Mediagazer: Designing a big news site is about more than beauty (Joshua Benton/Nieman Journalism Lab)

8:10 PM ET, July 26, 2011

Top News:

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes.com:

Claim: Smoking Gun Recording Links Piers Morgan to Hacking — CNN host Piers Morgan was editor of a British tabloid, the Daily Mirror, at a time when many British tabloid reporters were committing illegal hacking of voicemails. Morgan has vociferously denied personal involvement in or knowledge …

Discussion: Mediaite, The Wire, The Wrap, The Huffington Post, BBC and Telegraph

New York Times:

Murdoch Veterans Portray an Engaged Boss — LONDON — It was the political scoop of the year, a damning, serialized exposé in The Daily Telegraph about how British politicians were abusing their parliamentary expense accounts to pay for things like moat-cleaning and wisteria-trimming.

Discussion: Time, paidContent, Media News, Advertising … and Free Press

Damien McCrystal / Guardian:

Phone hacking: the case for the defence — Celebrities encourage intrusion, and we have a right to know about anything that affects politicians' ability to do their jobs — The most extraordinary thing about the News International crisis is the way in which it has caused the British national media …

Discussion: MediaShift, Jon Slattery and themediablog.typepad.com

Bloomberg: BSkyB Directors Facing $4.2 Billion Payout Quandary After Murdoch Scandal

Paul McNamara / New York Times:
News of the World's Desperate Final Hours

Discussion: Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Future of Journalism, CJR, Media Decoder and Financial Times

The Brads:

The Brads - This is Why Your Newspaper is Dying — Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen — Funny, but so true. Going through the list and seeing what I an guilty of.

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Designing a big news site is about more than beauty — It appears to be Pick On News Web Designers Day today. This comic — poking at news sites' unwillingness to link, misuse of thumbnails, and addictions to share buttons, among other things — made the rounds of Twitter, to the point of crashing cartoonist Brad Colbow's site.

Discussion: stdout.be and The Wall Blog

Martin Belam / currybetdotnet:

4 key pieces of audience engagement missing from Andy Rutledge's news redux — Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news, and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times design. — This post isn't going to make much …

Discussion: 10,000 Words, GigaOM and The Business Insider

Cory Bergman / Lost Remote:

NYTimes, TV stations among ‘most social’ companies — The New York Times is the most social company in the U.S., and local TV is the top industry on Twitter, finds a report by NetProspex (.pdf). The report measures the number of employees with social media accounts (using a company email address) …

Discussion: Future of Journalism and Steve Rubel

Jon Lafayette / Broadcasting & Cable:

Comcast, NBCU Bring Dynamic Ads to VOD — Kraft, Chrysler are initial sponsors — In a bit of synergy between its cable business and its networks, Comcast and NBCUniversal say they are working together to use dynamic ad insertion in On Demand programming.

Discussion: MediaPost, rbr.com and The Wrap, Thanks:beet_tv

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Report: We are a YouTube nation — Further evidence that we are all YouTube addicts comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project this morning: 71 percent of U.S. adults used video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo in May, according to a new Pew report, compared to 66 percent a year earlier.

Discussion: Pew Internet, AllThingsD, Future of Journalism and Hillicon Valley, more at Techmeme », Thanks:beet_tv

Alfred Hermida / Reportr.net:

How journalists are rethinking their relationship with the audience — Here is a brief write-up of some of the main points from my talk at the Screen Futures conference in Australia on the promise and practice of participatory journalism. — The talk was based on findings in my co-authored book …

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …

Felix Salmon:

The NYT paywall is working — Back in April, I was very skeptical that the NYT would achieve its leaked goal of getting 300,000 paying digital subscribers, and I put my money where my mouth was, entering into a bet with John Gapper. John wouldn't bet me that the NYT would get to 300,000 within a year …

Mark Joyella / Mediaite:

Erin Burnett Debuts On CNN, Immediately Breaks News, Sends Twitter Aflutter — The former CNBC anchor Erin Burnett made her debut on CNN last night, appearing with Wolf Blitzer in the hour leading up to President Obama's speech to the nation on the debt ceiling impasse.

Discussion: The Wire, On Media's Blog, TVNewser and CNN

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Read It Later Raises $2.5 Million, Wants To Become The Dropbox Of Content — Read It Later, the popular service that lets you bookmark a webpage and access it later from any smartphone, computer, or tablet, has raised a $2.5 million funding round. The round marks the company's first external funding …

Discussion: AllThingsD and GigaOM

Adrian Chen / Gawker:

Tech News Is So Phenomenally Boring — You never read tech news, do you? Good. Somehow, the story of the accidental early release of a Facebook iPad app everyone was expecting is threatening to turn into a week-long saga. Make it stop! This is the most boring s**t ever.

Discussion: Betabeat, Telegraph, 9to5Mac, PC World, The Business Insider, parislemon, Scripting News, Techi.com, All Facebook, @alexia and TechCrunch, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

How badges help news websites build community, make money — Badges are a potentially powerful tool for understanding a news audience and shaping its behavior. — Just like the military uses badges to display rank, and scouts use them to honor accomplishments, a news site or mobile app …

Discussion: The Huffington Post