The New York Times has partnered with local public radio station WNYC to launch Schoolbook, a site that will cover news of New York City public and private schools -- with customized pages for all 2,500 of them. Schoolbook will be edited by the Times' Mary Ann Giordano, who oversees the paper's community news sites The Local, with reporting from WNYC senior reporter Beth Fertig. The site launches Sept. 7.

For all the years following the ad blackout that occurred on the fatal day, 9/11-themed content has aired on TV without advertising, signifying "a stigma for the marketing community, which has largely tried to avoid 9/11-themed specials and documentaries," writes Brian Sternberg. But this year, that stigma is dissolving, with companies like AT&T and General Motors already sponsoring content leading up to the tenth anniversary. "There is a different tone than in years past," says Harry Keeshan, exec VP-director of investment at Omnicom Group's PHD, in the article.

Roy Peter Clark honors a recent New York Daily News front page that brilliantly illustrates Wall Street's recent volatility -- an example of how tabloid newspapers continue to play a vital role in journalism. "The responsible tabloid (a near oxymoron?) does not ignore serious news, but chances are it will see that news in unconventional ways, either through the engine of bald outrage or low comedy," he writes, adding, "let's send up a cheer that there are still photographers and headline writers at tabloids who devote their lives to making news interesting, even laughable, especially on a day when …

"In the aftermath" of the Television Critic Association Tour, Tim Goodman handicaps the upcoming TV season and the state of the networks in this insightful, well-written piece. Here's Goodman on how NBC's Robert Greenblatt masterfully spun his "lowered-expectation mantra" on the network's fortunes: "'I don't know if in the next one, two, three years we're going to see any kind of significant lift,' he told USA Today. Is he good or what? Because he's completely right. And if he's not, he's the new king."

Josef Adalian's scorecard on summer TV's ratings hits and misses is in slideshow form so it goes down quick and easy. The shows themselves are organized into categories from HBO Sunday Dramas to Showtime's Monday Comedies. As a fan of the show, we're glad to see that "The Glee Project" got its own separate slide -- probably because it's an anomaly, with "pretty much disastrous" ratings that turned around to become "a legitimate hit by Oxygen standards." In fact, "among young folks 12-24, 'Glee Project' has risen a jaw-dropping 217 percent since its little-seen debut," Adalian writes.

Bravo's in the cross-hairs, as the suicide of a "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" husband has ignited renewed focus on the ways reality show producers increase a show's drama quotient. "The tactics used on reality shows are well-established, more than a decade into the popular genre," write Sharon Waxman and Tim Molloy. For the "Real Housewives" franchise, these tactics include "plying them [show participants] with alcohol to dampen inhibitions, manipulating situations to create conflict and editing scenes to heighten the drama." The article includes a link to a slideshow titled "Tragedy Strikes: A Dozen Reality TV Personalities Who Have …

Back in May, Liberty Media announced plans to acquire 70% of Barnes & Noble for $1.02 billion. Three months later, Liberty has ended up investing $204 million for a minority stake in the bookseller. Zacks Investment Research says the change in strategy apparently resulted from disagreement between the two parties on how to value the Nook e-reader in light of massive fluctuations in the stock market and ongoing economic volatility.

Howard Stern is taking credit for the death of CBS Radio's long-time Philly FM rock station WYSP, which is switching to a simulcast of sports-talk AM station WIP. Stern said the station couldn't survive because of his syndicated morning show's move to Sirius XM a few years back. Meanwhile, the station's final morning show host -- "Partridge Family" child star Danny Bonaduce -- boasted of his own prowess: "It's been made clear to me that I exceeded their [CBS'] expectations and they don't want to lose me," he told the Philadelphia Daily News' Dan Gross.

How successful has The Hollywood Reporter's redesign as a semi-consumer magazine to attract consumer advertising -- as CEO Richard Beckmans declared was his intention last year -- been? Well, recently Beckman fended off rumors that he was being demoted at HR's parent company Prometheus Global Media. And a look at the latest issue shows just one ad from a non-Hollywood-related product, Suntrust Financial Services, but it's written like a trade ad, beginning "In the film industry..." So we're not sure how the ad strategy is succeeding, but we gotta say that its …

Nielsen has began testing live TV viewing of two cable operators' iPad apps. Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems are the operators involved, along with two programming companies Nielsen declined to name. "Right now, iPad streaming is not having an impact on ratings," said Matt O'Grady, Nielsen's executive vice president of media audience measurement. "But we're taking [the project] dead seriously because our clients need to know what the viewing is on tablet and smartphone platforms."