-air correspondents, reports Cynthia Littleton.

> Oxfeld posts Chelsea column that was spiked in 1997
> J-schools know they need to change their curriculum
> Judge OKs sale of Brown newspaper chain to insiders
> Breen creates "spill" cartoons out of BP's own crude
> Bloomberg circles the wagons on misleading spill poll
> Editor of Denver's 5280 says city/regionals doing fine
> Paul Miller Washington Reporting fellows named
> Did WSJ go easy on Wylys because they're GOPers?

Village Voice
Maybe blame was spread so thin that no heads could justifiably be lobbed off, writes Foster Kamer. Or maybe nobody was fired because the tip came from editor-in-chief Col Allan. || Earlier: New York Post wrong about murder suspect getting a new liver.

Nieman Journalism Lab
Megan Garber would like to see someone take the PolitiFact model and apply it to following up on facts, rather than checking them.

TheAtlantic.com | ProPublica.org
It's "the best use of Tumblr I've seen yet," writes Alex Madrigal. He points out five things that make ProPublica's new site great.

New York Observer
"I love funny writing, but I'm sick of snark," says Nick Catucci, who is leaving nymag.com to become Rolling Stone online editor. "Rollingstone.com has tremendous potential, and new ideas for shaping the coverage come to me constantly."

Los Angeles Times

CNN "We have a loyal audience," says "This Week" executive producer Ian Cameron. "But we brought in an admired anchor to do things a little bit differently." That anchor -- Christiane Amanpour -- tells Geraldine Baum: "I'm not touting being an outsider, but I'm certainly not pretending I'm not."

Statement from NPR

NPR would like to make it clear that we are not involved in any way in the petitions now circulating that encourage the White House Correspondents Association to select NPR for the lead White House correspondent seat. The first petition was put forward by CREDO Action, an advocacy site that is managed by Working Assets. MoveOn.org has now joined CREDO and is also promoting a petition. NPR was not consulted about either petition and we learned about them via Facebook and e-mail. We have no position on the petitions, and no comment on the other media organizations that are competing for the seat. NPR made its case directly to the White House Correspondents Association by submitting a letter of interest, which is the standard protocol and a process we respect. Our request for consideration is based on NPRs long record of high-quality reporting on the White House, our commitment to covering government and politics, as well as our large audience (over 27 million listeners to NPR programming on member stations and over 11 million unique visitors every month via NPR.org), and our reach across the U.S. and beyond.

Slate Group memo regarding the demise of The Big Money

We regret having to share the news that we're ceasing publication of The Big Money as of today. This has been a difficult decision, in part because so many aspects of the project have worked as we hoped. Jim Ledbetter and his team have done a first-rate job on the magazine itself, cultivating a talented crew of young writers, coming up with terrific features like Recessionary Road and The Facebook 50, and responding with speed and style to business news. In his short time as Publisher, Brendan Monaghan has broken new ground for the Slate Group as a whole, most importantly by masterminding our recent Untethered Conference.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the site is not pointed toward profitability on a fast enough timetable. We've struggled to grow the sites traffic to carry enough ad inventory to run a profitable business. There are some specific reasons for this slow growth which relate primarily to the category rather than to the quality of the magazine. Our timing also could have been better. TBM launched the week of the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, and its existence has coincided with a deep trough in advertising market for business-oriented publications.

The decision to close TBM as a separate destination doesn't signal a move away from business as a category or a subject. To the contrary, we expect Slate's engagement with business to get much stronger as a result of folding in aspects of what the separate site has been doing. We are not planning to keep the separate TBM brand alive -- basically because we think "Slate Business" has more power in the marketplace. Existing TBM pages and links will stay live, and The TBM URL will redirect to a Slate Business landing page, which will include new Slate Business content plus highlights from the TBM archive. We have not yet figured out all of the details, but we are planning to merge some of TBM's most successful features into Slate.

Most importantly, Jim and Brendan are both staying on with the Slate Group. After dealing as quickly as possible with some transition issues, Jim is going to become a full-time, staff business writer for Slate. He's excited about this prospect, as is David. Brendan is going to take the lead in developing alternative revenue streams and partnerships as VP of Business Development. Our expectation is that "Untethered" will become a Slate-sponsored event, and that Brendan and Jim will continue to work together on the program and marketing of it. We hope to do other business/technology conferences as well.

The Slate Group had a strong first half (revenue for the first six months is up 26% over 2009) and is very much on track with our objectives. Slate, Foreign Policy, and The Root are all doing well. Slate.fr, in which we are partners, is going great guns. Our overall strategy is unchanged. We remain interested in launching sites and projects and are always available to hear your ideas for new ones. Part of being a quasi start-up means being unsentimental about sites we like that aren't working as businesses and quickly evolving our model in response to a fast-moving marketplace. We are experimenters. This was a great experiment, but not every experiment results in a breakthrough.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank The Big Money staff for all the hard work they've done over the past two years. Jim, Brendan, Elinor, Chad, and Caitlin have all shown themselves to be stars and should close the books on the site proud of the work that they did for TBM.

Please pass along press queries to us or Alissa Neil. And let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Jacob [Weisberg] and John [Alderman]

Chicago Tribune
Tribune Co. is proposing to pay severances to its top 43 executives if they're asked by a new board to leave when the company emerges from bankruptcy. The package amounts to 2.5 times salary and bonus for CEO Randy Michaels; 2.25 times salary and bonus for COO Gerry Spector; and 1.75 times salary and bonus for Chicago Tribune publisher Tony Hunter and Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein. Thirty-two others would get 1.5 times salary and 18 months of benefits.

True/Slant
"By acquiring our team, our ideas, and our technology, and working to figure out how to integrate them into Forbes as an organization, it makes what we did [at True/Slant] an unquestionable success," writes True/Slant home page editor Michael Roston. || New York/Jan. 2009: Roston's laid-off life.
> Read more True/Slant farewells on "The Goodbye Channel"

Arizona Republic
Veteran Republic photographer Dave Seibert, 53, was handcuffed, jailed and then released without any charges. He had been shooting pictures of protesters blocking the entrance of Phoenix's downtown jail on Thursday.

CJR.org | ProPublica
"The consensus was that the Pakistan angle was interesting, but that the civilian casualties thing hadn't been covered as much, and that it might be more interesting to our readers," says World-Herald military reporter Matthew Hansen. "Omaha is a military town, there's a big Air Force base here. There's also a Center for Afghanistan Studies here." || Related from Stephen Engelberg.

NYT Picker
The creators of WeddingCredential.com have registered the site anonymously. Their search engine brings up 1,028 mentions of "rabbis" in Times wedding announcements, 466 "Harvard" references, and 20 "journalist" results.