Mediagazer: ‘The Walking Dead’ Has a Water Cooler: ‘Talking Dead’ (Rachel Dodes/Wall Street Journal)

9:00 AM ET, February 13, 2012

Top News:

Murdoch hit by threat of new legal fight in US — Rupert Murdoch's global empire is set to face new legal action in the US over alleged illegal practices by News Corp journalists. The lawyer at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal in the UK, Mark Lewis, who was instrumental in exposing …

Discussion: Press Gazette and Guardian

Trevor Kavanagh / The Sun:

The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh: Witch-hunt puts us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom — THE Sun is not a “swamp” that needs draining. — Nor are those other great News International titles, The Times and The Sunday Times. — Yet in what would at any other time cause uproar in Parliament …

Discussion: Telegraph, Journalism.co.uk, Bloomberg, @jayrosen_nyu, Guardian, Jon Slattery and FleetStreetBlues

Guardian:

Senior Sun journalists arrested in police payments probe — Rupert Murdoch is flying to London after five of tabloid's most senior staff are arrested inongoing inquiry into alleged bribery — The Sun has been plunged into crisis following the arrest of five of its most senior journalists …

Discussion: Press Gazette, rbr.com, Hollywood Reporter, paidContent, Guardian, mUmBRELLA, Future of Journalism, New York Times, The Wrap, Guardian, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, @dangillmor, Jon Slattery, Associated Press and The Independent

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian: Police investigation sparks civil war at NI

Andrew Pugh / Press Gazette:
Mail, Telegraph and NUJ criticise police after Sun arrests

Discussion: Guardian and Future of Journalism

Katherine Rushton / Telegraph:

ITV warns Apple not to brand smart television ‘iTV’ — ITV has written to Apple to warn the Silicon Valley technology giant off using its three-letter name for its long-awaited, “iTV” smart television. — ITV insiders fear Apple may ignore past assurances that it would not muscle into its territory with its new smart television.

Discussion: ZDNet, Ubergizmo, App Advice, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and Forbes, more at Techmeme »

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Pew: Online advertising passing by news organizations — News organizations are doing a crummy job of capitalizing on online advertising's growth. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the websites of 11 newspapers, several TV networks, and Yahoo and the Huffington Post …

Discussion: MediaPost, Journalism.org and Broadcasting & Cable

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

The Washington Post, Recast for a Digital Future — ON a Sunday in early December, Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post, summoned some of the newspaper's most celebrated journalists to a lunch at his home, a red brick arts-and-crafts style in the suburb of Bethesda, Md.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, The Atlantic Online, Wannabe Hacks, rjionline.org, Future of Journalism, Gannett Blog, @romenesko, Washington Post and ShortFormBlog

David Carr / New York Times:

Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn't — I was going to tweet about Roland Martin's suspension from CNN, but I decided to write a column about it instead. It's safer this way. — Let me explain. — Big media companies love when their employees hit Twitter.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and Kirk LaPointe's …

Samantha Murphy / Mashable!:

Twitter Breaks News of Whitney Houston Death 27 Minutes Before Press — Twenty-seven minutes before mainstream media broke the news of Whitney Houston's death on Saturday night, the story was on Twitter, reported by a man who tweeted the news out to his 14 followers.

Discussion: The New York Observer, Mark Edwards Worldwide, @mathewi, @bahjournalist, @rsarver, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, St. Petersburg Times and Gawker, more at Techmeme »

Felix Salmon:

Quality vs quantity online — At about the same time that Michael Kinsley's hilarious response to a blog post of mine hit the web, The Atlantic also uploaded to its website Kathleen McAuliffe's excellent story about how parasites shape our behavior. — McAuliffe's 5,873-word feature …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Rachel Dodes / Wall Street Journal:

‘The Walking Dead’ Has a Water Cooler: ‘Talking Dead’ — Millions watch shows about shows, and discuss them; 'Who fathered Lori's baby?' — AMC's apocalyptic zombie drama “The Walking Dead” and Bravo's “Real Housewives” reality franchise have something in common: Their fans love post-episode analysis.

Adam Liptak / New York Times:

A High-Tech War on Leaks — BACK in 2006, before the Obama administration made leak prosecutions routine, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether a prosecutor should be allowed to see the phone records of two New York Times reporters …

Ian Burrell / The Independent:

BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules — The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions …