Citizen-J site NowPublic has laid off several members of its dozen-person staff, paidContent has been told, confirming portions of an earlier post by Reportr.net. In an e-mail message to paidContent, NowPublic’s founder Leonard Brody said that, contrary to the earlier report that the site was headed for its demise, NowPublic…

The Huffington Post is launching a “Twitter edition” that is intended to serve as an extension and a distinct entity from the main news and opinion site, the company told paidContent. The primary purpose is to harness the social networking aspects of the site to create a real-time news service…

Longtime Digg CEO Jay Adelson is stepping down, saying in a blog post that went live just now that he is “ready to incubate some new business ideas.” He’s being replaced temporarily by founder Kevin Rose. Adelson, who has been CEO since 2005, emphasizes that he’s leaving because the site…

Nearly two months after Google’s rocky introduction of ‘Buzz,’ the sharing service remains under fire from privacy advocates; eleven congressmen have written a letter to the chairman of the FTC urging the agency to investigate complaints about the service—and, perhaps more ominously for Google (NSDQ: GOOG), also look into the…

A year after the Big Three car makers looked like they could wind up as just the Big Two, auto ad spending has recovered somewhat, and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are expected to shift more dollars to online. Huffington Post president and chief revenue officer Greg Coleman is sensing…

The NYTCo’s local content efforts are getting a quick boost from hyperlocal newswire Fwix. In a sense, the deal with Fwix can buttress the NYTimes.com’s New York metro area blogs program, The Local, which it began last year. The deal enables the distribution of Fwix’s technology and hyperlocal content across…

It took just two years for Gabe Rivera to have four verticals, including tech “front page” Techmeme, running off his algorithm for discovering and highlighting news. The fourth site, BallBug, launched for opening day in 2006. It took four years to add one—Mediagazer, a site launching today to aggregate news…

Arkayne, which makes a plug-in designed to automatically add related links to web pages, has raised $1 million in an angel round. The plug-in scans all of the posts on a website in order to automatically suggest related items that a visitor should read. A version for bloggers with “moderate…

iFollo, a site that lets members share stories about their run-ins with celebrities, has raised $1 million in a funding round from real estate investor Robert Trump, who is also a backer of game publisher ZeniMax Media. On iFollo, anybody can post an anecdote about meeting a celebrity and rate…

For some critics, the lack of participation from content companies at yesterday’s iPad launch threw some cold water on predictions for how the new device could help the media business regain revenues lost to the web. But if you looked hard enough, publishers were there and, more importantly, some have…

MSNBC.com is really getting serious about this whole breaking news thing: First it took over management of the @BreakingNews twitter feed from the company BNO News late last year, and now, it is buying the BreakingNews.com domain name from its current owner, to build its real time news delivery service.…

Update: Jan 28, 2010: The total investment for the major stake is about $4 million, according to an SEC filing by Loud3r. It is the year of low-cost content creators and aggregators. In that vein, Loud3r, a company that had to reboot earlier this year after some early missteps, has…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is integrating with Facebook in a big way, rolling out Facebook Connect across its properties worldwide. Yahoo already had some limited tie-ins with Facebook; for instance, its new home page lets users edit their statuses on Facebook directly from Yahoo.com. However, the new relationship goes much further,…

The NYTimes.com will close the curtain on its homepage aggregation tool, Times Extra, on Dec. 1, a year after it began beta testing the feature. Although Times Extra is still being promoted on the main homepage, the alternate home page has a note telling users that they’ll still be able…

Jim Brady, who has been hired to create a local Washington, D.C., news site for the company that owns Politico, says he has a clear idea of what he wants his new venture to be: replicable, digital and with a web-only focus. Brady, a former web editor for the Washington…

Updated: The full amount Hot Potato raised is $1.4 million, per an SEC filing. Hot Potato, an online startup that hopes to connect people watching live events in real-time, has raised $1 million in a funding round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka reports. Tech…

Web series production companies are struggling to find sponsorship deals to sustain themselves, so how do the sites trying to make a business out of reviewing the shows (and the production process behind them) have a chance at staying alive? By banding together to create a bigger brand that—hopefully—attracts more…

Perhaps the central struggle for publishers is figuring out a way to get their content out as widely as possible while also monetizing some of that distribution. In an effort to provide some order to the “link economy,” the Fair Syndication Consortium has created some new guidelines for how content…

News video-sharing and clipping service Redlasso has relaunched, giving bloggers access to video and audio clips from over 100 TV stations. The company secured licensing deals with *Meredith* Broadcasting, Journal Broadcasting Local Television, Gray Television and Barrington Broadcasting; RedLasso brokered its first new licensing deal with Fox, for content from…