Mediagazer: Gannett announces 2Q furloughs for USA Today employees (Jim Romenesko)

5:50 PM ET, April 4, 2012

Top News:

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:

News International misses deadline to file its accounts — News International has failed to meet the Companies House deadline to file its accounts and has asked for a month's extension. — The company, which trades under the name of NI Group Ltd, made the request following its failure …

Discussion: NPR, AllThingsD and AllThingsD

Michael Wolff / Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch's American media immunity

Discussion: FishbowlNY and Nieman Journalism Lab

Paul McNally / Journalism.co.uk: QC defends scope of original phone-hacking prosecution

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
DPP says there was ‘pushback’ from Met over hacking investigation

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

Lucy Manning / ITV:
Report likely to accuse hacking witnesses of misleading parliament

Discussion: paidContent

Media Decoder:

New Philly Owners to Bring Back Marimow as Editor — William K. Marimow, who served as top editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2006 to 2010, will rejoin the paper in the same role in a move that is expected to be announced this afternoon. — His appointment comes days …

Discussion: Poynter, JIMROMENESKO.COM, Philly.com, JIMROMENESKO.COM and Off Mic

Paul Nussbaum / Philly.com:

PMN's new owners meet the employees, discuss the future — In an informal session Tuesday with newspaper and website employees, three new owners of Philadelphia Media Network reiterated their plans to make long-term investments in the media company to improve its financial and journalistic prospects.

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

New high score: How the NYT created its “stupid game” — When Jon Huang was younger he was the type of kid who spent his time making mods for Duke Nukem 3D. So it makes a kind of sense he's now turned The New York Times into its own kind of shoot 'em up. — Huang was the multimedia producer behind …

Discussion: Co.Create, FishbowlNY and The Huffington Post

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Stupid game lets you destroy parts of NYT story about stupid games — The Times has figured out a great way to increase time-on-site (and destroy our productivity) by illustrating a story about our obsession with “stupid games” with a game that lets you shoot and destroy parts of its website.

Discussion: New York Times, Mediaite, The 6th Floor, Betabeat, Engadget and AllThingsD

Chris Roush / Talking Biz News:

Reuters editor in chief received $2.7 million in 2011 — Stephen J. Adler, the editor in chief of Reuters, received total compensation of $2.7 million in 2011, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. — Adler, who joined the company in 2010 after a stint as editor …

Newspaper Guild of New York:
Thomson Reuters denies Pulitzer pursuit report, ‘Baron’ affirms it

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Jennifer Saba / Reuters: Ex-Thomson Reuters CEO Glocer gets nearly $20 million

Jim Romenesko:

Gannett announces 2Q furloughs for USA Today employees — Gannett community publishing division president Bob Dickey tells his employees that “I am happy to announce USCP [U.S. community publishing] will not institute furloughs in the second quarter.”

Discussion: Politico

David Barboza / New York Times:

Flattering News Coverage Has a Price in China — SHANGHAI — China is notorious for censoring politically delicate news coverage. But it is more than willing to let flattering news about Western and Asian businesses appear in print and broadcast media — if the price is right.

Discussion: Reason and Media Decoder

Marc Berman / New York Post:

Keith needed ‘Diva’ limos e-mails reveal — Liberal bloviator Keith Olbermann spent his last days at Current TV driving colleagues nuts with rants about “smelly” drivers who had the audacity to talk to him, according to startling e-mails obtained by The Post.

Discussion: Capital New York, Hollywood Reporter and Mediaite

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:
Olbermann on Joining Current TV: 'I Didn't Think the Whole Thing Through'

Discussion: NPR, mediabistro.com, TVNewser and New York Magazine

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:

Reed Hastings Will Get His HBO Go as Comcast Nears Deal on Xbox — Updated Comcast and HBO are close to finalizing a deal to make the HBO Go app available on Xbox, according to several people familiar with the negotiations. — The app, which offers all of the pay cable channel's shows …

Discussion: Multichannel and The Verge

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:

New ASNE figures show percentage of minorities in newspaper newsrooms continues to decline — The number of minorities in the U.S. is growing, but in newspaper newsrooms it continues to creep downward. — New ASNE figures show that the percentage of minorities in newsrooms is now 12.32 percent.

Discussion: Jon Slattery, rjionline.org, Gannett Blog and Reflections of a Newsosaur

Austin Carr / Fast Company:

Zite, CNN Launch Publisher Program To Ease Cease-And-Desist Concerns — Last April Fools' Day, publishers from Time Inc. to the Washington Post Company sent fast-growing startup Zite an aggressive cease-and-desist letter. The publishers weren't joking, accusing Zite's app …

Discussion: Adweek, GigaOM, Poynter, CNET and VentureBeat

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Instapaper, Readability and monetizing other people's content — There's been a minor furor brewing in the digital-content sphere over the past few days involving Readability, an app and web service that allows readers to save content from any website and read it later …

Discussion: Melville House Books and The Brooks Review

Matt Buchanan / Buzzfeed: When Republishing Goes Really Wrong: The Random Longreads Generator

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:

Yahoo Cuts 2,000 Jobs in ‘Urgent’ Restructuring — Purple people eater? (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) — The anticipated wave of layoffs at Yahoo has arrived, and it's as big as promised. — The Sunnywale, Calif.-based internet giant announced plans to eliminate 2,000 jobs, or about 14% of its workforce of 14,000.

Discussion: Adweek, AllThingsD, BBC, Yahoo! Pressroom Home, Forbes and mnilive.com

Dan Zak / Washington Post:

Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? — The gabby, gray-haired grand poobahs of journalism sprang from the back flaps of their book jackets onto a real-life panel Tuesday afternoon in the air-conditioned guts of the Marriott Wardman Park …

Discussion: ShortFormBlog

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Nonprofit status: A maybe for news orgs, a yes for the NFL — I like football, so I was interested in this piece over at Pro Football Talk that details the salary of National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell. (That's $11,554,000 — not bad.) But then I was surprised …

Discussion: ProFootballTalk