Mediagazer: Manchester Purchase of Union-Tribune Raises Questions of Timing (Matt Potter/San Diego Reader)

1:45 PM ET, November 17, 2011

Top News:

British Tabloid Paper Portrayed as Prompting Suicides — LONDON — A lawyer representing 51 people who say they were victims of phone hacking and press intrusion told a hearing on Wednesday that his clients and their families had been followed, spied on, threatened, harassed, vilified …

Discussion: TVWeek.com

Josh Halliday / Guardian:

Sun's former head of features sues News Corp execs over sacking — Matt Nixson seeks £100,000 in damages after being abruptly fired from his job on 21 July — The Sun's former head of features, who was sacked in July, is suing News Group Newspapers and four members …

Discussion: Adweek

Paul Sonne / Wall Street Journal:

Police, News Corp. Question U.K. Hacking Total — LONDON—Lawyers for the Metropolitan Police and News Corp. have disputed the suggestion, made at a public inquiry here Monday, that a private investigator's notebook identifies at least 28 employees of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit as people …

Discussion: Poynter

Julie Moos / Poynter:

AP says safety concern was behind memo about journalists tweeting colleagues' arrest — AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sent a memo to all employees clarifying why staffers were cautioned Tuesday not to tweet about two journalists caught up in the Occupy Wall Street eviction from Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

Discussion: Future of Journalism, Media Decoder, LA Observed, Mediaite, The News About The News, Boing Boing, New York Magazine and The Huffington Post

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Memo to AP: Twitter is the newswire now

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Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Amazon KindlePhone for 2012? — Amazon just rolled out a full-fledged tablet. Next year, says Citigroup's research department, it could have its own phone. Here's the topline from analyst Mark Mahaney's newest note: — “Based on our supply chain channel checks in Asia led by Kevin Chang …

Discussion: Forbes, VentureBeat, The Wrap, CNET News, PC Magazine, Future of Journalism, Between the Lines Blog and The Next Web, more at Techmeme »

Tiffany Hsu / LA Times:

San Diego Union-Tribune sold to hotel magnate Doug Manchester — The San Diego Union-Tribune is being sold to MLIM, owned by local hotel magnate Doug Manchester, said current owner Platinum Equity. — Terms of the deal weren't disclosed by Los Angeles-based Platinum …

Matt Potter / San Diego Reader:

Manchester Purchase of Union-Tribune Raises Questions of Timing — Word this morning that Doug Manchester is buying the Union-Tribune may help explain some recent editorializing by the paper. — Don Bauder first reported here on September 29 about rumors circulating that Platinum Equity …

Discussion: Poynter

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Gawker Media's Nick Denton Wants Out of the Porn Business — Pssst. Hey. You. Want to buy a porn site? — Nick Denton has something for you: The Gawker Media owner is pawning off Fleshbot, the porn site he has operated for eight years in addition to sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Deadspin.

Discussion: VentureBeat, FishbowlNY, Fleshbot, AVN and Medacity

Glenn Peoples / Hollywood Reporter:

Google Music Launch Unveils a Solid Competitor to Apple, Amazon, Spotify … Google did not disappoint in its hotly anticipated launch event for Google Music in Los Angeles this afternoon. Although the company is relatively late in launching a music-download store, it has put together …

Discussion: New York Times, The Official Google Blog, Search Engine Land and GigaOM, more at Techmeme »

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Don't Be Too Disappointed By Google Music's Lackluster Debut

Discussion: the Econsultancy blog, more at Techmeme »

Martha Mendoza / Associated Press:

AP Impact: Right-to-know laws often ignored … Satbir Sharma's wife is dead. His family lives in fear in rural India. His father's left leg is shattered, leaving him on crutches for life. — Sharma's only consolation lies in a new law that gives him the right to know what will happen …

Discussion: 10,000 Words

Roy Greenslade / Guardian: Paper still blocked after three-year freedom of information battle

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

A Groupon for Newspapers? — Newspapers, in danger of having their advertising lunch eaten by Groupon and its ilk, have teamed up to form an online deals platform. — Eight publishing and media companies are launching the common digital shopping platform, called Find n Save.

Discussion: Poynter, Broadcasting & Cable, Future of Journalism and mnilive.com

Andy Greenberg / Forbes:

Google Tells Congress: Financial Embargo Of WikiLeaks Shows How To Deal With Web Piracy — A massive copyright fight is scaling up over the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that Hollywood sees as a panacea for online copyright violation and Silicon Valley sees as a fundamental threat to the Internet itself.

Discussion: GigaOM, The Raw Story, ESET ThreatBlog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Techdirt, Mixed Media and Firstpost, more at Techmeme »

Jessica Roy / 10,000 Words:
How The Stop Online Piracy Act Could Impact Journalists

Discussion: Forbes, MediaShift, Between the Lines Blog, Mashable!, Ars Technica, The Next Web, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Nation, Kickstarter Blog and Runnin' Scared, more at Techmeme »

Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:

Time Warner Cable's Marcus Sees HBO Go Agreement ‘Soon’ for Mobile Devices — Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), the second- largest U.S. cable-television provider, is nearing a deal with HBO to offer the HBO Go application to subscribers so they can watch shows on mobile devices, its chief operating officer said.

Discussion: Deadline.com

Ian Burrell / The Independent:

BBC aired documentary made by TV company in the pay of Mubarak — The BBC has admitted 15 breaches of its editorial guidelines and has bought documentaries for “nominal” fees aslittle as £1 from a company that was working to promote foreign governments such as the Egyptian regime of the now-deposed Hosni Mubarak.

Discussion: BBC

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Has Netflix Put Its Checkbook Away? — If you're waiting to hear about more big Netflix content deals in the near future, you may be disappointed. — J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth reports back from a recent huddle with Netflix managers, and says he thinks they're done writing checks for a while …

Discussion: rbr.com

Alysia Santo / CJR:

Public Radio and the Freelance Journalist — Should the same code of ethics apply? — Caitlin Curran was a freelance web producer for WNYC/PRI's radio show, The Takeaway, which has been covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. After a picture of Curran holding a sign at a recent OWS protest went viral …

New York Times:

Reuters Reporter Also Works for Yemen's President — The Reuters news agency on Thursday stood by its Yemen correspondent amid outrage from opposition activists over his employment by the government as a personal translator to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. — The reporter, Mohamed Sudam …

Arianna Huffington / The Huffington Post:

Motoring Into the Motor City: Introducing HuffPost Detroit — Today marks the rollout of our latest local section: HuffPost Detroit, fresh off the assembly line. — We motor into the Motor City with a clear editorial mission: to provide an alternative to the knee-jerk narrative the national media love to tell about Detroit.

Discussion: Poynter

Martin Wilson / The Drum:

Analysis: ABC figures for October 2011 — The latest ABC figures continued to highlight the decline in circulation for daily printed newspapers across the UK, with some Sunday titles however witnessing an uplift following the closure of the News of the World.

Discussion: Guardian

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

AOL's Product Guy, Brad Garlinghouse, Heads For The Exit — AOL doesn't have a chief product officer, but if it did, that person would be Brad Garlinghouse, the president of Applications and Commerce who heads up AOL's Silicon Valley office. As has been widely reported, Garlinghouse has decided to leave AOL.