Mediagazer: DirecTV Rises Most in Two Years After Adding Record Customers (Alex Sherman/Bloomberg)

11:15 AM ET, November 4, 2011

Top News:

Darren Murph / Engadget:

B&N launching Nook Tablet for $249 on November 16th, and we've got the dirty details — Sitting down? Good. Come November 16th, Amazon's Kindle Fire will have company. We've wrapped our paws around a stash of documents confirming the impending launch of the first bona fide tablet in the Nook line …

Discussion: SlashGear, paidContent, AllThingsD, Digits, Fortune, Mashable!, Softpedia News, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, The Next Web, Gizmodo and Business Insider, more at Techmeme »

Wall Street Journal:

Google Ponders Pay-TV Business — Pilot Project in Kansas City Would Rival Cable, Satellite — Internet giant Google Inc. is considering a plan to offer paid cable-TV services to consumers, a move that could unleash a new wave of competition within the traditional TV business.

Discussion: VideoNuze, Fast Company, SlashGear, Gizmodo, Deadline.com, Mashable!, Electronista, Engadget, Future of Journalism, New York Magazine, parislemon and Business Insider, more at Techmeme »

Steven Mufson / Washington Post:

Washington Post Co. posts $6.2M loss in third quarter — The Washington Post Co. lost $6.2 million, or 82 cents a share, in the third quarter of 2011 as a result of a series of one-time charges, a sharp contraction in its education business and continued deterioration in its newspaper and online publishing division.

Discussion: Poynter, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Business Wire

Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:

CBS turned down an ad-based Apple TV deal — CBS CEO Les Moonves is known to occasionally drop pieces of information that he's not supposed to on his company's earnings calls, and this quarter was no exception. When asked about CBS's appetite for striking deals with new streaming providers …

Discussion: iDownloadBlog.com, NetNewsCheck Latest, SlashGear, Engadget, 9to5Mac, Electronista, Gizmodo, Multichannel, Home Media Magazine and MacRumors, more at Techmeme »

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:

AP issues staff guidelines on retweets, no ‘personal opinions’ allowed or implied — The Associated Press has added a new entry on retweeting to its social media guidelines. Staffers are reminded to keep their opinions to themselves. … Disclaimers — like “retweets do not constitute endorsements” …

Discussion: Editors Weblog, Kirk LaPointe's …, The Wall Blog, 10,000 Words and ap.org

Alex Weprin / TVNewser:

HLN Finally Launches a Website To Call Its Own — HLN's web presence has long been relegated to a subsection of CNN.com. That in and of itself is not a bad thing, as CNN has one of the strongest digital presences of any news organization. But as the focus of coverage by CNN and HLN have diverged …

Discussion: HLNtv.com

Alex Sherman / Bloomberg:

DirecTV Rises Most in Two Years After Adding Record Customers — Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) — DirecTV, the largest U.S. satellite- television provider, rose the most in two years after adding a record number of net subscribers in the third quarter. — DirecTV added 327,000 U.S. users …

Discussion: Associated Press, Reuters and Forbes.com

Dominic Rushe / Guardian:

News Corp HR chief quits — Beryl Cook, who has been with the firm for 22 years, says she wants to return to Asia to be closer to her family — News Corp's top human resources executive has quit the media conglomerate as it deals with the effects of a phone-hacking scandal at its UK newspapers.

Discussion: Company Town, Media Decoder, Media Week and NetNewsCheck Latest

Business Wire:
Beryl Cook to Step Down as Chief Human Resources Officer of News Corporation

Discussion: Poynter

Josh Halliday / Guardian:
Murdoch fails to win Hunt's full backing

Discussion: Press Gazette

Adam Hochberg / Poynter:

U.S. Marshals ordered to seize Righthaven assets — A federal court has ordered U.S. Marshals to seize $63,720 in assets from Righthaven - the embattled Law Vegas company that files copyright infringement lawsuits. Righthaven tried to make money by acquiring the copyrights to newspaper articles …

Discussion: paidContent

David Kaplan / paidContent:

@ pcE11: Dawn Ostroff: Streaming Is Better Than DVRs For Advertising — Veteran TV exec Dawn Ostroff has only been in her job as the head of Condé Nast's new entertainment unit for three weeks, so it made sense that she didn't have much to say about that work when she sat …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Kimberly Dozier / Associated Press:

AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook … McLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets - up to 5 million a day. — At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” …

Discussion: Gawker, Business Insider and The Politico, more at Techmeme »

Steven Jacobs / Street Fight:

Main Street Connect Announces New CEO, $7 Million in Funding — Main Street Connect, the network of hyperlocal news sites, announced yesterday that Thompson Reuters' Global Head of Product Management Zohar Yardeni would come on as CEO, replacing founder Carll Tucker who will become chairman of the company's board of directors.

C. Custer / Penn-Olson:

Chinese Government on TV Content: No Net Video Allowed! — China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has been on the warpath recently. First, they threw a haymaker at China's sattelite TV stations by slashing the number of “entertainment” programs allowed daily …

Discussion: paidContent

Evan Smith / The Texas Tribune:

T-Squared: The Texas Tribune's Two-Year Stats … Yep, today's the second anniversary of our launch — a big deal for a whole bunch of reasons (can't believe we got here, look how much we've accomplished, maybe this thing will work after all). No fancy or elaborate celebration …

Discussion: Poynter

Ryan Chittum / CJR:

The Journal Fizzles on Occupy Oakland Protest — Several thousand Occupy movement protestors shut down the Port of Oakland yesterday, a week after Oakland police attacked the protest with tear gas and, allegedly, flashbang grenades and rubber bullets. Big news story.

Discussion: Poynter, The New York Observer, Los Angeles Times, Grist, Media Research Center and New York Times