Mediagazer: RPT-COLUMN-It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov't: DCJohnston (David Cay Johnston/Reuters)

1:55 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, mediabistro.com, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, FishbowlNY, Gothamist, Future of Journalism, Los Angeles Times, Company Town 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, On Media's Blog, Adweek, Guardian, News Desk, Media Matters for America and AdAge

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: NPR, Mediaite and The Wire

New York Times:

News Corporation Moves to Delay BSkyB Deal to Avoid Its Collapse — LONDON — Battered by allegations of phone hacking by the now-shuttered News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation on Monday effectively delayed government action on its proposed takeover of the satellite broadcast …

Discussion: New York Magazine, Poynter and DealBook

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: The Wrap

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
News Corp. Sends Signal to Wall Street With $5 Billion Share Buyback

Discussion: News Corporation and Forbes.com

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 and paidContent

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
The Twisted Logic of Murdoch's Pivot on BSkyB Deal

Discussion: Adweek, Media Decoder, rbr.com, Press Gazette, Media & Entertainment, Forbes.com, News Corporation, The Lede, Editors Weblog, Multichannel and Gawker

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: Future Journalism Project, Future of Journalism, The Informer, Poynter, The Wire, AdAge and FishbowlNY

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

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

Economist:

Opening statements — There is no question that the internet is transforming the news industry, just as it has reshaped so many other industries. And, as in those other cases, the internet's impact has both positive and negative aspects. Does this, on balance, strengthen or weaken the news system?

Discussion: Poynter, The Awl and The New York Observer

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: 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

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

New York Times:

British Tabloid Sought Phone Data of Investigators — LONDON — Shortly after Scotland Yard began its initial criminal inquiry of phone hacking by The News of the World in 2006, five senior police investigators discovered that their own cellphone messages had been targeted by the tabloid and had most likely been listened to.

Discussion: Press Gazette, Guardian, The Huffington Post, This Is London, Gawker, National Review, blogs.telegraph.co.uk, FP Passport, The Staggers, Crikey, The Wire and Runnin' Scared

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 …

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.

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Big Media Thinks Its Future Is in Your Phone — Big media companies have never been comfortable with the Web: It's sprawling, messy, hard to corral and even harder to turn into a profit center. — But many of those same companies tend be much more optimistic about smartphones …

Thanks:mikepilarz

Guardian:

Johann Hari suspended from the Independent over plagiarism claims — 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.

Discussion: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

David Kaplan / paidContent:

PIB: Magazine Ad Pages Rise A Bit, As Food Category Starts To Stumble — By and large, consumer magazine ad pages have been trending pretty well the past year, ekeing out slim gains amid advertisers' continued migration from print to digital. But as the latest Publishers Information Bureau figures …

Discussion: MPA, MediaPost, mediabistro.com and Folio