Mediagazer: Julian Assange extradition breaches legal principle, lawyer claims (Robert Booth/Guardian)

David Kravets / Threat Level:

Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’ — Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required. — Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic.

Discussion: MediaNama and Mashable!

Robert Booth / Guardian:

Julian Assange extradition breaches legal principle, lawyer claims — First day of hearing into extradition of WikiLeaks founder to Sweden centres on issue of Swedish prosecutor's impartiality — The arrest warrant for Julian Assange should not stand and breaches “a matter of fundamental legal principle” …

Tom Espiner / ZDNet:

Assange's Supreme Court extradition appeal kicks off — Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has begun his Supreme Court bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about allegations of sexual coercion. — Assange appeared relaxed as the two-day hearing began in the Supreme Court building opposite …

Discussion: Chicago Tribune and Guardian

Jana Winter / Fox News:

EXCLUSIVE: Wikileaks to move servers offshore, sources say — Julian Assange's investors are in the process of purchasing a boat to move WikiLeaks' servers offshore in an attempt to evade prosecution from U.S. law enforcement, FoxNews.com has learned. Multiple sources within the hacker community …

Discussion: FT Tech Hub, PC Magazine and Mashable!, more at Techmeme »

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

AOL Beats Low Expectations, Increasing Ad Revenue and Slowing Total Decline in Q4 (Plus Charts!) — AOL said it earned 23 cents a share for the fourth quarter on revenue of $576.8 million, compared to 65 cents per share on $596 million in the same quarter a year ago.

Discussion: Forbes, Betabeat, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Business Wire, Future of Journalism, TechJournal South and paidContent, more at Techmeme »

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Is AOL Retreating on Its Patch Profitability Promise? — For quite some time now, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been telling investors that parts of Patch, the company's network of hyperlocal news sites, would cross over into the black by the end of 2011 in a “rolling thunder” of profitability.

Dylan Stableford / Yahoo! News:

Yahoo News hires Olivier Knox as its first White House correspondent — Yahoo News has hired Olivier Knox, Congressional correspondent for Agence France-Press, to be its White House correspondent—the first in Yahoo's 16-year history. — Knox—who has spent more than a decade with AFP covering politics …

Discussion: FishbowlDC, FishbowlNY, ABCNEWS and JIMROMENESKO.COM

John Stevens / Daily Mail:

Email to James Murdoch telling him hacking was rife at NotW was deleted days before police launched investigation — An email warning James Murdoch that phone-hacking was ‘rife’ at the News of the World was deleted from his inbox days before police started an investigation into the newspaper, it was revealed last night.

Mark Hughes / The Telegraph:

Glenn Mulcaire ordered to reveal who told him to hack phones — Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who is accused of hacking phones on behalf of the News of the World, must reveal which journalists at the now defunct Sunday title instructed him, a court ruled today.

Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:

YouTube could introduce a subscription service of its own — At the D:Dive Into Media conference Tuesday, YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar gave his views on how the video marketplace is evolving both online and off. While much of the company's efforts have been based on advertising …

Discussion: AllThingsD and Business Insider, more at Techmeme »

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Amazon: Print Book Unit Sales Up; More Content For Prime — Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) says unit sales of print books grew by “double digits” in Q4 compared to last year. That “is impressive given the shift to Kindle,” said CFO Tom Szkutak in the investor call following this afternoon's disappointing earnings report.

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:
Amazon: Big Kindle sales, but sales and outlook fall short

Discussion: AllThingsD, NetNewsCheck Latest, Home Media Magazine and ReadWriteWeb, more at Techmeme »

Matt Rosoff / Business Insider:
Amazon Blows Q4, Stock Plunges 9% After Hours

Discussion: New York Times, Bookseller news, Amazon.com, @laurahazardowen, Reuters, Publishers Weekly, CNBC and Tech Trader Daily, more at Techmeme »

Lauren Lloyd / LAist:

Former L.A. Times Employee Warns Of Impending Massive Writer Layoff — A freshly fired Los Angeles Times pressman shared some shocking details about the publication's termination policies, recent employee suicides and impending layoff of writers with The Frying Pan editor Steven Mikulan.

Steven Mikulan / Frying Pan News: LA Times: Layoffs, Sabotage and Suicides?

Matthew Fleischer / FishbowlLA:
Suicides and Sabotage at the LA Times

Discussion: Future of Journalism and WebProNews

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:

Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff: We Made $150 Million Last Year — When it first debuted in 2009, Vevo aspired to be a “Hulu for music.” Today, it's exactly that: the second largest video property on the Web in the U.S., a title that — you guessed it — was once held by Hulu.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and The Wrap

Alexander Abad-Santos / The Atlantic Wire:

Time to Ask if Vanity Fair Is Racist (Again) — Vanity Fair has released its annual Hollywood cover, and now it's time for the fun though often futile, exercise of determining if the magazine has slighted minority actors and actresses based on their numbers and placement.

Discussion: Business Insider and LA Observed

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

A new iPad app that promises a future for long-form journalism — Longform.org, one of the growing breed of aggregators and social sites spreading multi-thousand-word journalism around the web, announced today that it will debut an iPad app tomorrow. — And unlike some magazines …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Future of Journalism, Poynter, NetNewsCheck Latest, eMedia Vitals and JIMROMENESKO.COM

John Ellis / BuzzFeed:

Big Media Is About To Pull The Plug On Newt Gingrich — The suits are taking charge, and they're killing the travel budgets. Sorry Newt, Rick, Zeke! — Gingrich is about to lose his pack. — It's January 31st and it's over. Mitt Romney has blown away the field in the Florida primary …

Tom Cheredar / VentureBeat:

Senate Democrats don't like the idea of a Netflix Facebook app — Streaming video service Netflix recently appealed to a panel of U.S. senators to update an old law that forbids the company from launching a Facebook application within the country. — The antiquated law …

Discussion: Senate Judiciary Committee

Dylan Stableford / Yahoo! News:

The secrets of Wolf's success: CNN anchor dishes to Yahoo News on debates, the ‘Magic Wall,’ and his rigorous exercise regime — Wolf Blitzer, anchor of CNN's political coverage and host of “The Situation Room,” is sitting in the network's Election Center in Atlanta, awaiting results of Tuesday's Florida Republican primary.

Discussion: Poynter, Associated Press and Jack Shafer