Mediagazer: FT's Paid Digital Subs Up 71 Percent In A Year (Robert Andrews/paidContent:UK)

New York Post:

Zuckerman's ax set to swing at the Daily News — Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman is apparently unhappy with advertisers' response to the new four-color paper, and the word inside is that more editorial cutbacks will follow. — Decisions about the cuts are expected to be made today.

Discussion: Poynter

Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:

Apple tells newspapers: no free iPad edition for print subscribers — A number of European newspapers have reportedly been told by Apple that they can no longer offer paid print subscribers free access to an iPad edition through the App Store, as the subscription strategy leaves Apple out of its 30 percent cut.

Discussion: MarketingVOX, eMedia Vitals, MediaPost, CNET News, Runnin' Scared, MacNN, PhoneArena, VentureBeat and Mashable!, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Freakonomics Leaving NY Times to Start Own Venture — The New York Times is preparing to erect a pay gate around its website, but Freakonomics, the popular blog started by economics Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, won't be behind it. That's because it's leaving the Times …

Discussion: Poynter, New York Magazine, Pulse2, New York Observer and WebNewser

David Kaplan / paidContent:

HuffPo's Coleman: 'We'll Double Revenues Again This Year' — As it looks to repeat its ad sales successes from 2010, The Huffington Post is adding a dozen ad sales people to its roster. In an interview with paidContent, Greg Coleman, president and chief revenue officer …

Discussion: Poynter, Yahoo! News, MediaPost and On Media's Blog, Thanks:davidakaplan

Mary Barron / Examiner:

Astrological signs are not changing, but journalism is — No one's sun sign has changed, despite the misinformation about the constellation Ophiuchus that is scampering around the web this week in reaction to some completely amateurish reporting. What has changed is that journalists used …

Claire Atkinson / New York Post:

Spotify leaps to US — Spotify, the popular European music service, is finally crossing the pond, The Post has learned. — After trying to crack the US market for more than a year, Spotify is close to a deal with one major music company in the US and has gained the support of at least one other …

Discussion: Mashable!, MediaFile, ReadWriteWeb, New York Observer, MediaPost, Electronista, SlashGear, SAI and hypebot, more at Techmeme »

Russell Adams / Wall Street Journal:

Magazine Publishers Ready Tablet App Store — The country's largest magazine publishers are gearing up to launch their own service for distributing digital publications on tablets, competing head-on with technology companies they've relied on to distribute their apps to date.

Discussion: paidContent, Mashable!, The Wrap, FishbowlNY and Editors Weblog

Greg T. Spielberg / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Gizmodo taps illustrators to give stories more punch, pop, pow! — When Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam was planning for this week's coverage of the Verizon iPhone, he didn't think in words. He visualized it entirely in images, daydreaming about how much more emotive pictures and sounds …

Discussion: Snarkmarket and InformationWeek

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Hate Ads? You'll Love This Site. Love Ads? You Too. — Here's perfect Friday fodder: “Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising,” a Tumblr that delivers exactly what it promises, via one-sentence jokes illustrated with stock photos. — The photo + caption combination seems …

Robinsloan / Twitter Media:

The science of the hashtag — So last week I talked about the art of the hashtag: the power of mad libs, universal particulars, and feedback loops. The day after I posted it, the #LessAmbitiousMovies hashtag took off on Twitter—you might have seen it in your timeline.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online and MediaPost

Lauren Kirchner / CJR:

On Mugshots and Cover Photos — There's not really all that much we can say about Jared Loughner's mugshot. Like any image that accompanies a news story, it provides context and contains a certain amount of information. The key bit of information this image most readily presents, of course, is “crazy.”

Discussion: Mother Jones

Tom Hespos / AdAge:

How Online Advertising Is Failing Content (And What to Do About It) — Selling Ads Based on Traffic Will Always Yield the Lowest-Common Denominator — Would you like a publisher to pay you for lending your content to their website? You'd better hope your publisher has an ad-sales person who can sell sponsorships.

Paolo Mastrangelo / NYC The Blog:

Video Of Subway Rat Nets Videographer $3,850 And Counting — 21-year-old Jeff Forde (seen at left) was traveling on the 4 train through Brooklyn earlier this week, dozing off at 2am, when he heard a woman scream. He opened his eyes and saw a rat on the train.

Discussion: AOL News, ANIMAL, Runnin' Scared, Gothamist and Mediaite

Robert Andrews / paidContent:UK:

FT's Paid Digital Subs Up 71 Percent In A Year — The Financial Times released its own audience figures... - “206,892 paying digital subscribers ... up 71% year on year.” — Daily print circulation: 390,121 (ABC: Dec 2010) - was 485,102 in 2000. — The digital figure is for online …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, WebNewser and The Big Picture

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

National Post rolls out digital “welcome mats” — On Monday, Canada's National Post published an article about a local school instituting a ban on gay-straight alliance groups. It's a good local story with broad cultural relevance, and, not surprisingly, it got linked on the web-curiosities aggregator Fark.

Discussion: Poynter

Dave Itzkoff / ArtsBeat:

Court Rejects Claim of Journalist's Privilege for Documentary Filmmaker — A federal appeals court says that Joe Berlinger, the filmmaker who was ordered to give footage from his 2009 documentary “Crude” to the Chevron Corporation, could not invoke a journalist's privilege in refusing to turn …

Craig Silverman / CJR:

To Delete or Not to Delete? — Should news organizations and reporters delete erroneous tweets? — One of the long-standing accuracy debates in journalism centers around whether you should repeat the original error in a correction. I examined this issue two years ago …

Discussion: Lost Remote and Poynter

Lauren Indvik / Mashable!:

“The Daily”: A Peek at the iPad-Only Newspaper's Social Media Strategy — Ahead of the launch of Rupert Murdoch's much-anticipated (and now delayed) iPad newspaper, many of us at Mashable have wondered exactly how the app-based publication will approach and utilize social media.

Steve Safran / Lost Remote:

New York Times social strategy: the numbers — Cory hinted at this story in the briefs below, and now we're fleshing it out a bit because it's so interesting. The website for the The New York Times, like so many other sites, continues to see the majority of its traffic (50-60%) going directly to the front page.

Discussion: Talking Biz News, GigaOM and NYConvergence.com

Steve Smith / minonline.com:

Oprah's iPad Sketchbook — The iPad ideas coming out of the magazine world are getting ever more curious. The February 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine directs readers to the iPad App Store where they can find a free sketching app for the iPad that lets readers enter a creativity challenge.

Discussion: New York Observer

Media Week:

Lebedev's i to feature media page — Alexander Lebedev's 20p-priced newspaper i is launching a dedicated media page on Monday. — It will be published every week on Monday, the same day as The Guardian's media supplement is published. It will be edited by Ian Burrell, the media editor of The Independent, the sister paper of the i.

Austin Carr / Fast Company:

Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: “50,000 Naked Men” — Following a week's worth of back and forth and blown off interviews, including one scheduled at 11 p.m EST, Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy finally picks up his cell phone after several rings.

Discussion: AdAge, Vanity Fair, MediaPost and New York Magazine