Comcast Cable President Neil Smit said the company's use of video-on-demand would help it compete against Netflix. He also touted another of Comcast's competitive advantages: that it offers "new content," while Netflix's strongest selling point is its inventory of older movies and TV shows. Smit also said he had seen no signs of "cord-cutting."

Gannett Co. is currently experimenting with a paid-content model for three of its newspaper Web sites, and will probably test out more before making a final decision on companywide use of paywalls, says CEO Craig Dubow.

AOL and the Huffington Post closed its $315 million acquisition deal and announced it would be be both hiring and firing employees. Joining the editorial team will be writers formerly from such pubs as the New York Times (Trymaine Lee), the New York Daily News (Michael McAuliff), and the very new The Daily (Jon Ward).

Proving that yes, you can survive in a bare-bones journalism start-up -- if you've identified a potential audience clearly in need of your product -- is this case history of how enterprising Associated Press reporter Dan Robrish started The Elizabethtown Advocate a year ago. Now the 600-circulation, six-page broadsheet in Pennsylvania is nearing profitability.

"Forget about the typical website: Go mobile first." That's the advice media consultant Frédéric Filloux gives to two French journalists "about to resuscitate a fairly well-know trade journalism brand, planning to go mostly online - and marginally on dead trees."By creating a mobile app for a niche audience, these entrepreneurs can even charge for content, adds Filloux in a fascinating -- and, we think, practical -- case history.

Glamour magazine's new iPad app is a sort of advertorial with interactive features. The four-episode series, "Glamour Girls," allows viewers to pause the action, "Shop the Looks," and go directly to Gap.com to buy a character's outfit. "The idea behind the series was to integrate a sponsor's products seamlessly into Glamour content -- something far more difficult to do in the print magazine for both logistical and ethical reasons," writes Jeremy Peters on The New York Times' Media Decoder blog.

For all those who think Charlie Sheen was just auditioning for his own reality show, latest news is that "cameras are already rolling" for a Sheen show on Mark Cuban's HDNet. According to HuffPo, Cuban says Sheen will decide the format -- whether reality, talk show or some other weird amalgam. We can't wait.

In light of recent "high-profile disputes between broadcasters and cable providers" over retransmission consent -- like last fall's two-week-plus Fox blackout on Cablevision -- the Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to examine its retrans negotiation rules, according to the L.A. Times.But will the reforms already proposed in the new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking go far enough? Probably not, since they fail to include any "binding arbitration or interim carriage requirements that would keep signals on the air even if the parties couldn't come to an agreement," according to Gigaom's Ryan Lawler.

With a jump of 5.3% in 2010 revenue, WPP enjoyed a solid rebound from a dismal -8% downturn the year before -- a trend that was likewise echoed by a 6.4% uptick for Omnicom and 8.3% for Publicis. All that growth was at least partly due to companies "flush with cash but reluctant to commit to longer-term investments [who] spent heavily on advertising in 2010," according to Reuters' Kate Holton.

CBS just announced it has bought the online video search service Clicker.com, which launched roughly a year and a half ago. Clicker, which allows viewers to find videos on the Web and connected devices, should make a good fit with CBS' TV.com, which includes content from free and paid video sources and searches for live and mobile content, according to Gigaom's Ryan Lawler.As part of the acquisition, CBS Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone will become president of CBS, replacing the outgoing Neil Ashe.