NBC and Microsoft are "getting an online divorce," according to the headline on this post, which reports that NBC is set to buy back Microsoft's stake in the MSNBC website and rebrand it NBCNews.com. Howard Kurtz cites "people familiar with the matter," and says an announcement is due soon, but concedes "there could always be a last-minute snag." And in fact an NBC source says negotiations are proceeding, but "there is no deal." On the other side, though, "website employees have already been briefed on the plans [to sell] and how they will be affected," writes …

In "an unusual marriage of mobile check-ins and offline ad units," Foursquare is helping local Baltimore magazine Urbanite and radio station WTMC sell more ads.  The promo, a social media game called "The Great Baltimore Check-In," combines check-ins with "print ads, website promotions and radio plugs," writes Christopher Heine. The campaign was tested last year and was "evidently successful enough" to be repeated for various retailers through Sept. 30.

A day after NBC's previous head of drama programming, Laura Lancaster, was let go, NBC  named Pearlena Igbokwe as her replacement, effective immediately. Igbokwe was previously at Showtime, where she worked for 20 years. Lancaster will act as a consultant to ease the transiton.

Consumer perceptions of  TV news hit a new low in the latest Gallup poll: 21% of respondents reported having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in that form of news, down from 27% in 2011, and a significant crash "from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in TV news in 1993," writes Jim Romenesko. Newspapers do slightly better, with a 25% confidence rate, though still down from 28% last year. Those numbers are just part of a a "broader trend" in which "Americans have grown more negative about the media in recent years, as they …

Despite its new availability on the ever-popular iPad, Next Issue, the service offering digital subscriptions to a variety of mags for one monthly fee, may not deliver the upsurge in circulation publishers want, argues Mathew Ingram. Why not? For one, the cable TV or Netflix-like subscription model "doesn’t really fit with the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism," writes Ingram. "If Next Issue were to pull individual articles out of its magazines and collect them based on popularity or some other algorithm — or made it …

Lisa Gersh, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia President and COO since May 2011, has been promoted to CEO -- a position most recently held by Wenda Harris Millard in 2008-2009, and before that by Martha Stewart herself.

NBC's EVP of drama programming, Laura Lancaster, has been let go from the company -- a victim of the network's struggles "to break out of fourth place in the ratings in recent years," and the lack of a breakout drama, Todd Cunningham reports. "NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt came from Showtime, and could look to the cable network for a replacement."

Another day, another carriage fee fight. This time it's between Viacom and DirecTV, and it could lead to a potential blackout as soon as tonight. Viacom reportedly is looking to raise fees by 30% -- or more than $1 billion -- according to DirectTV, while Viacom claims the current deal offers "way below market rates." "Industry executives and analysts have in recent months predicted that Viacom would encounter challenging negotiations like this because of ratings softness," writes William Launder.

Buzzmedia has bought Spin Media, which publishes the 27-year-old music magazine Spin, for an undisclosed sum-- a move that "could expand Spin’s reach online but also calls into question its future as a print publication," according to Ben Sisario. Buzzmedia owns  music and celebrity blogs.

Score one for Fox, CBS, and NBC, who got "their first win in the legal battle over Dish Network's AutoHop service by ruling that the case should be tried in California as requested" by the broadcasters, writes Katy Bachman. In hopes of being tried in New York, "where a previous case involving DVRs could give AutoHop legal precedent," Dish had filed a suit there, but parts of that suit were dismissed. However, New York will be the venue for the ABC suit against Dish, because that's where the broadcaster filed.