Mediagazer: When short sellers fund journalists (Felix Salmon)

11:10 AM ET, September 6, 2010

Top News:

Paul Carr / TechCrunch:

Rollover Minutes: How Adam Penenberg Has Legitimised New, New, New Journalism. Again. — Adam Penenberg. If you call yourself an online journalist, and yet that name doesn't immediately prompt a nod of recognition - a smile, even - then it's time to close your laptop and bow your head in shame.

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, TeleRead and Fast Company

Guardian:

MPs seek fresh inquiry into NoW phone hacking — • Calls for parliament to order second inquiry into hacking — • Scotland Yard to examine allegations by former NoW reporter — News International and David Cameron's PR chief, Andy Coulson, face the prospect of a fresh parliamentary inquiry …

Discussion: BBC, The Independent, Press Gazette, Financial Times, The Staggers, Daily Mail, Editors Weblog, Bagehot's notebook, Independent.ie, Reuters, The Dispatch Box, Jon Slattery and Liberal Conspiracy

New York Times:
In Britain, Labour Politicians Call for New Look at Scandal

Discussion: Guardian, Telegraph, Inforrm's Blog and Liberal Conspiracy

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

Some Newspapers Shift Coverage After Tracking Readers Online — In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing …

Discussion: Editors Weblog, The Huffington Post and College Media Matters

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:

New York Observer to Cast Its Net Beyond the Upper East Side — Listening to Kyle Pope, the editor of The New York Observer, discuss how he wants to re-energize his newspaper sounds a lot like someone describing a Broadway show or a television series that has run a little past its prime.

Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:

Regulating sex and speech — Let me start with a disclosure: I hope to think that Craig Newmark is a friend. He can be as hard for me to read as James Joyce or C++. But I know him as a decent and genuine man who believes that he is bringing a service to millions of people …

Discussion: New York Times, CNN, Gawker and Advocate, more at Techmeme »

Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:

The newswire quandary — Questions: should newswire agencies serve consumers - directly? And, to a broader extent, how does the current information shift impact the agencies' future? Two recent events lead me to explore these questions in today's Monday Note.

Michael Wolff / Guardian:

UK libel rules: Change the goddam law — Rupert Murdoch's biographer on the hefty legal challenges he faced when his book encountered British lawyers — One of the most confounding experiences a British visitor might have in the US is getting seriously sick without health insurance.

Felix Salmon:

When short sellers fund journalists — I'm as much of a fan of insidery media navel-gazing as anybody, but Cary Spivak and the AJR have gone way too far with their 3,200-word thumbsucker on the ethics of funding investigative journalism with the proceeds from short-selling.

James Chessell / TheAustralian:

Major newspaper groups put price on digital content — News Limited and Fairfax Media, are pushing ahead with plans to charge customers for access to their digital content. — News Limited is gauging consumer demand for subsidised electronic readers such as Apple's iPad …

Discussion: Sydney Morning Herald

Tanzina Vega / New York Times:

A Pitched Battle Over Bedbugs in Online Search Advertising — As people across the nation try to eradicate bedbugs from the crevices of their homes, a battle is being waged online among pest control companies over whose ad will be the first one most people see as they race to the Internet to learn about these insidious pests.

Miguel Helft / New York Times:

Apple Faces Many Rivals for Streaming to TVs — SAN FRANCISCO — When Steven P. Jobs introduced Apple's first iPod in 2001, it held more music and was easier to use than the handful of rival products already in the market. But it had a big shortcoming: it worked only with Macintosh computers …

Roxanne Varza / TechCrunch Europe:

Overblog marries Wikio to breed a European Google News for blogs — A trusted source has confirmed that French-blogging platform, Overblog, will soon be part of the Wikio family. Rumor has it that the growing Luxembourg-based news portal is apparently trying to develop European Google News for blogs.