Mediagazer: Murdoch Scandal's Shadow Man (The Daily Beast)

3:30 AM ET, August 23, 2011

Top News:

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

Journalists Kept in Hotel as Battle Rages Outside — With an 18,000-square-foot spa, helicopter service upon request and a self-described “culture of service perfection,” the Rixos is Tripoli's premier hotel. — But over the weekend, the 120-room oasis in the center of the war-torn Libyan capital became …

Andrew Hough / Telegraph:

Libya: Sky News reporter Alex Crawford praised for dramatic Tripoli reporting — An award-winning reporter from Sky News, Alex Crawford, provided some of the most riveting and dramatic reporting from the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Sunday night. — As Col Muammar Gaddafi's power “crumbled” …

Discussion: Poynter, The Huffington Post, ONA Issues, BBC, The Huffington Post, Press Gazette, Erik Wemple, Guardian, Washington Post and Future Journalism Project

Alex Alvarez / Mediaite:
Covering Libya: Who Was There, Who Wasn't, And Who Aired Caught On Tape

Discussion: Salon, Adweek, ProPublica, Guardian and TVNewser

Brooks Boliek / The Politico:

FCC finally kills off fairness doctrine — The FCC gave the coup de grace to the fairness doctrine Monday as the commission axed more than 80 media industry rules. — Earlier this summer FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski agreed to erase the post WWII-era rule, but the action Monday puts …

Discussion: Washington Post, Mediaite and Mother Jones

Jasmin Melvin / Reuters:

Outdated US media rules to be taken off the books — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is stripping 83 rules from its books as part of its reform agenda and commitment to a request from President Barack Obama earlier in the year to improve or remove any rules that were out of date, the agency said on Monday.

Discussion: Hillicon Valley, Washington Wire, Hollywood Reporter, TVB, NationalJournal.com, Deadline.com and New York Magazine

Robert Peston / BBC:

Coulson got hundreds of thousands of pounds from News Int — Mr Coulson resigned from News International in January 2007 — Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World who has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in phone hacking and bribing the police …

Discussion: New York Magazine, The Wire, Guardian, Deadline.com, Adweek and The Wrap

Rob Lewis / Techvibes.com:

Vancouver's Zite to be acquired by CNN for $20-25 Million? — Last week's GROW Conference in Vancouver was a huge success. All week the city was abuzz as Canada's smartest entrepreneurs descended on the city along with venture capitalists from across Canada and south of the border.

Discussion: VentureBeat and App Advice

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

Huge generation gap evident in attitudes about website comments — An Ad Age/Ipsos Observer online survey of 1,003 households shows a large generation gap in how people view website commenting. Young adults (18 to 24) are three and a half times more likely than those 55 and older to comment “often” on Web articles.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and Techland

Megan Garber / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The NYT's new education site with WNYC will be collaborative, experimental...and meter-free — This morning, The New York Times and WNYC announced a new collaboration: SchoolBook, a site for news, data, and conversation about New York City schools. Slated to launch September 7 …

Discussion: WNYC News Blog, The New York Times Company and rbr.com

Gayle MacDonald / Globe and Mail:

Tony Burman, Al Jazeera and the future of news — Tony Burman was in his 11th-floor office at Al Jazeera English in Washington, D.C. - a stone's throw from the White House - when a news item appeared on his computer screen that made the veteran Canadian news man stop dead in his tracks.

Alex Weprin / TVNewser:
Ayman Mohyeldin Leaves Al Jazeera for NBC News

Discussion: Media Decoder, nbcuniversal.presscentre.com, Facebook, @aymanm, MediaPost, On Media's Blog and Broadcasting & Cable

Jonathan Stempel / Yahoo! News:

Spitzer sued for libel over his Slate column — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was hit with two libel lawsuits seeking $90 million by former Marsh & McLennan Cos executives over a column posted on Slate.com about an insurance bid-rigging scandal.

Discussion: Bloomberg, On Media's Blog, The Wire, The Huffington Post and The New York Observer

Heather Kelly / VentureBeat:

The Daily Dot wants to be a small town paper for the entire Internet — The biggest hurdle to enjoying The Daily Dot, a fun new online news site that launches today, is that its premise is based on a bad metaphor: The Internet is a community and The Daily Dot is its local paper.

Discussion: ShortFormBlog, Forbes, SiliconFilter and Nova Spivack, Thanks:dmfreeman

The Daily Beast:

Murdoch Scandal's Shadow Man — Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye who hacked phones for News of the World, has kept a low profile, but a lawsuit is pushing him into the spotlight—and demanding he name names. Brian Cathcart on why that's bad news for the Murdochs.

Beth Davidz / Poynter:

8-step guide for setting up Newsbeat to see real-time analytics — You're sick of Omniture, and Google Analytics just doesn't cut it. Waiting hours for analytics can be killer in a 24-hour news cycle where minutes, nevertheless seconds, count. As soon as you post an article you want to know how it's doing.

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:

Miramax Launching Multi-Title Facebook Movie App In U.S., UK & Turkey — Watching movies on Facebook isn't new—Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), Paramount and Universal each are trying variations on the theme. But today, paidContent can report, Miramax is launching the largest-scale Facebook …

Roy Peter Clark / Poynter:

Good tabloid writing turns crap into a front-page natural — On August 11, many news organizations covered another dramatic drop of the Dow, this one more than 500 points. So volatile was the market that week that even the roller coaster cliché seemed insufficient.

Discussion: Reuters and Mediaite