Mediagazer: Notifying Next of Kin in the Age of Facebook (MediaShift Idea Lab)

4:35 AM ET, April 22, 2011

Top News:

A New York Times TimesSelect flashback: Early numbers are nice, but growth over time is nicer — The New York Times Co., as part of its earnings announcement today, gave the first concrete numbers for its new digital subscription offerings, noting that “paid digital subscribers have surpassed 100,000” …

Discussion: Techland, PC Magazine, VentureBeat, FishbowlNY, MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal, Future of Journalism and Publishing Executive News

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:
Times Company Profit Falls on Weak Ad Revenue

Nat Ives / AdAge:
New York Times Pay Wall Gets More Than 100,000 Takers in Early Weeks

Discussion: Mixed Media, paidContent, WWD Media Headlines, TechCrunch, The Wire, Guardian, Gizmodo, MediaPost, Geekosystem, Globe and Mail and Noted

MONEY, CASH, HO'S:

The Awl is now two years old. — This will be a long thing about The Awl, so if you don't care, please feel free to ignore. — A few weeks ago, when we realized that The Awl's birthday was coming up (an easily rememberable 4/20), we batted around some high level ideas on what we could do on the site to commemorate it.

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Reuters:

The Awl vs HuffPo — The Awl's David Cho has an interesting post on web publishing today: … If I were inclined to give Bill Keller the benefit of the doubt here — which I'm not — this is what I'd think that he was driving at with his talk of “adorable kitten videos”.

The Atlantic Online:

Detained Reporter Clare Gillis Says She is Alive and Well — Sixteen days after she was detained by the Libyan government, journalist Clare Morgana Gillis made her first direct contact with outsiders in two weeks today, telling her parents in a 15-minute phone call that she is in good health …

Discussion: FishbowlNY and The Huffington Post

MediaShift Idea Lab:

Notifying Next of Kin in the Age of Facebook — When she picked up the phone, I could tell from the sound of her voice that she didn't know yet. — “I'm sorry to tell you this — but I wanted you to hear from a friend, not Facebook. Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. Chris Hondros too.

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Portions of New York Times, ProPublica sites disabled by Amazon server outage — EC2Disabled.com / Amazon Web Services / Mashable — Portions of some major websites — including a few news sites — that rely on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing, or EC2, have been down most of Thursday due …

Discussion: NewEnterprise, more at Techmeme »

David Hirschman / Street Fight:

Journal-Register's Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap — Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But when TBD shifted its strategy last fall, slashing staff …

Discussion: Strange Attractor

Caroline McCarthy:

Onward, to the Plex. — So I have some big news. — After five incredible years at CNET, I'm moving on. May 6 is my last day; ten days later, I will join Google's New York office as a member of its fledgling Trends & Insights team. I'll be doing a lot of writing, editing …

Discussion: Epicenter, TechCrunch, @anildash, @dannysullivan, Betabeat, @mathewi, @fromedome, Gawker and PC Magazine

Gillian Shaw / Digital Life:

Canadians vow to break election day Twitter ban — Canadians are already casting votes on Elections Canada's social media ban. — So far the online world has given the ban — a blackout on the transmission of any electoral results to an area where the polls are still open that would extend …

Discussion: Globe and Mail and CBC News

Julie Moos / Poynter:

The top 5 news sites in the United States are... Earlier this week, we posted comScore data that showed the UK's Mail Online overtaking Huffington Post as the second most visited newspaper website in the world for March 2011. An astute reader wondered: If you merge comScore's data …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Adam Sternbergh / The 6th Floor:

How James Salter Wrote an Eleven-Page Biography of A.J. Liebling — Great books are easy to track down — there are plenty of people pointing you toward them — but great introductions to books are, almost by definition, difficult to discover. You pretty much have to stumble on one by happenstance.

Lucian Cionca / Google News Blog:

Automatic Personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News — Last summer we redesigned Google News with new personalization features that let you tell us which subjects and sources you'd like to see more or less often. Starting today — if you're logged in — you may also find stories based …

Discussion: Search Engine Land and The Next Web

Joe Mullin / paidContent:

Nevada Lawyer Launches Patent Assault Over Media Companies' Websites — A Nevada attorney and former tournament blackjack player says he invented—and patented—most forms of targeted online advertising. Now, Sheldon Goldberg has filed a lawsuit demanding royalties from 12 major media companies …

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Schiller to public radio: Don't just sit there, take risks — Vivian Schiller has a warning to her former colleagues at NPR: “Your continued existence is not guaranteed.” — But that warning — delivered yesterday in a talk at Harvard's Shorenstein Center — wasn't just about the congressional fight over public funding.

Discussion: All Updates, Future of Journalism and Media Buyer Planner