Mediagazer: Twitter's Secret History As the World's Worst Tech or Media Business (Ryan Tate/Gawker)

2:00 PM ET, March 9, 2012

Top News:

New Republic Gets an Owner Steeped in New Media — The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. — Mr. Hughes's purchase of a majority stake …

Discussion: MinOnline, Capital New York, Adweek, Folio, Betabeat, The New York Observer, paidContent, The Huffington Post, eMedia Vitals and Business Insider

The New Republic:

Home News: A Letter to TNR Readers from Chris Hughes — To the Readers of The New Republic: — Nearly 100 years ago, the founding editors of The New Republic wrote these words to introduce their inaugural issue: … A century later, people are once again skeptical that quality journalism can flourish.

Discussion: New York Magazine, NPR, CNNMoney.com, The Awl, Globe and Mail, The New Yorker Blog, The Next Web, Poynter, Vanity Fair and Business Insider

Dylan Byers / Politico:

Alan Grayson pitches TNR subscribers — Alan Grayson, the former Democratic Representative from Florida's 8th, is back on the campaign trail and soliciting support from subscribers of The New Republic, the century-old liberal magazine that — as of today — is owned and published by 28-year-old Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Tim Carmody / Wired:
I Think It Would Be Fun to Run the New Republic: Chris Hughes as Charles Foster Kane

Discussion: Media Decoder

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

Twitter's Secret History As the World's Worst Tech or Media Business — Twitter Inc.'s been spinning quite a turnaround story in the press lately. The microblogging service “has finally turned a corner,” declares the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. “It's a juggernaut,” a company executive tells the magazine.

Discussion: Business Insider, The Next Web, @benpopper and @pkafka

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Twitter's Ad Sales Are Booming, Says Gawker — Gawker's Ryan Tate got his hands on what he believes are recent financials for Twitter. I assume that his numbers are correct, and applaud him for getting them out there. But I think he's doing a bad job of reading them.

Discussion: Business Insider

Matt Thompson / The Mozilla Blog:

The New York Times joins Mozilla and Knight Foundation to drive open innovation in news — The New York Times and three other leading global news organizations are joining “Knight-Mozilla OpenNews,” a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news.

Discussion: The Next Web and Dan Sinker

Press Gazette:

First official figures give The Sun Sunday 3.2m circ — ABC today released the first official figures for The Sun Sunday - showing a launch circulation of 3,213,613 for the new title. In its final month before it was closed the News of the World had an average monthly circulation of 2,667,428.

Discussion: Guardian

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian: Sun on Sunday: £45m a year down versus the News of the World?

Guardian:
Ofcom steps up test of James Murdoch's fitness to keep BSkyB role

Discussion: Company Town and Reuters

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:
Injunction threat over Will Lewis security blog post

Discussion: Neville Thurlbeck

Erik Larson / Bloomberg:
News Corp. Alleged to Hack Family Priest's Line

Discussion: Guardian, Guardian, The Next Web and Guardian

Stephen Parkinson / Telegraph:
Phone hacking: can these journalists really get a fair trial?

Discussion: CJR, Jon Slattery and Guardian

Bonnie Kavoussi / The Huffington Post:

Felix Salmon At Columbia Journalism School: Don't Blame Journalists For Failing To Prevent Financial Crisis — Some business reporters have a message for critics who say they did not try hard enough to expose banks' misdeeds before the financial crisis: Don't blame us.

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Matt Rosoff / Business Insider:

Newspapers Are The Fastest Shrinking Industry In The U.S. — If you want to be a journalist, think online. — Newspapers have shed a greater percentage of jobs since 2007 than any other industry in the United States, according to data published today by LinkedIn.

Discussion: The LinkedIn Blog, Noted, Jon Slattery, Poynter and WebProNews

Yinka Adegoke / MediaFile:

Could a Netflix-cable alliance spur HBO to go rogue? — A potential alliance between online video streaming company Netflix Inc <NFLX.O> and cable companies could spur cable television's biggest premium player HBO to consider its options beyond the set-top box and go directly to customers on the Web.

Discussion: CNET, NetNewsCheck Latest, Mashable! and paidContent

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:
Comcast Declines to Offer Netflix to Its Customers

Discussion: VentureBeat, The Verge, the Econsultancy blog, Home Media Magazine, fiercecable.com/news/frontpage and New York Times

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:

TV Power NBC Universal Joins Web Video ‘Upfront’ — Owner of TV Networks to Display Digital Content Alongside YouTube, Yahoo and Hulu — The confederation of internet companies planning two weeks of “upfront” presentations for advertisers this spring are getting an unexpected new member: NBC Universal.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Media & Entertainment, Thanks:@learmonth

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Germany Wants To Charge Search Engines To Use News Excerpts — Germany's government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material. — Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.

Discussion: WebProNews and The Register

Mike Shields / Adweek:

Yahoo Sets Out to ‘Remake’ Yahoo News — Remake America is a new weekly series that will trace six middle-class families as they struggle to deal with a still-recovering U.S. economy. The documentary-styled show will run through the remainder of the year, examining how these families cope …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, mnilive.com, Beet.TV and FishbowlLA

Lauren Goode / AllThingsD:

With Interest Lists, Facebook Wants to Be a Personalized Newspaper — First we had Twitter Lists. Then Facebook Friends lists. Then smart lists. And now, Facebook is introducing Interest lists as a way to push relevant content up in the increasingly cluttered news feed.

Discussion: ZDNet, Poynter, NetNewsCheck Latest, newsroom.fb.com, The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb

Nielsen Wire:

Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers — Blogs are sometimes overlooked as a significant source of online buzz in comparison to social networking sites, yet consumer interest in blogs keeps growing. By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company …