Mediagazer: In Defense of Murdoch — NEW YORK — Fair warning … (Roger Cohen/New York Times)

3:50 PM ET, July 12, 2011

Top News:

News Corp.'s Lost $7B Shows Investor Concern — News Corp. (NWSA)'s loss of $7 billion in market value over four trading days shows investor concerns that a probe into alleged phone hacking by journalists at one London newspaper could have a broader impact on the company.

Discussion: New York Times, Gawker, Splice Today, mediabistro.com, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Gothamist, FishbowlNY, Los Angeles Times, Future of Journalism, Company Town, The Wire and Forbes.com

David Cay Johnston / Reuters:

RPT-COLUMN-It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov't: DCJohnston — David Cay Johnston is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed here are his own. — (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch may not garner as much attention for his financial savvy as he does for his journalistic escapades …

Discussion: Future Journalism Project, Guardian, AdAge, On Media's Blog and Adweek

Roger Cohen / New York Times:

In Defense of Murdoch — NEW YORK — Fair warning: This column is a defense of Rupert Murdoch. If you add everything up, he's been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant. Without him, the British newspaper industry might have disappeared entirely.

Discussion: Mediaite, Media Research Center and The Wire

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB bid is slipping with David Cameron's U-turn — The PM's remarkable decision to follow Ed Miliband's opposition day motion could signal sea change for Murdoch's UK plans — It has taken David Cameron to do what Jeremy Hunt couldn't or wouldn't.

Discussion: Adweek, Economist, Paul Krugman and AdAge

New York Times:
News Corporation Moves to Delay BSkyB Deal to Avoid Its Collapse

Discussion: NPR, Poynter, New York Magazine and DealBook

Aaron Elstein / Crain's New York Business:
News Corp.'s board knows something about hacks

Discussion: Guardian, Reuters, The New York Observer, Adweek, The New Yorker Blog, paidContent and Media Matters for America

Yahoo! News:

HuffPo controversy highlights cavalier online editorial culture — What began presumably as an innocent post by a cub reporter has ballooned into one of this week's media controversies. Here's the basic time line of events: A young and green Huffington Post journalist named Amy Lee borrowed quite liberally …

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

HuffPo Fires Writer for Doing ‘What We Were Taught and Told to Do’ — The Huffington Post indefinitely suspended a young blogger today for rewriting too much of someone's news article. This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles.

Discussion: Erik Wemple, AdAge, Erik Wemple, Future Journalism Project, Fortune, Future of Journalism, The Informer, Poynter, AllThingsD, AdAge and The Wire

Dylan Byers / Adweek:
Is Huffington Post Throwing its Writers Under the Bus?

Discussion: Poynter, Daniel Bachhuber's weblog, Editors Weblog, The Wire, Strange Attractor and FishbowlNY

Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:

Reuters' Digital News Chief: “This is the Most Amazing Story Around” — The appointment of Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters who quickly became the company's Social Media editor, is “the most amazing (journalism) story around,” says Jim Impoco, Executive Editor, Thomson Reuters Digital, in this inteview with Beet.TV

Ingrid Lunden / paidContent:UK:

Publisher Penguin Waddles Into Social Media Experiment With Peer Index — A little social media experiment is underway at the publishers Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK: the publisher has tied up with the social media site PeerIndex to try out a new way of promoting its books.

Discussion: GalleyCat, The New York Observer and Forbes.com

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

Journalism students must bridge 'digital divide 2.0′ to become less old-school — Assistant professors Alexa Capeloto and Devin Harner say young journalism students “know how to act the part of digital natives,” but “they're inclined to see the Internet as a tool for entertainment and socializing …

Discussion: USA Today and MediaShift

Guardian:

Johann Hari suspended from the Independent following plagiarism row — Interviewer and columnist has been suspended for two months pending outcome of internal investigation — Johann Hari, the Independent interviewer and columnist accused of plagiarism, has been suspended for two months pending …

Discussion: The Huffington Post and blogs.telegraph.co.uk

New York Post:

Kutcher's son of Sun Valley — Ashton Kutcher created his own Sun Valley-like conference for cool kids after the older moguls headed home. — The “Two and a Half Men” star has been bolstering his rep as a tech entrepreneur by investing in a host of start-up companies through a partnership …

Discussion: Betabeat

Alysia Santo / CJR:

Q&A: Luke Stangel, Co-Creator of TapIn Bay Area — “Mobile could make us focus again on what we do really well as reporters.” … You quit your job to start Tackable, a social networking company, with Ed Lucero, a tech startup veteran. Where did the original idea for a location-aware social network come from?

Dawn C. Chmielewski / Los Angeles Times:

Web-only studios mature by mimicking ‘old media’ — Digital studios such as Vuguru are adopting Hollywood rituals for their new media series and applying traditional business models to underwrite production costs. — Nine studio executives sat in a glass-enclosed conference room in Beverly Hills …

Chris Ariens / FishbowlNY:

Lance Ulanoff Leaving PCMag.com, Dan Costa Upped to Editor-in-Chief — After 16 years with the PCMag — first in print and later solely online — Lance Ulanoff (left) is leaving the Ziff Davis brand for “other interests.” — Dan Costa, who has been Executive Editor of PCMag.com …

Discussion: PC Magazine

Chip Bayers / Adweek:

The Original Internet Adman — The advertising business has always been a place for self-invented characters. So was the Internet business in 1994, when I moved to San Francisco. That's when I met Jonathan Nelson, now CEO of digital for Omnicom, a holding company that earned more than 18 percent of its revenue from digital in 2010.