Mediagazer: CAPTCHA Advertising Coming Soon To A Website Near You (Timothy James Duffy/Techi.com)

12:55 PM ET, April 16, 2010

Top News:

More Evidence of Newspaper Turnaround: Gannett Doubles Q1 Profit as Revenue Decline Moderates — CHICAGO Gannett Co. reported a first-quarter profit Friday that was double its year-ago earnings and said that U.S. newspaper advertising, down 8.5% compared to a year ago, showed improvement in every category.

Discussion: Jon Slattery, eMedia Vitals and Fitz & Jen

Gillian Reagan / The Wire:

Newspapers Rejoice! Gannett Smashes The Street With Profits Up 51% (GCI) — Gannett Co., Inc. (GCI), America's largest newspaper publisher, beat expectations for their first quarter results, pulling in adjusted earnings at $0.50 per share, compared to $0.41 expected by analysts.

Discussion: Guardian, Media Decoder, Broadcasting & Cable, paidContent and Romenesko

David Kaplan / paidContent:
USA Today iPad App Will Go Subscription Model This Summer

Discussion: Recovering Journalist

Ryan Chittum / CJR:

It's Time for the Press to Push Back Against Apple — Yank iPad apps unless Apple cedes complete control over the right to publish — The Nieman Journalism Lab's Laura McGann has a disturbing report that ought to perk up every news organization that sees Apple's iPad as part of its future.

Discussion: Mediactive

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / Digits:
Cartoonist: Apple Backs Down After Denying iPhone App

Discussion: Comic Riffs

Laura McGann / Nieman Journalism Lab:
Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can't get his iPhone …

Discussion: TVWeek.com, Faster Forward, Slate, Fortune, Tom's MAD Blog!, TUAW, Epicenter, Daring Fireball, Bay Area, Gizmodo, Mother Jones, PC Magazine and eMedia Vitals

Hollywood Reporter:

Weinsteins to take back Miramax — THR EXCLUSIVE — It looks like the Weinsteins have managed to fashion a winning bid in the Miramax auction and will take back control of the company they founded in 1979 and sold to Disney in 1993 for $80 million. — Running the process internally …

Discussion: Movieline, Gawker and New York Magazine

Lew Harris / The Wrap: Exclusive: The Weinsteins Negotiate Window to Buy Miramax (updated)

Clark Hoyt / The Public Editor's Journal:

Dueling Columnists — A surprising disagreement has broken out between two Times columnists, with Paul Krugman demanding an apology from Andrew Ross Sorkin and Sorkin so far refusing to back down. — The argument is over what approach Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who writes …

Discussion: Gawker, Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Romenesko, Dealbreaker and FT Alphaville

Jacob Harris / Open:

How Often Is The Times Tweeted? — I recently had the honor of speaking at the Chirp conference, where I got to stammer nervously about @anywhere and share a fun statistic I figured out a few days earlier: Someone tweets a link to a New York Times story once every 4 seconds.

Discussion: GigaOM, THINK / Musings, Webmonkey, VentureBeat, Journalism.co.uk, The Wire, The Huffington Post, Editors Weblog and ReveNews

Kenneth Li / Financial Times:

Demand Media enlists Goldman for IPO — Demand Media, a closely watched startup that mines online search engine data to generate thousands of videos and web stories a day, has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an initial public offering. — People familiar with the plans say the company could file for an IPO as early as August.

Discussion: Romenesko, paidContent, Silicon Alley Insider, FishBowlNY and Beet.TV

Newsdesk / Tower Ticker:

Chicago News Cooperative to name Madison Dearborn's Canning chairman — John Canning, founder and chairman of the Chicago private-equity group Madison Dearborn Partners, is set to be announced Friday as the new board chairman of the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative.

Discussion: Romenesko

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Apple's New Guidelines Won't Stop Wired Magazine iPad App, Conde Nast Says — Navigating New Restrictions En Route to the App Store — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Conde Nast 's Wired magazine app will indeed work on the iPad despite the restrictive new guidelines Apple issued this month, Conde Nast said Thursday evening.

Discussion: Mediaite, Poynter Online and Mobile Media

Matea Gold / Show Tracker:

Fox News yanks Sean Hannity from Cincinnati Tea Party rally he was set to star in — Angry Fox News executives ordered host Sean Hannity to abandon plans to broadcast his nightly show as part of a Tea Party rally in Cincinnati on Thursday after top executives learned that he was set to headline the event …

Discussion: Media Decoder, Tuned In, The Daily Beast, Think Progress, Washington Monthly, Mediaite, The Huffington Post, The Caucus, Strupp and Inside Cable News

Ilya Vedrashko / Hill Holliday:

Apple iAd Team Visits Hill Holliday, Shares Details — Back in January, we greeted the announcement of Apple's upcoming ad network with cautious optimism and a lot of questions. Today, Apple's iAd team headed by the now former CEO of Quattro Wireless Andy Miller visited Hill Holliday to fuel the former and answer the latter.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, the Econsultancy blog, Gawker and Techi.com

Mark Ftizgerald / Editor and Publisher:

Gannett Won't Pay Golden Parachute Taxes for Future Top Executives — CHICAGO Facing a shareholder proposal on so-called “excise tax gross-ups” — in which a company pays part of the tax on a top executive's golden parachute — Gannett Co. board of directors Thursday eliminated the perk for future executives.

Discussion: Gannett Blog and Fitz & Jen

Steve Myers / Poynter Online:

Brady: D.C. News Site to Rely on 3 Things for Delivering News on Every Block — People who visit Albritton Communications' still-unnamed metro D.C. news site when it launches in June will see elements that have been employed elsewhere — aggregation, geocoding, community engagement — but not quite in this formula.

Discussion: Pursuing the Complete …

Phil Bronstein / San Francisco Chronicle:

Journalism Deathmatches, Then and Now — A little bloodshed is good for the news business, particularly if journalism professionals are back to shooting at each other instead of collectively gathering around their own grave, hand-wringing and waiting to be pushed in by a dismissive and disinterested public.

Discussion: American Journalism Review

Andrew Vanacore / Associated Press:

Rolling Stone's archive going online - for a price — NEW YORK - For the first time Rolling Stone is inviting its readers on the long, strange trip though the magazine's 43-year archive, putting complete digital replicas online along with the latest edition. But you'll have to pay to see it all.

Timothy James Duffy / Techi.com:

CAPTCHA Advertising Coming Soon To A Website Near You — Sick of internet advertisements? Like it or not, banner, contextual, and even pop-up ads have become an integral part of nearly all modern websites. While it's understandable that all of our favorite websites need a way to subsidize server costs …

Erica Naone / Technology Review:

Will Twitter's Ad Strategy Work? — Twitter will have to overcome several challenges for the scheme to be successful. — This week Twitter launched Promoted Tweets, an advertising platform that sheds light on its much-discussed business model. The platform takes a page …

David / Signal vs. Noise:

Eyeballs still don't pay the bills — Ning is laying off 40% of its staff and dumping free versions of its service. That's a s**tty day for the people who lost their job and the folks left behind without their coworkers. I went through a few rounds back in the dotcom days and fun it was not.

Discussion: The Official Posterous …, GigaOM, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, the Econsultancy blog, TechCrunch and paidContent

Editor and Publisher:

Atlanta Gay Paper ‘Southern Voice’ to Return Next Week — ATLANTA The new owner of a longtime weekly newspaper covering the gay and lesbian community in Atlanta said April 9 that the shuttered publication would reopen within the next week. — Southern Voice shut down in November …

Ben Goldacre / Bad Science:

Libel claimants get what they deserve. So do you. — [Full text at guardian.co.uk, abbreviated in the paper] — After 2 years of pursuing one man through the courts, at a cost to him of £200,000 and 2 years work, the British Chiropractic Association yesterday dropped their libel case against science writer Simon Singh.

Discussion: Guardian