Mediagazer: New York Germinates Stories for Hollywood Harvest (Emily Witt/The New York Observer)

3:35 AM ET, July 30, 2011

Top News:

2007 Letter Clearing a Tabloid Comes Under Scrutiny — LONDON — When a Parliamentary committee first confronted The News of the World with charges of phone hacking in 2007, the paper's owners produced a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle & Lewis.

Discussion: Guardian, Future of Journalism and CJR

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Vanity Fair is first out of the gate with phone-hacking e-book — Where are all the rapid-turnaround e-books on the U.K. phone-hacking scandal?, we wondered earlier this week. — The saga has so far produced two print book deals, including one for Guardian reporter and resident champion …

Discussion: Future of Journalism, Publishing Executive …, GalleyCat and FishbowlNY

Joe Flint / Company Town:

News Corp. tells New York Post: Save any phone hacking information — News Corp. has told staffers at its New York Post tabloid to “preserve and maintain” any information related to phone hacking or government payoffs in exchange for scoops. — The memo comes in response to an ongoing probe …

Discussion: Poynter, Forbes.com, Adweek, Gawker, The Wrap, Media Decoder and AllThingsD

John Morton / American Journalism Review:
In Love with Newspapers — Rupert Murdoch's lifelong devotion to newsprint.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Longshot!:

and the Issue Two theme is... The moment has arrived. Here's how this works: Starting right now, you have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We'll take the next 24 to select, edit, design and lay everything out. The end result will be a beautiful glossy paper magazine.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, Runnin' Scared and 10,000 Words

The Atlantic Online:

The Almost-Free Toolkit We Use to Make Longshot Magazine — At 3 pm today, the Longshot Magazine team will begin work on our third issue. 48 hours later, we'll close the 60-page book. — Longshot is a crazy project that I cofounded with Sarah Rich and Mat Honan about a year and a half ago.

Discussion: Poynter, Portfolio and Future of Journalism

Paul Farhi / Washington Post:

David Minthorn is the grammar and style expert for the Associated Press — In its modern, digital forms, writing has become something like an untended garden. It's overgrown with text-speak and crawling with invasive species like tweets and dashed-off e-mails. OMG, it's a mess.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, Poynter and FishbowlNY

Mat Honan / Gizmodo:

Meet the Dozen Tech Publicists who Secretly Control the Media — The publicists and communications managers in the technology industry have tough jobs. They have to spin crap products into good stories. And let's face it, most of them are powerless. But not these dozen PR pros.

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

In Deal With NBC, Amazon Seeks to Widen Its Video Streaming Service — Amazon, the online retailing giant, announced a deal with NBCUniversal for access to part of Universal Pictures' film library on Thursday, its second such pact in the streaming video space in as many weeks.

Discussion: Adweek

Emily Witt / The New York Observer:

New York Germinates Stories for Hollywood Harvest — Two stories from New York have been optioned through the recent arrangement signed between the ICM agency and the magazine. ICM already represented The New York Times in Hollywood when it added New York as a client in June to better facilitate …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

R. Thomas Umstead / Multichannel:

TCA: HBO Execs Still Hoping Time Warner, Cablevision Go For HBO Go — ‘Luck’ To Debut in 2012 — HBO executives say that they're hoping to secure distribution deals for HBO Go holdouts Time Warner Cable and Cablevision in the near future. — HBO co-president Richard Plepler told TV critics attending …

Discussion: AllThingsD and Gizmodo

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Questions for Baratunde Thurston: What The Onion can teach real news organizations about social media — The Onion is funny because it looks and feels like real news. To do that well, The Onion has to act like a real news organization. — So when Baratunde Thurston …

Discussion: Mediaite, MinOnline and NetNewsCheck Latest

Steve Buttry / The Buttry Diary:

A false choice — and an excuse — for journalists: Better to be first or right? — An editor asks by email a question I hear often as journalists address the challenges of digital journalism: “Is it better to be first, or be right?” — Three times recently, the editor said, his staff was beaten …

Discussion: Future of Journalism