Mediagazer: News Corp. Agrees to Purchase Elisabeth Murdoch's Shine for $673 Million (Kristen Schweizer/Bloomberg)

2:25 PM ET, February 21, 2011

Top News:

Josh Halliday / Guardian:

Libya: journalists prepare for ‘floodgates to open’ — Newspaper journalists and broadcasters descend on Libyan border as uprising threatens Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year rule — Journalists from newspapers and broadcasters across the world, including ITV News and the New York Times …

Discussion: hrw.org, Washington Post, On Media's Blog, New York Times and The Daily Dish

New York Times:

Cellphones Become the World's Eyes and Ears on Protests — For some of the protesters facing Bahrain's heavily armed security forces in and around Pearl Square in Manama, the most powerful weapon against shotguns and tear gas has been the tiny camera inside their cellphones.

Discussion: Guardian, Seattle PostGlobe, New York Times and VentureBeat

Jack Shenker / Guardian:

Egypt's media undergo their own revolution — Does the political upheaval in Egypt spell the end of state-controlled media? — It was a front page few thought they would ever see. After weeks of dismissing pro-change Egyptian protesters as traitors, anarchists and malevolent foreign agents …

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Jon Williams / BBC:
The difficulty of reporting from inside Libya

Discussion: Mediaite, New York Times, Future of Journalism and Online NewsHour

Verne G. Kopytoff / New York Times:

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter — SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook …

Discussion: TechCrunch, SAI, Marx Layne, Teds Take, Adotas, @rklau, Mark Evans Tech, Latest Open Salon Blog, Soup and @mathewi, more at Techmeme »

Matt Mullenweg:

Blogging Drift — The New York Times has a pretty prominent article today called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging …

Discussion: Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

Tina Brown's Quiet Restart of Newsweek — There will be no celebrity-studded gala with fireworks over New York Harbor this time. No brash predictions of upending the magazine business. — The debut of Tina Brown's Newsweek will, in fact, look nothing like the opening of her last magazine …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, SAI, New York Observer, eMedia Vitals, @editorialiste, @gabrielsherman and New York Magazine

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers' Attention — By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready. — Trying to exploit viewers' two-screen behavior …

Discussion: Jezebel

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Key departures suggest 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism — PolitiFact's 2009 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting recognized its straightforward approach to politics, and it also validated the work of a little-understood, emerging type of journalist: the news app developer.

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

DST About To Lead Huge Spotify Funding — European streaming music startup Spotify is in the process of closing a very large financing, say multiple sources. DST, the venture firm that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, is said to be leading the deal, which values Spotify at around $1 billion.

Discussion: SAI, GigaOM, VentureBeat, Music Ally and paidContent:UK, more at Techmeme »

Patrick Thornton / Poynter:

How journalists are using metrics to track the success of tweets — When I first started on the BeatBlogging.org project almost three years ago, very few journalists and news organizations were using social media. In fact, you were considered kind of strange if you used social media.

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

Kristen Schweizer / Bloomberg:

News Corp. Agrees to Purchase Elisabeth Murdoch's Shine for $673 Million — Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. agreed in principle to buy his daughter's U.K.-based television production company, Shine Group Ltd., for 415 million pounds ($673 million). — Elisabeth Murdoch is expected to join …

Discussion: The Wrap, paidContent:UK, DealBook, Guardian, FishbowlNY, Wall Street Journal, News Corporation, Reuters, Canadian Press and C21Media

David Carr / New York Times:

2 Platforms, With 2 Sets of Problems — Digital subscriptions, a grail for the mainstream media that often seemed more like a mirage, took on some firm if not altogether friendly dimensions last week. — Traditional print publishers have spent the past few years cast in the role …

Discussion: Mediactive, MediaPost, MacStories and Monday Note

Anthony Crupi / Mediaweek:

Can Piers Punch Back? — Shaw had it half right: Not only are England and America two nations separated by a common language, but we're also forever riven by custom. Perverse contrarians, the Brits revel in doing things the wrong way 'round, steering from the passenger's seat, adding the letter …

Discussion: Mediaite, The Wrap and Inside Cable News

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

McSweeney's latest love note to newspapers: The Goods — If I was looking for an easily identifiable trigger for my love of reading, it would most likely be devouring Peanuts (and later Calvin and Hobbes) in the Sunday Star Tribune as a kid. (Whether that had anything to do with my decision to work in newspapers is harder to trace.