Mediagazer: As Staff Flees, TechCrunch's Traffic Plummets (Jeff Roberts/paidContent)

5:00 PM ET, February 28, 2012

Top News:

Jeff Roberts / paidContent:

As Staff Flees, TechCrunch's Traffic Plummets — TechCrunch, the long-time darling of the digerati, is smashed to bits and all of AOL's horses and men will be hard-pressed to put it together again. The site has lost almost every one of its top writers and traffic has fallen sharply, dropping by 35 percent from a year ago.

Discussion: VentureBeat and Boing Boing

Tom Cheredar / VentureBeat:

AOL sees three more major talent departures — For some reason, tech/media company AOL usually experiences talent departures in waves. Today for instance, people in three major positions announced that the were leaving the company for one reason or another.

Discussion: Betabeat, AllThingsD, TechCrunch and Business Insider

TechCrunch:
Goodbye Erick, Hello Eric

Discussion: AllThingsD, WebProNews, New York Magazine, FishbowlNY, AOL Corp, Betabeat, PandoDaily and Business Insider

Tom Harper / This Is London:

Rebekah's gift horse from Met shows its close ties to Murdoch newspapers — Scotland Yard loaned Rebekah Brooks a police horse, the Standard can reveal. — The 43-year-old former News International chief executive rode the retired horse for a year at her farm in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire before it was put out to pasture.

Discussion: FleetStreetBlues, Big News Network.com, The New Yorker Blog, The Huffington Post, Guy Fawkes' blog, Press Association, Guardian, Associated Press, Press Gazette and Guardian

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian: News of the World ‘may have paid £850,000’ to Glenn Mulcaire

Telegraph:
Crimewatch presenter: NotW spied on me because of its links to Daniel Morgan murder case

Discussion: Guardian, Metro.co.uk, Guardian, Journalism.co.uk, The Independent, Reuters and Press Association

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
Leveson inquiry: banning unofficial police interviews would ‘help abuse’

Discussion: Press Gazette

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
Phone hacking: six News of the World staff instructed Mulcaire, papers allege

Discussion: BBC, Guardian, The Independent, Guardian and Journalism.co.uk

Dominic Rushe / Guardian:
News Corp faces threat of US legal action

Discussion: Street Fight, Crikey and New York Times

Jim Romenesko:

The Daily threatens to sue reporter for tweeting objection to story — Earlier this month, Luke Kummer tweeted this objection to the handling of his reporting, then resigned from The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad publication. He then received this warning from the HR manager for The Daily and New York Post:

Discussion: The New York Observer and FishbowlNY

BBC:

Syria unrest: UK's Conroy freed from besieged city — Briton Paul Conroy has been rescued from the besieged Syrian city of Homs, but France's President Sarkozy has withdrawn an earlier statement that wounded journalist Edith Bouvier is also safely in Lebanon. — Her whereabouts remain unclear, hours after she apparently left Homs.

Discussion: Committee to Protect …, The Huffington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Reuters, ABCNEWS, Committee to Protect …, Poynter, CNN and Digital Spy

Stephen Farrell / At War:
Conflict Reporting in the Post-Embed Era

Discussion: Telegraph, Freedom of the Prez, The Editor's Desk and Guardian

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Once Film-Focused, Netflix Transitions to TV Shows — Belying the “flix” in its name, Netflix is now primarily an Internet streaming service for television shows, not feature films. — TV series now account for more than half of all Netflix viewing. That helps to explain why this Wednesday …

Discussion: Engadget, The Consumerist, Shelly Palmer Digital Living, Gizmodo, /Film and SlashGear

Tim Carmody / Wired:
Oscar Night Turns Into a Winning Night for Netflix, Too

Discussion: PC Magazine and GigaOM

Barry Petchesky / Deadspin:

“Twitter Is Not Your Personal Playground,” ESPN Reminds Its Employees — A mole sends along the following email, which was spammed out to ESPN talent on Monday: … Going unmentioned is the brow-mopping and relief in Bristol that controversies over childish Twitter fights over attribution …

Dylan Byers / Politico:

Julian Assange claims ‘intellectual property’ — Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing organization WikiLeaks, may have been the subject of a U.S. government indictment, according to reports out today. — In 2011, the vice president of Stratfor, the private intelligence firm whose emails …

Discussion: Charlie Beckett and TPM Idea Lab

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Does WikiLeaks still matter?

Discussion: Jack Shafer, Mashable!, The Firewall, The Atlantic Online, Foreign Policy, Sydney Morning Herald, Capital New York, Forbes and paidContent:UK

Mark J. Perry / CARPE DIEM:

Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 60-Yr. Low in 2011 — The chart above displays total annual print newspaper advertising revenue based on actual annual data from 1950 to 2010, and estimated annual revenue for 2011 using quarterly data through the third quarter, from the Newspaper Association of America.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online and Seeking Alpha

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

MTV Mobile Moves Into Social TV With Digital Agency AKQA — Viacom's MTV is making one more move into trying to capture the youth market on the platform where it's increasingly spending most of its time: the broadcaster, in partnership with digital agency AKQA, has launched “Under The Thumb,” a new social TV app.

Discussion: rbr.com

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Interview: FT CEO Denies Sale And Braves Strike Ahead Of Social Launch — Financial Times CEO John Ridding rejects dinner-party chatter that the publisher may be sold to Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. — Instead, he is pushing the group toward a digital subscription future that, he reveals, will soon incorporate social networks.

Discussion: Guardian and eMedia Vitals

Georg Szalai / Hollywood Reporter:

Former Top News Corp. Spokeswoman Teri Everett Joins Time Inc. — She recently left Rupert Murdoch's conglomerate and will now become executive vp at the Time Warner publishing unit, reporting to new CEO Laura Lang. — NEW YORK - Former News Corp. top communications guru Teri Everett …