Time Warner Cable, the normally placid No.2 U.S. cable operator, is getting ready for a fight with its programming partners at the cable networks and broadcasters over rising affiliate fees. In truth, TWC has always been ready for a fight with the programmers. This time, it wants to make the first move and get its 14 million subscribers behind it.

The New York cable operator is launching an ad campaign “on behalf of its customers” to target what it sees as unfair price demands by programmers. It argues that these price demands, which usually come around this time of year at the end of programming contracts, can sometimes be as much as 300 percent increases. TWC says programmers make the demands “secure in the knowledge that video distributors are the ones who have to pass those costs along to customers and take the blame.”

So what’s Time Warner Cable going to do about it? They’re going to launch a website — yes, a website with the catchy URL: www.rolloverorgettough.com. News Corp, Sinclair Broadcasting and cable networks must be quaking in their collective fee-hiking boots.

(For the uninitiated: One way for companies to make money from their shows is to charge cable operators for the privilege of distributing them. Programmers like to raise those fees every so often. When cable operators resist, shows you like have a way of being held for ransom and sometimes disappearing for a while.)

Time Warner Cable’s website will allow customers to give their feedback and will be supported by ads in newspapers, TV and the Web.

“We want them to know why we fight so hard on these issues - if we Roll Over, they pay the price. If we Get Tough, they may lose their favorite shows until we reach a reasonable agreement.” said TWC CEO Glenn Britt in the press release.

It’s not the first time Time Warner Cable has tried to be principled about not overpaying for content. You might remember the great “Why is SpongeBob crying?” campaign of Dec 2008 when Viacom and TWC fell out over rising carriage fees.

Britt’s easiest solution to avoid revisiting this issue every year might not be to build websites, but to buy content companies like its larger counterpart Comcast is trying to do with NBC Universal. If nothing else it will give TWC more leverage in negotiations with some content makers — and they’d have to play nice.

Dear Italian opposition member,

I thought of you often and with mixed-feelings at the Reuters Memorial Lecture 2009 in Oxford on Monday. You might have been too busy finding yourself and exploring the meaning of life, so I thought I would send you a sum-up of a truly remarkable event, which might give you some (Italian) food for thought.

It emerged that Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister,  is one of a kind — but you may hardly regard this as as news. He stands out so much in the grey political crowd that most UK people, even those not passionate about politics, would be able to identify him, an achievement of which Herman van Rompuy can only dream.

And it is only fitting that a man as colorful as Signor Berlusconi should have a suitable nemesis — someone every-inch as conspicuous: Carlo De Benedetti.

No, do not stare in disbelief at this, I am not telling you Ingegnier De Benedetti, the owner of the daily la Repubblica and weekly L’ Espresso, the editorial equivalents of a thorn in the side of the PM, is founding a party promising to save Italy.

Does this promise sound familiar? I should hope so, because this is your role — to provide the useful opposition to Mr Berlusconi’s policies.

You would have learnt a thing or two, dear Mr Opposition member, at the Reuters Memorial Lecture 2009. Do not get me wrong, it was not all facts, facts, facts: there was drama, a passionate defence of the “good old newspaper”, a just as passionate invective against the PM’s habit to speak against the press and a few good jokes in the bargain.

Italian opposition, wherever you may be, you should have taken notes: Mr De Benedetti made with surgical precision an analysis of how Mr Berlusconi’s media empire and his own political role makes up most of the Italian tv channels– in a country which watches plenty of TV.

Then he gave examples of how and why he thought the PM’s empire was detrimental to democracy and finally gave a clear picture of who should do what and it was not you, dear absentee Leftie Italian politician, it was La Repubblica.

That’s right, a newspaper. A specimen of a dying breed which we are told is going the way of the Dodo. The same newspaper you may find in your office every morning, probably in a neatly folded bunch including other big Italian names and even the FT.  One of the same newspapers against which Berlusconi issued writs for a combined 4 million euros. (The other newspaper is another left-wing publications, called L’Unita — check tomorrow in your newspaper fold, you may find that too. )

De Benedetti also defended the country’s image, refusing to draw a parallel with Russia and stressing the only threat an investigative journalist could possibly suffer in Italy would be “psychological.”

You may argue at this point Signor De Benedetti has got his own axe to grind; a judge has recently ordered Fininvest, the PM’s holding company, to compensate CIR, the holding controlled by the De Benedetti family, for having bribed a judge in the takeover batter for publisher Mondadori.

You may also say that his take on the role of newspapers is a tad sentimental and a tad inaccurate: You can find analysis on the Internet– something Signor Benedetti seems to think impossible. You could also argue that stoking up the battle with Berlusconi only serves his own interests — his newspapers are selling like hot-cakes only on the back of the PM’s sex and legal scandals.

You would have a point, but it would still not explain why you have not yet got your act together. Politics would be better served by an opposition able to rise above the cacophony and make a point, loudly, clearly, patiently, terrier-like. Just as Signor De Benedetti did last night.

When the lecture ended he was positively mobbed by well-clad,  glamorous Italians as well as less well-clad Brits. People wanted to hear more of his opinions. I was running late to catch my London train, so I beat a hasty retreat. I cannot tell you whether he was carried in triumph to the refreshments room. One thing I could tell you: he got my attention.

I wrote an analysis on Monday about the possibility that News Corp might take its news search results away from Google and list them on Microsoft’s Bing search engine instead. My conclusion: This one isn’t such a hot idea. Then I read John Gapper’s Financial Times item about how it *could* be a hot idea.

To recap, here’s how it would work.

• Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
• Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
• News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
• Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.

I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don’t care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers  the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it’s unlikely. If they don’t find it, they won’t seek it.

Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:

In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. …

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. …  If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?

In other words: You, Mr. or Ms. Newspaper Publisher, hate Google because you’re in a co-dependent relationship. You need Google, but Google hurts you too, so you want to escape from Google, but you can’t… But think about it this way: How much worse can it be? You’re shedding hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, and you call 25 percent ad revenue declines an improvement over how they were a few months ago. What’s NOT to lose? And if someone’s paying you more than you’re making now?

Not to add too many question marks to one blog post, but does this make Rupert Murdoch the smartest man in newspapers?

What’s in a name? The Internet pioneer formerly known as America Online, now known as AOL, will from next month be known as Aol. How do you pronounce that? We’re not sure but the idea seems to be make a break from the past without completely forgetting its roots.

AOL or Aol is, as you likely know, being spun-off from parent Time Warner on Dec 9 to once again be an independent company. It’s expected to have a market valuation in the $3 billion range, a tad smaller than the $163 billion market cap it had when it actually bought Time Warner back in 2000.

The company, will unveil its ‘Aol’ brand identity on Dec 10, the same day it starts trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ‘AOL’ ticker (but don’t let that confuse you).

Global brand and innovation consultancy Wolff Olins were the clever chaps who decided that losing all contact with the past and coming up with a completely brand new name might be a step too far. In fact, according to Wolff Olins CEO Karl Heiselman, the new logo (below) is “something bold and exciting that sets AOL apart.”

Click here to see a corporate video about the new brand identity.

Several media reporters wrote on Twitter on Thursday that this was one of the worst weeks in journalism, and it’s hard to argue with them. BusinessWeek is canning a third of its staff as Bloomberg gets ready to buy the magazine. The Associated Press is laying off 90 people as part of its effort to cut payroll costs by 10 percent this year.

And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.

The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That’s not as big a number as other places you’ve read about lately, but it’s still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)

Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don’t want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.

Why is this happening? Here’s what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:

As part of the work we’re doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.

The background: The Post’s web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.

With yet layoffs taking place at U.S. media outlets from Conde Nast to BusinessWeek to Time Inc., and advertising revenue showing little sign of rising anytime soon, I have a feeling that we’ll continue to read grim entries like this one.

Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.

Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in "Delete".

"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making," he argues. "It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events."

Mayer-Schonberger shared his theory on how to fight back against the digital panopticon with Reuters before giving a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Twitter’s been making a lot of changes lately. They’ve introduced new technologies like lists — which is kind of like a friend filter on Facebook — and a new way to share one another’s Tweets.

Usage on the company’s website has taken off like a rocket, up 1,703 percent year-over-year in September, and that doesn’t even count people who access the service through text messaging or specialized applications on their smartphones or computers.

But today was perhaps the most radical change of all. Twitter changed its cosmically deep and evocative signature query, “What are you doing?”

Now, Twitter wants to know, “What’s happening?”

No, it’s not an homage to the ’70s TV show by the same name.

Instead, as company co-founder Biz Stone explained in a post on the company’s blog on Thursday, Twitter wanted to re-invoke its vision of a “mobile status update.” And while this all may seem silly to some, Stone wrote that it is an attempt to recognize the larger importance of the Tweeters and their interactions.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

It probably won’t change Twitter, Stone says, but at the very least it might make the service easier to explain to your parents.

With media titans GE and Vivendi still negotiating a deal to bring cable operator Comcast into a mega-media joint venture, a management move at DirecTV is giving dealwatchers a fresh programming alternative.

Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew report the appointment of PepsiCo veteran Michael White (pictured below), who has no experience in pay TV, as DirecTV CEO is being read as a sign the company's parent, Liberty Media, just wants a baby-sitter until its sells the operation in the next couple of years.

Telecom leaders Verizon and AT&T approached Liberty earlier this year, they report. Both have cross-marketing deals with DirecTV and would leapfrog the rest of the market with the addition of DirecTV's subscriber base. But fears of insurmountable regulatory resistance put those talks on ice.

Liberty Media shareholders are set to vote this morning on a plan to split DirecTV from Liberty Entertainment -- a move that Wall Street believes could pave the way for a telephone company to put in a bid for DirecTV, leading to a similar bid for smaller rival Dish Network.

If Comcast gets its content pipeline connected to NBC Universal, the pressure on the telcos to boost subscribers could get them to test the regulatory waters again.

Remember Leon Hill, the controversial peddler of Facebook souls?

Not surprisingly, Hill said he has received a letter from Facebook’s lawyers informing him that his service selling Facebook friends ran afoul of the site’s terms of service and possibly a slew of trademark and computer fraud laws.

After some back and forth with the lawyers, Hill said that he has stopped offering one of his two Facebook marketing services and will no longer solicit friends for customers that have standard Facebook accounts. And he’s removed Facebook’s logos from his site.

“If they did want to take me to court over anything I’d probably be screwed, to be honest,” Hill said, citing Facebook’s deep pockets (He may also have been thinking about the $711 million in damages Facebook recently won in an anti-spam case).

But Hill hasn’t been scared away from Facebook entirely. He said that his firm uSocial will continue to sell fans to customers and companies that maintain a so-called Facebook Fan page.

That’s because the job of rounding up fans for a customer’s Facebook Fan page doesn’t actually require logging into their account, as was necessary for customers with personal Facebook pages. Instead it seems, uSocial will rely on a network of partners to solicit fans for customers by offering them the URL for a Facebook Fan page.

Whether Facebook considers the case closed is not entirely clear. Hill says he has not heard back from Facebook since he informed the company of his position a couple of weeks ago.

“Either they’ve given up or they’re trying to get a stronger case against me,” he says.

Facebook said in a statement that it will continue to enforce its policies and to protect the integrity of its site. “We’re pleased uSocial has agreed to comply.”

The flap over Sarah Palin's photo on the cover of Newsweek magazine is turning into a fray...

To use the words of TV detective Monk, "here's what happened..."

Newsweek put Palin on the cover ahead of the release of her book "Going Rogue."

Usually magazine covers before a big book launch are prized, but the former Republican vice presidential candidate didn't quite see it that way.

Palin criticized Newsweek for using the photo of her in athletic gear which was taken for an interview with a running magazine, and wrote on her Facebook page: "The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now."

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham responded with a statement of his own on the magazine's Web site: "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do,” he said. "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

Now Runner's World has decided to join in and put an Editor's Note on its Web site saying the Newsweek cover photo of Palin was shot exclusively for the August issue of the running magazine and those photos are "still under a one-year embargo."

So we called Newsweek and spokesman Frank De Maria said: "We purchased the photo from an agency and we were not aware of any issues with it."

A year since the election, Palin still manages to stir controversy -- and this wasn't even about her book...

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi (man holding guitar with Palin written on it in July)