Mediagazer: Fast Chat: CNN President Ken Jautz (D.M. Levine/Adweek)

4:25 PM ET, August 9, 2011

Top News:

Erin Griffith / Adweek:

The Trouble With Back-Ends — No publication has a better story about back-end chaos than BusinessWeek. — Before it was acquired by Bloomberg LP, the publication sank a shocking $20 million into the back-end development of Business Exchange, a professional social networking site …

Discussion: @fromedome, @mikeydigital, @andymboyle, @osder, @jonathanstray, @fromedome and @codybrown

Yinka Adegoke / Reuters:

Murdoch to face Wall Street on News Corp earnings call — (Reuters) - News Corp is taking a risk in putting boss Rupert Murdoch, famous for his off-script comments, on the media conglomerate's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday with succession questions sure to be asked.

Discussion: The Huffington Post, Free Press, Company Town and Runnin' Scared

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:

News Corp.'s Independent Directors Have Strong Ties to Murdoch — When the News Corporation board convenes on the 20th Century Fox Studios lot Tuesday for its first meeting since a phone hacking scandal overseas plunged the company into turmoil, the participants will include many people with deep and personal ties to Rupert Murdoch.

Discussion: Poynter

Ian Burrell / The Independent:
‘NOTW’ staff offered lucrative severance pay

Discussion: Press Gazette and Adweek

Michael Wolff / Adweek:
How Bad Is News Corp.?

Discussion: Guardian and Mixed Media

Steve Myers / Poynter:

U.K. photographer explains how she captured dramatic photo during riots — All the major newspapers in the U.K. published a dramatic photo of a woman jumping from a burning building during the riots that have terrorized the country, captured by Amy Weston of the photo agency WENN.

Discussion: Guardian, Mashable!, Disruptors, Guardian, Yahoo! News, The Daily What, Barbara Krasnoff's blog, Boston Globe, Telegraph, Adweek and Guardian, more at Techmeme »

Guardian:

London riots: Sky, ITN and CNN reporters attacked — Broadcasters' vans smashed in Croydon and Sky News reporter Mark Stone forced to flee in Clapham disturbance — Journalists and photographers came under attack on Monday as London faced its third consecutive day of violent riots in the capital.

Discussion: BBC, Journalism.co.uk, Fast Company, The Wire, Forbes, The Lede, The Huffington Post, PC World, NBC Bay Area, WebProNews, Press Gazette, Guardian and Jon Slattery

Telegraph:
How technology fuelled Britain's first 21st century riot

Discussion: Gawker, TechCrunch Europe, ReadWriteWeb, Gizmodo, Techland and The Lede

Mark Milian / CNN:

Newspaper giant Tribune Co. developing tablet device — (CNN) — Hoping to take a small slice from Apple's big pie, newspaper publishers are developing tablet computers of their own. — The Tribune Co., one of the largest U.S. news enterprises, is working on a touchscreen tablet that it plans …

Discussion: mocoNews, Poynter, TechCrunch, eBookNewser, Liliputing, Gizmodo, LAPTOP Mag, PC World, rbr.com, 9to5Google, 9to5Mac and NetNewsCheck Latest, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

AOL Earnings: Shares Plummet Despite Ad Revenue Gains — The addition of the Huffington Post and other acquisitions allowed AOL chairman Tim Armstrong to tell Wall Street what it has long waited to hear: the internet company's global advertising revenues grew in the second quarter, the first time that's happened since 2008.

Nicholas Carlson / The Business Insider:

AOL CEO Says The Ad Side Of The Company Doesn't Have Enough “Operational Scale” — AOL just reported its Q2 earnings. — The display advertising sales numbers were OK. — People worried they would be much worse because a couple weeks ago, CEO Tim Armstrong fired AOL's ad sales boss …

Joe Pompeo / Yahoo! News:

Phone-hacking scoopster Nick Davies may join Guardian's planned U.S. operation — When not tirelessly chronicling the ongoing British phone-hacking saga, The Guardian has been lining up journalists to staff the U.S.-based website that the U.K. broadsheet plans to have up and running sometime this fall.

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

New Stats: Book Publishing Is Growing; E-Book Revs and Sales Up Over 1000% — One positive story in a week of terrible economic news: BookStats, a new annual statistical survey of raw sales revenue and unit data provided by nearly 2,000 publishers that is being released today …

Discussion: GalleyCat and Techland

D.M. Levine / Adweek:

Fast Chat: CNN President Ken Jautz — Since taking over as president of U.S. operations at CNN last September, Ken Jautz has been struggling to jazz-up what had become a snoozing network—at least by the clamorous standards of the cable news universe—with high-profile hires like Erin Burnett …

Discussion: TVNewser and Inside Cable News

James Parker / The Atlantic Online:

Valley of the Trolls — It's the rare star who can withstand the predatory cameras of TMZ on TV. — AM I ON some kind of Web site for nuts and stalkers?" asked Paris Hilton, rhetorically (I think), during the premier episode of her new reality show, The World According to Paris.

Nat Ives / AdAge:

How These Magazines Increase Circulation While the Industry Declined — Tactics Range From Absorbing a Defunct Title to Getting Bloggers to Sell Subscriptions — Here's the bad news that everyone was expecting: Magazines' paid and verified circulation in the first half slipped 1.36% …

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Onion's CTO: Our paywall experiment is just that — When word got out about The Onion testing a paid content model overseas, Gawker declared the beginning of the end: “It only affects dirty foreigners at the moment, but everyone knows damn well that these things always presage a domestic rollout.

Discussion: The New York Observer, A.V. Club, Splitsider, Mediaite, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Consumerist

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

NYT Labs: Can a newspaper think like a startup? — After delaying the project while it launched a paywall, the New York Times has finally rolled out its version of Google Labs, the now-shuttered project that provided a home for the search company's various web experiments.