The Breakfast Meeting: Martha Stewart Retrenches, and Romney Stagecraft

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia on Thursday announced cuts to its business, Christine Haughney reported, laying off 70 people (12 percent of its staff) and scaling back two of its four magazines. The company's three divisions - publishing, merchandising and broadcasting - have all experienced declining income in recent years, but the latest cuts go to the heart of the company, its publishing division, which still provides 64 percent of total revenue, according to the latest public filings.

Government officials used social networking to get the message out about Hurricane Sandy as never before, reflecting the public's increasing reliance on smartphones to get news and information, Brian Stelter and Jennifer Preston reported. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York is data driven in his Twitter messages; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey at times has turned wistful about the damage in his state. David Bednarz, a deputy communications manager for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Conne cticut, explained the changed media landscape: “We have found that many people do not own battery-operated radios anymore and can't listen to the governor's live news briefings. Using their cellphones, Twitter was the last resource they had available to them to find out what was happening while they were stuck in their homes with no power.”

• NBC networks, as well as HBO, plan to air a telethon Friday night for victims of Hurricane Sandy, Brian Stelter and Dave Itzkoff report, while ABC has taken a different tack: the network said it would turn Monday into a “Day of Giving,” starting with “Good Morning America” and ending with “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” to encourage donations to the American Red Cross.

In a case viewed as important test of press freedoms in Greece, a court on Friday acquitted an investigative journalist who was accused of breaking privacy laws by publishing the names of more than 2,000 Greeks believed to be holding Swiss bank a ccounts, Liz Alderman reports. The list published by the journalist, Kostas Vaxevanis, in his magazine, Hot Doc, had been handed to the Greek authorities to help crack down on tax evasion, to little effect. Mr. Vaxevanis quoted George Orwell in court, The Guardian reported: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations. As such it was my duty to reveal this list.”

The advance team for Mitt Romney has a daunting challenge, Ashley Parker writes: namely, to produce “Hollywood-caliber events with a fraction of a film director's time and budget.” The concerns can seem similar - trying to film when the light is golden, picking the music to score the event - but the number of moving parts can be daunting. For one appearance in Lancaster, Ohio, on an October Friday that Ms. Parker tracked from planning to execution, there was the high school football game to consider, as well as parking being used by a local fair a nd a combine demolition derby.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.