Mediagazer: Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy (Macon Phillips/White House.gov Blog)

2:10 PM ET, January 15, 2012

Top News:

Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy — The White House has responded to two petitions about legislative approaches to combat online piracy. In their response, Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget …

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Pirates! Rupert Murdoch Rails About Obama, Google, and Silicon Valley — On Friday, Rupert Murdoch and his top executives gathered for a day-long private confab in Las Vegas to think big thoughts about digital stuff. I'm guessing there wasn't a session entitled “How Great is Google?”.

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

SOPA Delayed; Cantor Promises It Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until ‘Issues Are Addressed’ — Some late breaking news here: following Lamar Smith's announcement that the new manager's amendment for SOPA will remove DNS blocking (to be added back at a later date after it's been “studied") …

Discussion: TorrentFreak, Hillicon Valley, CNET, WebProNews, Ars Technica and VentureBeat, more at Techmeme »

Justin Martin / Poynter:

Why Christian Science Monitor stories have too many links, wrong ones — I often don't read my own articles in The Christian Science Monitor. The volume of hyperlinks the publication drops in their copy is just too distracting. Consider this Op-Ed on volunteerism among Millennials.

Discussion: @mathewi

Declan Fahy / CJR:

Media Made Hawking Famous — Amid 70th birthday adoration, reporters ignored their role in the physicist's celebrity — The extensive coverage of Stephen Hawking's seventieth birthday on January 8 focused on the physicist's status as the world's most famous living scientist.

Discussion: @tcarmody

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

People using pseudonyms post the highest-quality comments, Disqus says — One of the most popular commenting services for news websites and blogs says its data shows that commenters using pseudonyms are “the most important contributors to online communities.”

Discussion: Future of Journalism and eMedia Vitals

Markcuban / blog maverick:

The TV Business Keeps Getting Stronger ! — Back in my broadcast.com days we had a saying that “bits are bits”. That once content becomes digital, it is naturally going to become available on any and all digital devices. Based on this, we always made the point to be platform and device agnostic.

Craig Newmark / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Fact-checking should be part of how news organizations earn trust — Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact checking is an idea whose time has come.

Discussion: Erik Wemple, The Huffington Post, Free Press, craigconnects, Guardian and GigaOM

Craig Silverman / Poynter:

Plagiarism may be part of ‘weeding out’ at Journal Register — Can plagiarism be a byproduct of progress? — That's the contradictory question I'm pondering after a conversation with Matt DeRienzo, group editor of Journal Register Company's publications in Connecticut.

Discussion: Future of Journalism

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:

Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives — The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives.

Discussion: The Raw Story, The Snitch and Deadline.com

Meryl Gordon / CJR:

Gender Imbalance on the Campaign Trail — Voters skew female; reporters still do not — MANCHESTER, NH — The sea-green and white concrete gymnasium at Saint Anselm College was transformed this past Saturday night into a temporary state-of-the-art filing center for the GOP presidential debate …

Discussion: The Politico and Poynter

Rebecca McPheters / AdAge:

Magazines and Newspapers Need to Build Better Apps — Viewpoint: Significant Glitches Trouble Too Many Publishers' Apps — While it is still early in the migration process, Apple's iPad and other tablets appear to be a very good thing for the publishing industry, allowing publishers …

Discussion: Future of Journalism and Poynter

Felicia Pride / FishbowlNY:

Arianna Huffington Says Media Needs More Good News, Launches Vertical — What seems to be dominating headlines these days? War. Political mudslinging. Economic distress. Prejudice diatribes. Pure foolishness. — Does media need more feel-good stories? — Arianna Huffington thinks so.

Josh Stearns / Groundswell: The Missed Opportunity of HuffPost's “Good News”