Welcome to the 32nd episode of “The Mediatwits,” the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift’s Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. We’re back from our holiday break and ready to tackle more media news. The big news of the new year is a new CEO (again) at Yahoo, this time PayPal president Scott Thompson will try his hand at turning around the Net pioneer. But most pundits say the odds are long on Thompson being successful because he has little discernible experience running a media or advertising company.
Our special guest this week is Edelman PR exec/pundit Steve Rubel, who is working on a new e-book via Tumblr called “The Clip Report,” where he will give visual takes on the future of media in scrapbook-style. And finally, we turn to one new prominent Twitter user, @rupertmurdoch, and what appeared to be a new verified account for his wife, @wendi_deng, that ended up being a fake. What does that mean for the credibility of the Twitter platform and its lack of transparency in verifying accounts?
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio’s Music Alley.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
Intro
1:00: Mark’s visit to Disneyland and the MouseWait app
2:10: Rafat is all work and no play over holidays
3:05: Rundown of topics on the show
Yahoo’s new CEO
4:00: Yahoo hires Scott Thompson from PayPal; is he the right guy?
6:10: Could Thompson secretly be a media genius?
7:50: Rafat: Why should we care about Yahoo?
Steve Rubel’s Clip Book
10:10: Special guest Steve Rubel
12:45: Rubel: I share some intelligence publicly and some internally at Edelman
15:50: Rubel will look at 5 companies that control content online
18:20: People are relying more on visual information, infographics
20:50: Rubel: Two tiers of content: quick-bite snacks and in-depth long-form
25:45: Richard Sambrook’s role at Edelman PR teaching companies to run newsrooms
Fake @Wendi_Deng
28:15: Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter, but his wife’s verified account was fake
29:10: Does this hurt Twitter’s credibility?
30:10: Twitter has a bad track record on being transparent
More Reading
Yahoo Stakes Future on Accountant-Engineer Who Is Unproven in Media at Bloomberg
New Yahoo CEO (And BoSox Fanboy) Scott Thompson Speaks: It’s Still Early Innings at AllThingsD
Yahoo Finds New CEO at PayPal at Wall Street Journal
The Key to Yahoo’s Long-Term Health? Data, Says New CEO at AdAge
Steve Rubel’s Clip Report
Trash your old media eulogies, The Clip Report details its future at the Next Web
Why Twitter’s verified account failure matters at GigaOm
The Case of the Unfortunate Underscore: How Twitter Verified the Fake Wendi Over the Real Wendi at AllThingsD
How did fake Wendi Deng slip through the Twitter net? at the Guardian
Weekly Poll
Don’t forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about how Scott Thompson will do as Yahoo CEO:
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+
