Newsweek, the 80-year-old weekly pub that went digital-only last year, is for sale again by owner IAC, according to sources cited by Ted Johnson. "The price is expected to be negligible; what will matter more is the assumption of liabilities, although Newsweek is a much pared-down operation."

With its first airing Sunday night, HBO's Liberace biopic, "Behind the Candelabra," tracked the most viewers -- 2.4 million -- for an HBO Films premiere in almost 10 years.

"With less than two months to go before the make-or-break September issues close,"  major fashion magazines Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and InStyle tracked a slightly higher number of ad pages for the first half of the year, writes Erik Maza. Still, "from January to March, magazines had a total of 31,137 pages, down 4.8 percent, according to the Association of Magazine Media."

Hearst becomes "the latest publisher to join the native ad gold rush, with new products that will let advertisers run their messages into editorial real estate and, if desired, incorporate edit-produced content," writes Lucia Moses. "The units can run across Hearst brands, among them Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire,  and the content can run outside Hearst, if the client wishes."

"With this month's hire of online ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director," the New York Times is becoming more open to "exchange and automated media selling environments," though its execs still have issues with programmatic activity, writes David Kaplan. "There's more work to do in balancing sales channels and buying mechanics."

Jason Lynch chronicles the rapid demise and death of NBC’s “Smash,” from its hot start to its final episode buried on Memorial Day weekend just 15 months later.  Among the problems: Karen McPhee was no Megan Hilty and “Hit List” was no “Bombshell.”  So in the end “Smash” turned out to be no smash. But then again, notes Lynch, neither did this season’s version of an NBC savior, “Go On.”   That burden now shifts to “The Michael J. Fox Show” for 2013-14 as “Smash”…”limps to its final curtain call” this Sunday.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes has sent a memo to his subordinates at the leading cable news network. He sent this memo to his staff yesterday in connection with the federal investigation into an alleged leak to Fox News reporter James Rosen. The memo's a masterpiece. For all those who wonder what it is about Ailes that endears his people to him - and that makes him such a good interviewee for any media reporter lucky enough to get an audience with him - just read this.

Turner Broadcasting System chief research officer Jack Wakshlag said the TV industry is creating complicated, useless “Frankenmetrics” to measure viewer habits for linear television, online video and VOD. He counters that three questions would give advertisers and content providers the answers they want. “There are three things we have to start with — how many, how often and how long,” Wakshlag said at an TV industry conference. Get the answers and he believes a company can calculate share, reach and frequency and time spent.

Discovery Network is looking to snare a young, male-centric audience online with the launch of its free, ad-supported video network, TestTube. The video network was the brainchild of Revision3, an Internet television studio acquired by Discovery Networks last year. "If you had to think about what Discovery would look like if you invented it today for the millennial generation, TestTube is that image," J.B. Perrette, chief digital officer of Discovery Communications, says.

"It's basically outright warfare going on," says one source. "None of us wanted to be part of the Philly.com ship of entertainment and sex." But the site remains in "power because they still control our main portal to the world. Nobody knows about Inquirer.com." The tension is longstanding. In March, the creation of the Inquirer.com and PhillyDailyNews.com sites gave both papers handsome websites and the online editorial control they had long been denied. But Philly.com conspicuously fails to advertise either site, and their peculiar structure suggests that they may have been built to benefit Philly.com to the papers' detriment: Newspaper …