Mediagazer: NY Times Paywall May Be Working, Could Work Better (MediaShift)

8:45 AM ET, June 24, 2011

Top News:

For Student Journalists, No Burden Guarding Vargas' Secret — When Jose Antonio Vargas told the Oracle editorial staff his immigration status, silence fell upon the room. — “I'm an undocumented immigrant,” he confessed to the group after a nervous pause for a sip out of his Starbucks cup.

Discussion: Poynter, The Atlantic Wire and AmSpecBlog

Phil Bronstein / SFGate:

I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant — I was duped. I once hired an illegal immigrant to be a reporter for the Chronicle. — “I don't think I'm a criminal,” Jose Antonio Vargas told me when we met last week, right before he announced his status to the world. “Don't make me seem guiltier than I am.”

Discussion: Poynter, Slate, Big Journalism, Mountain View Patch, TBD All News, Gawker, The Huffington Post, ProPublica, The New Republic, The New Yorker Blog, Salon, Most Recent Home Page Posts …, The Atlantic Wire, The Daily Caller, San Francisco Peninsula … and Washington Post

MediaShift:

NY Times Paywall May Be Working, Could Work Better — There's been a lot of hand wringing about pay walls in digital media lately, but not a lot of discussion on how they're working or how to improve them. — The pay wall that's gotten the most press, of course, is that of the New York Times — instituted on March 28.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and Media Week

Jake Dobkin / Gothamist:

Call For Journalists: Gothamist Wants Long-Form Features — Gothamist is interested in adding long-form non-fiction features to our website. Since we're new to this game, we're going to dip our toes in the water slowly, by publishing a single feature next month.

Discussion: paidContent, eMedia Vitals, Forbes.com and FishbowlNY

Ken Doctor / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The newsonomics of the next-gen NPR network — Editor's Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. — Tell me if you've heard this one. The head of media company says: Why are we reinventing the wheel?

Discussion: WBUR

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

“The Drupal of dataviz”: Overview, AP's News Challenge winner, wants to make sense of big document sets — When WikiLeaks released its Iraq War Logs last year, it unleashed upon the world, and particularly upon newsrooms, 391,832 individual documents. If a single reader were to tackle that document set …

Discussion: GigaOM and eMedia Vitals

Curt Hopkins / ReadWriteWeb:

Brazilian Blogger Assasinated — On March 18, 2009, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi became the first blogger to die in prison. A culture blogger, he was imprisoned in the vicious Evin prison outside Tehran and either killed outright or at least allowed to die. He was followed on April 9 of this year …

Discussion: Reporters Without Borders

David Hirschman / Street Fight:

St. Louis Beacon: Revenue Beyond the Banner Ad — The St. Louis Beacon was founded in 2007 by a group of veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters who perceived a serious lack of in-depth reporting about the communities they lived in. After building up the site, they snagged a couple …

Discussion: Poynter

Lacey Rose / Hollywood Reporter:

Late Night's Late Bloomer Jimmy Kimmel … Famous athletes have their bizarre pregame rituals, and so, it seems, do comedians. It's minutes before Jimmy Kimmel Live!'s 7 p.m. taping June 9, and half a dozen members of the host's staff are huddled around him in his sprawling Hollywood office.

Kat Stoeffel / The New York Observer:

Joshua Hersh Leaves The Daily for The Huffington Post — The Huffington Post has poached reporter Joshua Hersh from The Daily, spokesman Mario Ruiz told The Observer. — Mr. Hersh will be a staff reporter covering foreign policy and the State Department in the Washington, D.C. bureau.

Discussion: @aarongell

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

News and Opinion Get Cozy in NY Times's New Sunday Section — Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times — The New York Times is serious about keeping the chocolate of opinion out of the peanut butter of its objective reporting. Readers, on the other hand, would often rather just have a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Discussion: MediaPost

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

American Media Buys OK Magazine — Richard Desmond. Image by Getty Images Europe via @daylife — Richard Desmond couldn't sell OK Magazine to Time Inc. Now he's found another buyer: American Media Inc., home to the National Enquirer and Star, is buying the money-losing entertainment title.

Discussion: AdAge, mediabistro.com, Kleinman, Guardian, Folio, Adweek, MinOnline, Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, Yahoo! News, Media & Entertainment, MediaPost, FishbowlNY, New York Magazine, The Atlantic Wire and Gawker

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

Good News for ‘Newsweek’ — After a year of year-on-year declines in ad pages, Newsweek has something to celebrate. For July, at least, it has stopped that decline, which could mean improved advertiser confidence in the brand. — Last year, the magazine had 52 ad pages for the month of July; this year it will be the same.

Discussion: mediabistro.com, FishbowlNY and The Wire

The Atlantic Wire:

Taegan Goddard: What I Read — How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers to these questions.