Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:

TV Networks Fight Drug-Ad Measure (WSJ)
“Advertising costs are deductible to any company as a business expense. The plan being considered by Rep. Rangel’s Ways and Means committee would eliminate the deduction with respect to prescription drug advertising,” writes Martin Vaughan.

Big media seek 21st century business models (Reuters)
“Media moguls at this week’s Sun Valley conference have spent as much time discussing how to reconfigure business models disrupted by the Web as they have worrying about the weak economy,” reports Yinka Adegoke.

Zucker Says Marketplace Has Reached Bottom (B&C)
Ben Grossman writes: “NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker said Thursday that while the overall marketplace is still challenged, he thinks it may have bottomed out. ‘It’s still quite uncertain and we don’t really see the full recovery we are all hoping for,’ he said.  ’It’s still tough out there, but I think we have seen a bottom.’”

The Financial Times and New York Times make further syndication deals (Editors Weblog)
“Both the Financial Times and the New York Times have announced their international syndications will include additional countries. The FT has confirmed content sharing arrangements with publications based in Turkey, France, and South Korea,” writes Christie Silk.

NBC Reveals Displeasure as U.S.O.C. Unveils Plan (NYT)
Richard Sandomir writes: “The head of NBC Sports said Thursday that he broke off talks in April about combining the Olympic channel that it partly owns with the one being planned by the United States Olympic Committee.”

AP Works Toward Universal Online News Format (Mediapost)
Gavin O’Malley writes: “The Associated Press, along with fellow non-profit The Media Standards Trust, on Friday unveiled a digital news “microformat” to effectively encapsulate the content and key meta-data of every news story online.”

In other news:

• Detroit Free Press exempt from latest round of Gannett layoffs (Crain’s)
• AOL: More Layoffs Inevitable (Business Insider)

Just about everyone has thrown a thought or two by now into the great bubbling pot of stew that is the future of journalism. Latest in line is Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.

Mayer, one of Google’s earliest employees who gets reams of newsprint in Silicon Valley for her cupcake spreadsheets and love of Oscar de la Renta, spoke before a Senate subcommittee on a future of journalism hearing on Wednesday.

Apart from defending Google, which has come under attack from the news industry — most notably the Associated Press — for profiting from content, Mayer gave some tips on how journalists should write their stories.

Mayer talked about something she called the “atomic unit of consumption” — a news article rather than an entire newspaper, much like one song downloaded digitally instead of buying an entire album. Here’s an excerpt from her prepared testimony:

The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule.

Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper’s homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.

Mayer then went on to suggest that reporters and editors need to think differently about how they write for online:

Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication.

To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

So wait, now the big bad wolf is counseling Little Red Riding Hood before gobbling her up for dinner? Maybe Google and news publishers can be friends… or at least frenemies. Read Mayer’s full testimony here.

Keep an eye on:

• Online video site Hulu signs its first international TV content deals. (Financial Times)
• Former CNBC host lands at MSNBC. (Associated Press)
• Hear it once and for all: Twitter is not for sale. (Reuters)

(Photo: Actress Brooke Shields portrays Little Red Riding Hood at a charity fundraiser/Reuters)

Three of the traditional media world’s brightest stars have a bright idea: Start a consultancy to help old-media companies charge for their content online. (And announce the venture in an old-media publication.)

From The Wall Street Journal’s website on Tuesday afternoon:

A trio of media executives is starting a firm to guide efforts by newspapers and other publishers to charge for content posted on their Web sites as advertising revenue tumbles.

The venture, Journalism Online LLC, is being led by Steven Brill, the founder of the American Lawyer magazine and Court TV; Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; and cable-television veteran Leo Hindery.

Crovitz, who was unseated when Rupert Murdoch bought his paper and given a column instead, told the Journal that charging for online content won’t solve all the problems facing newspapers and other information purveyors on the Internet, but it would do some good. He also said that Journalism Online LLC would make money by sharing revenue from consumer payments and licensing fees. No word from Hindery (now in private equity after selling TCI to AT&T and running Global Crossing before that company hit the skids) or Brill (one existing magazine, one defunct one).

UPDATE: Crovitz told us that publishers — not all of them newspaper publishers — are in talks about whether to use the system. He wouldn’t name any, however. (And another UPDATE! Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News Chief Brian Tierney says his papers aren’t ready to sign up yet, but they are interested in talking more about it.)

How does it work? Crovitz said some publishers could charge annual or monthly subscriptions, and possibly per-article payments. The system also could allow a comprehensive monthly fee for access to all publishers who use the system. The New York Times quoted Brill as saying $15 a month is a possible price, but Crovitz said that it’s too early to say yet.

The New York Times and other papers are trying to figure out ways to make people pay for the news they get online after several failed experiments. Mostly, they spent the last decade and more doing exactly the opposite. Now, thanks to the Internet eating their lunch, newspapers and other old-school information providers are facing a loss of advertising revenue, paying subscribers to their print editions and, well, their entire lives. At this time of financial distress, their thoughts naturally turn to how to make more money.

Here are some other details on the project from the NYT’s own article:

• The company has a board of advisors that includes two of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general of the United States.
• The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work, and has retained Mr. Boies’ law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, for that work.

(Photo: Reuters)

Digg gained plenty of press because it let its users determine the popularity of various news articles. A new website, NewsCred, is taking a different approach: it lets readers rank the credibility of the news itself.

The site has been up since May in a private “alpha” mode  and on Tuesday launches into an official “beta” version — Web terminology for something that’s live for the public, but not necessarily in its final form.

To find out more about NewsCred, I spoke to Shafqat Islam, 27, who was born in Bangladesh but lives in Geneva, and is one of the two chiefs who runs the site. Islam is a former project manager for financial systems at Merrill Lynch (he built systems there for traders and private bankers) who runs the site with Iraj Islam (no relation), 24, and a resident of Stockholm.

I asked Shafqat Islam what the purpose of the site is. After all, there are plenty of websites out there that present news from various sources all in one place. Besides ranking sites by credibility, he said he wanted to develop a modern news service that was not too difficult for people who are not techies at heart.

“For regular customers like my friends or my family, none of them had even heard about NetVibes or knew what an RSS feed was,” he said. “We wanted to create a news aggregating site where it’s just as simple as clicking the logos of your favorite websites. It’s for mainstream news readers.”

NewsCred capitalizes on the concept of the “community” in news presentation, something that traditional news outlets and other sites have determined is crucial to keep users interested in coming back. Making the ranking of credibility a mainstay of the site is something that he thinks will add a level of involvement among users that they don’t get right now on Yahoo’s or Google’s news sites.

“We want to give news readers a platform to voice their opinion. We really believe that being a news reader is qualification enough to give your opinion on a journalist or a news article,” he said. “We also want to encourage people to discover more news sites.”

The site is mainly in English, but already provides some links to sources from other languages, and will expand its offerings to include more regular helpings of French, English and Spanish — a polyglot angle that a number of other sites lack, but that seems natural to Islam, who besides English speaks French, Bengali, Arabic and Hindi.

So far, the site is self-funded, Islam said, but venture capital funding is not out of the realm of possibility.