Mediagazer: The Placebo Called Convergence (Digital Deliverance LLC)

11:35 AM ET, June 10, 2010

Top News:

Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed — Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the wireless-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

Taylor Buley / The Firewall:

AT&T's iPad Hackers ‘Ignored’ By Reuters, Other Mainstream Press — Gawker contributor Ryan Tate set the Web ablaze on Wednesday with a blog post detailing the alleged breach of 114,000 iPad users' email addresses. The post named names: among them, executives at News Corp, The New York Times Company and Dow Jones.

Discussion: Gawker, ABCNEWS, Silicon Alley Insider, Velocity, Computerworld, Journalism.co.uk, Talking Biz News, The Next Web, TPM LiveWire, Gizmodo and Fast Company

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

BP and Officials Block Some Coverage of Spill — When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request.

Discussion: Romenesko, Company Town, The Wire, Editors Weblog, Media Decoder and New York Magazine

Penelope Green / New York Times:

Currents | Q&A: A Look Back From Departing Architectural Digest Editor — Look, there's Cher on the cover in silver snakeskin, and looking not a day over 40. She's a survivor, to be sure, and so is Architectural Digest, the shelter behemoth that seems hardly to have aged …

Discussion: New York Magazine and Curbed LA

Christopher Mims / Technology Review:

Why Instapaper Will Never Be Booted From the iTunes App Store — Creator of the popular reading app Marco Armenti on how he's managed to avoid angering the New York Times - so far. — Publicity-wise, nothing could have been better for bestselling iPad newsreader Pulse than being featured …

Discussion: TechCrunch

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Meet the Two Grad Students Who Freaked Out the NYT-The Pulse iPad …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, Citizen Media Law Project, Shaping the Future …, PC World and TeleRead

Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:

Akamai Beefs Up Network Ahead of the World Cup — Akamai has spent the last year building up its network capacity in anticipation of global Internet traffic hitting a record high due to the World Cup, which gets under way this Friday, according to an AP article this morning.

Discussion: Speakeasy, Guardian, Poynter Online, TechCrunch and Associated Press

Jeremy Peters / Media Decoder:

Washington Post Reporter Cancels Book Party Appearance — Of all the image problems the media has, few are as bruising as the perception that journalists are too cozy with the powerful people they cover. — And few newspapers know that better than The Washington Post …

Discussion: Romenesko and Cision

Choire / The Awl:

‘New York Times’ Bans the Word ‘Tweet’ — Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went out, asking writers to abstain from the invented past-tense and other weird iterations of the magical noun-verb “Twitter.”

Discussion: TechCrunch, Romenesko, New York Observer and The Wire

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

What Happens To Blogging When Twitter Goes Down — Twitter pulled a Twitter today and went down, as you well know, and thus took the blogging world crashing along with it. It is no small secret that in regards to online content dissemination (which is not a dirty word, I promise), Twitter is quickly becoming the de facto solution.

Alex Williams / New York Times:

Notoriety in a Tight Embrace — “THE universe has given me nine lives, and clinically I have burned through eight of them,” said the former editor of Men's Fitness and self-styled sexual libertine who appeared to flame out after he emerged as a player in a series of recent scandals.

Golnaz Esfandiari / Foreign Policy:

The Twitter Devolution — Far from being a tool of revolution in Iran over the last year, the Internet, in many ways, just complicated the picture. — Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts …

Discussion: Guardian

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Interview: Part 2: Dow Jones' Les Hinton & Robert Thomson On WSJ Digital — The Wall Street Journal was a poster child for premium subscriptions long before Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) bought out the Bancroft family. But the digital landscape has changed dramatically since then.

Discussion: FishbowlNY and LA Observed

Digital Deliverance LLC:

The Placebo Called Convergence — Crosbie's Manifesto - Part Two — It doesn't matter whether executives, housewives, politicians, or plumbers. Most people's ability to perceive change is inversely proportional to its scale. They hail superficial changes as transformative …

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Sideways: The First iPad-Only Magazine Is About . . . The iPad — While the print magazine industry is hanging its hopes on the iPad to lead it to the digital promised land where people actually pay for digital editions, it is still stuck with adapting a product designed for paper to the screen.

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

Yahoo's Old Fashion Take on Value of Journalism: Scoops Drive a Media Business — LOS ANGELES —Hiring a small group of enterprising sports reporters four years ago, who grabbed headlines with scoops, was a clear indication of the value of original journalism in driving traffic and attracting advertising dollars.

Discussion: Romenesko

Joe Pompeo / Silicon Alley Insider:
Yahoo! Hires Mark Lisanti As Deputy Editor Of Its New Entertainment Blogs (YHOO)

Discussion: Cajun Boy, WebNewser and Thompson on Hollywood

Rasmussen Reports:

74% Oppose Taxing Internet News Sites To Help Newspapers — The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering several ways to help the struggling newspaper industry, but Americans strongly reject several proposed taxes to keep privately-owned newspapers going.

Discussion: Fast Company, Screenwerk, MediaPost and paidContent

Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing:

Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress — The Library of Congress has nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters. The largest library in the world …

Discussion: Gizmodo and ResourceShelf

Sue Halpern / New York Review of Books:

What the iPad Can't Do — Inside cover of David Foster Wallace's annotated copy of Don DeLillo's Players — Not long after the iPad went on sale in early April, the Ilinois Institute of Technology announced that it would be providing each member of next fall's freshman class with one of the new Apple devices.

Jim Romenesko / Romenesko:

WSJ editor: How many apps will merely be mediocre or meaningless? — “DOG BITES MAN, MAN BITES DOG, BYTES DOG MAN” — I normally don't get invited to awards ceremonies these days because since I became editor, the Journal doesn't seem to win many awards - so the only way to get here was to be the keynote speaker.

Aaron Smith / Pew Internet:

Neighbors Online — Americans use a range of approaches to keep informed about what is happening in their communities and online activities have been added to the mix. Face-to-face encounters and phone calls remain the most frequent methods of interaction with neighbors.

Discussion: Free Press, CyberJournalist.net, ReadWriteWeb, PJNet, MediaShift Idea Lab, Kirk LaPointe's … and ResourceShelf

Carole Wurzelbacher / Editors Weblog:

Despite industry problems, Japanese print readership remains high — Amidst serious industry turmoil, Japan has somehow managed to avoid the looming problems that print media faces all over the rest of the world. The Japan Times reports a study done by the Japan Newspaper Publishers …

Discussion: Guardian and search.japantimes.co.jp