Mediagazer: Read It Later Raises $2.5 Million, Wants To Become The Dropbox Of Content (Jason Kincaid/TechCrunch)

7:00 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

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

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

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: 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, Journalism.co.uk 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

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 …

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

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

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 …

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

Los Angeles Times:

Hollywood awaits how Peter Chernin will fare with new venture — The upcoming ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ film and ‘Terra Nova’ TV series form the foundation of the former News Corp. president and longtime Hollywood power broker's media company, Chernin Entertainment.

Discussion: Company Town

Media Buyer Planner:

Nielsen, Kantar Target Local TV Metrics | Taking Sides on FCC Broadband Plan — Nielsen has made a multi-year deal with Kantar Media for its consumer viewing data from DirecTV set top boxes, a move that is expected to improve insights into local TV products and make a break away from diary-based measurement, writes Media Daily News.

Discussion: Adweek, MediaPost, Business Wire and Multichannel