Mediagazer: Tech and Social Movements: Beyond ‘Did Twitter Cause the Tunisian Uprising?’ (C. W. Anderson/The Atlantic Online)

5:25 PM ET, January 16, 2011

Top News:

Tech and Social Movements: Beyond ‘Did Twitter Cause the Tunisian Uprising?’ — One of the least important things the uprising in Tunisia is going to do is add more empirical fuel to the long-running debate about the role played by digital social media in fostering political and social change.

Discussion: Foreign Policy, New York Times, GigaOM, Guardian, Main page collection, Gawker, BBC, The Huffington Post, Guardian, The Lede, Christian Science Monitor, Middle East Blog, Los Angeles Times, Eunomia, Mother Jones and CNN

Louis C. Hochman / Morris Township-Morris Plains Patch:

Column: The Shrinking Newsroom Is Bad For Us All — It's bad news. And it's bad for news. — The journalists of the Daily Record, Courier News and Home News Tribune learned this week about half of them will lose their jobs in the latest in a string of consolidations that goes back several years.

Discussion: Gannett Blog

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Man Bites Dog! Web Publisher Pays Writers — It's a time-honored Web tradition: Build a business by getting people to give you interesting content to publish, for free. And it's still a very popular one. See: Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, Quora, etc.

Discussion: paidContent, more at Techmeme »

Media Decoder:

Publishers Told to Say Yea or Nay to Borders Deal by Feb. 1 — Publishers have been given until Feb. 1 to decide whether they are willing to accept Borders' proposal to turn delayed payments into a loan, several people briefed on the situation said on Friday.

Discussion: Jacket Copy

Joel Meares / CJR:

Play With The 2010 News Cycle Thanks To Pew — How did Fox, NBC, NPR fill the year's “newshole”? — Forgive us for not noting this sooner—our attention has been devoted to the Giffords shooting and debates that followed. But a big hat-tip to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence …

Erica Naone / Technology Review:

Will You Tweet This? — New analysis could help predict how stories will be shared. — When a piece of news breaks online, it's hard to predict how widely it will be discussed in blog posts or tweets and for how long. — Jure Leskovec, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University …

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: FT tech hub

Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:

Can Jack Bauer Rescue Hulu? Or How About Barbie? — As the protagonist of the Fox hit series 24, Kiefer Sutherland mastered the delicate art of escaping difficult situations. But what Jack Bauer faces next may be a true Mission Impossible: succeeding with original programming on digital platforms.