MONDAY'S LINKS: $5 Million for HuffPo, Europe's Free Newspapers Trend

By: E&P Staff In today's links, a venture capital firm gives the Huffington Post $5 million to work with, more European newspapers are joining the free "commuter daily" market, and Viacom is using Google to distribute ad-supported clips of its television shows.


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Softbank Puts $5M In Huff Post
New York Post: A group led by venture capital firm Softbank is investing $5 million in the Huffington Post, an online news site and political blog owned by the pundit Arianna Huffington. The investment comes a little over a year after the launch of the Huffington Post -- which then was billed as a celebrity-filled blog but has since evolved in to its own news brand.


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Google teams with MTV on Ad Deal
USA Today: In an effort to reduce unauthorized use of its TV properties, MTV Networks has cut a deal with online giant Google to distribute ad-supported TV clips to bloggers and website publishers. The deal, the first of its kind, sets up a syndication network to put four- or five-minute clips of shows like Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV's Laguna Beach across the Web. Revenue will be split between MTV, Google and the website or blog pub


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Europe?s Papers Join the Cry of 'Read All About It, Free'
New York Times: When Metro International, a publisher of free newspapers, moved into France in 2002, established competitors cried foul, and some of their workers took to the streets. Four years later, Metro and other free papers are fixtures of the French cityscape, accounting for one in five papers read in France, and publishers of paid-for dailies are considering free editions of their own. The about-face in France reflects a broader shift across Europe, as upstart free papers continue their rapid growth and publishers of existing papers, casting about for any way to retain readers, increasingly turn to giveaways. Last week, the News Corporation, which publishes The Sun and The Times of London, confirmed plans to start a free newspaper in Britain next month.


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Murdoch to Launch a Free Evening Paper in London
Los Angeles Times: News International, Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper arm, is planning to launch a free evening publication in September, in the company's first newspaper launch in Britain. The group is expected to put significant marketing muscle behind the 48-page color publication, called thelondonpaper. The paper will be aimed at a young, upscale audience and distributed in central London.


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When Everyone's a Critic, Where Do All the Critics Go?
Guardian: "Who needs critics, anyway?" asks Jeff Jarvis. "Not the producers of The Da Vinci Code, who launched a gigahit without showing the movie to critics much in advance. Not the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, which was deep-sixed by professional scribes -- who as a group gave it only 52 out of 100 points, as calculated by RottenTomatoes.com -- while the critics who count, the ones with tickets in hand, gave the sequel the biggest three-day box office in US history. Not newspapers in the US, which are laying off critics and refusing to send many of those left to soak up PR and parties at television critics' junkets to Hollywood. Yes, who needs critics in an age when everybody's a critic? And what is the role of the critic at a time when there is far too much entertainment for any critic to take in and review?"


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What Makes Jared Run?
New York Magazine: Jared Kushner is a young heir in a hurry: A week ago, the 25-year-old's only claim to public recognition was his father, the scandal-plagued billionaire developer and top Democratic donor Charles Kushner. Now he?s the new owner of the New York Observer, for which he reportedly paid $10 million, despite the fact that it loses $2 million a year. The other serious bidders, Robert De Niro and his Tribeca partners, were offering to pay nothing while promising to keep the paper going, an insider says. Kushner, who?s ?finishing up his law and business degrees at NYU, insists it can make a profit.