MONDAY'S LINKS: Peltz Cagey on Tribune, Can Bewkes Save AOL?, Washingtonpost.com's Blogroll

By: E&P Staff In today's links, analysts are already speculating about the intentions of new Tribune shareholder Nelson Peltz, Tim Rutten says that the Reuters doctored-photo flap is a symptom of newsroom cost-cutting, and questions whether Time Warner COO Jeff Bewkes can help right struggling AOL.


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Peltz Is Cagey on Tribune Investment
Los Angeles Times: Wall Street speculated that 64-year-old billionaire Nelson Peltz would increase the pressure already being applied by a shareholder group that has called on Tribune management to sell assets, spin off its broadcast division or sell the company. Tribune declined to comment on Peltz's investment, as did representatives of the dissident Chandler family of California, the company's largest shareholder, with 15% of the stock. Peltz isn't talking about it either. In an interview Friday, he wouldn't even confirm that his investment vehicle. Of his overall investing philosophy, he did say: "We don't buy a share of stock if we don't have a plan."


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Effects of Cost-Cutting Evident in Reuters Flap
Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times: Before the American news media's collective shrug consigns the Reuters photo scandal to the nether world of shabby journalistic footnotes, one of this affair's wider implications is worth a moment's exploration.


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You've Got ... a Company to Fix!
Newsweek: Jeff Bewkes, 54, has helped a company redefine itself before. During his seven-year tenure at HBO, he got the network to focus on original programming after rival networks like Showtime and upstarts like Starz moved against HBO's Hollywood movie franchise. The result: pop culture phenomena like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" that made HBO the most profitable entertainment network in TV. The trades took to calling him "the real Mr. Big" after the "Sex" character. He had even more clout after his 2002 promotion to Time Warner corporate. Bewkes oversaw the company's Hollywood outposts (Warner Bros. and New Line studios) and television networks (the former WB and cable outlets CNN, TBS and HBO) before his promotion to COO last December. Could his next title be CEO? Maybe, but first he has to fix AOL.


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Washingtonpost.com Launches Sponsored Blogroll
Adotas: The Washingtonpost.com has launched a blog promotion program called Sponsored Blogroll, which aims to give B and C-list bloggers a taste of the Washingtonpost.com?s 8 million monthly readers and help connect them with Washington Post advertisers. The Sponsored Blogroll project is the brainchild of Jeff Burkett, head of the WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive?s sales development team.


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Jill Carroll's Story: Part 6
Jill Carroll in the Christian Science Monitor: At various times, I heard my captors discussing changes in their plans because of directives from the council and Zarqawi, including one in Arabic I only partially understood: something about how my case should be resolved "without money and without killing." But that night - with the nature of those who held me spelled out for the first time - I lay on my bed motionless in the dark. ... I lay on my back, hands clasped across my stomach. Eventually I dozed off. Next morning, I woke up in the same position. That's the way I woke up every morning in that house - frozen in the position I'd assumed after crawling into bed. I was too afraid to move, even in my sleep.


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Decoding the President's Summer Reading List
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: Summer reading lists are meant both for self-improvement and to impress an audience. ... Nonetheless, it is hard not to brood, in old-fashioned Kremlinological style, on the meanings of George W. Bush?s syllabus for this particular summer. Where in summers past he has read fiction by Tom Wolfe, or a comprehensive history of salt?both very good things in the right seasonal doses?this summer, perhaps under the pressure of events, he has embarked on a more strenuous list. An amazingly strenuous list, actually.


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Bloggers and Journos Now Comrades-at-Keyboards
Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian: The war is over. No, not that war. Or that one. I mean the supposed battle between mainstream media and bloggers. The last shot, a dud, was fired by Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's School of Journalism, when he issued an encyclical in the New Yorker this month defending professionalism and decreeing that citizens' media is just "journalism without journalists". It was met online with an exasperated yawn from bloggers and (in Roy Greenslade's term) hackademics, who said there never really was a fight. Bloggers don't think they'll replace reporters, they want to work in symbiotic bliss, amateur alongside professional, complementing each other's skills to expand the reach of the news. I call this networked journalism and I am seeing more examples of the two tribes coming together not to clash but to conspire.