With just a dash of disdain, David Carr concedes that metrics-driven media is fundamentally reshaping journalism. But, whether the shift is ultimately good or bad for reporters -- and the publishers than employ them -- is anyone’s guess. “Depending on your perspective, the trend could be a long overdue embrace of the realities of the publishing landscape, or one more step down the road to perdition,” Carr writes in The New York Times. “Just because something is popular does not make it worthy, but ignoring audience engagement is a sure route to irrelevance.” 

Viacom is teaming up officially with blogging platform Tumblr to create co-branded campaigns for shows and events, starting with the MTV Movie Awards. Reportedly, Viacom is the first company to have such a formal agreement with the social platform, writes Sam Thielman.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing changes to state rules that would "put the onus on Comcast to prove that its mega-merger with TWC is in the public interest" and give New York state's Public Service Commission "much greater oversight of the proposed cable combo, making it almost impossible to finalize," according to sources cited by New York Post reporters.

The U.S. pay TV market is declining, with more than a quarter of a million users of cable, satellite or fiber services pulling the plug in 2013, according to an SNL Kagan report. "If the slide continues in the coming years, that means 2012 was the industry’s high point," writes Edmund Lee.

AMC's"The Walking Dead" will expand its reach beyond cable to broadcast this fall, with each new episode appearing on MyNetworkTV one night a week. "This first off-net deal for [the top-rated show]comes at the end of its fourth season as it hits 51 episodes," writes Michael O'Connell.

CBS filed an initial public offering for its Outdoor Americas division in a bid to raise as much as $560 million by selling 20 million shares for $26 to $28 apiece. The parent company will still own 83% afterward. "About 47% of the company’s billboards and transit displays are in New York while 13% are in Los Angeles,  according to today’s filing," writes James Callan.

The timing couldn't be better for the Weather Channel's just-launched morning show, "AMHQ," according to John Swanburg. "The weather hasn’t just been bad this winter—it’s been Book of Revelations bad." And "no other news organization has the Weather Channel’s ability to cover the nasty stuff." Still, "even in these perilous weather times, there are stretches when the worst things on the five-day forecast are some partly cloudy skies." Swanburg looks at the direction the channel is taking, including some dubious decisions like naming winter storms.

Data-driven journalism is booming, with news organizations "pouring money into recruiting talent and expanding their menu of stories derived from a mix of sophisticated number crunching, explanatory narratives and interactive graphics that weren't possible in the old days of print," writes Roger Yu. Besides the fame of Nate Silver, known for "his eerily accurate prediction of President Obama's victory in the 2012 election," other reasons for this trend include the relatively cheaper cost of "software that processes data and turn them into attractive graphics," as well as the fact that "cloud technology — storing information on remote servers …

Despite rumors to the contrary, The New York Times is not for sale, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper's fourth-generation publisher and chairman, said at a Media Matters event at Harvard University. "Rather than looking for an exit strategy, Sulzberger said he and [cousin and vice-chairman Michael] Golden are grooming six members of the fifth generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to eventually take over the company once he retires, a development the chairman hastened to add isn't coming anytime soon," writes Leon Lazaroff.

Data from a new Nielsen/InPowered study "raises serious questions over whether native advertising threatens to upend th[e] trust publishers have earned with their audience," writes Steve Rubel. In the study, "85% of consumers said they seek out "trusted content" [third-party articles by journalists] and 67% said it drives their buying decisions," creating  "a 15% lift in purchase intent vs.... only 8% for branded content on company/product web sites."