Mediagazer: National Cable Ad Sales Grew 7.8% to $22.1 Billion in 2011: CAB (Mike Reynolds/Multichannel News)

5:45 AM ET, February 28, 2012

Top News:

Dominic Rushe / Guardian:

News Corp faces threat of US legal action — Fresh allegations increase likelihood of News Corp being prosecuted under Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, experts say — Fresh allegations of a “culture of illegal payments” at the Sun newspaper have significantly increased the likelihood …

Discussion: Press Gazette

Paul McNally / Journalism.co.uk:

Leveson: inquiry remains ‘committed to free press’ — Lord Justice Leveson responds to critics, saying inquiry ‘is doing no more than doing its mandated terms of reference’ — Lord Justice Leveson has responded to critics of his wide-ranging inquiry into press standards and insists he remains committed …

Discussion: Guardian and Big News Network.com

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
Charlotte Church settles NoW phone-hacking claim for £600,000

Discussion: Digital Spy, Reuters, Guardian, Journalism.co.uk, Associated Press, Telegraph, Press Gazette and TVWeek.com

David Leigh / Guardian:
Sun had ‘culture of illegal payments to sources’

Discussion: Crikey, Daily Mail, Guardian, Press Association, The Huffington Post, Reuters, @arusbridger, Journalism.co.uk, Press Association, Sky News and Press Gazette

TechCrunch:

Goodbye Erick, Hello Eric — TechCrunch has been through a lot lately, and we need to focus on what truly matters: covering startups and innovation. So, this post is going to be short. — But here is what's going on: Erick Schonfeld is leaving and Eric Eldon is replacing him as editor.

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

Stephen Farrell / At War:

Conflict Reporting in the Post-Embed Era … BEIRUT, Lebanon — These are the words of William Howard Russell, writing in The Times of London newspaper in October 1854 about The Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed assault by a few hundred British mounted cavalrymen against Russian artillery at Balaclava during the Crimean War.

Discussion: Committee to Protect …, Freedom of the Prez and The Editor's Desk

Inti Landauro / Wall Street Journal:
France Working on Plan to Evacuate Reporters in Syria

Discussion: Washington Post

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Does WikiLeaks still matter? — It has been some time since WikiLeaks stunned the world with classified video of U.S. military attacks on civilians in Iraq and thousands of secret diplomatic cables — revelations that triggered an all-out attack on founder Julian Assange by the U.S. government …

Discussion: Jack Shafer, The Atlantic Online, paidContent, WebProNews, Guardian and Forbes

Quinn Norton / Wired:
Wikileaks Pairs with Anonymous to Publish Intelligence Firm's Dirty Laundry

Steve Huff / Betabeat:
[UPDATED] Anonymous Teams With Wikileaks To Publish Confidential Stratfor Emails in ‘The Global Intelligence Files’

Discussion: Guardian, Charlie Beckett, Mother Jones, Journalism.co.uk, PR Newswire, The Firewall, Fortune, The Firewall, VentureBeat, ZDNet, Techland, The FJP, ReadWriteWeb, The New York Observer, CNET, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Next Web

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Did Warren Buffett Just Bash the Washington Post's Strategy? — Warren Buffett is The Washington Post Co.'s biggest, most influential and most loyal outside shareholder. Don Graham, the Post Co.'s chairman and head of its controlling family, regards Buffett with something close to awe …

Discussion: Forbes

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:
Washington Post steps into paid content with iPad app for politics news

Discussion: Daily Download, Washington Post, Erik Wemple, Garcia Media, FishbowlDC, Mashable! and MediaPost

Tim Carmody / Wired:

Oscar Night Turns Into a Winning Night for Netflix, Too — Promotional photo for Best Picture winner The Artist, courtesy Weinstein Company — Sunday night's telecast of the Oscars showed an industry unusually infatuated with itself and its own history, even by the standards of awards shows.

Discussion: Home Media Magazine and GigaOM

Sonya Hubbard / footnoted.com:

Details about the Gray Lady's $25,000-per-hour consultant... When the New York Times' (NYT) and its president and former chief executive, Janet L. Robinson, announced a few months ago that Robinson would step down at the end of the year - even though no successor had been identified - the news caught many off guard.

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM

Robert McMillan / Wired Enterprise:

The Meta-Story: How Wired Published Its GitHub Story on GitHub — Wired took a trip with Octocat this week, publishing on GitHub. Image: GitHub — Earlier this week, Wired published a story about GitHub, the “version control” site that's taking the internet by storm. But it was more than just a story.

Mike Reynolds / Multichannel News:

National Cable Ad Sales Grew 7.8% to $22.1 Billion in 2011: CAB — Group Attributes Growth To Upfront, Scatter Gains, Proliferation of Original Programming — National cable ad sales surpassed the $22 billion plateau last year, according to Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau calculations.

Discussion: MediaPost, Broadcasting & Cable and TVWeek.com

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:

New Magazine Aims for ‘Luxury Customers’ — Do you have a net worth of $5 million? A house worth more than $1.5 million? An average income of more than $250,000? And an affinity for bargain hunting? — If you answered yes, then, aside from being extremely lucky, you're just the reader for Du Jour …

Discussion: Adweek and FishbowlNY

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Pearson Sees Digital Income Beating Print Publishing In 2012 — Pearson's digital revenue grew 18 percent to £2 ($3.17) billion (a third of the total) through 2011, as its book publisher Penguin's e-book sales rose 106 percent and the group reached 43 million students through digital learning services.

Discussion: Pearson, Personanondata and Media Week

David Carr / New York Times:

White House Uses Espionage Act to Pursue Leak Cases — Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration's press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria.

Discussion: Prof Chris Daly's Blog and The Huffington Post