The Media Mob

Danny Shea of the Huffington Post is reporting that David Gregory has been chosen as the next moderator of NBC News' Meet the Press.

Mr. Gregory's name has been reportedly on a short list of possible replacements for the esteemed position since Tim Russert passed away of a sudden heart attack this past June.

When reached by Media Mob, an NBC News spokesperson said that the network "has nothing to announce."

Likewise, when contacted by phone, Mr. Gregory’s agent, Richard Leibner of N.S. Bienstock, said he could neither confirm nor deny the report.

It's been a busy week for Sean Penn. In theaters, the actor is generating Oscar buzz for his starring role in Milk and on the newsstand, he wrote the cover story for The Nation. If the Mr. Penn has his way, he just might bring an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

In the December 15th issue of the magazine, Mr. Penn interviews Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro, an assignment that seems designed to infuriate his critics on the right who despise the actor for his 2004 and 2005 fact-finding trips to Iraq and Iran, his attention-grabbing attempts to save survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and his friendship with Cindy Sheehan.  read more »

Apparently, Britney Spears took a stroll on the streets of New York last night while her newsless, yet somehow touching documentary For the Record aired on MTV.

She updated her Twitter just a few minutes ago:

britneyspears I enjoyed a relaxing walk last night around NYC. Even though it was raining, it was a lot of fun! ~Britney

This might actually be the real Britney too. Her assistant Lauren, usually signs off on posts she writes, and Brit has been updating as herself for awhile now.

Last week, Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, announced when and where candidates could announce their interest in replacing him as organizer of the New York Tech Meetup. So far, several candidates have stepped forward, including Greg Magarshak, founder of social media company Lucky Apps; Joe DiPasquale, founder of CollegeWikis.com and self-described Meetup fanatic; Rich Hecker, an organizer of Bootstrapper.com and co-founder of The Connectors Group, a new angel investment group, and Groupable.com, a site that works a lot like Meetup; Joshua Sherman, an organizer of Personal Democracy Forum and founder of BuycottForChange.org; among others.

What does the tech community think so far? The blogs are abuzz.  read more »

Via Keith Gessen's tumblr, a video of New Yorker literary critic James Wood doing something no one could have guessed he knows how to do.

What else do you call a day when the comedic actress and writer is seemingly everywhere all at once?

First up, Vanity Fair, which enlisted The Times' Maureen Dowd to profile Ms. Fey, whom the magazine's cover trumpets as "A New American Sweetheart!" (Punctuation theirs.) The magazine's Web site also features one of those behind-the-scenes videos of Ms. Fey's photo shoot that all magazines' Web Editors are convinced Internet users love. (In an example of too-weird-to -ignore/too-geeky-to -explicate life imitating art, a very Maureen Dowd-like character played by Christine Lahti once wrote a profile of the protagonists' of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show, like Ms. Fey's 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show very much like Ms. Dowd's launchpad, Saturday Night Live.)

Ms. Dowd's story was dutifully picked up by The Daily News, The New York Post (whose Page Six also had an item about Ms. Fey today), and The Associated Press, and TMZ. (Apparently a lot of people have been wondering why Ms. Fey has a scar on her face.)  read more »

Today CBS News executives named Nancy Cordes as the network's new Congressional Correspondent. Previously, Ms. Cordes served as the network's Transportation and Consumer Safety Correspondent. According to the press release, she will continue to cover both beats.

More from the release:

Prior to joining CBS News, Cordes was an ABC News correspondent based in New York (2005-07), where she reported for all ABC News broadcasts and covered many major news stories, including Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and the 2004 election. Before that, she was a Washington-based correspondent for NewsOne, the affiliate news service of ABC News (2003-04). Prior to joining ABC News, Cordes was a reporter for WJLA-TV Washington, D.C. (1999-2003), where she covered the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon, the 2000 Presidential race, the D.C.-area sniper attacks, and peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia. She began her career as a reporter for KHNL-TV Honolulu (1995-97).

Critics are falling all over themselves to laud Gus Van Sant's Milk. Some seem to love one scene in particular:

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

One of the first scenes in 'Milk' is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase 'angel-headed hipster' comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events.

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On the eve of Thanksgiving, The New York Times' Glenn Collins sat down with Gael Greene, New York Magazine's dismissed "Insatiable Critic."

Mr. Collins called Ms. Greene, "The priestess of radicchio, beurre blanc and arugula," but also noted that the critic had "become an attenuating natural resource at New York since giving up her weekly chief reviewer’s role eight years ago."

It wasn't always so. Ms. Greene was once so closely associated with the magazine that she appeared in a 1986 television commercial touting New York.

Ms. Greene appeared in the above commercial with theater critic John Simon (himself let go by New York's editor Adam Moss in 2005) film critic David Denby (who left the magazine in 1998 to become a critic at The New Yorker), and Dan Dorfman (who left the magazine in 1986 and went on to become a commentator for CNBC and a controversial writer for Money, followed by a stint at The New York Sun).  read more »

Twitter stepped into the spotlight this week, not only as a charity organizer and possible advertising goldmine during the holidays, but as a legitimate news aggregator.

Lots of tech blogs have been touting Twitter's potential since its inception, but on-the-ground reports from the Mumbai terror attacks put the idea in motion. In some cases, Twitterers were able to be on the scene long before TV and newspaper reporters could get there.

CNN reports that an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

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