THURSDAY'S LINKS: Tribune Assets Seen as Major Lure for Bidders, Media Feeds Terror?, AOL Revives Netscape

By: E&P Staff In today's edition researchers link media reports to terror, AOL is reviving its Netscape brand with news and bloggers, and a tribute to Md. newsman Phillip Merrill.


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Tribune's Assets Seen as Big Lures for Bidders
Los Angeles Times: "Several media analysts said that if the Chandler family succeeded in forcing a Tribune breakup, it was far more likely the company would be sold off piecemeal rather than to one or two buyers. That's because the larger individual assets -- including the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles and the Chicago Cubs baseball team -- are likely to draw interest from local and regional buyers who view them as trophy properties."


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Publishers Using Web to Strengthen Print Brands
Advertising Age: Conde Nast, like most publishers, has struggled to strike the right balance between the amount of content to put up online and what to keep exclusive for the print editions, for fear too much free online content would cannibalize newsstand and subscription sales. A recent web venture, however, has changed the mindset inside the company toward doing more robust web ventures.


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Researchers: Media Reports Can Lead Directly to Terror Attacks
Washongton Post: "More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks. It's a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a 'common-interest game,' say Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University. 'Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents,' their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money 'as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers.'"


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AOL Turns Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts
New York Times: In attempt to revive an aging but still well-known Internet brand, AOL is turning its Netscape.com site into a collection of links to news articles, submitted by users and expanded upon by a staff of bloggers. AOL's plan to keep and expand [Netscape's] audience was devised by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc., a collection of blogs that AOL bought last year. Mr. Calacanis proposed that Netscape could combine blogging with the growing popularity of sites that allowed people to share interesting things they found on the Internet with others.


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Phil Merrill, the Skipper Who Was Rarely Becalmed
"Washington just got a lot quieter," writes Roxanne Roberts inthe Washington Post. "Some guys mumble through life. Some converse. Phil Merrill blared through seven decades, usually at the top of his lungs. He talked loud, argued loud, and -- this is key -- laughed loud. The publisher-businessman-philanthropist, who disappeared from his sailboat on Saturday, was a bold, exuberant bundle of energy, someone who never faded into the woodwork. You always knew when he was in the room. Heck, 'you always knew when he was in the room next door,' says Diana McLellan, who worked at his Washingtonian magazine for seven years."


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Lowly Ombudsman Now Poised To Be a Star
"We're beginning to see -- if not quite a golden age -- at least a flowering of the ombudsmanship movement," writes Mark Jurkowitz
in the Boston Phoenix. "In this post?Jayson Blair era, when news outlets are recognizing the greater need for transparency, the ranks of ombudsmen are expanding both nationally and globally. The big psychological breakthrough came when the Times, which had fiercely resisted the concept for years, finally agreed to hire Okrent for the job, in the wake of the Blair fiasco in 2003."


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'The Beginning of the End Game' for Tribune?
New York Times: "If the rupture on the Tribune board did lead to the sale of assets, it would represent a major redrawing of the map for the newspaper industry this year."


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'Click Fraud' Gets More Sophisticated
Wall Street Journal: "Hackers are using increasingly sophisticated computer programs to automate phony clicks on Internet ads and then hide the click fraud from detection. This threat, though still small, poses a challenge for Google, Yahoo and other Internet companies that sell pay-per-click ads and need to assure advertisers that they are paying for legitimate clicks from potential customers. A catalyst has been the explosion of 'bots' -- malicious software that hackers sneak onto thousands of home computers and network together into huge 'botnets.'"


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Iran Lifts Ban on Newspaper After Insulting Cartoon
"Iran's judiciary has lifted a ban on a state-run newspaper, which sparked violent protests last month by publishing a cartoon considered insulting by Iran's Azeri minority, a judiciary official said on Wednesday. 'The ban has been officially lifted and (the newspaper) "Iran" can be published on Thursday,' a justice ministry official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters."


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Austrian Journalist Hubertus Czernin, Who Helped Recover Stolen Nazi Art, Dies
Los Angeles Times: "Czernin, an Austrian journalist who was a key figure in efforts to return five multimillion-dollar paintings looted by Nazis in World War II to their rightful owner in Los Angeles, has died. The Gustav Klimt paintings were seized by Nazi officials in Vienna in 1938. Two pieces are famous portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, an art patron who helped finance Klimt's work, and three are landscapes. Czernin's reporting on the issue led to a series of articles about stolen works of art published in Vienna's Der Standard newspaper in 1998, when Czernin first wrote about the case of Bloch-Bauer and her paintings. He later wrote a book on the art restitution issue and used Klimt's 1907 gold portrait of Bloch-Bauer on the cover."