One good way to keep up with the top media industry news is to follow the @mediagazer Twitter account. Recently, we’ve made a few improvements to our feed to make it more useful for our followers. We’re now including a link directly to the story we’re featuring in addition to the link to the Mediagazer discussion on that story. We’re also aiming to include the author’s Twitter handle in every tweet, to make it easier for you to discover and keep up with top media writers.

Our mission at Mediagazer is to provide readers with a straightforward, efficient, and comprehensive look at today’s top media news, and we think these changes meet that criteria. Gabe Rivera has a fuller explanation of our new Twitter feed over at Techmeme.

Today we’re launching the Mediagazer Leaderboard – a list of our top 100 source websites, ranked in order. The ranking is based on a variable we call presence – the percentage of headline space a source occupied on Mediagazer over the past 30 days. The greater a site’s presence, the higher they appear on the list.

Since its heralded launch in 2007, the Techmeme Leaderboard has become an essential collection of news thinkers, makers, and leaders. We expect the Mediagazer Leaderboard to follow that example for the media industry. Because our list is dynamic and automatically updated every 20 minutes, you will never find a stale or abandoned site – just sites with current, informative news about the media industry.

A short note about our methodology: Links in “Discussion” do not affect presense, only full headlines. And, to keep things simple, “source” is identified by a publisher’s choice of brand. For instance, Media Decoder is a blog from the New York Times, but, for purposes of the Leaderboard, headlines from “Media Decoder” are counted separately from headlines listed from “New York Times.” For a deeper explanation about the Leaderboard’s purpose, methodology, and whether or not it is biased (short answer: it is!), please see this post from Gabe Rivera about the launch of the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Why are you launching this now? We needed at least 30 days after our March launch to have enough data to calculate. Then we tacked on an extra month because, well, we were busy. As an additional incentive to launch today: I’m leaving tomorrow for New York City to attend Mediabistro Circus and TechCrunch Disrupt, so I’ll be available to answer any questions or dismiss any complaints in person. (Want to meet up? Drop me a line.)

How else can you use this thing? We’ve made it easy to get to our sources. The source URL and RSS feed are hyperlinked on our list, so you can easily check out any of the sites. Curious as to what kind of stories have become Mediagazer headlines? You can access each sources’ headlines by clicking the “Archive” link next to the source name. It will return each Mediagazer headline from that particular source. If you’d like to track the history of the Leaderboard, you can access previous lists by entering the date on the right side of the page. We also have an OPML file available, allowing you to access and play with all this Leaderboard data.

So, what’s the point? Mediagazer is designed to showcase the top media news of the day. We think that revealing our top sources, and just how important they are to us, will help our audience better understand the greater media landscape. While we suspect that the release of the Leaderboard will further inflate egos and perhaps settle a small bet or two, we hope you can use the Mediagazer Leaderboard to discover just how strong some of the media voices around you are.

Mediagazer presents the day’s must-read media news on a single page.

The media business is in tumult: from the production side to the distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry. What do news organizations need to do to survive? Will books become extinct? When will an audience pay for content? Can video bring television and the internet together? Will the iPad save us all? Keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, as essential media coverage is scattered across numerous web sites at any given moment.

Mediagazer simplifies this task by organizing the key coverage in one place. We’ve combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors to present the one indispensible narrative of an industry in transition. We collect relevant takes on an issue and package them together in a comprehensive group of links. That way, you not only get the lead opinion on an issue, but you can easily find the supporting, opposing, smart, controversial, notable, and previously unseen viewpoints. You get the big picture.

We make it easy for you to get your media news fix. If you want to share the latest media news with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, you can use the easy “share” button next to the headline title. (See more here.) If you’re on the go, you can easily access Mediagazer on your smartphone by viewing mediagazer.com/m in your mobile browser, though mediagazer.com will redirect there on iPhone and Android devices. If you have a simpler phone, mediagazer.com/mini will bring you the same information in a simpler display.

Mediagazer is brought to you by the same people behind Techmeme, the leading aggregator of computer and internet industry news and analysis. We are a self-funded and independent company. Mediagazer earns revenue through the support of sponsors, and we are proud to announce the companies who are with us from Day 1: WordPress, Tynt, Seesmic, Smash Summit, and Zemanta.

So, welcome to Mediagazer! Stay a bit, poke around a little, feel free to explore the site. Please direct any general questions about the site to questionsorcomments@mediagazer.com, any editorial questions to editorial@mediagazer.com, and sponsorship inquiries to sponsor@mediagazer.com (or check out mediagazer.com/sponsor). In one last note, we would love to thank our talented designer Kristin Nienhuis for all of her input and work on this site. You can contact her and see more of her portfolio at her personal site.