Mediagazer: Google Readies Its E-Book Plan (Wall Street Journal)

5:55 AM ET, May 5, 2010

Top News:

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

News Corp.'s Fabled Subscription Plans a Month Away — Remember Rupert Murdoch's plan to convince other media companies to join him behind a pay wall and offer their stuff only via subscription? It's still around, in some form. We'll hear more about it in “three to four weeks” Murdoch said today during News Corp.'s earnings call.

Discussion: Press Gazette, MediaPost, Company Town, Broadcasting & Cable, paidContent, Crain's New York Business, paidContent, Media Matters for America and The Huffington Post

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

News Corp. Beats Estimates On Profit, Revenue But Digital Losses Increase — Avatar didn't bring home the Oscar for best picture but it helped News Corp (NYSE: NWS) to a win for its FYQ3—revenue up nearly 19 percent to $8.8 billion and a profit of $839 million.

Discussion: MarketWatch, Business Wire, MediaMemo, Media Decoder, Company Town, Media Money …, Romenesko, rbr.com, CNBC and Variety

Joe Pompeo / Silicon Alley Insider:
Murdoch: ‘Any Idea About Us Spending $30 Million On A [Newspaper] War Is B.S.’ (NWS)

Discussion: Associated Press and The Wire

Gabriel Sherman / New York Magazine:

CBS News and CNN Are Back in Partnership Negotiations — CBS News and CNN are in advanced negotiations about signing a news-gathering partnership, according to executives familiar with the discussions. The talks revolve around how the two news divisions can combine operations in a bid to cut costs and expand audiences on both sides.

Discussion: B&C, New York Times, Mediaite, Tuned In, MediaPost, The Wire, LocalNewser, New York Observer and Lost Remote

Wall Street Journal:

Google Readies Its E-Book Plan — Google Inc. plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July, a company official said Tuesday, throwing the search giant into a battle that already involves Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. — Google has been discussing its vision …

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

Eighty Percent of Net Users Watch Video as Gobal Consumption Explodes, comScore — Online video consumption has become pervasive around the globe as nearly 80 percent of all Internet users watch some video, according Tania Yuki, who heads online video product management for comScore.

Discussion: comScore, Inc.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Any Good Live Video on the Web Right Now? Ask Clicker. — For a bunch of reasons, Web video tends to work better when it has already been recorded. But here's one way to make live Web video more palatable: Make it easier to find. — Clicker, the would-be TV Guide for Web video, is now indexing live video streams, too.

Discussion: paidContent, TechCrunch, Mashable! and NewTeeVee

Newsdesk / Tower Ticker:

Bloomberg's Jim Kirk named CNC managing editor — Jim Kirk, who left the Chicago Tribune 17 months ago to oversee Bloomberg News' Washington bureau coverage of the White House and Congress, is heading home to become managing editor of the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative.

Discussion: Chicago Reader, blogs.vocalo.org and Romenesko

David Kaplan / paidContent:

‘Tentative Recovery’ Eases Thomson Reuters' Falling Profits — Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) CEO Tom Glocer pointed to the “tentative recovery” as helping fuel momentum for the company in the past quarter, as the company's profits fell less than analysts anticipated.

Discussion: Bloomberg, FishbowlNY, Financial Times, Press Gazette, Associated Press, PR Newswire and Talking Biz News

Matthew Shaer / Christian Science Monitor:

Faisal Shahzad Facebook mixup highlights hazards of Web journalism — Earlier today, bloggers at the Huffington Post published a photo from Faisal Shahzad's Facebook page. One problem: They got the wrong Faisal Shahzad. — It was a testament to the hazards of reporting in the digital age.

Discussion: Gawker and The Huffington Post

Joel Johnson / Gizmodo:

48 Hours, 1,000s of Contributors, 1 Magazine — Can you make a magazine in a weekend? Of course you can. But can you make it good? That's the question 48 Hour Magazine is trying to answer, using online media tools to make an old-school rag in two days.

Discussion: 48 Hour Magazine and nhpr.org

Mindy McAdams / Teaching Online Journalism:

Looking at jQuery for visual journalism — With all this talk about the so-called death of Adobe Flash, the future of HTML5, etc., I thought I should take a closer look at jQuery. This post is intended to give you an overview and help you decide whether you too should take a closer look.

Jon Bershad / Mediaite:

Judge Allows Lawsuit Against Jersey Shore For “Profiting From Showing Fights” — MTV had a huge hit on their hand last year when they took the formula from their reality TV stalwart The Real World, tossed in reductive ethnic stereotypes, and made Jersey Shore.

Discussion: Associated Press

William Wei / Silicon Alley Insider:

One In Eight Americans Will Stop Paying For TV In The Next Year — Here's Why — There's a new study by the Yankee Group that says an average of one in eight Americans will decide to stop paying for their cable or satellite television service in the next year. — Why?

Discussion: MediaPost, New York Post and Mediaite

Zeke Turner / New York Observer:

People Editor Larry Hackett Elected ASME President — It's been a big couple of weeks for People magazine managing editor Larry Hackett. — First there was People's Sandra Bullock adoption exclusive and then this week's country star coming-out cover story.

Discussion: MediaPost

Jim Romenesko / Romenesko:

‘Conservation group’ quoted by NYT has direct ties to offshore drilling industry — “The sky is not falling,” a Gulf of Mexico Foundation exec told the Times for its front page oil spill story. ProPublica's Marian Wang writes: “The Times doesn't offer any more information about the foundation.

Discussion: ProPublica: Blog, CJR and the nytpicker

Jonathan Stray / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Why does the BBC want to send its readers away? The value of linking — The BBC aims to double the number outbound clicks from its site by 2013. That's double the number of people sent away from the BBC site — intentionally. In a recent BBC blog post, BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann cites …

Choire / The Awl:

Pink Weekly Debuts Cash-for-Traffic Reporter Bonus Jackpot Scheme — At last Wednesday's weekly staff meeting at the New York Observer, an old-fashioned paper memo was distributed; it was not sent out by email. It explained a new trial incentive program for reporters, to begin immediately.

Discussion: WebNewser, FishbowlNY and Journalism.co.uk

The Independent:

‘The first punch came, landing on my nose, sending blood down my face’ — ‘Independent’ reporter Jerome Taylor relives his bloody experience on the trail of voting fraud in east London — When I look back on it now what surprises me is how disarmingly polite my attackers were.

Discussion: Press Gazette, FleetStreetBlues, One Man & His Blog, Guardian, Journalism.co.uk and Jon Slattery

Alexandra Jaffe / Editors Weblog:

Living Stories launch for WordPress could mean integration in newspaper sites — In February of this year, Google announced plans to open-source its Living Stories code, offering the program for development for news sources and blogs worldwide. Though there hasn't since been a large influx …

Peter Rothberg / The Nation:

The Nation Goes Open Source — Of all the many changes at TheNation.com, the one you won't readily detect is the technology underlying the new site - the open source content management platform “Drupal.” With redesigns, readers naturally focus on the “front-end,” (did the colors change? …

Discussion: New York Observer and CyberJournalist.net

Joe Pompeo / The Wire:

NYT's Goldman Scoopster, Louise Story, Joins Bloomberg TV As Contributing Editor — Louise Story, one of the two New York Times reporters who broke the news on April 16 about the S.E.C. suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, has joined Bloomberg TV as a contributing editor.

Discussion: Talking Biz News and FishbowlNY