MMG Worldwide and Y Partnership, both agencies that specialize in travel advertising, will join forces under the name MMGY Global. Financial terms were not disclosed. The newly merged agency will be headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., previously home to MMG, and operate offices in Orlando, Fla., (the former base for Y Partnership), Denver and New York. All employees are expected to stay on, and the new agency will continue to work on accounts that have been handled by each agency separately, as well as clients they both shared: Delaware North Companies and Hilton Worldwide.

Here's another trend story, this time detailing the high programming costs currently plaguing cable channels. "No longer able to simply stock their channels with reruns of 'Seinfeld,' 'Golden Girls' and old movies, cable programmers have ratcheted up spending in the last five years to distinguish themselves with marquee franchises such as ESPN's "Monday Night Football" or provocative original shows including... FX's 'Sons of Anarchy," writes Meg James. Still, all this spending on programming -- for example, TNT's jump of 55% since 2006 to a cool $1.1 billion  -- seems to be worth it, as "cable channels remain the most profitable …

As we mentioned up above, while print may be dying, digital content is taking its place -- and finally newspapers are learning to get paid for their content. For example, major publisher Gannett is gearing up for a big rollout of digital paywalls next year, "giving readers only limited free access to content," according to Jim Hopkins, reporting on CEO Gracia Martore's speech to  Wall Street stock analysts. This "model will be closely watched across the industry because [Gannett is] the nation's No. 1 newspaper publisher. It proceeds cautiously in new initiatives, so a move toward companywide paywalls would …

Print may be dead (or dying), but long live content. That's the rallying cry for magazine publishers like Condé Nast, which is actively trying to diversify its revenue stream. “A year or so we took the word ‘publications’ off the building and took it off of our business cards,” Drew Schutte, the company's chief integration officer, tells Andrew Phelps in a Nieman Journalism Lab post. “There was this final commitment to the fact that we are a company that makes quality content…and we’re going to put that on whatever medium it makes sense.” To that end, Condé Nast created the …

Is the New York Times' new Election 2012 iPad app the first-ever Times product to aggregate news stories from other sources? We're not sure, but Joshua Benton thinks it's "noteworthy" that "one of the current top items in the app isn’t a New York Times story at all," but "a one-sentence summary of a[n] L.A. Times story on Sarah Palin."  He continues, "I can’t think of anything else as linkbloggy that the Times has ever done. It’s telling this is happening on the national politics beat, which is both a space where the Times invests heavily in coverage and …

Shape magazine's mobile sweepstakes, in which readers swiped barcodes in the November issue for entry, garnered a record 400,000 entries, according to its campaign partner, mobile marketing company Nellymoser.   The takeaway for magazine publishers:  “'sweepstakes and discounts really increase the response and participation rate' compared to other uses of the action codes,"  writes Ioanna Opide, in part quoting Roger Matus, Nellymoser EVP.

TV ad spending will continue to increase, topped only by online ads as a growth category, according to forecasters speaking at the UBS global media and communications conference. TV's growth rate may be as high as 6.7%, said Vincent Létang, executive vice president and director for global forecasting at the Magnaglobal unit of Mediabrands. That's among the top points covered in this detailed report on the three-day conference that continues today.  In other news, AMC, known for critically acclaimed scripted series like "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," is mulling a move to program more unscripted reality series to cut costs. …

The Chicago Sun-Times is adding a metered paywall (which, like the New York Times' wall, goes up after 20 free articles per month) for most of its content. Among the exceptions: the movie reviews of Roger Ebert, who has criticized such paywalls in the past. Yearly digital-only subscriptions will be $77.87; monthly fees, $6.99. In other paywall news, MediaNews Group will offer free Web content on Mondays for three of its California newspapers that previously went behind paywalls in August. That's because they're only publishing digital editions on Mondays, the day when print issues for Vacaville's

Verizon is talking with potential programmers for a Web service that will stream TV shows and movies, to be launched -- possibly next year -- in markets other than those served by its broadband and TV package FIOs. "While a limited package of TV shows and movies is unlikely to have an immediate impact on cable sales, the launch of an online video service by a major company like Verizon will only add to the uneasiness in the pay TV business," writes Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew.

CNBC Europe and CNBC Asia have merged to form CNBC International. "We will achieve better overall coordination with a single P&L focused on one set of common goals and objectives," wrote President Mark Hoffman in a company-wide memo announcing the change. Satpal Brainch, President and Managing Director, CNBC Asia Pacific, will run CNBC International.