Food for thought: Appearing on "The View," TV journalist Julie Chen told a  story about how she had plastic surgery "early in her career to give her a Caucasian-style double eyelid," at the urging of "media honchos who advised that she could not succeed with Asian eyes," writes Maureen O'Connor. The "View" ladies' response? Basically, "You go, girl" -- or, that "nobody blames Chen for 'giving in'" to the need to conform to white standards of beauty, writes O'Connor. Still, she finds the story "depressing," since Chen had to "permanently erase... [her] ethnicity with a surgeon's scalpel, and struggle with …

Madison Square Garden Co. is putting its music-TV channel Fuse on the block, with JPMorgan set to explore offers. Price for the deal could be around the $300 million to $400 million mark, according to an analyst quoted in this post.

Maxim, "the lifestyle title that once defined men's magazines in the U.S.," has been sold to Darden Media Group for an undisclosed sum in a "deal expected to close by the fourth quarter of this year," writes Lucia Moses. Currently the title includes 15 international editions and digital extensions, but Darden -- "formed earlier this year by Cal Darden Sr., a retired United Parcel Service senior vp" -- expects to "extend the brand across cable, radio and music platforms," writes Moses.

Breaking a two-year trend in which total U.S. television households declined, the just-released Nielsen DMA rankings for the 2013-14 season show an uptick of 1,637,050 for a total of 115,810,740 homes. For some reason, people are flocking to Lima, Ohio.

Yesterday, 9/11, was a day for remembering -- and sometimes blundering with media messages. For example, Esquire's website had perhaps the worst mixup, wrongly headlining a photo of a tragic scene from that day in 2001. Lots of companies tried to send 9/11 memorial messages via Twitter. "General response to these messages is mixed: some see co-opting 9/11 as the epitome of tastelessness while others note that none of these messages, with... [some exceptions], are directly selling any particular product," writes Patrick Coffee.

The Roanoke [Va.] Times laid off 31 employees, including five staffers in the newsroom, according to a source cited by Andrew Beaujon.

Investing in CBS is the best major media stock buy you can make,  according to the analysis of this Bloomberg post. Why is the channel doing so well? Not only is CBS  "the most-watched TV network in the U.S.," its digital and transmission fee strategies have paid off.  "Large audiences for 'NCIS,' 'The Big Bang Theory,' and National Football League games have given New York-based CBS the clout, like ESPN and Fox News, to demand higher fees from pay-TV services such as Time Warner Cable while allowing the company to sell digital rights to distributors including Amazon.com Inc."

Gannett's USA Today is doubling its issue price, from $1 to $2, at the end of the month -- the first price increase in five years."But it's a risky move because many readers will balk, further reducing USAT's circulation volume, once the nation's largest," according to the Gannett Blog. "That would cut even more into print advertising revenue, which management presumably hopes to offset through the higher cover price and more digital ad sales."

Gannett CEO Gracia Martore just released a new social media policy for the company's employees. Guidelines include “never post anything you would not be willing [to] publish or broadcast," and this warning: violations “may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.”

First came Riptide, a just-released “oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, from 1980 to the present.” But while the project was steered by distinguished groups -- Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on The Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Nieman Journalism Lab -- its "white male perspective" missed a key point, asserts Andrea Peterson. "Digital advances, particularly the spread of the Internet and the rise of blogging, gave a powerful new way for voices marginalized in the elite journalism sphere to spread their stories." Peterson expounds on that point in this interesting post.